In November 2017, a legal claim by a Peruvian farmer against a German energy company, Luciano Lliuya v. RWE, made headlines around the world. On paper, it appeared like a straightforward property claim between one man and a corporation: the lawsuit alleged that the company was causing a risk of damage to the claimant's house and demanded that the risk be removed. But the house in question was located in the Peruvian Andes, far away from the company's power plants in Europe. And the risk was due to potential flooding from glacial retreat caused by climate change. For the first time anywhere, a legal claim between a person and a corporation over climate change impacts was going to trial. All those involved in the legal process knew that this was more than a property claim: the company's lawyers refused to settle out of court, arguing that it was a matter of precedent. Much broader questions were at stake, such as how people should engage with changing socio-material environments and who should take responsibility for global warming. Framing these issues in terms of a dispute between a human person and corporate person, the legal framework reduced these concerns to a concrete property claim, yet ultimately spurred wider public discussions about the stakes of climate change.
The legal process began in 2015 when Saúl Luciano Lliuya travelled to Germany and filed a lawsuit against RWE, a major energy company and greenhouse gas emitter. He brought the case with support from Germanwatch, an environmental NGO that promotes increased climate action by governments and corporations. For Germanwatch, the case is part of a broader effort to hold major emitters accountable for their contribution to global warming. The claim emerged after Saúl met representatives from Germanwatch following the 2014 UN Climate Summit in Peru. Saúl comes from the Cordillera Blanca mountain range in the northern Peruvian Andes, a global hotspot for climate change. He is a member of the Quechua-speaking rural Andean population that has been historically marginalised. As a farmer and mountain climbing guide in his early forties, he has witnessed a dramatic retreat in the glaciers that surround his hometown of Huaraz. In the long term, locals worry about potential water scarcity, but in the short term, there is a risk of flooding: glacial retreat has caused mountain lakes to fill with water to dangerous levels, threatening to break their banks and devastate downstream settlements. For Saúl and many other Andeans, this also affects potential persons of a different type: they regard the mountains as sentient beings that are suffering because of glacial retreat.
RWE, the defendant company, has no operations in Peru but has produced a substantial amount of greenhouse gas emissions through coal-fired power generation since it was founded in 1898. The lawsuit alleges that RWE made a measurable contribution to global warming through its emissions, thereby partially causing an increase in flood risk to the plaintiff's property, which lies below a dangerous glacial lake.1 The claim seeks a small financial contribution—around $20,000—to a government project to reduce flood risk in accordance with the company's relative contribution to historic global emissions. If successful, the lawsuit could pave the way for numerous other claims by impacted communities.
The lawsuit is part of a growing wave of climate litigation around the world. As of 2023, over two thousand lawsuits have been filed seeking to push corporations and governments toward increased climate action (Setzer and Higham 2023). Claims against governments have been most successful so far. After a court ordered the Dutch government to increase its efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions in 2015 (Urgenda Foundation v. State of the Netherlands), similar verdicts followed in numerous countries including Germany (Neubauer v. Germany) and France (Notre Affaire à Tous v. France), both in 2021. In 2023, sixteen young people won a case against the state of Montana over how its fossil fuel policies would affect their future (Held v. Montana). While claims against fossil fuel companies have been less successful so far, a Dutch court found in 2024 that Shell has a legal obligation to address climate change in line with the Paris Agreement (Milieudefensie v. Shell). The case is currently under appeal. Since 2017, around forty US states, cities, and municipalities, including California (People of California v. Exxon Mobil Corp.) and New York City (City of New York v. Exxon Mobil Corp.), have filed lawsuits against fossil fuel companies arguing that the defendants deceived consumers about the harms of global warming. The lawsuits, which seek billions of dollars to address impacts such as sea level rise, have not yet moved beyond the pre-trial stage. As of late 2024, no lawsuit worldwide has been successful in holding fossil fuel companies legally responsible for their contribution to climate change impacts—so far.
The case against RWE (Luciano Lliuya v. RWE) was initially dismissed by the Essen State Court in 2016, where judges found that it was not possible to legally attribute an individual climate change impact to a major emitter. That decision was overturned when the case went to appeal at the Upper State Court in Hamm. In a landmark decision, the appeals court judges ruled in 2017 that the lawsuit was admissible. In a preceding hearing, they stated that they saw the possibility for a claim under German law. The court would appoint independent scientific experts to examine the evidence. For the first time anywhere in the world, judges found that legal statutes could potentially be applied to hold a greenhouse gas emitter liable for its contribution to climate change impacts. The court visited Peru in 2022 to gather evidence at the glacial lake above Saúl's house. While the case is still ongoing as of 2024 following pandemic-related delays, it could set the stage for a momentous legal precedent.2
Since the case began, I have accompanied it as an ethnographer and advisor to the plaintiff's legal team. My involvement in the lawsuit began as a consultant for Germanwatch, the NGO backing the case, during the initial stages, when I contributed to the claim's scientific and legal argumentation and helped coordinate communications with Saúl in Peru. I later went on to examine the claim from an anthropological perspective for my PhD project. Between 2015 and 2017, I conducted ethnographic research in the Peruvian Andes for twenty months. Living in a village with Quechua-speaking farmers, I studied how people were engaging with the changing environment. Climate change is causing an increasing threat to rural livelihoods, as glacial retreat is leading to flood risk and long-term water scarcity. I also accompanied the plaintiff to court hearings and UN Climate Summits. I continue to provide scientific advice to the legal team. By studying litigation from the inside, I aim to untangle the complexities of legal activism and highlight how climate change creates new kinds of social and moral relations across the planet.
The 2017 decision by the Upper State Court finding the lawsuit admissible led to a flurry of media reports around the world. In Germany, it prompted prominent commentaries on TV news programs calling for greenhouse gas emitters to be held accountable for climate change. Numerous journalists and documentary filmmakers visited Saúl in Peru. Discussions emerged in Germany and beyond about who should take responsibility for climate change and how politics could respond to the challenge. The claim propelled Saúl to international stardom, making him ‘a modern David’ taking on the Goliath of RWE, according to a profile in TIME Magazine (Nugent 2018).
Speaking outside the courtroom to a crowd of journalists and TV cameras after the 2017 hearing, Saúl shared his perspective: ‘Today, the mountains have won. The lakes are the tears of the mountains. Today, justice heard the mountains crying’.3 With this, he brought an entirely foreign type of person into play, one that has no formal standing or existence in the legal process. Nevertheless, his statement resonated with public audiences. Later that day, several German TV channels broadcast his words to millions of viewers on the evening news (Statista 2024). His invocation of the Andean mountains raises an important question: can the mountains play a role in the case, even if the court does not recognize them as a participant? Formally, the lawsuit is between Saúl and RWE. Both are considered to be persons under German law. Legal personhood gives them rights and responsibilities: Saúl can claim that his rights have been infringed upon and RWE must respond in court. The Andean mountains are not officially involved, yet for Saúl they are a powerful actor. In this article, I examine how corporations and mountain beings emerge as different kinds of persons during Saúl's claim. Corporate personhood is a widespread legal concept that is crucial to the functioning of contemporary neoliberal capitalism (Kirsch 2014). The personhood of mountains shapes how many rural Andeans engage with their environment. Both ideas of personhood involve ontological claims, meaning they reflect a particular understanding about the nature of reality. In the lawsuit, RWE and the mountains become entangled in the politics of personhood. The politics of personhood refers to discussions about which actors have a stake in social, political, and environmental disputes. It revolves around the question of who counts as a relevant social actor.
While some jurisdictions have begun to recognize ‘rights of nature’, I argue that ecosystem beings can play a role in legal claims even without formal legal recognition. Tracing the construction of personhood in the claim between Saúl and RWE, I show how both the company and Andean mountain beings are brought into existence as social actors when people engage with them. The claim hinges on the idea that RWE can be held liable as a single entity for emissions produced in numerous coal-fired power plants operating across Europe over the past century. Saúl and his supporters do not just accept the ontological notion of corporate personhood, they actively participate in making RWE a legal person by asserting the company's responsibility. This allows Saúl to draw RWE into a legal relation. More broadly, Saúl asserts that major greenhouse gas emitters are morally connected to those around the world who suffer the worst impacts of climate change. When Saúl brought up earth beings with his words outside the courtroom, he introduced the possibility that other beings might also be entangled in this web of moral relations. Corporate persons and mountain beings are made into social actors through ethical claims about climate justice.
Corporations, Mountains, and Other Persons
Personhood is a social phenomenon. Around the world, cultural and legal customs govern who counts as a person and what it means to be one.4 Power relations shape the way people come to understand themselves as particular types of persons (Rose 1996). Historically, personhood has been a frequent subject of political and legal deliberation. In a US context, Christopher Stone (1972) traces disputes over whether foreigners, women, African-Americans, Native Americans, and unborn foetuses should be considered legal persons. The notion that corporations are persons is a longstanding legal doctrine in many countries, allowing corporations to enter into contracts and face legal claims while protecting investors from personal financial liability (Blair 2013). In German jurisprudence, a corporate legal person is an organization that exists independently of its members and directors (Raiser 1999). It acquires rights and duties and can participate in judicial proceedings as a legal subject. As capitalist corporations gained increasing social significance during industrialization in the nineteenth century, they gradually came to be recognized as legal persons (Raiser 1999). Following a similar historical trajectory, US jurisprudence formally recognized corporations as legal persons in the late 1800s (Johnson 2012). Around the world, disputes are ongoing over what specific rights and responsibilities corporate personhood should involve.
Researchers have analysed the social implications of corporate personhood, particularly after the controversial ‘Citizens United’ ruling by the US Supreme Court in 2010 that granted free speech rights to corporations, allowing them to make unlimited financial contributions to political campaigns. Corporate personhood is a wide-ranging concept that shapes how we think about both corporations and human persons. While numerous people and activities are often associated with a corporate entity, the notion of personhood gives corporations agency and accountability (Kirsch 2014). For Marina Welker (2014), the idea of the corporation as a coherent actor reflects an individualist liberal model of subjectivity that defines humans as rational, self-interested actors. This makes it possible to identify the corporation as an intentional subject, though in practice, the boundaries of the corporate person are often unclear. While some argue that corporate personhood is an illusion (Bashkow 2014), many lawyers and legal scholars engage the corporate person as ‘an organic social reality’ (Blumberg 1990). Anthropologically speaking, I argue that corporations become persons when people engage them as persons. As such, the notion of corporate personhood is made and remade through mundane social practices, such as when corporations are brought to court as rights-holding legal defendants. This article examines that process ethnographically.
The notion that corporations are persons, able to act of their own accord, has become the subject of widespread critique, particularly from activists seeking to limit corporate power. Erin Fitz-Henry (2018) traces US environmentalists’ efforts to promote legal rights for nature. Activists sought to destabilize corporate personhood by bringing other potential persons into play, arguing that ecosystems should have more rights than corporations. For Fitz-Henry, this activism brings ontological questions about personhood into US legal and political discussions. Ontology, in this context, refers to conceptions about the nature of reality; for example, whether or not corporations and trees should be considered as rights-holding subjects. At the same time, new legal movements have emerged that support granting rights to ecosystems. In a seminal essay, Stone (1972) argued that if humans and corporations are considered legal persons with various specified rights, then natural environments should be protected under similar provisions. Decades later, such ‘rights of nature’ have found official recognition in several countries. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize the rights of nature in its constitution (Gutmann 2021). In 2017, the New Zealand government recognized Mount Taranaki as a ‘legal personality’, acknowledging Māori demands to recognize the mountain as a being in its own right (Roy 2017). In 2019, the High Court of Bangladesh ruled that all rivers in the country are living beings with legal rights (Samuel 2019). Debates are ongoing about how successful these legal changes are in terms of recognizing indigenous perspectives and protecting ecosystems (Tănăsescu 2022)—I return to these discussions in the conclusion. In the remainder of this article, I explore how RWE and Andean earth beings emerged as potential participants in legal proceedings and in public discussions surrounding Saúl's claim.
Personhood under German Law
When Saúl first visited Germany in 2015 to submit the lawsuit, we travelled to the RWE headquarters near the courthouse in the city of Essen. As Saúl glanced up toward the imposing skyscraper of glass and steel, I said to him, ‘It's them you're suing’.
‘Really?’ Saúl grinned. ‘Don't scare me!’
It was his first physical confrontation with the company. Until that point, it had only existed to him as an idea; a potential target of litigation discussed on transatlantic Skype calls with German lawyers. Later that day, after filing the lawsuit at the courthouse, we visited a nearby open-pit coal mine operated by RWE. Saúl stood in awe, gazing at the massive hole in the earth's surface that extended almost as far as the eye could see. He later explained to me that it felt like he was taking on something powerful.
Saúl's claim arose within the German legal system which sets strict limits on who can make claims, whom a claimant can approach and what they can demand. Saúl participates in the lawsuit because he feels the responsibility to act on behalf of Andean mountains facing devastating transformation. In legal terms, the claim asserts that Saúl and RWE are neighbours (Walker-Crawford 2023). It rests on Section 1004 of the German Civil Code, a general nuisance provision that allows for claims about property interference and is typically applied to resolve neighbourhood disputes.
In the bureaucratic structure of law, persons are brought into play through documents attesting to their personhood (Barrera 2008). At the outset, Saúl's lawyers had to provide documentary evidence proving the two parties’ existence. The claim says that ‘Mr. Luciano Lliuya is a natural person’, attaching a copy of his national identity card. An excerpt from the commercial register served the same purpose for RWE. To establish the company's liability, the claim states:
Greenhouse gas emissions are primarily emitted by the defendant's subsidiary companies, particularly as a necessary consequence of coal-fired power generation. These emissions are to be attributed to the defendant juridical person as the parent company, particularly because the construction and operation of the power plants is not determined by the subsidiaries but occurs based on the defendant parent company's direction.5
With this, the lawyers tied greenhouse gas emissions produced at numerous power plants across widespread locations to RWE. Configured as a legal person, RWE acquires an identity that is independent from its founders, owners, and employees. Lacking the individualistic confines of a human body, corporations are relational beings. RWE became enmeshed in neighbourly relations that made it an agent subject to potential legal claims over its activities. Drawing on scientific research about climate change and flood risk in the Peruvian Andes, the lawyers sought to draw a causal link between Saúl and RWE.
In ontological terms, the lawsuit enacts RWE as a person, engaging it as an independent entity subject to legal rights and obligations under German law. In response to this engagement, lawyers representing RWE filed lengthy legal replies in the company's defence. The replies acknowledged RWE's personhood and asserted that it had the right burn coal and should not be held legally liable for the impacts of climate change on Saúl's life. In court hearings, judges addressed both Saúl and RWE as judicial parties. Through these practices, the lawyers and judges enact RWE as a legal person. Even to Saúl, the company felt real and powerful when he walked by the towering headquarters on his way to file the lawsuit. Saúl and his interlocutors engage RWE strategically. From the perspective of Saúl and his activist backers, the company serves as a symbolic placeholder for global polluting industries. By acknowledging the company as a defendant and commenting on its powerful nature, Saúl participated in the social practices that make RWE a corporate person. The legal claim enacts both Saúl and RWE as particular types of persons, bringing them together as neighbours.
The lawsuit was successful in drawing an ethically charged relation between Saúl and RWE. It brought him and the company's representative face to face in a German courtroom where their lawyers discussed the moral implications of global warming for major polluters. But what can be made of Saúl's reference to the sentient Andean environment? The judicial framework does not grant standing to earth beings, and they find no mention in the legal documents. According to the politics of personhood enshrined in German law, RWE is a legal person susceptible to judicial claims from other recognized persons—such as Saúl—while sentient landscapes do not exist. Nevertheless, Saúl met an enthusiastic and emotive response when he spoke of earth beings in the courthouse lobby, as discussed in the introduction. His words appealed to widespread conceptions about Andean indigeneity. He introduced a new kind of person to the politics of climate change.
Engaging Earth Beings in the Andes
On a cold, dark morning in July 2017, I accompanied Saúl in climbing Mount Vallunaraju, overlooking the city of Huaraz. After sleeping in a tent at the foot of the glacier, we rose before dawn and set off. Attached to each other by rope, we held ice picks under thick gloves and wore crampons on our boots to walk on the ice.
It was pitch-dark as we set off from the base camp. We wore headlamps to see. ‘This entire area—the campsite—was covered by the glacier just a few years ago’, Saúl explained. Every year that he climbed the mountains, he found the glaciers had receded by a few more meters. As we made our way onto the ice, the initial incline was relatively easy. It felt like walking up a snowy hill as the freezing wind hit my face. Then Saúl, ahead of me, stopped walking. As I made my way up to stand beside him, he removed his gloves and pulled a little plastic bag out of his jacket pocket, leaving the ice pick dangling by a sling on his wrist. From the bag, he pulled out a handful of coca leaves and tossed them to the ground. ‘For the mountain’, he exclaimed.
For many Andeans, engagement with powerful earth beings is a part of daily life. While ritualistic practices are often subtle in the Cordillera Blanca—as when Saúl casually paid tribute to the mountain during our climb—they play a significant role for many people I met. Particularly in rural Quechua-speaking areas, people told me stories about powerful mountain and lake beings that give life to farmers by providing water and fertility, yet can respond violently when treated with disrespect. People's engagement with the sentient environment seemed to be something very personal; it usually took time for me to build enough trust before they would share their experiences with me.
Saúl is uncertain about what it means for the landscape to be alive. ‘A mountain is a geological formation’, he later explained to me, ‘but another perspective is that the mountains nurture us. They used to be considered gods—something to fear’. Lying in his tent at night during climbing tours, Saúl sometimes encounters the mountain he is about to summit in his dreams, in the form of a person talking to him. He has also had experiences that are difficult to explain. On one tour, he woke up at night to the sound of voices and footsteps. Looking outside his tent, there was nobody to be seen. ‘I don't know; it's difficult to say with certainty’, Saúl explained, ‘but something is there’. It may defy explanation, yet the significance is clear: ‘For me, the mountain is someone who gives you everything’. A feeling of responsibility toward the Andean landscape is one of the primary reasons motivating Saúl's participation in the lawsuit against RWE. Mountains are persons of a different sort. Their power is unquestioned in Saúl's engagement with them.
On another occasion during my research, I chatted with a group of villagers about how the environment was changing. An old man adjusted his wide-brimmed hat and surveyed the horizon. ‘What will happen to the mountain when the glacier disappears? I don't know—maybe it will die. A few years ago, the mountains were all white, now look! The peaks are becoming dark’. We sat by a small pasture in a village far above Huaraz in the Cordillera Blanca. I was visiting the village with Elías, an 83-year-old man who worked on a local government project at a dangerous glacial lake overseeing flood safety works. Under the burning mid-morning sun, the villagers expressed concern about potential water scarcity and increasingly strong hailstorms that threatened their harvests. Many households depend on mountain springs for drinking water, but those were beginning to run dry, meaning people had to carry water to their houses in buckets from the nearby river. They talked in Spanish mixed with Quechua terminology. I asked whether they engaged in any customs such as offerings to the mountains. Such practices were not common anymore, the old man replied; perhaps that was part of the problem. ‘The mountains are living beings, just like you and me, we have to respect them’. Respect, for him, meant thanking the mountains for plentiful harvests and not leaving plastic bottles or other trash to litter the environment.
Stories about sentient mountains are passed down through the generations. Some speak of glacial lakes as enchanted places that can bewitch unassuming wanderers. Driving back down to Huaraz later that day, I turned to Elías. With deep wrinkles on his face, he gazed out at the mountain landscape he called home. Working at a glacial lake by the glaciers, he made monthly offerings to the earth and lake beings to keep them happy. Only that, he asserted, would prevent a devastating avalanche and flood. On cold nights in a little shack by the lake, the beings spoke to Elías in his dreams. They demanded coca leaves, food, and drink. Elías considered it his responsibility to maintain positive relations with the landscape and its beings.
‘What do you think, Elías?’ I asked as he turned to look at me. ‘What will become of the mountains when the glaciers melt off?’
Elías paused to ponder the question, glancing past me towards the snow-capped peaks in the distance. ‘The mountains are hurting, that's clear. But I think they will be OK’. He looked me in the eyes. ‘The Earth, the mountains, they're powerful. They always find a way’.
Another villager from the area outlined his theory of how the mountains were changing—they had become calmer. ‘They used to be chúkaro’, he explained, employing a Quechua term used to describe wild animals. ‘The mountains were more dangerous. But now that tourists come and climb the mountains every year, they've become tame’. People may not fear the mountains like they used to, yet the landscape claims lives every year in mountain climbing accidents. Some locals trace these deaths to a lack of respect for the mountains.
The environment is changing in uncertain ways, yet many villagers can feel its potency. ‘It's something quite intimate’, Saúl once explained to me. ‘When you're growing up, your parents tell you stories about powerful mountains and enchanted lakes, things like that. For example, they say that you shouldn't throw away food that you produce—it means the food will cry’. According to Saúl, the environment's sentience is self-evident for most villagers. ‘It's something you know—because you've lived all your life in those surroundings’.
Through their relational engagements, Saúl and his compatriots enact the mountains as powerful sentient beings. Saúl's own sense of self—of who he is and what responsibilities he has in relation to the world around him—emerges in relation to the Andean environment that comprises the people in his village and the sentient landscape. Much like the lawsuit involves a relational assertion that enacts Saúl and RWE as human and legal persons, Saúl and the mountains emerge as particular kinds of beings through his engagement with the landscape. While the relation between Saúl and RWE involves legally inscribed categories of personhood, his and other Andeans’ relations with the environment are more ambiguous. The people I spoke to have strong sense of the mountains’ power, yet they do not all agree about what this means in practice. In addition, there are uncertainties about how the mountains and their relationship with the landscape will change in times of global warming and glacial retreat.
Despite their ambiguity, Andean earth beings are playing a part in legal and political disputes about environmental justice. Just as the legal invocation of RWE is a deliberate move to enable a politically charged claim, sentient landscapes can emerge strategically within the framework of activism. This occurred when Saúl travelled to Germany to fight his case.
Strategic Indigeneity
On a sunny day in early November 2017, days before the yearly UN Climate Summit began in Bonn and around a week before the court hearing in Hamm, Saúl stood on a stage in front of a crowd of twenty thousand cheering protestors. It was a large turnout for a demonstration demanding immediate action on climate change from the world's governments. Locals were concerned about RWE's expanding coalmines in Germany which had recently displaced a village and forest (Watts 2017). In an act of civil disobedience, some had entered the open-pit mines and climbed RWE's giant diggers. Today, they joined with a crowd of foreign activists who had travelled to Germany for the UN Summit.
‘Since I was a small child, I could see changes in the mountains. Glaciers are retreating very quickly’. Standing beside Saúl at the podium, I translated his Spanish words into English. ‘We are very worried about the water, but this is something that we haven't caused’. He claimed: ‘This was caused by the big companies that burn coal and petroleum. That's why I've sued the company RWE to make them take responsibility’.
A roar swept through the crowd. For the activists, Saúl was a climate justice hero they could finally see in the flesh. He was a small man with a puffy red jacket, but his words carried significant weight.
‘We have the obligation, the responsibility to protect our Pachamama, which is the mother Earth, in the Andes’. The audience cheered even louder. Saúl had to wait for the crowd to quiet down before he could continue. His words resonated with many who saw him as an indigenous activist who likely had a special tie to the landscape he inhabited—the Pachamama. Yet I translated this to the audience—using the word Pachamama, widely recognizable in English—with surprise. I had never heard Saúl use the word publicly.
Pachamama is a key term in multiple varieties of the Quechua language, including that spoken in the former Inca capital of Cusco. It translates roughly as ‘mother earth’, but often encapsulates a broader understanding of the Earth as a life-giving force, embedded within Andean cosmologies (Allen 1988). However, the term is not widely used in the Cordillera Blanca. For Saúl, Pachamama is a foreign term that he strategically applied to gain public resonance.
With this, Saúl followed in the footsteps of other Andean environmental activists who have purposefully deployed ideas of indigeneity. At a mining conflict in the Peruvian city of Cajamarca, north of Huaraz, protests achieved a new public dimension when activists began to describe the mountain under threat as sacred, using the word Apu. This Quechua term, often used to describe agentive mountains, is common in other parts of Peru, but not in Cajamarca, where few people speak Quechua. While this terminology reflected locals’ understanding of the mountain as an agentive being, it invoked popular imaginations of indigeneity that spoke to journalists and international activists. Some proponents of the mining project argued that this characterisation of the mountain as an Apu was fraudulent, but Li (2015) contends in an ethnography of the dispute that a binary opposition between ‘authentic’ indigenous tradition and invented conceptions is misguided. Even if locals had not commonly used the term Apu, this conception opened political discussions to understandings that saw the landscape as agentive. According to one local activist, Apu was a useful translation, as the term had wider resonance, even if people in Cajamarca did not traditionally use it.
After the demonstration in Bonn, I asked Saúl why he used the term Pachamama. ‘It's a nice concept’, he replied. ‘I understand that Pachamama is mother earth’. Yet growing up in the rural Cordillera Blanca, he had heard a different set of stories. ‘My mother always told me, “There's the sun, our father, and there's our mother, the moon.” But I don't remember her telling me anything about Pachamama’. When he was thinking about his speech that morning over breakfast, he wanted to find something that would resonate with the audience: ‘Pachamama has already become widely known and so they can understand it’. Saúl realizes that many see him as an indigenous climate activist, even if he does not call himself indigenous, as the term is not widely used in his region. That positionality—of the Andean David facing the industrial Goliath—legitimizes and strengthens his public image. At the demonstration, he drew on an Andean conception that was foreign to him, yet served to support his public standing. ‘So you borrowed the term?’ I asked.
‘Exactly—because it was convenient and made sense’.
When the German court took Saúl's lawsuit seriously, it gave him a platform to bring other perspectives into the conversation. Saúl strategically applied a widely recognised ‘indigenous’ concept to raise this issue with the German and international public, even if that concept was not indigenous to his own lifeworld. While that involved a simplification and repackaging of his complex and ambiguous engagement with the Andean environment, it served the strategic aim of showing a foreign audience that the environment itself might be concerned about global warming. Saúl has become a public figure, and his participation in a widely publicised legal trial provides public legitimacy to the idea that earth beings and other nonhuman persons have a stake in legal and political discussions about climate change.
Mobilizing Personhood for Legal and Political Change
Saúl engages both RWE and the Andean landscape by asserting moral relationships with them. These engagements involve ontological claims over who has a stake in contemporary political concerns regarding climate change. RWE and the Andean mountains emerge as distinct beings through claims about relational responsibility. Through these engagements, Saúl also emerges as a particular type of subject—both to public audiences and himself. Speaking outside the courtroom, he is an indigenous activist seeking redress from industrial polluters. Offering coca to the mountain during a climbing tour, he is a rural Andean trying to enact a positive relation with the powerful sentient landscape. Nevertheless, Saúl's public assertions about mountain beings contribute to growing claims that legal and political systems should account for ecosystems in their own right. Given the law under which it was filed, the lawsuit invokes a neighbourly relation between Saúl and RWE as morally responsible persons. This raises the idea that climate politics should account for such relations. It opens the possibility that other nonhuman persons might also have a stake in these discussions.
Debates are ongoing about how ecosystem personhood and rights of nature can or should be recognized within existing legal systems. While a number of countries have recognized ‘rights of nature’, Andreas Fischer-Lescano (2020) recognizes persistent challenges in applying legal personhood to the ecosystem: nonhuman legal persons cannot articulate themselves, meaning they require representatives who must interpret their presumed interests. Their interests may be difficult to define, and they may even have conflicting interests. Legal frameworks for representing corporate persons are well established: corporations have governance structures such as boards and CEOs which allow them to express their interests. To account for ecosystem persons, legal frameworks may have to be rethought, argues Fischer-Lescano (2020). If they are badly applied, rights of nature may even harm indigenous peoples whose perspectives they supposedly represent: legal personhood rights were granted to the former Te Urewera national park in New Zealand in 2014, ostensibly recognizing indigenous claims to the territory. However, this ultimately perpetuated conservationist policies that historically dispossessed indigenous peoples of their land. The environment's recognition as a legal person restricted Māori people's access to resources in the area (Coombes 2020). Whether or not ecosystem persons are adequately recognized within law, they play an important role in the lives of many people facing climate change and environmental degradation in their communities. For Saúl, the existence of mountain beings is self-evident, whether or not they are recognized under German law.
In the meantime, some people are strategically embracing notions of indigeneity to attract broader public support. Speaking to a crowd of protestors at the UN Climate Summit, Saúl spoke about Pachamama. The concept is not native to his region, but it speaks to his ideas about the sentient environment. It was also a concept the crowd understood and could relate to him as a native Andean. Similarly, indigenous groups in Ecuador and New Zealand strategically embraced the idea of granting legal personhood to the ecosystem, even though the rights of nature concept did not fully represent their own philosophies and engagements with the environment (Tănăsescu 2020). Translating ideas across conceptual boundaries involves strategic compromises. When Andean ideas about the environment are brought to European courts or international political discussions, they must be communicated in a way that makes sense to a foreign audience.
The strategic deployment of ‘indigenous’ ideas points to a broader issue with the concept of indigeneity, which is often associated with a sense of timelessness. The concept of Pachamama may not be indigenous to Saúl's region of Peru, but even in places where the term is widely used, it emerged at a particular point in time. Language changes; words and concepts travel across time and space. Indigenous ideas are historically contingent, just like German legal concepts. Saúl's invocation of Pachamama is no different from his use of the argument that RWE is his neighbour: both involve the strategic deployment of terminology that sparks wider public imagination. The idea of applying German neighbourhood law to climate change is fairly recent; it was first proposed by a legal scholar in a 2010 article (Frank 2010). The term ‘indigenous’, in its contemporary usage, emerged in the context of European colonialism to define America's original inhabitants (Stavenhagen 2009). Concepts such as Pachamama and the idea of indigeneity itself are historical artefacts.
My discussion shows that ecosystem persons can play a role in legal claims even when they have no formal standing. Saúl brought Andean mountain beings into play when he spoke about their relevance outside a court hearing in Germany. Over the subsequent years, he gave numerous statements to the international media about how climate change is making the mountains suffer. Both the mountain beings and the defendant corporation are made real through people's engagement with them. The legal recognition of corporations as persons under modern capitalism is an ‘acknowledgment of the power of non-human actors that is made real and visible to humans through legal ritual performance’, much like indigenous ritual practices ascribe personhood to the ecosystem (Martin 2019). Ongoing discussions about rights of nature involve negotiations about what role indigenous conceptions of the environment can play in contemporary legal systems (Tănăsescu 2020). These discussions do not just concern legal questions about who can participate in judicial processes; they ultimately revolve around political questions about whose concerns should be taken into account and how humans should engage with the environment (Tănăsescu 2022). Legal action can be a tool for drawing new issues into the realm of the political (Eckert and Knöpfel 2020). When Saúl spoke about Andean mountain beings in the context of his lawsuit, he raised the possibility that they could be considered as relevant actors in legal and political discussions about climate change, alongside humans and corporations.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Saúl Luciano Lliuya, Roda Verheyen, and my other ethnographic interlocutors for sharing their insights on climate change, law, and justice. I shared early drafts of this article in seminars at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the Socio-Legal Studies Association, and would like to thank the participants for their valuable comments. Finally, I am grateful to Guilherme Fians, Elena Borisova, Matthew Keracher, Sandhya Narayanan, Liz Fisher, and Wilhelm Frank for their generous feedback on this article. This work was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom (Grant reference: ES/W00674X/1).
Notes
The lawsuit drew upon a study that quantified historic industrial emissions linked to individual companies (Heede 2014).
Rooted in the tradition of civil law, court rulings in Germany usually provide normative guidance for future rulings rather than being strictly legally binding, as in most common-law systems (von Ungern-Sternberg 2013). Nevertheless, a ruling in Luciano Lliuya v. RWE could constitute a precedent in a broader sense: numerous other countries have similar legal provisions to those applied in the German case, meaning the plaintiff's legal argumentation could be adapted for similar cases in other jurisdictions (e.g., under English law: Kumar and Frank 2018).
All quotations from Saúl Luciano Lliuya and other Peruvians are the author's translation from Spanish.
Anthropologists have documented the construction of personhood in numerous contexts since Marcel Mauss argued in a 1938 lecture that personhood is a social phenomenon (Mauss 1985); see Carsten (2004) for an overview.
Saúl Ananías Luciano Lliuya v. RWE AG, Landgericht Essen, Az.: 2 O 285/15, lawsuit of Luciano Lliuya, 24 November 2015; author's translation from German.
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