A Cloud Forest in Ecuador Now Has Rights Under Law – And Maybe a Place In Music Too

“Trees speak in your leaves, please. And streams tell me your dreams…” Writer Robert Macfarlane was mumbling these lyrics from a random page of his notebook. It was nighttime, and the high forest was lit up with the amber glow of a campfire. His friend and musician, Cosmo Sheldrake, had already recorded some forest sounds in his phone. After hearing these lyrics, he started layering these sounds on an app, according to a report by The Guardian.

The two other members of the camping crew, mycologist Guiliana Furci and legal scholar Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, watched in curiosity as, within the next few minutes, they had already churned out a full-fledged song. It was Macfarlane’s idea, originally, to organize this camping trip, as part of his research for “Is a River Alive?”, his new book about rivers. After the song was published, the artists filed a petition for the forest to be credited as a co-creator.

As mentioned by the YouTube description of the song, Sheldrake believes that every place is a unique soundscape. Every place has its own unique voice, its special melody. And while artists create paintings, poems, sculptures, music, and whatnot, all the credit is attributed to the humans, while nature remains discarded in the background somewhere. After having that song-making session in the high forest, the four artists were determined to support nature in reclaiming its rights as the primal creative force behind these artistic works.

Titled the “Song of the Cedars,” this nature-inspired song tells the story of Los Cedros Cloud Forest, punctuated by the melodies of echo-locating bats, buzzing nightly insects, howler monkeys, rustling leaves, hums and echoes of the forest world, and even a subterranean recording of the soil taken from the spot where a new species of fungus was collected. This, according to the artists, is the first legal attempt to give back to nature what is rightfully hers. In their own words, this is for “incorporating a kingdom of life that has never been recognized in those legal frameworks.”

The groundbreaking petition was filed in collaboration with MOTH (More Than Human) Life Collective and submitted to Ecuador’s copyright office. The petition appealed to the legal authorities to recognize the Los Cedros cloud forest as the co-creator of the song. Macfarlane believes that this remarkable move was chosen to shatter the notion that humans are the sole creators of their artworks. Almost always, nature is the background force that inspires their creativity. In case of this song, particularly, he said, “It wasn’t written within the forest, it was written with the forest. […] We were briefly part of that ongoing being of the forest, and we couldn’t have written it without the forest. The forest wrote it with us.”

Garavito, who is also the chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law and the founding director of MOTH, said that this petition allows them to feel confident as a legal foundation that nature in Ecuador can claim its rights. “The copyright agency will have to look at the decision by the constitutional court, which is binding on all other authorities, and decide whether that legal personhood means that the Los Cedros forest can also be the moral author of a song,” he added.

Although there is no update on whether the forest has received its credit or not, the song is available to download for free. Probably, the forest itself is listening to the melodious track, but, unlike human composers, it will not receive any royalties.