Rights of Urban Nature. How to Apply a Non-Anthropocentric Ethic to an Anthropogenic World

Rights of nature are part of a growing alternative to anthropocentric responses to the manifold ecological crises of this planet. Those very same crises, however, keep changing the playing field rights of nature try to address. In this thesis, I try to reconcile these underlying tendencies by looking at how to apply a non-anthropocentric ethic to an anthropogenic world. Structured in three core chapters, I will first look at what humans knew and know about nature, the concept’s contemporarily competing understandings, as well as its unique genesis within cities. I build on these findings by analysing environmental perspectives through the lens of ethical inclusion and exclusion. I hope to show that the conditions to reach a truly non-anthropocentric ethic are imaginable yet impractical, potentially even dangerous. The third core chapter serves as a possible solution to escape such an arbitrary ethic. Somewhat counterintuitively, I propose political humanness, defined as a non-negotiable political artefact, to create a point of departure for a careful reconstruction of actionable normativities. I develop the concept of liminal stakeholders, which, together with its entangled environment, forms a politically justified, new dualism as well as normative standard of nature. The resource demands of liminal stakeholders, however, are incompatible with the resource supply of their entangled environments. The resulting ratio dilemmas describe these insurmountable incompatibilities. Only through cities, thus places that only ever existed to promote political humanness in the first place, I am able to escape these dilemmas. I do so by imagining them as patchy holocenes, which represent local and short-term safe havens within a globally and long-term unsustainable, chaotic world. Negotiated through the politics of liminal parliaments, cities offer guidance to resolve some of the conflicts between the historical asymmetry of human and non-human natures.