Learning to Belong: Reflections on the Rights of Nature

What would it mean to recognise nature not simply as a resource to be managed, but as something to which we are profoundly related?

This question has been at the heart of my writing and research in recent years, particularly my exploration of Irish mythology, landscape and ecological belonging.

I have become increasingly interested in the older stories and cosmologies through which people understood their place within the living world. These traditions offer us ways of thinking about belonging that extend beyond ownership or individual identity, towards relationship, responsibility and care.

The growing conversation around the Rights of Nature invites us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world. It asks us to question the assumption that rivers, forests, wetlands and other living systems exist merely for human use, and to imagine what it might mean to recognise their intrinsic value and protect their ability to flourish.

For me, this conversation also raises questions about the stories we tell ourselves. How might our relationship with the land change if we understood ourselves not as separate from nature, but as participants in a wider living community?

In my own work, I have been exploring the concept of Kanyini, an Aboriginal Australian understanding of connectedness and responsibility, alongside older Irish cosmologies and traditions of belonging. I am interested in what these different perspectives might invite us to remember about our place in the world.

The challenge before us is not only legal or political. It is also cultural and imaginative. We need new ways of thinking, but perhaps we also need to recover an older capacity to listen, to feel kinship with the places we inhabit, and to recognise that the wellbeing of the natural world is inseparable from our own.

The Rights of Nature conversation offers an opportunity to bring these questions into public life — and to imagine a future shaped less by domination and more by reciprocity.

Perhaps learning to protect nature begins with learning to belong to it again.