‘Song of the Cedars’ (MOTH Records). In a groundbreaking move for legal and environmental history, the MOTH (More Than Human) Life Collective  has submitted a petition to Ecuador’s copyright office to recognise the Los Cedros cloud-forest as the co-creator of the song, composed in collaboration with musician Cosmo Sheldrake, writer Robert Macfarlane, field mycologist Giuliana Furci, and legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito. This is first legal attempt to recognise an ecosystem’s moral authorship in the co-creation of a work of art.

The petition proposes to extend the already established legal personhood of the Los Cedros Biological Reserve, recognised by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court in 2021, when it ruled in favour of cancelling mining permits in the reserve. The ‘Song of the Cedars’ case is poised to take this recognition a step further, extending it into the creative domains. This action creates a legal path whereby the natural world is acknowledged as a vital creative force. The rights that the petition pursues for Los Cedros and the human co-creators are moral rights – that is, recognition of co-authorship – as opposed to economic rights over royalties. The song is both available for free download and released on streaming platforms; any income generated through the latter will go directly to the recently established Los Cedros Fund for the protection of the cloud forest.

This legal case aims to disrupt traditional anthropocentric copyright frameworks by granting creative rights to a non-human natural entity. This is the first known attempt in any jurisdiction to establish the ‘moral authorship’ of an ecosystem as a co-creator in a work. The forest’s essence is embedded in the song — an immersive musical experience that includes natural sounds such as Toucan barbets, echo-locating bats, Howler monkeys, crickets, rustling leaves and even a subterranean recording of the soil taken from the exact location where a new species of fungus was collected and described. These were recorded in the upper regions of Los Cedros in 2022, during an expedition organised by Robert Macfarlane as part of the fieldwork for his upcoming book about rivers and the rights of nature movement, Is A River Alive? (due to be published in May 2025).

_{Photos taken in the Los Cedros cloud-forest by Robert Macfarlane. Single artwork by Elena Landinez.}

The submission of this petition marks a milestone in the evolving Rights of Nature movement, with the goal of extending moral rights to non-humans; in this case to an ecosystem. The right of “moral authorship” has thus far been recognized only in human creators. If the petition is denied, the MOTH Collective intends to bring this case to the Constitutional Court, in collaboration with Ecuadorian lawyers.