MOTH (More Than Human Life)
Culture for Impact is an annual recognition by the Museum for the United Nations - UN Live to celebrate cultural initiatives that unleash the power of popular culture to address major societal challenges and inspire positive change.
UN Live proudly presents the MOTH (More Than Human Life) Project, an interdisciplinary initiative reimagining the rights and well-being of humans, non-humans, and the web of life. Hosted by NYU’s School of Law, MOTH brings together musicians, writers, scientists, artists, and legal scholars to envision a world where nature’s intrinsic value is fully recognized.
At its core is MOTH Records, a pioneering music label creating songs in collaboration with the living world. By recognizing the creative force of non-human organisms, MOTH Records challenges human-centered norms in the music industry, redefining how we connect with nature through sound.
Join Lead Curator Annesofie Norn and members of the MOTH core group—Giuliana Furci, Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, Cosmo Sheldrake, Robert Macfarlane, and the Los Cedros Cloud Forest—as they explore how music inspires change, why the forest is seen as a “moral author,” and how art can turn wonder into action.
UN Live: What do you believe is the power of popular culture to change hearts and minds?
Art speaks to the heart. It can inspire what Rebecca Solnit called “hope in the dark”. It offers modes and spaces of imagining the world otherwise; opening possibilities of feeling and relation which are not accessible through other forms. At its most powerful and consequential, art is the vector which moves the world from wonder to change, by way of hope and action.
Our song, "Song of the Cedars" was collaboratively created by four humans and a cloud-forest. We wished to use the song, and the legal petition we filed alongside it in the Ecuadorian court system, to recognise – legally and culturally – the inextricable agency and participation of the natural world in the making of art. We could not have written the song without the Los Cedros cloud-forest; it, therefore, made absolute philosophical and legal sense to us to acknowledge the forest’s “moral authorship” in the song’s creation, and to seek to drive global change in the profoundly anthropocentric realm of copyright law.
While human musical creations have used sounds of nature since time immemorial –– and some have recognized nature’s role in them –– our initiative is the first known legal attempt in history to recognise an ecosystem as the moral co-author of a song or other work of art.
UN Live: What drew you towards using music as a platform to spark positive change?
The soundscape of Los Cedros, an exceptionally long-lived and pristine region of Neo-Tropical cloud-forest on the Pacific side of the Ecuadorian Andes, is likely to have been more or less constant since before the end of the last Ice Age. It is an ancient, ancient music-maker, and it was a privilege for us to participate and collaborate in the forest’s millennia-old tradition of polyphony.
Music carries home to heart and mind the interconnectedness of human and more-than-human sounds and lives. Nature has its own music; while it might not write novels, it indubitably produces melodies, notes and rhythms—the calls of howler monkeys, the rustling of leaves, the sound of crickets, the songs of birds, the pulsing flow of underground systems and above-ground streams. In ‘Song of the Cedars’, the many voices of the cloud-forest –– its many-tongued chorus of beings –– together form a natural orchestra that sings to and with the human voices.
Music evokes an emotional response, regardless of the language of the receptor. In this specific case, soundscapes featuring natural elements bring the presence of Los Cedros directly into the ears and spirits of listeners, evoking the uniqueness, and emphasising the forest’s creative capacities.
UN Live: What has been the impact of your initiative so far?
‘Song of the Cedars’ received extensive global media coverage. Our initiative received substantial attention from the Guardian, Al Jazeera, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC World Service, BBC World At One, among other major global print and broadcast media. The song has also proved quickly popular with listeners: it has at the time of writing been played 143,000 times on Spotify alone, and a further 30,000 times on YouTube.
The song has also renewed worldwide attention towards the conservation of the Los Cedros cloud forest. The forest is already protected under a Rights of Nature ruling based on articles in the Ecuadorean constitution, but there are attempts ongoing from mining interests to subvert or deny this ruling. Song of the Cedars has given a new, emotionally resonant identity to this fragile, irreplaceable forest within global conservation circles.
Our effort to expand what might be called ‘the legal imagination’ has also resonated intensively with artists, scientists, advocates, lawyers and many others who are advancing the rights of nature and other ways of moving beyond anthropocentrism in law and policy.
UN Live: Can you share a couple of examples of when you experienced that your initiative made a real impact for someone?
Our initiative is making a rapid impact in the field of law and rights. As the director of the Earth Law Center told the CBC, "The possibilities are immense. Over time, the entire legal system could be reimagined to represent all life on Earth — not just humans. Humans are just one part of a vast, interconnected web of life. Shouldn't our legal system reflect this reality, too?"
Among everyday listeners, it has proved a huge inspiration at a time when good news feels rare in the world. For example, when the song was launched, the celebrated musician Alexi Murdoch replied on a social media post: “This is crushingly beautiful. Deep medicine. I am lifted up and devastated all at once…I’ll say that this is a rare thing that opens up a crack in the soul’s canopy between the above and below…and all at once I’m flooded with the longing and the beauty and the grief at my mortal distance and the joy in the impossible closeness of the harmony, the singing of the eternal. Thank you.”
UN Live: What are you hoping that others can learn from your initiative, and what is your dream for the initiative?
Cosmo Sheldrake at Los Cedros Forest - Credits Dylan Stirewalt.
This is the first known attempt in any jurisdiction to establish the 'moral authorship' of an ecosystem as a co-creator in a work. We hope for the Ecuadorian Court to rule in favour of the petition, setting a legal precedent that will only be the start of a new vision, offering a decisive rejection of existing, heavily anthropocentric copyright frameworks.
We hope this case will inspire others to reimagine ecosystems not just as resources but as active, creative participants in our society. Nature is not only a vast source of inspiration and primal materials for art but also for engineering and medicine. The ultimate dream is to see ecosystems worldwide recognised for their creative contributions, fostering a larger global shift toward symbiotic living: what Joanna Macey has called ‘The Great Turning’ that humans must make.
Additionally, we aspire to reinforce the cloud-forest’s existing Rights of Nature as recognised by the Ecuadorean Constitutional Court ruling and to extend those rights further into the realm of moral authorship.
UN Live: At the centre of UN Live’s work and thinking is the importance of building empathy and global belonging for a positive future for all, where popular culture is an important building block. How would you say that your initiative is building on that?
The "Song of the Cedars" case amplifies the voices of the non-human world, cultivating interspecies empathy, and advocating for the recognition of rights across species boundaries, even between ‘humans’ and ‘ecosystems’ such as a cloud-forest. It connects people emotionally to ecosystems, aligning human identity with the broader web of life.
UN Live: At its simplest, what is your message for the world?
Many of the world’s existing legal and cultural structures are deeply anthropocentric and omit the inextricability of both our physical and imaginative co-existence with more-than-human nature. That must change if we are to live well on this complex and wondrous Earth.
We are honoured that MOTH shared their work with us and are rooting for them on the Ecuadorean Court court ruling! Learn more about MOTH here, and listen to “Song of the Cedars” here.
The selection criteria for the Culture for Impact list
The selection criteria prioritize innovative cultural initiatives addressing societal challenges and fostering change:
Culture Innovation: Initiatives that demonstrate a pioneering or significant application of popular culture to address societal challenges or promote positive change.
Genre Diversity: Inclusivity across a spectrum of cultural genres, showcasing a diverse range of creative expressions and innovative approaches.
Topic Versatility: Recognition of initiatives that address a wide array of topics and issues, demonstrating the versatility and adaptability of cultural genres.
Global Inclusivity: Emphasis on initiatives that contribute to cultural impact on a global scale, promoting inclusivity and representation from various regions around the world.
Dual Impact Approach: Acknowledgment of initiatives that have achieved significant reach while also recognizing the nuanced impact of smaller-scale efforts that contribute profoundly to cultural change.