What have fungi to do with the law? When we encounter mushrooms in the forest—those curious forms that sometimes even resemble little human figures, complete with a kind of hat—our instinct is to bend down, to look closer, and to ask: “What is this?” This simple gesture of curiosity and attentiveness matters. It shifts our attention away from imagining nature as human-like or elevating certain natural assets to something grander or divine, as they are often framed within the Rights of Nature (RoN) movement through traditional arboreal metaphors of forests and trees. While RoN has brought us into the woods, this article looks down toward mushrooms—and, even more, toward the largely invisible world of fungi—opening a more grounded and open-ended encounter with what is there. We suggest that this form of attentiveness contributes to debates on the RoN and, ultimately, on legal subjectivity itself.
The RoN movement has proposed a paradigm shift: recognizing nature’s intrinsic value, moving beyond legal models that center human responsibility without challenging human dominance, and subjectifying natural entities so that they may hold rights and, in some cases, legal standing.Footnote 1 This emerges against the backdrop of the dire environmental crises confronting the planet, which are frequently traced to historically entrenched human–nature relations. As Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature famously argues, the rise of mechanistic worldviews in early modernity rendered nature legible primarily as an object to be dominated, managed, and exploited, with profound ecological and social consequences.Footnote 2 This conceptual legacy endures in contemporary political, economic, and even scientific metaphors that continue to frame the natural world as passive matter available for human use. Against this background, the growing RoN movement has emerged as a significant attempt to unsettle inherited assumptions and to reconfigure the juridical and philosophical foundations of human–nature interactions.
What makes RoN especially interesting is that it is not merely a set of technical legal innovations; it also unsettles deep-seated ontological and conceptual frameworks about what—or who—can count as a subject before the law. Landmark cases such as the recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person in Aotearoa, New Zealand, the granting of legal rights to the Mar Menor lagoon in Spain, and Colombian courts’ protection of the Amazon forest via rights recognition illustrate how RoN is becoming both a legally and philosophically entrenched movement across diverse jurisdictions.Footnote 3
Yet, these cases also raise a broader set of questions: What do the existing RoN narratives—often told through courts, statutes, and activist mobilization—reveal about how “nature” is imagined, and what do they reveal about how the human is imagined in relation to it? Which metaphors are mobilized to stand in for the more-than-human world, and how do they shape the kinds of legal and ethical relations that become thinkable? Forests, rivers, and mountains frequently serve as emblematic RoN subjects, but each of these carries particular narrative forms that stabilize specific models of agency, subjecthood, and interdependence.Footnote 4
This article examines the metaphors through which “nature” is conceptualized in contemporary RoN law and jurisprudence. It draws on a distinction between metaphors as explanatory and representational devices—primarily rhetorical instruments—and metaphors that operate as deeper cognitive and epistemological structures shaping human–world relations.Footnote 5 RoN frameworks often rely on metaphorical substitutions themselves, as specific natural entities are made to stand pars pro toto for “nature” as a whole. These figurations, in turn, shape the legal reasoning that informs RoN jurisprudence. Taking seriously the anthropological proposition that fungi operate as disturbing elements that resist taxonomic fixity and hierarchical ordering, the article asks what a fungal metaphor might contribute to RoN debates and to the reconfiguration of human positionality within the more-than-human world.Footnote 6 The aim is not to propose fungi as rights-bearing subjects; rather, fungi serve here as heuristic devices for destabilizing and reimagining the legal ontology underlying RoN. This critical reframing leads to a reconsideration of the (human and political) organism and the immune discourses that surround it.Footnote 7
Building on the disturbances introduced by the fungal model, the article calls for a revised legal-ontological framework for RoN—one that is relational, non-hierarchical, and capable of unsettling the immunized borders of the modern legal subject. Within an interdisciplinary dialogue between law and philosophy, it examines how the metaphors and ontological assumptions embedded in RoN cases shape the legal imagination itself.Footnote 8 Tracing the metaphorical trajectories from arboreal imagery to fungal models illuminates how different natural figures enable or constrain RoN’s transformative aspirations and how rethinking metaphor through fungi can open new possibilities for conceptualizing the RoN.
1. RoN—rights of trees?
The RoN movement has developed into a globally resonant legal and philosophical project, expanding far beyond its early origins. While environmental protection had long been articulated through anthropocentric frameworks—emphasizing human interests in clean air, stable climates, or intact ecosystems—the contemporary movement seeks to recognize nature itself as a subject of law.Footnote 9 This shift is visible across continents, in courts, legislatures, and civil-society initiatives, and it is increasingly documented.Footnote 10 Nature “as such,” understood in its entirety rather than as a collection of resources or ecosystem services, has been acknowledged in some jurisdictions as possessing legal subjectivity.Footnote 11 Parallel recognitions have been extended to specific natural entities, such as animals, mountains, rivers, or grasslands—databases of global jurisprudence record an expanding number of these initiatives, illustrating how formerly symbolic or theoretical ideas have entered the realm of positive law.Footnote 12 Yet trees and forests occupy a particularly central place among the natural entities invoked in this process.
Christopher D. Stone’s Reference Stone1972 essay, “Should Trees Have Standing?” is regularly cited as a foundational moment in RoN scholarship.Footnote 13 Stone wrote the piece in the context of litigation that sought to prevent the clearing of trees to make way for a planned Walt Disney ski resort in the Mineral King Valley of California. Although the lawsuit itself ultimately failed to establish legal rights for the affected trees, the accompanying text introduced a set of arguments that proved decisive in shaping the intellectual trajectory of the movement. Stone asked whether natural objects could be recognized as rights-bearing subjects in much the same way as corporations or municipalities—entities that possess legal personality not because of their biological or moral capacities but because the law chooses to grant them such status. His provocative question was not merely rhetorical; it aimed to expose the contingency of existing legal categories to demonstrate that the exclusion of natural entities from legal standing was disputable. Stone’s intervention became a canonical reference, reappearing in legal theory, environmental philosophy, and judicial reasoning whenever the personhood or subjectivity of non-human entities was at stake.Footnote 14
In the twenty-first century, developments that once seemed hypothetical have materialized in courts and legislatures. A vivid example is the 2018 decision of the Colombian Corte Suprema recognizing the Amazon forest as a rights-bearing legal subject.Footnote 15 Unlike earlier cases centered on procedural standing or administrative duties, the Colombian ruling affirmed that the forest holds substantive rights that the state must protect. Remarkably, the case was brought by representatives of future generations, who argued that government inaction on climate change constituted a violation of their constitutional rights; the Court accepted this argument and extended it by declaring that the Amazon itself required legal safeguarding, creating obligations for the state to implement measures to halt deforestation and reduce emissions.Footnote 16 This decision is emblematic of a broader judicial shift away from protecting discrete interests of human groups and toward recognizing the intrinsic value and vulnerability of ecological wholes. Legislative and normative initiatives have followed a similar path. In 2019, France approved the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Trees, a document that, while not formally binding, articulates a set of principles concerning the dignity, biological integrity, and developmental capacities of trees. The declaration frames trees not merely as property or ecological assets but as living beings that play irreplaceable roles in planetary systems. It states in Article 1: “L’arbre est un être vivant respectable, essentiel à l’Homme et à l’équilibre de la planète que l’Homme partage avec le reste du Vivant.”Footnote 17 Importantly, even in jurisdictions where legislatures have not adopted explicit rights-of-nature frameworks, natural entities may nonetheless acquire forms of recognition that resonate with the movement’s underlying logic. The United Kingdom provides an illustrative example: although British law does not formally recognize nature as a legal subject, recent judicial responses demonstrate how courts can attribute to natural objects a status that transcends their mere classification as property. The case of the Sycamore Gap tree—also known as the Robinson tree—offers a striking illustration of this dynamic.
The Sycamore Gap tree, located along Hadrian’s Wall, had long been an iconic feature of the British landscape, widely photographed, culturally embedded, and affectionately regarded by the public. In 2023, the tree was deliberately felled by two men, an act that generated widespread shock and media attention. Prosecutors charged the men with two counts of criminal damage: one relating to the tree itself and one relating to the surrounding landscape. Under standard sentencing guidelines for criminal damage in the United Kingdom, the offenders might have faced custodial sentences as short as six months. However, the court diverged from typical sentencing expectations based on its assessment of the nature and magnitude of the harm. Justice Lambert, delivering her decision in July 2025, stated, “When considering the harm caused by your actions my focus must be upon the social impact of the offence. The … heart-felt messages from members of the public … reflect my own impression of media accounts of the public’s reaction, which was one of widespread shock and bewilderment.”Footnote 18
Her reasoning underscores the deeply affective and communal relationship that many people felt toward the tree, which had served not only as a distinctive physical landmark but also as an emotionally significant symbol embedded in collective memory. The language used in the judgment—evoking sentiments akin to the loss of a loved one—suggests that the harm extended beyond property destruction to what could be understood as a violation of a socially recognized, quasi-personal entity. Ultimately, this judicial framing contributed to the imposition of prison sentences of four years and three months, far exceeding what might have been predicted from the statutory baseline.
The cases discussed indicate a shift within cultural, philosophical, and scientific discourses—not only in how nature is conceptualized, but also in the growing commitment to institutionalizing these discourses within judicial systems, their legal apparatuses, and associated practices. Yet, a crucial question remains: to what extent is it possible to think—and speak—about RoN in a way that does justice to the complexity of living and natural structures without reducing or oversimplifying them?Footnote 19
2. Arboreal metaphors of nature
While forests and trees are by no means the only natural entities to have been attributed subject-like status in law, they have nevertheless constituted a central and enduring element of the RoN movement and the accompanying scholarship from its earliest foundations to the present. This prominence resonates with some of the most persistent representations of nature in literature. A diachronic reading of Western literature shows how persistent this image is, from Dante’s Divine Comedy (1321), where he imagines himself lost and confronting his fears in the selva oscura, to the Romantic and Naturalist writing of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854).Footnote 20 Similar patterns appear in Amazonian literature, including Simá by Lourenço da Silva Araújo Amazonas (1857) and Hostal Amor by Cayo Vásquez (2006), as well as in contemporary environmental writing.Footnote 21 These works use particular modes of representing the relationship between humans and nature, reflecting the dominant ideological, political, and scientific ideas of their respective periods. A striking example is the novel The Vortex (1924) by Colombian writer José Eustasio Rivera, which uses a rich set of metaphors to depict both exploitative human relations and the fraught relationship between humans and nature, set against the backdrop of the rubber boom in the Amazon at the turn of the 20th century.Footnote 22
To understand how forest and tree metaphors have shaped various forms of legal discourse, this study draws on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of metaphor, particularly their distinction between orientational and ontological metaphors. Lakoff and Johnson have placed everyday language metaphors and their cognitive dimension at the center of scientific discussions—not least the relationship between language and thought.Footnote 23 In the context of the empirically based linguistic research they conducted at the end of the 1970s, Lakoff and Johnson found “that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature.”Footnote 24 Within this framework, metaphors are not only rhetorical tools but also cognitive structures that establish a conceptual system on which our worldview is based and structured, as well as the ways of thinking and acting in the represented world.
According to Lakoff and Johnson, an orientational metaphor “organizes a whole system of concepts with respect to one another. We will call these orientational metaphors, since most of them have to do with spatial orientation: up-down, in-out, front-back, on-off, deep-shallow, central-peripheral.”Footnote 25 This can be illustrated by René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637). Descartes uses the forest metaphor to describe the resoluteness required for moral action and the need to shield such resolve from idle talk and ungrounded opinion. The forest represents a condition of uncertainty, providing a way of imagining a complex moral world in which clear and decisive action must nevertheless be taken.Footnote 26 In Lakoff and Johnson’s terms, the metaphor generates a series of orientational mappings that frame moral conduct through spatial directionality, associating what is morally right with what is straight, direct, and properly oriented.
At the same time, the forest can also function as an ontological metaphor. Through ontological metaphors, “we can identify our experiences as entities or substances, we can refer to them, categorize them, group them, and quantify them—and, by this means, reason about them.”Footnote 27 A notable example is Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994), in which the Italian novelist and philosopher uses the forest metaphor to characterize “narrative text” or “any kind of narrative” in a broad, encompassing way.Footnote 28 Through this metaphor, Eco proposes a kind of map of world literature, in which texts, readers, conditions of production, paratexts, and their relationships can all be understood together. The forest here functions as a totalizing metaphor: a kind of container, an enclosed semantic space that organizes meaning and structures the relations between the elements within it.
As a mental or meta-structural framework, the tree metaphor has become a standard model for representing scientific knowledge through hierarchical organization and causal relations. Within this framework, processes of subject formation depend on one’s position within a broader genealogical structure. This logic finds its clearest expression in forms such as the Stammbaum (genealogical tree) and the arbor Porphyrii, which organize identity and relations through lineage and ancestry. As both an explanatory and figurative device, the Stammbaum is embedded in a relational logic that orders subjects according to hierarchies of descent, historical precedence, and significance.
This top-down representational logic, from forest to tree, also serves to simplify and render legible complex systems of relations. In RoN discourse, similar synecdochic patterns often appear: trees stand in for “nature” as a whole, reducing ecological complexity to individual rights-bearing units. This pars pro toto logic reinforces ontologizing tendencies already embedded in forest and Stammbaum forms of representation.
Understood as a mental structure, arboreal imagery—or forest metaphors—appears captive to its own success. Its stability and productivity depend on the historical continuity of metaphorical discourse. As Annemieke Verboon notes, one rhetorical effect of the tree figure is that it actively preserves its underlying mental structure.Footnote 29 While arboreal imagery has been effective in recognizing natural entities—such as trees or bodies of water—as legal subjects or in supporting non-human-centered scientific paradigms, it remains unclear whether this representational model can adequately account for complex ecological systems without being constrained by its own historical formation.Footnote 30
Despite (or perhaps because of) its stability, arboreal imagery continues to function as a highly productive representational strategy.Footnote 31 At the same time, there is still no discursive framework capable of connecting these individual cases and supporting a philosophically and legally rigorous account of legal claims, subjects of nature, and subjects of law. This may help explain why most RoN decisions have not been implemented. The forest metaphor, as a representational logic, functions as a paradigm. In this sense, it aligns with Hans Blumenberg’s notion of an absolute metaphor—one that proves “resistant to terminological claims and cannot be dissolved into conceptuality.”Footnote 32
From this perspective, the richness of arboreal imagery and its symbolic density can be understood as a by-product of this stable cognitive structure, as can the widespread use of forest metaphors across cultural contexts.Footnote 33 As a mental structure, it reproduces forms of subjectivation by stabilizing identities and assigning positions within a larger whole. Serving as a framework of semantic orientation, the forest metaphor organizes space as a whole while also categorizing the beings contained within it. In the RoN cases discussed above, individual natural entities granted legal status often function as totalizing representations of nature rather than as representatives of it. As a result, these recognized subjects simultaneously stand for nature as a whole while being treated in isolation, detached from the wider ecological system they are meant to represent.
3. Fungi as a disturbing element
Fungi are as integral to tree ecologies as leaves and roots, yet they also extend beyond arboreal systems, forming subterranean and atmospheric networks that resist the unit-based logic of individuality. In this sense, fungi introduce a conceptual disturbance to dominant ways of imagining and subjectivizing nature, particularly those grounded in arboreal metaphors, as discussed in the preceding sections. While trees tend to support imaginaries that stabilize identities, anchor hierarchical relations, and project human subjectivity onto nature, fungi—or the fungal metaphors—unsettle these assumptions.Footnote 34 They exemplify non-linear, networked, and relational forms of life that Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing identifies as “disturbance-based ecologies” in the Anthropocene.Footnote 35
Fungi have moved to the center of biological research, environmental humanities, and climate science, a shift that can be described as a “fungal turn.”Footnote 36 Works such as Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (2020) have brought fungal worlds into broader theoretical discussion, showing how fungi exemplify the entanglements that define the Anthropocene: multispecies dependencies, uncertain boundaries, and ecologies shaped by disturbance rather than stability. Remarkably, up to 90 percent of fungal species remain unclassified, underscoring the profound epistemic challenges they pose.Footnote 37
What is striking about the “fungal turn” is the conceptual indeterminacy of fungi in biological discourse. The mycelial network, in particular, invites a shift not only in how we represent nature, but also in how we think about the modern legal subject and its underlying ontology. Fungi are everywhere—in soil, air, food, and bodies—and yet remain largely invisible in both ecological and legal frameworks. They decompose organic matter, maintain soil fertility, facilitate the uptake of nutrients and water through mycorrhizal relations, and contribute to carbon sequestration.Footnote 38 From soil remediation experiments to increasing evidence of fungal contributions to carbon storage and climate resilience, their ecological significance is only beginning to be understood.Footnote 39
Yet their elusiveness, relationality, and sheer diversity resist stable categorization. What fungi are—plants, animals, networks, ecosystems, processes, or something else entirely—remains an open scientific question. Sheldrake’s claim that fungi are “better thought of not as a thing, but as a process” captures their challenge to conventional ontologies, including those embedded in law.Footnote 40 Despite their ecological centrality, fungi remain poorly protected under existing environmental regimes.Footnote 41
This has prompted new initiatives, including the 2024 “Fungal Conservation Pledge” launched by the UK and Chile at COP16, which calls for the recognition of three kingdoms (flora, fauna, and fungi) and for fungi to be included in biodiversity governance on an equal footing with animals and plants.Footnote 42 Earlier efforts, such as the 2013 European Charter on Fungi Gathering and Biodiversity under the Bern Convention, remain non-binding and merely focused on macro-fungi.Footnote 43 This emphasis on mushrooms (the visible fruiting bodies of fungi) reveals a persistent tendency in law to privilege what is visible, discrete, and nameable, while overlooking the vast majority of fungal life that does not appear as bounded entities.Footnote 44 Even conservation efforts, then, risk reproducing the very conceptual limits that fungi otherwise help to unsettle.
Alongside becoming a subject of scientific research, fungi have also become powerful metaphors. Their refusal of binary classification—being neither plant nor animal and both individual and network—aligns them with contemporary thinking about decentralized communication and ecological interdependence. They evoke Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Rhizome and Édouard Glissant’s relational poetics, offering models of connectivity that challenge hierarchical and anthropocentric imaginaries.Footnote 45
But fungi do more than serve as mere metaphors themselves: they also expose the limits of the metaphors that have historically shaped RoN frameworks, especially the reliance on arboreal figures that project a human-like, stable, and bounded form of subjectivity onto nature. In this sense, fungi challenge the very foundations of legal subjectivity. Their processual and relational nature resists the law’s demand for fixed, identifiable rights-holders. Biologists like Alan Rayner emphasize that fungi “do not die of age.”Footnote 46 Sheldrake’s depiction of fungi as ongoing processes similarly destabilizes the legal assumption that subjects are discrete entities with clearly defined boundaries.
To consider fungi as legal subjects would therefore require law to engage directly with scientific uncertainty, ontological ambiguity, and relational dynamism—not as problems to be minimized but as constitutive features of the beings to whom rights might be extended. This is not about adding fungi to an existing catalog of rights-bearing natural entities. It is a more radical shift: fungi force legal thought to reconsider what kind of entity can be “en-titled” in the first place.
Ultimately, the disturbance introduced by fungi reveals how deeply anthropocentric many RoN metaphors remain. Tree- and forest-based legal imaginaries often mirror human self-understanding: large, visible, long-lived organisms whose temporal and spatial scales approximate (or exceed) ours. By contrast, fungal worlds foreground forms of life that are interdependent, mutable, partially knowable, and inseparable from the ecologies they compose. Seen through a fungal lens, even forests come to appear differently. Fungi thus function as a productive counterpoint to arboreal metaphors while remaining intimately linked to trees through mycorrhizal relations. Their conceptual disturbance invites a rethinking of how legal subjectivity is constructed in the first place and points toward more-than-human metaphors capable of engaging the complexity of life in the Anthropocene.
4. The immunized legal person
In legal philosophy, the concept of a legal person is traditionally traced to the mask, a notion rooted in Roman law and the etymological source of the term persona. Footnote 47 Figuratively, the mask represents the face—or representative form—through which an individual assumes a role or function within a social and legal system.Footnote 48 Fungi, by disturbing the stabilizing metaphors of forests and trees, reveal this mask and make room for contamination. This dynamic resonates with Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical philosophy, which engages critically with the immunitarian paradigm.Footnote 49
Esposito’s analysis of the modern legal subject examines the relationship between life and power and, by extension, the ways in which the body has been represented as both an individual and a political category since the early modern period, linking the organism metaphor to hygienist and medical discourses.Footnote 50 The immune paradigm structures the identity of the modern political subject through a paradox: the very mechanisms through which political order seeks to safeguard life simultaneously act upon and transform the subject itself, effectively “immunizing” the individual.Footnote 51 The Hobbesian model of the state offers a key illustration of this logic, inaugurating “modernity’s most celebrated immune scenario.”Footnote 52 On the one hand, the Leviathan guarantees the security of the members of the social body, thereby establishing both the political conditions of the munus—the common—and the broader discursive framework of political life. On the other hand, munus denotes “task, obligation, [or] duty (including in the sense of a gift to be repaid).”Footnote 53 The dynamic of gift-giving thus lies at the heart of the common and sustains the social pact.
According to Esposito, the term immunus names a condition in which certain subjects are exempted from the original obligation of gift-giving, marking a form of exception within the political body. Central to his concept of biopolitics are the excesses of institutional power and its capacity to act directly upon living bodies.Footnote 54 In this sense, immunus designates a strategy through which the political body seeks protection from the very dynamics of communal life. The paradox of this immunizing logic is that the instruments designed to preserve life can themselves become threats to it; immune mechanisms thus operate to shield the political body from the excesses of the munus. Footnote 55 The immune system, in this sense, establishes a representational framework in which individual life is secured by being partially subsumed, and thereby constrained, within larger political forms.
Upon closer examination, it is precisely subjective rights that function to immunize the subject.Footnote 56 From this perspective, modern subjects of rights are configured not only through a metaphorical structure that privileges hierarchy (the Stammbaum model) and thereby reduces complexity in a pars pro toto logic but also through an immunological dynamic embedded in representations of individual and social life.
Within this representational logic, it is important to note that Roberto Esposito’s immune paradigm does not seek to resolve the aporetic character of immunity in his biopolitical philosophy; rather, it treats aporia as a constitutive feature of the organic model. In this sense, it departs from reductionist dynamics that, in a top-down manner—as discussed in the previous part on arboreal imagery—determine constitutive elements. Instead, by embedding aporia within its structure, the immune paradigm introduces an internal difference that can be translated into a new semiotics of the organic, manifesting as a productive disturbance.Footnote 57
Given the scientific uncertainty surrounding their classification within the eukaryotic kingdom, along with broader conceptual ambiguities, fungi offer fertile conditions for a shift in thinking in the form of a disturbing yet productive metaphor. More than this, the fungal metaphor can function as an alternative strategy of metaphoricity itself, operating as a representational logic. As a mental structure that informs scientific, philosophical, and political discourse, it draws on the rhizomatic and less hierarchical organization of fungal life.
In this sense, it enables both a reconfiguration of how nature is represented—allowing for shifts and fluctuations in its identity—and new ways of understanding how a legal subject might be constructed. This approach moves beyond a simple transposition of the immunological model of the modern legal subject in its restrictive sense and opens onto new legal imaginaries within a RoN framework that incorporates a more dynamic and unsettling form of autopoiesis.
5. Entangled laws: rethinking RoN through fungi
This article, approaching legal subjecthood from the perspective of fungi, does not frame fungi as natural entities positioned within a hierarchical Stammbaum-style model or as beings destined to become yet another legal subject. Instead, the fungal model developed here questions the ontological assumptions of RoN itself. Mycelial networks exemplify relationality and elusiveness, suggesting that nature may be better understood as a fluctuating assemblage rather than a stable entity. Michel Serres famously asks: “Being or relating—that is the whole question.”Footnote 58 The fungal model thus invites a shift from possessive rights to relational responsibilities, from subjects to connections, and from entities to processes. It offers ways to respond to common critiques directed toward RoN as overly vague or as relying on excessive restriction of human activities.Footnote 59 Rather than resolving these tensions, it reframes them: nature becomes legible not as a collection of bounded legal subjects, but as a network of symbiotic and parasitic relations. In this view, nature can be approached as a political subject composed of interacting processes, echoing Serres’ relational thinking. The actors within this system are not fixed in advance by a stable explanatory structure—such as the forest metaphor and its reductionist pars pro toto logic—but emerge and shift according to their positions within the dynamic net of relations.
Existing RoN cases (trees, rivers, and mountains) appear, from this perspective, like fruiting bodies of a deeper conceptual mycelium. Yet they remain largely entity-oriented. Fungi suggest that even a tree is already composite, always more than one. They therefore invite a move beyond rights for discrete entities toward rights understood within relational assemblages.
If the journey toward a new ontology of rights first led us to recognize nature as a subject of rights within the RoN movement, our curiosity must now lead us to lower our gaze and recognize ourselves as part of a natural system that vibrates, dwells, and unfolds from the depths to the surface, much like a mycelial network spreading and sprouting in multiple forms. Fungi remind us that, after this journey, legal subjectivity will no longer remain the same—and perhaps this transformation is precisely what the RoN movement calls for.
Author contribution
Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Software, Supervision, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing: A-J.S., F.C.L.
Conflict of interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
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