Towards the recognition of Table Mountain as a ‘living’ entity — in law and beyond

In ceremony on Hoerikwaggo, 21 March 2025. (Photo: James Taylor)

22 Apr 2025

During the first few months of 2025, while the Trump administration was waging all-out war on the natural world, a movement was gaining momentum around a novel form of environmentalism. In New Zealand, in January, Mount Taranaki was granted legal personhood — and then suddenly, in late March, the focus was on Table Mountain. Driven by some of South Africa’s most respected lawyers, activists and healers, the project was nothing if not a radical response to desperate times.

“This work of Cormac Cullinan presents a new way of thinking about the intimate presence of the human community on the Earth.”

At the age of 85, almost a decade before he died, the great monk, philosopher and cultural historian Thomas Berry — among the twentieth century’s leading voices on the relationship between humanity and the natural world — lent his reputation to a South African lawyer in his early 40s.

Cullinan’s Wild Law, published in 2002, was according to Berry “one of the finest contributions to the entire field of jurisprudence in recent times”.

Berry, who wrote the foreword, wasn’t the only giant of the environmental movement with praise for the book — Wangari Mathai, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize a few years later for her work on green belts in Kenya, and Vandana Shiva, who was already known as the “Gandhi of grain” for her anti-GMO activism in India, loved it too.

For all three of these heavyweights, Cullinan’s Wild Law offered a way through the global crisis of governance that was suffocating the natural world.

The jurisprudence of wild places

Twenty-three years after it was published, in early April 2025, Cullinan — now in his mid-60s — would place a copy of the book in my hands.

His intent was not to demonstrate the stature of the activists he had once impressed, nor was he encouraging me to read the text from beginning to end. What he wanted, rather, was to remind me of his answer to a question I had asked the week before, when we were hiking together up the Constantia Nek route to the top of Table Mountain.

For how long, I had asked, had he been nurturing his dream of securing legal personhood for the mountain? In other words, when had it first occurred to him that Table Mountain ought to be recognised as a wild, living entity with its own inherent rights?

As Cullinan had explained to me, the idea had taken hold when he was writing Wild Law — the book was completed in the study of his former home in Cape Town’s southern suburbs, he had said, with a view of the mountain through the front window.

The opening of chapter six — titled “Respecting the Great Law” — was his proof. Accordingly, he had inserted a post-it note for my convenience.

“Where does it begin and end?” the text wondered, at the top of page 76. “What is the mountain and what is the range? What is it made of and are the clouds, forests and streams part of it? What is it to me and me to it? Is it an object of reverence? A muse to inspire me? Or is it merely a pleasingly shaped pile of sandstone and granite?”

No easy clarity

Although the intervening years had brought no easy clarity to such questions, for Cullinan it was the cumulative experiences of the human beings who had been sheltered, nurtured, fed, watered and otherwise spiritually or physically sustained by “Hoerikwaggo” — the indigenous Khoi and San name, which translates as “ocean-emerging mountain” — that was the underlying point.

Our recent hike, a collective pilgrimage in the form of a “request for permission” during an overnight stay in the old Scouts hut, had prompted the same understanding. Of the dozen or so who had made the journey — lawyers, activists, artists and traditional healers — it was Delme Cupido, an indigenous rights expert and the southern African director of the continental non-profit Natural Justice, who had put it best.

“You’re all sharing these stories about your deeply felt, subjective relationships with the mountain,” Cupido had observed, as the evening’s ceremony was drawing to a close. “An object can’t do that.”

In ceremony on Hoerikwaggo, 21 March 2025. (Photo: Paul Weinberg)

Cullinan, now back in his office for the follow-up interview, was struck by the profundity of the insight, as if he was hearing it read back to him (from my notebook) for the first time.

“It’s true,” he said. “The mountain is a tangible presence in Capetonians’ lives. We look at it, we refer to it, we walk on it, we explore it. But, officially, it’s just a pile of rock, a national park. What’s obvious to me is that there is this disjuncture between our experiential reality and our educated worldview.”

And yet still, as I asked him to repeat, what was he hoping to achieve by exposing and addressing the disjuncture? After all, as a national park, could the mountain be accorded any more protections than it already had?

“In mainstream conservation,” Cullinan responded, “you would say something like, ‘There used to be five Kudu and now there’s 10 Kudu.’ This project is much harder to quantify, but that’s because there is something much deeper at play. In indigenous culture, for example, the laws aren’t written down, they are embedded inside people. So, while the initiative is partially about protection, it is more importantly about a shift in perspective.”

Hoerikwaggo, Mount Taranaki and new precedents in international law

In January 2025, New Zealand's parliament unanimously passed a law granting Mount Taranaki, also known by its Māori name Taranaki Maunga, the status of a legal person. As one of the most symmetrical volcanic cones in the world — and, like Table Mountain in South Africa, the country’s “most climbed” peak — the news was welcomed by the vast majority of New Zealanders. But it was the parliamentary promise to the Taranaki Māori, who had always related to the mountain as descendants to a living ancestor, that was finally responsible for the ratification of the new law.

Taranaki Maunga, it turned out, was New Zealand’s third natural feature to be granted legal personhood in 11 years — in 2014, the Tūhoe nation were the first to secure the status for the Te Urewera rainforest, while in 2017 the Whanganui tribes did the same for the Whanganui River.

“When we think about the concept of personhood, what we are doing is putting in place a very Māori indigenous concept into Western law,” Jamie Tuuta, the chief negotiator for the Taranaki, explained to The Guardian in early 2025. “When we view (these natural features) as being ancestors… what we ultimately look to do is to see behaviour change.”

This, as a motivating factor, was almost exactly what Cullinan had been contemplating since 2002 — by relating to Table Mountain as a conscious being, his subjective experience had taught him that a person’s attitude towards all of nature was bound to change as a result.

As he wrote in Wild Law: “All the while the mountain remains as it is, solid and still, yet playing its part in co-creating the micro-climate around me, the meaning in my head and the gladness in my heart.”

In the decades since those words were committed to the page, Cullinan’s ideas about an Earth-orientated jurisprudence — or, as per the book’s original purpose, his ideas about legal systems that did not “legitimise and encourage the exploitation of Earth” — had begun to take hold.

As co-founder of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (Garn), established in 2010, he had watched in awe as the organisation grew its membership to upwards of 5,000 environmental experts across more than a hundred countries. From his vantage point on Garn’s executive committee, he was delighted and encouraged by the developments in New Zealand. He took notes, from the front row, as Ecuador reaped the rewards of incorporating the “Rights of Nature” into its Constitution. Also, as a judge on the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, he had heard testimony from — and provided guidance to — dozens of whistleblowers, front-line conservationists and indigenous elders, people who (like him) sensed that radical action was necessary if the planet was to escape a catastrophic ecological fate.

Altogether appropriate

It seemed altogether appropriate, then, that the initiative to secure legal personhood for Table Mountain had recently won Garn’s backing.

“For a long time,” Cullinan said to me, “I have been working for the rights of nature all over the world. This year, I thought to myself, it was time to return to my roots.”

And back home, of course, to bolster the international heft of Garn, Cullinan knew he could rely on the support of some of the country’s heaviest-hitting activists — the human rights and environmental lawyer Pooven Moodley, for instance, who had held the line alongside him in the legendary legal battle to expel oil giant Shell from the waters of the Wild Coast.

Moodley, who would win the 2023 United Nations Human Rights Prize for his work, pointed Daily Maverick to an aspect of the Shell case that was still drawing the attention of the world’s media — an angle that had been covered by The New York Times and Washington Post, but that was perhaps best articulated in the long-form Al Jazeera feature, “Defending the ancestors against Big Oil”.

As Moodley made clear: “In our case against Shell, the courts accepted our legal argument that the ancestors, according to the coastal communities, live in the ocean. This was a major breakthrough in terms of pushing the boundaries of the law and recognising ancient cosmology. The legal recognition of Hoerikwaggo builds on this precedent.”

It was an understanding shared by all of the participants on the founding hike up Table Mountain. But for sheer ancestral and ceremonial heft, there were another two voices that stood out — Linda Tucker, the world-renowned white lion conservationist and Timbavati-based traditional healer, and Mpatheleni Makaulule, founder of the organisation Dzomo la Mupo, a healer in the Makhadzi tradition of the tshiVenda.

Both Tucker and Makaulule had featured in Daily Maverick before, in articles that focused on the place of indigenous practice and sacred sites in the pushback against environmental collapse (see here and here). And for both, as evidenced in their prayers and invocations, there was no question that the conscious spirit of Hoerikwaggo — arguably South Africa’s most potent sacred site — was immeasurably wider and deeper than the span of any single human life.

An antidote to the techno-feudalists

In early February this year, from inside the bowels of the Department of the Interior, a series of secretarial orders were signed that were destined to cause irreparable harm to the wild places of the United States. To the horror of environmentalists everywhere, Doug Burgum, President Donald Trump’s interior secretary, had taken active steps to advance the proposals laid out in Project 2025, the America First Agenda and the American Petroleum Industry’s deregulatory wish-list — henceforth, it seemed, none of the public lands and waters across the length and breadth of the nation would be safe from the profit motive of Big Oil.

In Alaska, 13 million acres of pristine and untouched wilderness were declared open for drilling and mining; across the lower 48 states, with the reversal of a Biden-era rule, taxpayers were suddenly saddled with the costs of cleaning up after the oil and gas companies; and in Utah, New Mexico, Minnesota and Colorado, plans were hurriedly afoot to undo the protections offered by “national monument” status.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

Also, bedrock protections for more than 1,000 migratory bird species, as well as the “critical habitat” protections for 900 endangered wildlife species, were placed abruptly “under review”. As for America’s indigenous communities, many of them were shattered to learn that their public lands were once again in the crosshairs of the extractive corporations.

It was nothing less than a declaration of war on Nature herself — and, as the environmentalists at Garn and elsewhere knew, it was hardly an America-only phenomenon.

By April 2025, with the world’s progressive intellectuals beginning to get a handle on the scale of the threat, The Guardian would drop a piece that outlined the full planetary context. Titled “The rise of end times fascism” and written by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, the analysis would situate the emerging hazards inside a “monstrous, supremacist survivalism” that was “the governing ideology of the far right”.

The establishment of “new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera” was addressed in the article’s opening paragraph — mainly because, under Trump, the red tape that had been bogging down the concept’s Big Tech investors was quickly being removed.

“The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse,” wrote Klein and Taylor. “Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimisation, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.”

Big Oil

To anyone reading the piece against the backdrop of Burgum’s secretarial orders, there could be no doubt that the neighbours of the techno-feudalists in startup country would be their brethren in Big Oil. As for the rest of us, from New Zealand to Ecuador to South Africa, there could be no doubt that we were well and truly on our own.

And so, by contrast, the initiative to declare Table Mountain a living entity had been designed as “inclusive” from the start. Public engagement, Daily Maverick was promised, would play a critical role, with the aim of raising awareness about Hoerikwaggo within the broader Rights of Nature movement. Creative perspectives, Daily Maverick was told, would be woven into advocacy partnerships with local artists and religious leaders, so as to ensure the resonance of the message across cultural and spiritual communities.

Here, Cullinan admitted, his instinct as a lawyer was to shy away from the term “sacred”. Still, as he was well aware, the world had changed drastically from when he was writing Wild Law — back then, the interdependence of humanity and nature, like body and spirit, was a radical notion to people who had been raised on the hard rationalisms of the West.

Now, he knew, we were all suffering the consequences.

“I’m thinking of the expression, ‘Is nothing sacred to you?’” Cullinan smiled. “Do we really want to live in a world where nothing is sacred?” DM

For more on the Table Mountain Rights initiative, visit http://www.tablemountainrights.org/

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