Cloud forest in Ecuador could be recognised as songwriter in radical legal proposition

A forest in Ecuador could be recognised as the co-creator of a song under a groundbreaking legal proposal.

- Patrick Barkham

A petition has been submitted to Ecuador's copyright office to recognise Los Cedros cloud forest as the co-creator of the composition Song of the Cedars. The action by the More than Human Life (Moth) project is the first legal attempt to recognise an ecosystem's moral authorship of a work of art.

The song contains melodies of echo-locating bats, howler monkeys, rustling leaves and even a subterranean recording of the soil taken from the spot where a new species of fungus was collected and described.

It was composed by the musician Cosmo Sheldrake, writer Robert Macfarlane, mycologist Giuliana Furci and law scholar Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito during a field trip to Ecuador.

The song was created when the group set up camp in the high forest during an expedition organised by Macfarlane as part of his research for Is a River Alive?, his new book about rivers and the rights of nature movement, which will be published in May.

"It wasn't written within the forest, it was written with the forest," said Macfarlane. "This was absolutely and inextricably an act of co-authorship with the set of processes and relations and beings that that forest and its rivers comprise. We were briefly part of that ongoing being of the forest, and we couldn't have written it without the forest. The forest wrote it with us."