Recognising Table Mountain as a 'living' entity

A project driven by some of South Africa's most respected lawyers, activists and healers is aiming to get the mountain legal personhood status.

- By Kevin Bloom

At the age of 85, almost a decade before he died, the great monk, philosopher and cultural historian Thomas Berry — among the 20th 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, Cormac Cullinan.

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

His intent was to remind me of his answer to a question I had asked the week before, when we were hiking 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 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 sticky 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