The extinction of rights and the extantion of ghehds

ABSTRACT The need to move away from the grip of the Anthropocene in all of its manifestations is now urgent. As Einstein might have said, ‘you can't solve the problems of the Anthropocene by using the same anthropocentric thinking that created those problems in the first place’. In addition to scientific and technological change, there must be, in lock step, cultural, ethical and legal change. Radical change is needed in all of these domains as many of our older practices and concepts have, sadly, become redundant for all cultures (old and new) on the planet. The Anthropocene is a powerful colonising agent and it ultimately desolates all that it touches. The antidote to the dysbiosis of the Anthropocene is the Symbiocene. Here, a powerful new meme based on the mutualistic features of grand-scale symbiosis in life can inform every aspect of humanity. Rights, it is argued, have crucially served to entrench separation between human and non- human beings in a competitive and adversarial legal and political system. I offer ‘ghehds’, as a concept befitting the Symbiocene, a more life-inclusive, descriptive ethical approach to all interspecies relationships. Ghehds (from the root ghehd, to unite, with etymological connections to modern words such as: to gather, together and good) will help bring about the extinction of rights and its applications to nature. Instead of a hierarchy of competing rights, assuming autonomous individuals or entities in a contested domain, ghehds respect entitlements of coalescence, vagility, passage, movement and flow within organically and symbiotically unified wholes. Rights assume division, competition and exclusion; ghehds assume unity, cooperation and inclusion. The concept of ghehds is offered as a way of avoiding biological and other forms of extinction.