“I should be very much pleased if you could find me something good (meaty) on economic conditions in California … California is very important for me because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.”
—Letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Sorge, 1880; from Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies)

“The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms.”
—Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social

Let’s start somewhere insistently human. Southern California—a behemoth of density, a sprawl of freeways and subdivisions stretching to the horizon. But Southern California is large. It is too vast to grasp all at once. So, let’s zoom in to the place where I was born and raised: Orange County, or, “the OC.”

On the surface, the OC gleams and sparkles. Median home prices soar above $1M. Along beachy boulevards, people stride like polished advertisements with sun-bronzed skin, sculpted faces, and perfect white smiles flashing from behind steering wheels of Italian sports cars. The whole place feels like a showroom for upper-middle-class comfort. Aspiration is carefully staged and endlessly maintained.

There are rolling hills with sparkling ocean views. But expect no expanse of sweeping forests or cliff bluffs. Single-family homes cling tight to the hillsides like barnacles, sprawling for miles in long wavy lines. In between identical track homes are strip malls, car dealerships, office parks, and parking lots. Much of my hometown was designed by its founder (Ole Hanson) under a “Spanish Colonial Revival” template, fondly evoking the bygone era of Southwestern colonization in an attempt to perpetually re-create Westward imperial fantasies.

All this life here; unfurling on millions of acres of delicate Southern California chaparral, before it was bulldozed for this American dream. In my little slice of suburbia, there were no hiking trails, forests, or grasslands. Only cement, asphalt, palm trees, and ornamental hedges. Our sidewalks led to nowhere. It was as if history began the moment the developer broke ground.

Surrounding our community for miles was a thin wooden wall, separating us from “the outside.” Occasionally, I’d peek through a knot in the two-by-four planks. What gazed back at me? Chaparral, mostly greasewood and manzanita. To me, these were just objects. Inanimate biological plant matter. Once every blue moon, a coyote jumped the wall and scared a young couple walking their dog. This was nature—a small, shriveled thing. A shameful blight. Dangerous. It was hidden and replaced by green lawns, hot asphalt, and sweet-tasting hose water during the hot summer.

This late-stage capitalist nightmare did not materialize out of thin air. The OC was the master plan of Californian real estate developers in the 20th century. These weren’t your mom-and-pop home builders. These were the big guns. The Mission Viejo Company, the largest home developer in the OC, was a subsidiary of Philip Morris—the world’s largest tobacco company, infamous for public deception, manipulating science, and lying under oath about the health risks of smoking. The Mission Viejo Company built one of the first and most extensive master-planned communities in the US (also called Mission Viejo). It is no coincidence that the largest peddler of cancer, death, and misinformation lined its pockets by investing in suburban sprawl.

Whether we like it or not, humans are fundamentally entangled with the living subjecthood of land, waters, technologies, art, capital, and all the other component parts of life.

The Western myth of technocratic modernity asserts that humans have risen above nature through reason and control. Humans are subjects that live in a world of objects—separation without interconnection. Societal problems can be solved by crafting advanced fixes that rely on technology, reason, human objectivity, and liberal governance. But in reality, a genuinely modern society (could such a thing ever exist?) would have built systems that acknowledge the fundamental entanglement between humans, nonhumans, technologies, and environments.

This separation of humans from their world is precisely what French philosopher Bruno Latour called modernity’s founding myth. Through his Actor-Network Theory, Latour argued that agency and political life don’t belong to humans alone—they are distributed across sprawling networks of people, objects, institutions, and environments. Whether we like it or not, humans are fundamentally entangled with the living subjecthood of land, waters, technologies, art, capital, and all the other component parts of life. We will return to him and his theory soon.

Beyond the green lawns of my hometown, the chapparal and the coyotes lingered just outside the wall. They had no say in the destruction of the living world around them in exchange for cheap track homes. Would it be possible for these “objects” (or more accurately, nonhuman actors, as Latour suggests) to have a voice in the changes of the landscape, perhaps just as much as the Mission Viejo Company or Philip Morris? If these nonhuman actors were given agency, debates over suburban development in Orange County would have involved not just developers, homeowners, or city planners, but also the wetlands, rivers, mycorrhizae, heat domes, aquifers, and species displaced by expansion. These nonhuman actors would demand a seat at the table—not symbolically but materially. Through representative human voice (sometimes called guardianship) they would insist that their effects be accounted for before, not after, the build.

How could such a world be possible?

Human representation for the nonhuman is not a fantasy. It has been commonplace for centuries and still is today as a centuries-old legal tradition. In maritime law, ships are sued and defended as legal persons. In corporate law, firms like Philip Morris hold rights that exceed those of most humans. Estates speak for the dead. Trusts speak for the unborn. Animals have court-appointed advocates in abuse proceedings. The law animates nonhuman actors routinely so that they may enter into debate and dialogue with human desires.

The question was never whether the nonhuman could be represented. Rather, it has always been about who gets to decide which nonhumans are worth representing. And, more importantly, who profits from the answer.

It is out of exactly this tension—over who speaks, who decides, and who benefits—that the Rights of Nature movement has emerged in the last 20 years.

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to amend its constitution to recognize nature (Pachamama)as a legal entity with enforceable rights. Judges decide how to speak on behalf of rivers or mountains, drastically shifting the way the country operates its drilling, mining, and development strategies. Private property laws have changed to accommodate new norms around nature. Indigenous peoples have reclaimed power once denied from them.

In Aotearoa, New Zealand, the Māori have leveraged the notion of “legal personhood” for three distinct natural entities to advance decolonization projects: the Whanganui River (2017); Te Urewera Forest (2014); and Mount Taranaki (2017). For example, guardians were appointed to the Whanganui River to speak on its behalf through a guardianship (kaitiaki) model comprised of both Māori and Crown representatives. Long ago, the British Crown lay ownership claim to the Whanganui riverbed with an iron fist. Today, neither the Māori nor the Crown owns the river. No one does. The river “owns” itself through the legal personhood model. Guardians deliberate on how decisions concerning the river are practiced through reciprocity, respect, and abundance.

Other instances include Peru, Ecuador, Spain, India, and even over 129 municipalities across the US. In several of these cases, these shifts were swayed and guided through sustained, powerful advocacy by Indigenous communities advancing their cosmologies and sovereignty efforts within settler-state legal systems. Even in countries like Spain, Colombia, and Bangladesh, courts and lawmakers have begun to experiment with rights-based frameworks for rivers, ecosystems, and other nonhuman beings.

What can we learn from decades of suburban sprawl, Bruno Latour, and the rapidly unfolding Rights of Nature movement? What does it mean to become guardians of nature in modern times? How could a coyote send a delegate to the Orange County planning commission, or the chapparal’s representative to speak in an interspecies congress?

Put more succinctly: How could the river debate the suburb?

To answer these questions, we must return back to our Southern California suburb—a “geography of nowhere.”

The story of suburban Southern California is not unique. It is but one of many identical communities that unfolded across the United States in the 20th century. The American suburb was the inevitable result of “growth” or “progress.” It was a calculated project, engineered by 20th-century government planners in the spirit of colonial-capitalist expansion. At its core, suburbia was designed as a racialized sanctuary for the white middle class, offering a manufactured escape from what was framed (through racist imagination) as the “ills” of urban life, namely proximity to Black and brown working-class communities. This is known as “white flight,” entrenched through policies of redlining and made possible through state and federal incentive programs that subsidized suburban expansion through tax breaks, mortgage assistance, and the development of massive highways and automobile infrastructure.

It is also no surprise, then, that underneath a veneer of manicured perfection, Orange County hid its rotten underbelly. Prescription drug abuse was commonplace in many Orange County schools. Mexican migrants, who make up the vast majority of the blue-collar workforce in Orange County, were often underpaid or had their wages stolen by exploitative employers. The ultra-wealthy parents of my high school peers, many of them titans of real estate, finance, or banking, were often embroiled in high-profile multiyear divorce litigations, catapulting legal documents to each other between separate gated communities.

James Howard Kunstler famously referred to the American suburban landscape as “the geography of nowhere.”

Why “nowhere”?

The American suburb not only restructured “space” but also erased it. Suburbs were made to sever people from the social and ecological histories of the land they inhabited, replacing ecological, communal, and place-based life with atomized routines centered on productivity, the nuclear family, and consumer spending. In this sense, the suburb functioned as a “great separator” or “great eraser.”

Cul-de-sacs and subdivisions reorganized human life to maximize economic value and mold humans into factory workers, office employers, and disciplined consumers. Underneath the suburb, there is no “pre-history” of the land or place. No Indigenous peoples. No historical ecology. No past of conflict and culture. In suburbia, history begins at the moment of development. It all started with the Mission Viejo Company, and you can be a part of it for the low cost of 2.99 percent APR.

Tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac, between all of this, I was raised by two young Buddhists as they studied the Dharma with deep intensity. For many years, I tagged along as they traveled and trained with Tibetan masters. For years, they rose the ranks and began assisting with, and even co-teaching, meditation retreats in New York, Texas, California, and everywhere in between. I didn’t meditate back then. I barely knew what meditation was. More often, I played Game Boy quietly in the back corner.

The American suburb…is designed to obstruct histories of interconnection and material reliance of our co-existence, replacing them with the American cosmologies of consumerism, individualism, success, and the protestant work ethic.

Why did two young Buddhists, who met at the esoteric Esalen Institute on the Big Sur coast, raise their son in the Orange County suburbs? Why not escape to Berkeley or Cambridge, strongholds for spiritual progressivism at the turn of the century? From their account, they liked teaching from the belly of the beast. In their eyes, the stolid individualism and consumerism of suburban America was ground zero for spiritual transformation and change.

While my Buddhist parents were teaching on impermanence and interconnection at their meditation retreats across the US, my entire world was built on the facade of permanence, separation, and isolation—the endless green lawns and wood fences. An exquisite paradox. The American suburb, as well as many other cornerstones of our “modern” socioecological lives, is designed to obstruct histories of interconnection and material reliance of our co-existence, replacing them with the American cosmologies of consumerism, individualism, success, and the protestant work ethic.

In suburban life, authenticity is invisibility and individuality.

Like Southern California, most of the world is becoming more urbanized and suburbanized than ever. Climate change and biodiversity loss are becoming increasingly dire. It is time, today, more than ever, to reconsider the notion of interconnection. We must peel back the layers of separation that we, in the suburbs, cities, and far beyond have built lives upon. As the mythical illusion of American democracy and progress crumbles before our very eyes, perhaps a fresh look at interconnectionmay help guide us where we can go next.

“Interconnection” is having a moment right now; though, it really always has. Historically, it has been the cornerstone of nearly every religion (e.g., Karma in Buddhism, tikkun olam in Judaism, or Pachamama in several Andean Indigenous cosmologies). But today, interconnection passes through our post-religious sensibilities. Instead of religious dogmatism, we rely on scientific knowledge, literature, history, policy, and economics to attempt to map out interconnection. As such, we use these sensibilities to yardstick our societal problems and create “solutions” for them.

Let’s have an example. Climate change is pretty much as interconnected asit gets. Global fossil fuel producers (e.g., BP, Shell, Exxon) manufacture and ship oil to every corner of the planet. Localized ecologies are disrupted by oil manufacturing. Water is poisoned by drilling spills. Forests are deforested for oil roads. Entire economies are born to support oil operations.

How is our society responding to all of this? Mechanically, rationally, and in a segmented way. Scientists use billion-dollar grants to generate more efficient models on climate collapse. Policymakers and economists scramble to design more “efficient” ways to tax or sell carbon on the free market (these are called “nature-based climate solutions”). Technocrats are fundraising for geoengineering projects to make more clouds, block the sun, or suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

It is no surprise then, in the face of today’s complex and entangled “planetary” crises—climate change, democratic failure, fossil fuel overextraction, biodiversity collapse—that technocratic solutions are the first way most of us try to “fix” our interconnection; to make things better again. The answer to climate change? Better climate science. More “efficient markets” to internalize our environmental externalities. More restrictive government.

But what if we have it wrong?

What if policymaking, technological development, or climate science only perpetuates the same systems that got us here in the first place? What if climate change and democratic failure isn’t a problem to solve, but only a symptom of a larger underlying societal disease? What if the root cause is that, for too long, the West has been operating under a false paradigm that has placed the human (as subject) over the nonhuman aspects of our world (the landscapes, the rivers, the mountains, the parts, the objects)? What if our best shot is to redesign the system that gave us the suburbs, fossil-fuel extraction, and capitalism life and power begin with?

Let us entertain this world by revisiting Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theoryas the foundational model.

In his book We Have Never Been Modern, French sociologist Bruno Latour (1947–2022) uses Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to flip the script on how we think about modern society. The whole idea that the Western world has been steadily progressing into some rational, orderly, modern world? Total fiction. A convenient myth. If humans were “truly modern,” we wouldn’t be facing ecological collapse, a wildly unequal global economy, and the systemic breakdown of the very social, political, and ecological infrastructures we rely on.

Again, Latour demonstrates that “agency” and “subjectivity” are not exclusive to humans. Instead, they are distributed across sprawling networks of people, objects, institutions, laws, and ideas. We are not detached or rational observers of a world “out there.” Latour isn’t the first, or last, to draw attention to this. Many Indigenous scholars, like Kyle Whyte and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, have pointed out that these worldviews have been at the heart of Indigenous cosmology for time immemorial and are essential to processes of decolonization. Donna Haraway, feminist philosopher and STS scholar, calls this sympoiesis. We are participants in a dense mesh of relations. We’re in it and of it. And, we always have been.

Back to our OC suburb. Today, suburbs are the outcome of careful and deliberate human design. They are shaped by corporate incentives, central planning, shareholder return, the demand of American consumers, single-family homeowner incentives, ecologies of place (i.e., water availability, soil quality), the laws and regulations of the state, and much more.

In an ANT world, Latour asks us to see the suburb not as a neutral space or container for human life, but as an assemblage of actors with effects and entanglements.

The suburbs’ car-dependent layout shapes transportation infrastructure and fossil fuel demand. Its multitude of lawns, irrigation systems, and paved surfaces reshape local ecologies and water cycles. The suburbs’ raw housing materials (i.e., woods, plastics, iron, rock) are drawn from extractive industries, with histories of their own; and the spatial organization produces particular forms of social isolation, racial segregation, and political behavior. The suburbs act—on people, on the planet, on patterns of life and death. The suburbs’ actions go on to affect those around it.

Interconnection, right?

To fix this separation, Latour advanced ANT to radically flatten the “modern” human-nature hierarchy. Rather than assuming that humans are the sole political subjects of our world, ANT imagines a “parliament”, or what I imagine as a “council of things”, in which nonhuman entities (i.e., rivers, technologies, infrastructures, even microbes) are granted a kind of representational voice. This isn’t metaphorical. Latour literally envisions new political and legal institutions in which the interests and effects of nonhuman actors must be accounted for, negotiated, and responded to. Humans, in this model, don’t stand above the aspects of our world that we create or interact with—animals, highways, trees, rivers, technology, buildings, institutions, and, of course, suburbs. Rather, humans must answer to a broader ecology of beings and things.

So, what does this look like, in practice?

Under a “council of things,” we might imagine new legal and ethical systems of delegation. Environmental, social, and infrastructural pieces of suburban sprawl would be represented by humans (or guardians) in political life—the coyote, the chaparral, the river, the soil, the concrete, and even the human communities displaced to build. This makes them visible; thrust back into relation with one another. Today, impacts on the nonhuman are usually treated as externalities, addressed haphazardly and too little and too late, mostly through halfhearted environmental review processes, corporate greenwashing initiatives, or material “recycling” programs that often go straight to the landfill. This isn’t cutting it. Not only does such an oversight create environmental harm—it compromises the integrity of the human, disenfranchising us from the web of life from which we arose and giving way to a dark future of indifference toward the world we inhabit.

Such a model is totally inconceivable in our current state of US politics, and probably in most other places across the West. According to one of the widest studies of democratic progression, in the majority of the West, democracy is either broken, stumbling along, or severely crippled.

But it’s not all bad news.

There is some serious interest booming across the world to move away from human-centric models of governance, which both includes and expands beyond a strong modern revitalization of Indigenous philosophy and decolonization practice.

Many people are seriously questioning the fact that for the last hundred years, the West has designed systems that granted subjectivity (alive-ness) to only some aspects of our society. Again, remember that in the US (and many places in Europe and beyond), corporations like Google, Facebook, and Goldman Sachs have the same (or even more) rights that human beings: free speech, political sway, and jurisdictional claim.

Rivers, mountains, ecosystems, rivers, or other parts of the world have not been afforded the same consideration. But this is beginning to change, leading us up where I believe ANT takes us at its head—the Rights of Nature movement.

The Rights of Nature (RoN) movement has gained remarkable momentum over the past two decades, spreading across the world with striking speed. Yet its trajectory is anything but linear. RoN means something different depending on where it is drafted, by whom, and toward what ends. Its implementation is often contradictory, contested, and incomplete.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the US. Over 129 municipalities have enshrined RoN provisions in local ordinances and community bills of rights. Yet, a significant share of these originate in predominantly white, politically conservative communities pursuing what amounts to legal workarounds to defend access to clean land and water. Here, RoN is less about recognizing the intrinsic vitality or relational standing (interconnection) of the living world than about shoring up a particular vision of human entitlement to one version of a “clean” nature. This “protected nature” remains firmly instrumental and bounded; a resource to be secured and utilized for one group’s uses rather than a subject with negotiable claims of its own. This mirrors the broader logic of mainstream conservation, whose long history of land dispossession and racialized enclosure reproduces rather than challenges the hierarchies that produced ecological crisis in the first place.

But, in other geographies, like New Zealand or Ecuador, RoN is more concerned with recognizing the aliveness of the nonhuman landscape, challenging anthropocentric Western legal traditions, and redefining the relationship between humans and the environment. Most importantly, they have been led by pluralist coalitions of Indigenous peoples and their allies in creating political gain. RoN is giving a voice not just to nature, but also toward humans who have been expropriated from their own land and the political system that stripped away their own personhood. The same holds for the coalitions of Native American Indigenous peoples in the US who have led the charge on RoN cases for salmon, wild rice (Manoomin), and more.

[Rights of Nature] may be the closest we’ve come to a “parliament of things,” which could sever the harmful dualisms between man and nature…

Why is RoN important as we reflect back toward our suburbs, the climate, our societal problems at large, and even Mr. Latour?

RoN may be the closest we’ve come to a “parliament of things,” which could sever the harmful dualisms between man and nature, challenge environmental degradation, and inject new energy into faltering democracies everywhere. Indeed, democracies have historically been most effective when underrepresented voices have strength, especially those who have long been excluded from political and economic life. This is no different.

The RoN movement is still very young. Twenty years is a blip on the radar for the beginning of an entirely new social, political, legal, and environmental delegation system. But, in the next two generations, it is not unreasonable to think that people may be able to vote, sue, and speak on behalf of forests, mountains, or the river. But the billion-dollar question is this: How would such a premise work to reconstruct the way towns, cities, and suburbs fluidly interconnect and communicate with our rivers, mountains, and landscapes? Furthermore, how could such a system escape the same traps of the past?

If RoN simply replicates the logic of conservation—its racial exclusions, technocratic distance, and an ill-founded tendency to protect “nature” as a resource reservoir for those already in power—it will accomplish nothing transformative. To mean something, RoN must do the more difficult work of rehauling how political and ethical decisions are made through collaborative guardianship models that reject top-down agency in favor of communal deliberation, localized knowledge, and the voices of those who have been most systematically silenced—human and nonhuman. RoN must put private property and common land into genuine tension with each other and sit with the discomfort that produces.

What could this look like in practice?

Back in our Orange County suburb, a developer could be mandated to negotiate with the river next door over lawn runoff and chemical pollution. Who represents such a river? There are many options. Drawing on the Ecuadorian RoN model, city judges and planners could be educated on what it means to uphold “nature’s rights.” But such an approach would require a full reworking of the law in order to enforce such mandates. The Aotearoa New Zealand model offers a more navigable path through “legal personhood” of the river and an elected board of guardians—community leaders, ecologists, Native American communities, and other stakeholders—who speak for the river where it cannot speak for itself. Guardians would deliberate and speak on the river’s behalf, debating with those who represent purely economic or technocratic interests. While radical on the surface, such an approach bears a keen resemblance to many democratized and non-hierarchical systems of decision-making for entities with legal personhood already existing today—boards of directors for nonprofits, collective equity in cooperatively owned businesses, and more.

There is, perhaps, a strange opportunity embedded in this moment of polycrisis. The weakening of state authority and the fracturing of liberal democracy, alarming as they are, also open space for new sociolegal formations to take root. The crises converging on us—ecological, democratic, material—will force a reckoning with the limits of rights, property, and development that no previous generation has had to fully confront. We may be among the last generations to avoid asking, in earnest: What does the Coyote or the River have to say about all this?