NATURESHIP’S mission is to protect urban microhabitats. We do this by engaging human guardianship through technology, culture, and community, giving nature a voice in democracy, its own self governance with indigenous understandings of nature.
In 2020, I was one of 8 artists selected for
VISIONS 2030 Imaginator Start-Up. In this collaborative initiative, I conceived a 'wild-and-crazy idea' that can be applied to a social challenge. They pair Imaginators with practical problem solvers, such as scientists or engineers. I imagined NATURESHIP and I was paired with
Earth Law Center’s Executive Director & Directing Attorney Grant Wilson. Beyond conservation, we are inspired to build a new kind of community movement, rebalancing the human-nature relationship.
My own neighborhood, HARLEM New York, is the first region to launch the project.
HARLEM - A ‘Declaration in support of NATURESHIP' has been drafted for the enrollment of the community members. The Harlem project has three synergistic facets that comprise the Work, i.e., legal conceptualization and visual mapping, documentation: a short film, and programming and community outreach. These are delivered and implemented through a team-based organization headed by
Nicole Mackinlay Hahn.
[ RON ] RIGHTS OF NATURE
Open spaces are vanishing in our cities, while marginal neighborhoods, in terms of waste and resources, are treated inequitably. Since 1972, the Rights of Nature has been a concept parallel to human rights, bestowing 'environmental personhood' on watersheds, rivers, and mountain ranges.
NATURESHIP explores extending this notion to urban microhabitats. From backyards and stoops, gardens, rooftops, and composts, such microhabitats would be legally grouped together to form a new kind of municipality, where ecosystems have the right to exist, thrive, and evolve.
Becoming a bearer of rights, ‘Nature - as Personhood Movement’ is growing, nature requires services, and ecosystem ‘Hamlet’ - A fellowship of self governance, guardians [ also known as Conveners made up of humans and AI ]. NATURESHIP combines technology with ecology, to create a new kind of resilience; where nature and life forms co-evolve together, not separately.
This project aims to explore ideas as much about whom we are and our spirit as individuals and communities in the face of the challenges that climate change, over development, loss of space brings, as it is about our relationship to the landscape and natural environment.