Speculative Constitutions in Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish Cycle and the Rights of Nature.

This paper examines two speculative examinations of humanity as a unified species and agent of ecological change: Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish Cycle and the rights of nature movement. Le Guin's Cycle imagines the slow interplanetary reintegration of human polities against a backdrop of cultural and environmental difference. I read the novels of the Cycle as an allegory for the rights of nature movement, which seeks to synthesize traditional and modern knowledge in a legal solution to ecological crisis. Both discourses, I argue, productively imagine a new historical understanding of humanity's place on Earth, but they provide a weak theory of law's capacity to initiate and institutionalize this new understanding. In place of a static theory of history and legal revolution, I propose a dynamic view of how narrative projects like the rights of nature contribute to cultural and political change. This comparative reading shows the utility of speculation in law and literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]