Knock on Wood

LEGAL BID MADE FOR FOREST AS A FELLOW MUSICIAN

Under a groundbreaking new legal proposal, the Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador could soon be recognised as a joint composer and benefit from income from the music created there!

The forest provided the perfect acoustic backdrop to 'Song of the Cedars', a piece of music composed over the course of two days around the camp by writer Robet Macfarlane and a group of people accompanying him, whilst he was undertaking research for his forthcoming book. Macfarlane, Cosmo Sheldrake, Guiliana Furci and Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, founder of the More Than Human Rights (MOTH) project who are steering the legal bid, recorded samples of monkeys, rustling leaves and echo-locating bats, toucans, cicada & frogs for their song.

If their petition to the Ecuador's copyright office is successful it would be the first time an ecosystem's moral authorship has been legally recognised and would mean income from streaming the music would be diverted to a fund for the forest's protection. Speaking on X Macfarlane described the ecosystem as " a river-forest of mind-blowing biodiversity & endemicity; of mind-shaping liveliness & presence."

"It wasn't written within the forest, it was written with the forest," he told the Guardian. "This was absolutely and inextricably an act of co-authorship with the set of processes and relations and beings that that forest and its rivers comprise."

You can listen to 'Song of the Cedars' below: