As told by New Zealand, rivers and forests are legitimate human ancestors. The country’s most recent conferral of personhood adds a mountain to the list and is a good example of the diversity, equity, and inclusion implications that President Donald Trump is trying to avoid.
It is an example in principle, that is. Thankfully, the United States does not have any legal human-nature consubstantiality. The closest we have come is a version of legal personhood granted to Lake Erie, struck down in 2020, and a California river that only counts as human under Native American tribal law.
New Zealand, however, does. A forest was first in 2014, and now Mount Taranaki has all the “rights, powers, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a person.” The mountain’s induction is one settlement among decades’ worth of settlements between the Maori tribe and the New Zealand government.
That is the thing: Personhood of “sacred land” comes in the form of a settlement. It equates to a payment, or the billions of dollars in redress that New Zealand has already granted to Maori tribes so far. Rather than a fundamental shift in how the people relate, the “personhood” status comes down to a settlement allowing nominally native people to live in an advanced society while themselves maintaining an overly distinct and legally consequential status.
Certainly, it is not too much for the Maori to want to retain elements of their culture. It is a good way, even, to affirm shared humanity. But New Zealand’s assent to naming a landmark a person is a step far beyond that, and it makes for serious societal inconsistencies. In the words of CBS, “It fulfills an agreement of redress from the country’s government to Indigenous people for harms perpetrated against the land since.”
Harms not only against the Maori people are significant, apparently, but also against their land. This law is no mere rhetorical take-back — it confirms the outlandish exemptions from reality that certain groups are granted by virtue of ill-addressed guilt.
Justice might have been offering some recognition, maybe even some gift of acreage, to the tribe. Instead, the law overcorrects. It is pretty obvious that every successful, civilized society we see today borrows from the ethics of Christianity. And Christianity, of course, has a very specific — and dominant — view of human dignity. This is how natural rights seem universally applicable and how societies seem backward when they do not apply the framework. New Zealand is not making some grand change to human rights, but it is arguing that they are alienable.
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The problem is not so much that people will start treating Mount Taranaki as an actual human. I am sure no one expects as much. It opens the door to that new reality, of course, but more so it highlights that group carve-outs are inseparable from the sort of exceptional, reparations-based treatment in which they result.
DEI programs and their takeoff, as seen in America, proved an idealized, systematized form of the incidences we see in New Zealand. Imagine the two countries together, and that might be the culmination. So, can it get worse from where we are? Yes, but we do not have to let it.