A forest in Ecuador could be recognised as the co-creator of a song under a groundbreaking legal proposal.

A petition is to be submitted to Ecuador’s copyright office to recognise the Los Cedros cloud forest as the co-creator of the composition Song of the Cedars. The action by the More Than Human Life (Moth) project is the first legal attempt to recognise an ecosystem’s moral authorship of a work of art.

The song contains melodies of echo-locating bats, howler monkeys, rustling leaves and even a subterranean recording of the soil taken from the spot where a new species of fungus was collected and described.

It was composed by the musician Cosmo Sheldrake, writer Robert Macfarlane, field mycologist Giuliana Furci from the NGO Fungi Foundation and legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito during a field trip to Ecuador.

The song was created when the group set up camp in the high forest during an expedition organised by Macfarlane as part of his research for Is a River Alive?, his new book about rivers and the rights of nature movement, which will be published in May 2025.

“It wasn’t written within the forest, it was written with the forest,” said Macfarlane. “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. We were briefly part of that ongoing being of the forest, and we couldn’t have written it without the forest. The forest wrote it with us.”

The song was written when Macfarlane began sharing verse one evening around the campfire. Sheldrake used an app on his mobile phone to layer forest sounds he had recorded and create melodies to match the words. Furci said: “Night came, the fire was lit and we were all tuning in to make some sounds and record others, and also participate in what beings should be named in the lyrics. That’s how the song emerged. It was very much shaped by the time we’d left that high camp.”

In a historic ruling, the legal personhood of the Los Cedros biological reserve was recognised by Ecuador’s constitutional court in 2021, when it determined to cancel mining permits in the reserve.

“It gives us confidence and a firm legal foundation that we can make this claim in Ecuador,” said Rodríguez-Garavito, the chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law and founding director of Moth. “The copyright agency will have to look at the decision by the constitutional court which is binding on all other authorities and decide whether that legal personhood means that the Los Cedros forest can also be the moral author of a song.”

If the agency refuses the request, Rodríguez-Garavito said they would challenge the decision in Ecuador’s courts.

If the agency grants moral authorship to the forest alongside the song’s co-creators, it is expected that copyright authorities in other nations would have to acknowledge the same moral authorship.

Moral authorship does not mean that the forest is granted economic rights. It will not receive royalties, although all income from streaming platforms will go to a fund for its protection.

The song, which will be available for free download, will be performed by Sheldrake at Cop16 on Tuesday at an event for the FFF Initiative, a collective effort to have fungi recognised on an equal footing as flora and fauna.

Furci said: “It’s fitting that the song will launch at this event, where we will be looking at new ways to measure, diagnose, treat and protect the living world, incorporating a kingdom of life that has never been recognised in those legal frameworks.”

Macfarlane said that philosophically, legally and culturally “we have neglected in all jurisdictions” to recognise the creative co-authorship of the more-than-human world. “So much art, arguably all art, is made collaboratively with the living world, but the law doesn’t recognise this. There’s no example where a creature or plant, let alone a complex natural system like a forest and its rivers and beings, has been allowed moral authorship,” he said.

“If successful, this will be the first time in any jurisdiction that a more-than-human being – a river-forest in this case – has been recognised as a moral author in a work of art. That feels to us both incredibly exciting and drastically overdue.”

Rodríguez-Garavito said: “For some people, and definitely for some lawyers, this will feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable, because this challenges deep-rooted assumptions of western law and of ownership – of charity versus entitlement.

“This is an experiment and an invitation. We undertake this project very much in the mode of inviting other artists, lawyers, creatives to think about the confines of property and authorship and take action along similar lines in their own professional niches.”