17th October - Law News

Edition 5408: LawNewsIndex is a UK based daily legal news archive on Law, Lawyers, Law Firms, Jurisprudence, Legislation, Litigation, Legal Ethics, Human Rights and Social Justice related issues since 2011.

Today's Highlighted Video: Garet O Finlayson and another (Appellants) v Caterpillar Financial Services Corporation (Respondent) (The Bahamas) Case ID: JCPC/2023/0115

A selection of important developments in the world of law and justice (for a comprehensive look at the news and events, please visit @theLawMap Twitter/X feed):

Saturday Conversations on Law

• Keeping up with the Bar - Law Society removes cap on president's pay - Legal Futures
• New SRA chair Caroline Corby revealed as legal regulator says she will help to lead change | Law Gazette
• The government is set to unveil plans to extend the BBC licence fee to online streaming services in what is unofficially being dubbed a “YouTube tax”
• Thriller writer Lee Child backs launch of reading scheme to send prisons half a million books: The Jack Reacher author, the UK’s first prison reading laureate, said drive to improve literacy skills was a practical way to address reoffending and support rehabilitation
• Met needs to move away from criminalising sex workers, officers say after Levy failings - Levy, a convicted sex offender, was left to kill two women and rape another
• Online pornography depicting strangulation or incestuous relationships will be banned from 6 November, it will be illegal to possess or publish porn which shows strangulation or suffocation, incest or roleplaying as under 16

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Last Sunday's Editorial: 

 

The 'Sunday Editorial' is a special feature comprising essays, comments and original creative writing on a broad range of subjects from in-house and guest writers:  

 

The forest listens - the ancient Sanskrit Rigveda poem ‘Ode to Aranyani’ and its ecological imagination in relation to our contemporary climate-related consciousness: There is something quietly radical about a goddess who makes no demands upon the world. In the tenth book of the Rig Veda, Aranyani appears as the presiding spirit of the forest, a presence whose abundance is neither cultivated nor accounted for. She moves among the trees without disturbing them, seemingly feeding without farming, and inhabiting a realm whose apparent emptiness conceals a plenitude of life. The hymn addressed to her, commonly known as the ‘Aranyani Sukta’ or the ‘Ode to Aranyani’ (Rig Veda 10.146), is an encounter with the more-than-human world that resists the assumption that nature exists chiefly to satisfy human purposes. In an age of ecological catastrophe, its strangeness is also its relevance.

The poem begins with a question: ‘Aranyani, Aranyani, what is it that makes you vanish in the forest?’ The repetition is at once invocation and uncertainty. The speaker seeks to locate the goddess, but the forest frustrates the desire for a stable address. Sounds emerge from its depths; something seems to move, though nothing can be seen. The woods are neither a passive landscape nor a picturesque refuge. They possess an agency that exceeds the observer’s power to interpret them.

This is not quite the pastoral. The pastoral, even in its most sophisticated forms, tends to make nature available to human feeling: the meadow becomes an emblem of innocence, the shepherd’s song a commentary on the city. Aranyani’s forest is less obliging. Its noises are ambiguous, its inhabitants elusive, its life only partially legible. The human imagination is invited into the woods, but not granted mastery over them. What the hymn offers is not a landscape arranged for contemplation but a world that continues to exist beyond the limits of human perception.

The goddess herself is an arresting figure. She is associated with wild fruits, the sounds of animals, and the movement of life beyond the village boundary. She does not, the poem suggests, destroy or tame the creatures around her. Nor does she require the familiar signs of civilisation: the plough, the settlement, the carefully ordered field. Her abundance appears without the visible apparatus of production. Thus, Aranyani unsettles a durable economic assumption: that what is not cultivated must be unproductive, and that what cannot be measured has little value.

The distinction between forest and settlement is not merely geographical. It is a distinction between different modes of inhabiting the earth. The village establishes its claims through boundaries, labour and possession; the forest inhabits a more ambiguous order, where life flourishes without announcing its ownership. Aranyani’s independence from human cultivation does not make her world barren. On the contrary, the poem imagines an abundance that precedes and exceeds the human economy.

To read this ancient hymn as an anticipation of contemporary environmentalism, however, would be to mistake resemblance for identity. The Vedic imagination is not a modern ecological science in religious dress, and its deities cannot simply be recruited as a spokesperson for biodiversity conservation. The forest in the hymn belongs to a particular ritual and cultural world, one in which human beings negotiate their place within a cosmos populated by powers both visible and unseen. Its significance today lies less in the discovery of a ready-made environmental doctrine than in the possibility of recovering an attitude that modernity has frequently diminished: a willingness to acknowledge that the non-human world possesses forms of value independent of our uses for it.

Such an attitude has become difficult to sustain. The contemporary ecological crisis is usually narrated through statistics, projections and the language of management. Forests become carbon sinks; species become units of biodiversity; rivers become resources whose condition can be expressed in numerical indices. These measurements are indispensable. Without them, the destruction of habitats and the accelerating disruption of climate systems would be harder to document, contest and reverse. Yet the language of measurement has its limits. To know how much carbon a forest stores is not necessarily to understand what it means for a forest to exist.

The ‘Ode to Aranyani’ restores, however briefly, the question that instrumental reason tends to exclude: what kind of world is being destroyed when a forest disappears? The answer cannot be reduced to the loss of a resource. It includes the extinction of relationships, the silencing of habitats, and the disappearance of forms of life whose meanings may never be fully available to human understanding. The forest is valuable not only because it sustains us, but because it is alive beyond us.

Here the poem acquires an ethical force. Its speaker listens before he knows; he encounters before he categorises. The sounds of the forest are not immediately translated into useful information. They remain strange, inviting an attention that is alert without being possessive. This is an important distinction in a culture increasingly accustomed to treating attention as a scarce commodity, harvested by devices and converted into profit. Aranyani demands a different kind of attention: patient, receptive, prepared to admit that the world is not exhausted by what we can recognise in it.

There is, too, a suggestive irony in the hymn’s treatment of fear. The forest is unfamiliar, perhaps unsettling; the sounds that issue from it resist easy explanation. Yet the goddess is not presented simply as a threat. What appears dangerous to the intruder may be the ordinary music of another order of existence. The poem asks us to consider whether the strangeness of the wild is itself a reason for hostility, or whether it exposes the narrowness of our expectations.

This matters in an era when the language of ecological restoration can sometimes reproduce the habits of domination it seeks to overcome. Nature is to be repaired, optimised, made resilient; landscapes are assigned targets, and living systems are expected to perform according to human timetables. Such interventions may be necessary, especially where human activity has caused extensive damage. But the ideal of a perfectly controlled ecology contains its own contradiction. A forest is not a machine whose proper functioning can be secured by the adjustment of its parts. It is a community of lives, dependencies and contingencies, many of which remain only partly understood.

Aranyani offers no policy programme, still less an escape from the material realities of environmental destruction. Her forest cannot substitute for legislation, scientific research or political responsibility. The danger of invoking ancient wisdom is that reverence becomes a comfortable alternative to action. One may praise the sacredness of trees while permitting their destruction; one may celebrate an indigenous or classical ecological imagination without confronting the institutions that continue to commodify the earth.

Nevertheless, poetry can alter the terms in which action becomes imaginable. The hymn’s achievement is to make the forest present without making it wholly transparent. Its goddess is neither a decorative symbol nor an easily domesticated emblem of green virtue. She remains, in some sense, beyond us. That distance is precisely what gives the poem its force. It suggests that care need not depend upon possession, and that the world may command our obligations without first demonstrating its usefulness.

Perhaps the most urgent lesson of the ‘Ode to Aranyani’ is therefore not that we must recover a lost harmony with nature. Such harmony may never have existed in the uncomplicated form that contemporary nostalgia prefers. Rather, we must learn to live with the recognition that the earth is not ours alone, and that our survival depends upon forms of life whose independence we have too often mistaken for insignificance.

The forest in the hymn does not plead its case. It does not offer a defence of its economic value or demand recognition from the village. It sounds, moves and flourishes beyond the human gaze. Aranyani’s quiet sovereignty reminds us that ecological responsibility begins where the fantasy of total possession ends. To listen to the forest is not to imagine that we can speak for it, but to accept that it has a life and a claim upon the world that precede our understanding. In that acceptance lies a beginning—not of redemption, perhaps, but of humility, without which redemption is unlikely to be possible.

 

Read last week's Editorial 

Taz Rahman holds a masters in ethics and social philosophy from Cardiff University. He is a South Wales based writer and literary documentary maker. His debut poetry collection 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' was published by Seren Books and longlisted for the Laurel prize in 2024. He is widely published in leading poetry magazines and anthologies and had founded Wales' first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet. 

 

 

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