Custard, crown jewels, and the Cullinans
Screengrab from a Youtube video on The Guardian website.
What does this weekend’s anti-inequality protest in the Tower of London have to do with the environmental lawyer whose keynote address opened the World Conference of Science Journalists far away in South Africa?
Everything. The clue is right there in the name.
The protest couldn’t have been more British if it’d tried. A non-violent act of civil disobedience in which young British activists pelted a display case housing the Imperial State Crown — arguably the alpha-male of the crown jewel collection — with apple crumble, and topped it off with custard.
Their rallying cry: to draw attention to the gross inequality in their country. The same inequality we see the world over.
The UK’s crown jewels epitomise the extractive colonial project that allowed a few to amass enormous wealth at the cost of the majority. The capitalist project picked up where colonialism ended, and both have set the planet on a path of ecological ruin and likely mass extinction.
Front and centre of the Imperial State Crown is a singularly magnificent gem: the eye-wateringly opulent Cullinan diamond. At least, a piece of the diamond that still holds the record for being the largest gem-quality diamond ever found, and which was cut down into nine pieces.
The story here isn’t that the Star of Africa gem was found at a mine just an hour’s drive from the Pretoria venue where the World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ) took place for the first time on Africa soil.
The story is that the environmental lawyer whose keynote address opened the event is directly linked to the Cullinan family on whose farm this gem was found.
While Cullinan-the-diamond — along with the Imperial State Crown — represents the very extractivism that created so much inequality globally, Cullinan-the-lawyer was at the conference to present an emerging idea that is regarded by many as the very antidote to that predatory exploitation of the planet, its inhabitants, both human and more-than-human that got us into this mess in the first place. #AmitavGhosh #NutmegsCurse #JeremyLent #PatterningInstinct
Cormac Cullinan unveiled at the conference an idea whose time many will say has come: the notion that giving legal rights and status to Nature can help arrest our plummet towards mass systems collapse and likely extinction.
Cullinan-the-lawyer has been at the forefront of the global rights of nature movement which, in its own words, calls for the ‘recognition that our ecosystems – including trees, oceans, animals, mountains – have rights just as human beings have rights. Rights of Nature is about balancing what is good for human beings against what is good for other species, what is good for the planet as a world. It is the holistic recognition that all life, all ecosystems on our planet are deeply intertwined.’
#MothRights #RobertMacfarlane #IsARiverAlive?
The Cullinan family connection is a bit complicated, but stay with me because it adds even more depth to this unlikely unfolding of events: Cormac Cullinan isn’t the direct biological line of Thomas Cullinan who owned the farm where the bit-of-bling was found. He’s married to Mary Ann ‘Max’ Cullinan, who is a direct descendent. Both Mary Ann and Cormac happened to have the same last names when they met, which made the legal paperwork of their union simple but complicated things when explaining that they weren’t related before their marriage.
In many ways, South Africa is a microcosm of the state of the world today: a country where a few powerful elite were able to capture the commons — the resources, minerals, human ‘capital’ (I say that reservedly, because human beings aren’t units of capital) — and amass enormous wealth and political power at the cost of the majority.
Mary Ann and Cormac Cullinan are a tour de force in this context, both having committed much of their lives to working to undermine the illegitimate white minority apartheid state in South Africa, and now becoming a voice for the humans and more-than-humans who are suffering for being on the wrong side of the power divide in today’s highly unequal global system.
We could quibble about how valid this link is — Cullinan-the-lawyer is only married into Cullinan-the-family, there’s no genetic link. But genetics are only one way that we can trace family trees. More important, here, is the memetic link. Here I’m using the original idea of the meme, coined first by geneticist Richard Dawkins, who proposed the notion that ideas can spread the way genes do.
Ideas matter. Ideas can be dangerous.*
You couldn’t have scripted the past week’s events better: to have Cullinan-the-lawyer open the WCSJ with the idea of the Rights of Nature movement, at a venue just an hour’s drive from where the Cullinan-the-diamond was found, while at the same time having activists apple-crumble a piece of bling that the UK’s monarch wore at the coronation earlier this year and whose centre-piece is a chunk of that very Cullinan diamond.
As we say in South Africa: nooit, bru!
*I regard myself as a memetic parent, not a genetic one. Which is why JD Vance should worry his pretty little head about us childless cat ladies, because our every existence upends the patriarchy that he and his MAGA followers cling to so desperately. Imagine what our ideas can do?