The MOTH (More Than Human Life) Project is an interdisciplinary initiative advancing rights and well-being for humans, nonhumans, and the web of life that sustains us all. Hosted by New York University's School of Law, its members include musicians, writers, scientists, artists, and legal scholars brought together by their vision of societal, legal, and intellectual paradigms that recognise the intrinsic value of the natural world. The MOTH Project works on several fronts to deepen and expand legal and nonlegal frameworks to better include nonhuman beings and to recognise the intrinsically relational nature of the living world.

MOTH Records is a label emerging from the MOTH Project that platforms music created in collaboration with the living world: a noisy and musical place with the power to change the way we think, feel, and imagine. One of the guiding questions of MOTH Records is how best to attribute authorship, moral rights, and royalties to nonhuman co-creators, from organisms to ecosystems. The purpose of these efforts is to disrupt the traditional anthropocentric corporate frameworks underlying the music industry which have traditionally ignored or discounted the contributions made by nonhumans.

Artwork by Elina Landinez 

"Song Of The Cedars" is a collaboration between the Los Cedros cloud forest, Cosmo Sheldrake, the writer and lyricist Robert Macfarlane, the field mycologist Giuliana Furci, and the legal scholar-advocate César Rodríguez-Garavito. In a groundbreaking move in the development of a more ecocentric law, the MOTH (More Than Human Life) Collective has submitted a petition to Ecuador's copyright office to recognize the Los Cedros cloud-forest as the co-creator of this song. The petition proposes to extend the already established legal personhood of the Los Cedros Biological Reserve, recognized by Ecuador's Constitutional Court in 2021 when it ruled in favor of canceling mining permits in the reserve. The "Song Of The Cedars" case is poised to take this recognition a step further, extending it into creative domains. This action creates a legal path towards acknowledging the natural world as a vital creative force and giving it the credit deserves.. The rights that the petition pursues for Los Cedros and the human co-creators are moral rights—that is, recognition of co-authorship—as opposed to economic rights over royalties.

The song is available for free download and also released on streaming platforms; any income generated through the latter will go directly to the recently established Los Cedros Fund for the protection of the cloud forest. This is the first known attempt in any jurisdiction to establish the 'moral authorship' of an ecosystem as a co-creator in a creative work. The forest's essence is embedded in the song, an all-encompassing immersive musical experience that includes the natural sounds of nonhuman beings such as Toucan barbets, eco-locating bats, Howler monkeys, crickets, rustling leaves, and even a subterranean recording of the soil taken from the exact location where a new species of fungus was collected and described. These were recorded in the upper regions of Los Cedros in 2022, during an expedition organised by Robert Macfarlane as part of the fieldwork for his upcoming book about rivers and the rights of nature movement, Is A River Alive? (due to be published in May 2025).  

Song of the Ceders

MOTH Records is an imprint of Tardigrade Records, the label started and run by Cosmo Sheldrake. The work of MOTH Records builds on Cosmo's commitment to engage musically with the more than human world. He has worked for a number of years to find ways to share the publishing royalties of his new releases with the animals and places that have inspired -- and, on a number of tracks, co-authored -- the music. This is the case with his EPs 'Wake Up Calls' and 'Wild Wet World', of which 50% of the publishing royalties are distributed to conservation organisations and charities working with the animals and ecosystems featured.