Day 1 ∙ Monday, August 7

from 19:00

Seminar opening

Introduction of the seminar program and its lecturers, especially our special guest, a German biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber. – Horní Maršov is the historical center of the Eastern Krkonoše Mountains and the gateway to the Krkonoše National Park. House of Renewal of Traditions, Ecology and Culture (DOTEK) In Horní Maršov there is a unique educational center for ecological and environmental education in our country, which is managed by the non-profit organization SEVER. Its employees JUDr Hana Kulichová will introduce us to the activities of DOTEK and the original ecological exhibition here and will briefly introduce us to this area of the Krkonoše Mountains at the foot of the "golden" Rýchory with the last piece of the Krkonoše primeval forest. During the seminar, we will take a total of five trips to the surrounding countryside - to Dvorský les, to Modré Kameny, to Aichelburg Castle, to the Chapel of St. Anne and to Stará hora and to Horní Albeřice.

Day 2 ∙ Tuesday, August 8

from 7:00

Iroquois Thanksgiving – a joint morning ritual in nature: “Words before everything else.”

from 9:00 to 11:30

Andreas Weber, An Organism Like Me

Part 1 of the lecture series "Community of Subjects: Nature as Living, Perceptive and Communicative". 45 min. lecture, 30 min. group "holding" process, break, one hour of questions and answers

Biologists increasingly understand living beings as agents, as subjects acting in terms of their own selves and in their own interests – they are much more like humans than we have previously imagined. This introductory lecture elaborates on the biological, behavioral, and cognitive foundations of viewing life as a shared subjectivity.

– Andreas Weber is a German biologist, philosopher, biosemiotician and writer. Author of the book Alles fühlt (So it feels).

from 1:00 p.m.

Afternoon trip to Rýchorská bouda and Dvorský les (9 km), combined with a two-hour natural science workshop:

Andreas Weber, Tell Me Who I Am

The nature of the subject of non-human beings can be experienced. This experience is actually what fuels the human “love of nature,” even though it is often not well understood. In this workshop, we will expand the experiences of mindfulness of other beings to deeper interactions with living others.

from 19:00 to 21:15

Andreas Weber, Ecosystems as processes of mutual care

Part 2 of the series "Community of Subjects: Nature as Living, Perceptive and Communicative". 45 min. lecture, 30 min. meditation, 30 min. group "holding" process, short break, 30 min. questions and answers

Life means the self-formation of a feeling identity in a constantly changing body. The attitude of the self remains identical, but the basic body is not at all stable. At the level of its material composition, it is on the one hand in contingent decomposition and on the other in constant re-creation. Bodies compost into other bodies. Life is a distributed process. From this perspective, we can examine the life process as a compulsory care – life is organized in such a way that it opens niches for further life. Life is a process of giving life, it is a gift that must be given in order for one’s own existence to continue.

Day 3 ∙ Wednesday, August 9

from 9:00 to 10:50

Andreas Weber, The Light in the Eyes of the Wolf

Part 3 of the series "Community of Subjects: Nature as Living, Perceptive and Communicative"

What draws humans to the more than human world, as evidenced by hundreds of thousands of years of ritual and artistic practice centered around other animals? Even though humans are actively participating in the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history, they are also the only species that can be said to seek proximity to other species. Homo sapiens could be renamed Homo biophilos. Engaging in processes of community, ecological stewardship, sharing breath, and creating one’s own identity with the depths of other beings shapes the human psyche. We are “wild” inside—we can only truly understand ourselves when we relate to living in the bodies of other beings.

from 11:00 to 12:00

Arthur F. Sniegon, Live Elephant, Good Elephant

A Czech conservationist and activist shares his experiences and insights from ten years of living and working in Central Africa. He will talk not only about forest and savannah elephants, but also about the wildlife crisis in this part of the world in general and possible approaches that can at least partially solve the situation. Field examples of the status quo of poaching and conservation measures, especially from Congo, Cameroon and Chad.

– Arthur F. Sniegon is an evolutionary biologist and conservationist. Founder and coordinator of Save-Elephants zs, elephant evangelist.

from 1:00 p.m.

Afternoon trip to Krausovy Boudy and Modré Kameny pod Světlou (9.5 km) and workshop with Andreas Weber.

from 19:00 to 20:45

Andreas Weber, 'The Rights of Nature' and the Commons of Nature

Traditional “animistic” societies are not anthropocentric but biocentric, all beings serve life according to rules encoded in ancestral commandments on how to live rightly. While in contemporary Western cultures, rights in relation to nature are thought of according to the Roman concept of law, namely as certain property rights, that is, as property that people can own, in traditional societies nature is understood as something that is outside of ownership. These cultures consider reality as a commons, a free-flowing resource that nourishes all and must be nourished by all. This lecture will deal with the rights of nature from the perspective of embodied commons.

from 20:55 to 21:30

Tereza Stehlíková, Imagine how animals perceive.

We humans are highly visual creatures, and we prioritize our sight over our other senses. When we think about animals, we think about their experiences from our perspective. However, as Ed Yong shows in his book An Immense World / How Animals Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, animals perceive the world in countless ways through a complex interplay of adaptive and differently adapted senses that are shaped by their environment and their needs. While it is impossible for us to fully penetrate the world of another species, we can use our sense of imagination and try to empathize with animals. The lecture will introduce the book and use it as a reference, address the audience blindfolded, and invite participants to imagine other possible perceptions, guided by spoken excerpts of the text as well as non-visual sensory stimuli.

– Tereza Stehlíková is a Czech-British artist and educator. Her artistic research focuses on the role of our senses and embodiment in communicating meaning.

Day 4 ∙ Thursday, August 10

from 9:00 to 10:00

Michelle Maloney, The Rights of Nature and the Laws of the Earth – An Australian Perspective (online lecture)

Dr. Michelle Maloney is a leading Australian lawyer focused on creating systemic change to shift industrial societies towards an Earth-centred culture and governance. Maloney argues that we must first consider the Earth and what the Earth needs to survive before deciding how our actions and plans fit within those boundaries. Michelle is an advocate for the rights of the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, Australia, which is under threat. She is pushing for new laws and petitions that would recognise the rights of nature, and therefore the Great Barrier Reef, to live and flourish, and empower communities to defend the rights of the Barrier Reef against Australia’s unhealthy obsession with coal mining.

– Michelle Maloney is co-founder and national coordinator of the Australian Earth Laws Alliance (AELA) and a senior fellow at the Centre for the Future of Law at Griffith University.

from 10:00 to 11:00

Jiří Zemánek, On the genesis of the idea of the rights of nature in Western ecological and legal thought: John Muir and Aldo Leopold, Oliver Stone and William O. Douglas, Thomas Berry and Cormac Cullina

"A society cannot be better than its idea of law" (Philip ALLOT)

We will ask ourselves why the transformation of law is so important today for solving the current unprecedented ecological and climate crisis and we will recall several prominent ecologists and lawyers who in the 19th and 20th centuries opened the way for the promotion of the rights of nature as another revolution in the field of law and environmentalism. Aldo Leopold and his vision of the ethics of the land; the groundbreaking concept of the rights of nature by lawyer Oliver Stone. Thomas Berry and his broad understanding of the idea of law from a cosmological perspective - based on one integral earthly community: the Earth as a community of subjects; three fundamental rights of members of the earthly community. South African lawyer and ecologist Cormac Cullinan - the jurisdiction of the Earth and the concepts of the big and wild law.

– Jiří Zemánek is an art historian, cultural activist and publicist, a member of the Pilgrim association.

from 1:00 p.m.

Afternoon trip to Aichelburg Castle and Tipplet's Huts (10 km) and workshop with Luďek Čertík: Listening walk, joint ear-twisting followed by sharing of observations.

from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Luděk Čertík, Voices of Others: Listening to the Inhuman

When Jacques-Yves Cousteau released his famous underwater film The Silent World in the late 1950s, he had no idea how deeply misleading and erroneous the idea that the world of seas and oceans is silent is. Today, not only do we know that it is literally overflowing with voices, songs and sounds of all kinds of living creatures (from octopuses to whales communicating over distances of thousands of kilometers), but we are even able to understand many of these messages. And as listening and recording technologies improve, as we ourselves learn to listen better and more attentively, the family of sounding creatures, and not only aquatic ones, is constantly expanding with new (and often surprising) members. In fact, we could say that there is no life without some form of sound. What does this mean for us? This is just one of the many questions that we will touch on in this resonant lecture. Our companions will include, for example, zebra finches, many-voiced thrushes, and giant sperm whales.

– Luděk Čertík is a poet, essayist and musician. Member of the organizational team of the cultural magazine Milk & Honey and the Pilgrim association.

from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Jiří Malík, On the return and ethology of falcons and wolves and the Living Landscape model

The return of the golden falcon after one hundred and twenty years and fifteen years of practice of protecting falcon nesting in Teplice Rocks; wolves in the cultural landscape after more than two hundred years. The Living Landscape Model: a unique method of landscape adaptation to climate change from the Czech NGO Živá voda.

– Jiří Malík, ecologist and environmental activist, chairman of the Living Water association.

Day 5 ∙ Friday, August 11

from 9:00 to 10:00

Freya Mathews, On rewilding and the Pleistocene Park project in Siberia (online interview)

Leading Australian ecophilosopher Freya Mathews introduces us to the concept of rewilding. It is a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes. The goal of rewilding is to create resilient, self-regulating and self-sustaining ecosystems and reduce human impact on them; it can also help mitigate global climate change. One such method is the restoration of Pleistocene megafauna. Freya Mathews introduces us to the visionary project of the Pleistocene Park, founded in 1988 by Russian researcher Sergei A. Zimov in northeastern Siberia (Yakutia) with the ambition of restoring the type of Pleistocene ecosystem in which mammoths once lived, while reducing the risk of permafrost thawing. / “A Pleistocene park is being born to become wilderness again” – SCIENCE documentary.

– Freya Mathews, Australian ecophilosopher, one of the main advocates of panpsychism in the context of ecological philosophy.

from 10:00 to 11:00

Jan Stejskal, How to save an extinct animal – the extraordinary story of the northern white rhinoceros

The last two northern white rhinos in the world are known to be female, Nájin and Fatu. Both were born in the Dvůr Králové Safari Park, both now live in Africa, and both are unable to bear a calf. A few years ago, the northern white rhino would have been doomed, but now it has hope of being saved thanks to the use of the most modern techniques of artificial reproduction, including the production of embryos from stem cells of already deceased animals. However, the fascinating possibilities of modern science are accompanied by urgent ethical questions about how far we can go in saving endangered species.

– Jan Stejskal is the head of international projects at Safari Park Dvůr Králové, who coordinates the globally monitored project to save northern white rhinos.

from 1:00 p.m.

Afternoon trip to the Chapel of St. Anne, Stará hora and Stružková waterfall and back (10.6 km) and lecture:

Jaromír Bláha, Noah's Ark: Islands of Wilderness in the Cultural Landscape Conservation of Wildlife and Large Carnivores in the Czech Republic – Practical Notes

Research in national parks, reserves and other wilderness areas shows how important they are for saving life on Earth. Species that have completely disappeared from the cultural landscape survive in them. However, the restoration of wilderness, as well as the return of wild animals, provokes strong positive and negative reactions. For over two decades, the DUHA movement has been striving to expand wildlife areas, monitoring and protecting large carnivores. What are the obstacles and what results have we achieved? – Jaromír Bláha, veterinarian and environmental activist of the RAINBOW Movement

from 19:00 to 20:30

Pavel Janšta, Man between Heaven and Earth / Haiku, Tao and Leonardo

The author will present the Neo-Confucian concept of man, guided by “ren” (comprehensive kindness) and aware of himself as a fractal entity connected to the universe through “li”, the omnipresent sets of laws according to which everything in the universe is organized. From this perspective, man is not an isolated human being, but an aspect of the Earth, an animal, a plant, a rock, everything that lives between Heaven and Earth; he is a being who loves others and strives for the mutual benefit of the broad earthly community of life. The lecture will be interspersed with haiku thematically related to animals.

– Pavel Janšta is a traveler and pilgrim, founder of the Vodňany žijou association and a municipal politician. He traveled from Vodňany to Jerusalem, from Hiroshima to Nagasaki. Member of the Pilgrim association.

from 8:30 p.m. to 9:15 p.m.

Tomáš Daněk, David Abram: Becoming an Animal

Tomáš Daněk will present the basic ideas of David Abram's book Becoming Animal, the Czech edition of which is currently being prepared by the Brno-based HOST publishing house under the title Stávat se zvířetem. Robin Wall Kimmererová wrote about Abram's book: "Becoming Animal resonates deeply with the indigenous way of knowing and allows us to listen to wordless conversations with ancient boulders, walruses, birds and roof beams. Abram's deep knowledge of intelligences other than our own allows us to enter into mutual symbioses that can in turn sustain our world."

– Tomáš Daněk is an ecologist and environmentalist, working at the Department of Development and Environmental Studies, Faculty of Science, University of Prague in Olomouc.

Day 6 ∙ Saturday, August 12

from 9:00 to 10:15

Jiří Zemánek, The Rise of the Nature Rights Movement in the First Two Decades of the 20th Century or the Transition to Rights-Based Environmentalism

The groundbreaking work of attorney Tom Linzey and the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) in Pennsylvania and other U.S. states is turning American law upside down in the first decade of the third millennium, asserting that the rights of people, communities, and above all nature are more important than corporate and property rights. The adoption of the Ecuadorian constitution in 2008, recognizing that nature has legally enforceable rights to exist and to maintain its cycles, structures, functions, and processes. The case of the Vilcabamba River. The Bolivian Revolutionary Law on the Rights of Mother Earth (2010) – “buen vivir” and “Pachamama”. The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia, the creation of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, the establishment of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, and the work of the International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature.

from 10:20 to 11:00

Barbora Kinkalová, "The Earth Came First" – New Zealand as a Pioneer in the Field of Nature's Rights

How the Maori relationship with the natural environment gradually gained recognition among the New Zealand population, eventually leading the New Zealand government to recognise the legal rights of the Whanganui River and Te Urewera forest ecosystems. The Whanganui River was recognised by treaty as a legal entity (2010), not owned by people but by itself. A similar Act in 2014 transformed Te Urewera National Park from state ownership to a legal entity that owns itself and must be managed in a way that respects its rights. For the first time in the world, the government has created laws that recognise that a specific area of nature is not subject to legal claims of human ownership.

– Barbora Kinkalová is a film producer, documentary filmmaker, occasional eco-activist, and member of the Pilgrim association.

from 11:00 to 11:40

Klára Salzmann, On the necessity of legal protection of watercourses

About the necessary legal protection of watercourses as an absolutely essential natural infrastructure (the basis of green infrastructure); about the necessity to set legislation in this way and subordinate all activities in the landscape to it.

Klára Salzmann is a landscape architect and professor at the Institute of Landscape Architecture, Faculty of Arts, Czech Technical University, Prague.

From 1:00 PM

Afternoon trip from Spálený Mlýn to Lysečinská bouda, to Horní Albeřice and to Krakonošová cave (11 km) and a lecture:

Alena Malíková, Do plants have rights?

The Rheinau Theses were written with the aim of giving plants the opportunity to express themselves and to stand up for their rights. Let's get to know them and open our hearts to the world of plants together. Plants are beings of perfect peace. Alena Malíková will accompany the lecture with examples of plant paintings by the pioneer of abstract art, the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint.

– Alena Malíková is the administrator of the Moravian Gate PRO-BIO regional center of the Organic Farmers' Association in Příbor. She is a member of the Soil Foundation, the Pilgrim Association, and the Czech section of the Budapest Club.

from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Who are the others? or Lessons from the Mikmaq / Hana Nováková

The rights of nature are opening the way to a new civilization today, which overcomes the limitations of anthropocentrism, on which contemporary civilization is built. In this sense, they are an important inspiration for us from indigenous culture. Documentary film director Hana Nováková, using the example of the Canadian Mikmāk people, will tell us about the interconnectedness of the human world with moose and salmon, about the wisdom of children and the wisdom of the elders, about the legendary seven generations, and about ancient prophecies about a turning point and a time of healing the injustices of people and the landscape; or rather, she will have the Mikmāk matriarch Cheryl Maloney speak in this spirit from video clips. Finally, we will try to think together about what our world could be like if we accepted that we are part of not only our "homosphere", but of more than a human world. What would it be like if we acknowledged our animality and began to humbly care for the welfare of this larger earthly family of ours.

Hana Nováková is an Indologist, ethnozoologist and documentary director. She leads the Open Seminar at FAMU.

Final celebration with poems, songs and dances by the fire.

Day 7 ∙ Sunday, August 13

Breakfast from 8 am and then departure home.

After the seminar, we will hold a workshop on August 13-16. hiking from Horní Maršov across the Krkonoše Mountains to the Labské and Pančavské waterfalls (83 km).

Andreas Weber's lecture and workshop series was supported by a grant from the Czech-German Future Fund.

Contacts for further information

• Jiri Zemanek, sarvanga@centrum.cz, 777 117 466
• Alena Malikova, alena.malikova@bioinstitut.cz, 604 905 611
• Tomas Hruza, tomashruza@gmail.com, 775 052 607