Pachamama

Pachamama is the earth mother of the Andes, and she is emphatically not a goddess of the past. Her name, in Quechua and Aymara, means something like world mother or earth-and-time mother, and she is understood less as a personal figure with myths than as the living ground itself, the earth as a sacred, animate being who gives life, food and fertility, and who must be honoured and fed if she is to continue to give. This is the crucial point about Pachamama: she is worshipped today, by millions of people in the Andean highlands of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina, in a tradition that has continued through and beyond the Inca empire, absorbed elements of Catholicism, and remains vividly alive in the present. Her worship is intensely practical and reciprocal. Because the earth gives, she must be given to in return: before drinking, people may pour a few drops on the ground for the Pachamama (the challa), and at planting, harvest, the building of a house, or the start of an undertaking, offerings are made to her, coca leaves, food, drink, and the elaborate ritual bundles known as despachos or pagos, burned or buried to feed the earth and keep right relations with her.

The month of August, when the earth is felt to be "open" and hungry after the dry season, is an especially important time for these offerings. This principle of reciprocity, that human beings and the earth are bound in a relationship of mutual giving, and that to take from the earth without giving back is to court misfortune, is at the heart of Andean religious life. In recent times Pachamama has also become a symbol in Andean indigenous and environmental movements, invoked in defence of the land and of indigenous rights. She is the living earth-mother of the Andes, worshipped in the present and fed by her people in an unbroken relationship of reverence and reciprocity.

Pachamama's move into modern law is a genuinely unusual development in comparative legal history. Ecuador's 2008 constitution, adopted after a constituent assembly process that drew explicitly on Andean indigenous concepts, became the first national constitution in the world to grant enforceable legal rights directly to nature itself, using the term Pachamama in its text and establishing that nature has the right to have its existence respected and its cycles, structures and functions restored, rights that citizens and the state are empowered to invoke in court on nature's own behalf rather than only through claims of harm to human interests.

Bolivia followed in 2010 and 2012 with its own Law of the Rights of Mother Earth and a longer companion framework law, again drawing directly on the concept of Pachamama as understood in Aymara and Quechua tradition and asserting a comparable set of legal rights and protections for the natural world, developed with substantial input from indigenous social movements and coca-growers' organizations that had long organized around defence of the land in explicitly Pachamama-centred terms. These laws have had a mixed and debated record in practical enforcement, legal scholars and environmental advocates differ over how much concrete protective effect the rights-of-nature provisions have actually achieved against continued mining, drilling and agricultural expansion in both countries, but their existence marks a genuine and closely studied instance of an indigenous Andean religious and cosmological concept being translated directly into the formal language of national constitutional and statutory law, cited internationally as an influential precedent by rights-of-nature movements advocating similar legal changes elsewhere.