The author is the sole proprietor of the legal liability corporation My Presence is Productive (MPIP), created in 2015 as a conceptual strategy to eliminate the legal distinction between their research and themself. Their goal is to effectuate alternative methodological strategies to portray objective data with regards to the monetization of land.
The author will present the project Whereas The Sun, first enacted on March 4, 2021 at the University of Pennsylvania Program in Environmental Humanities when MPIP encouraged the ethical management of solar resources by moving to legally grant the sun personhood in the same way that other natural resources have been granted personhood. The author will ask attorney Vikram Patel to read My Presence is Productive’s formal recognition of the Sun’s environmental personhood into the public record.
My name is Elizabeth Shores and I am the sole proprietor of the Legal Liability Corporation known as My Presence is Productive (MPIP). I created MPIP in 2015 as a conceptual strategy to eliminate the legal distinction between my research and myself. The goal of MPIP is to effectuate alternative methodological strategies to portray objective data with regard to the monetization of land.
When Kristen Neville Taylor and Ricky Yanas reached out to invite me to join them at the University of Pennsylvania Program in Environmental Humanities Solar Imaginaries event on March 4, 2021, I spent some time considering their request for me to develop a tool or strategy to reimagine how solar energy could function in the future. It got me thinking about what it might feel like to be the sun and how we can try to preemptively protect it. The sun has been providing the human and more-than-human world with a free ‘resource’ for so many billions of years. We talk about exploiting it, and we literally use that word exploiting as if it were free. But when we look at anything that we exploit there is always long-term harm from it whether it’s people, natural resources, the more-than-human-world, etc.
And so, in order to encourage the ethical management of solar resources we moved to legally grant the sun personhood in the same way that other natural resources have been granted personhood. In March on Turtle Island, and again in November 2021 on Aotearoa, I have asked my attorney, Vikram Patel, to join us and read My Presence is Productive’s formal recognition of the Sun’s environmental personhood into the public record.”
Further Reading: Gordon, G. J. (2019). Environmental Personhood. Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, 43(1).
Shores, E. A. (2021). Whereas the sun. https://ppehlab.com/solar-imaginaries/solarsynthesis/whereas-the-sun/
Soldier, L. L. (2017). WHEREAS: Poems. United States: Graywolf Press.
Elizabeth Shores is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator who uses multi-sited transnational collaborative design to study the language of empire in material culture. Elizabeth received their MFA and BFA degrees at the Universities of New Mexico and Iowa, respectively, as well as completing coursework at Shanghai University.