On 26 February 2019, a lake became human. For years, Lake Erie – the southernmost of the Great Lakes – has been in ecological crisis. Invasive species are rampant. Biodiversity is crashing. Each summer, blue-green algae blooms in volumes visible from space, creating toxic “dead zones”; the algae is nourished by fertiliser and slurry pollution from surrounding farms. In August 2014, phosphorus run-off so fouled Erie that the city of Toledo, at the lake’s western tip in Ohio, lost drinking water for three days in the hottest part of the year.

Appalled by the lake’s degradation, and exhausted by state and federal failures to improve Erie’s health, in December 2018 Toledo residents drew up an extraordinary document: an emergency “bill of rights” for Lake Erie. At the bill’s heart was a radical proposition: that the “Lake Erie ecosystem” should be granted legal personhood, and accorded the consequent rights in law – including the right “to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve”.

The Erie Bill of Rights is a brief, passionate, urgent text; reminiscent to me of a scene from a Greek tragedy or an Ibsen play. “We, the people of the City of Toledo … ” runs the italicised choral refrain; a “recital”, in legalese. The bill’s phrasing rings with love and rage. It dreams beautifully of an equitable land ethic. “It has become necessary,” the bill declares, “that we … extend legal rights to our natural environment to ensure that the natural world [is] no longer subordinated to the accumulation of surplus wealth and unaccountable political power.”

In 1970, JG Ballard coined the phrase “invisible literature” to mean “the vast majority of published documents – from market research reports, pharmaceutical company house magazines [to] US government reports and medical textbooks”. I take the Erie Bill of Rights to be exemplary of the “invisible literature” of our Anthropocene moment. At once hopeful and desperate, it is a late-hour attempt to prevent a slow-motion ecocide.

Embedded in the bill is a bold ontological claim – that Lake Erie is a living being, not a bundle of ecosystem services. The bill is, really, a work of what might be called “new animism” (the word comes from the Latin anima, meaning spirit, breath, life). By reassigning both liveliness and vulnerability to the lake, it displaces Erie from its instrumentalised roles as sump and source. As such, the bill forms part of a broader set of comparable recent legal moves in jurisdictions around the world – all seeking to recognise interdependence and animacy in the living world, and often advanced by indigenous groups – which have together come to be known as the “natural rights” or “rights of nature” movement.

A boat crosses the algae bloom on Lake Erie near Toledo, Ohio. Photograph: Aurora Photos/Alamy

The Lake Erie Ecosystem Bill of Rights came before Toledo citizens in a referendum on 26 February; 61% voted for it, and Lake Erie became – symbolically, temporarily – a “legal person”. It joined other more-than-human entities accorded various versions of legal personhood, including the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India (though this decision was later overturned by India’s supreme court), the Whanganui River in New Zealand (designated by parliamentary declaration “an indivisible and living whole”), the Colombian Amazon, and all nature in Ecuador, which in 2008 famously enshrined the rights of “Pachamama” (“Mother Nature”) in its constitution (though the subsequent benefit of this enshrining for both indigenous Ecuadorians and nature is highly debatable).

At first sight, the rights of nature movement appears potentially forceful as well as intellectually fascinating. To many lawyers and philosophers, however, the assigning of legal personhood to a more than human entity is a profound category error, which can create more problems than it solves. Critics observe that corporations also have standing as legal persons; is it desirable that the Niger Delta might exist in legal affinity with Shell? The plaintiff power of personhood also becomes a liability risk. If a river may bring an action against a factory for polluting it, may a developer in turn sue that river when flood water damages the housing stock? Legal recourses – in tort, criminal and public law – already exist to protect nature, and may be thought more robust than rights-based moves, which are often subject to swift challenge or reversal.

Campaigners want kinship across species divides to be recognised, and ecocide made a crime

There is also the problem of defining “being”. Where does a forest begin and end? Is a mountain made of the rain it draws down from the clouds as well as the bedrock that gives it altitude? More political criticisms find the idea of a lake as rights bearer objectionable, given the scant rights extended to many subjugated human groups, or note that when cramming indigenous worldviews into western rights-law frameworks, a colonial distortion is inevitable, however well intentioned the undertaking. Anthropomorphism is also awkwardly central to the natural rights movement. Lakes and forests must undergo transformation into “legal persons”, rather than being recognised as “legal lakes” or “legal forests”. Because a river is unable to stand up in court, a human proxy must inevitably bring an action, determine optimal outcome, and do the river’s talking for it.

“We risk only having respect for things insofar as they resemble human experience and characteristics,” writes Anna Grear, among the best analysts of this movement. “The law [instead] needs to develop a new framework in which the human is entangled and thrown in the midst of a lively materiality – rather than assumed to be the masterful, knowing centre.” Or as Thomas Berry puts it in The Great Work, “Trees have tree rights, insects have insect rights, rivers have river rights, and mountains have mountain rights”.

Pastaza Valley in the Andes. In 2008, Ecuador enshrined the rights of ‘Mother Nature’ in its constitution. Photograph: Ammit/Alamy

These are all good criticisms. Nevertheless, there is value to be salvaged from – and encouraged in – the natural rights movement. Its messy idealism is a function of desperation; a grapple with David Abrams’s stricken question: “How can a culture as educated as ours be so oblivious, so reckless, in its relations to the animate earth?” I am sympathetic with the movement’s wish to recognise the more-than-human world as animistically, entanglingly alive, rather than as an inert “standing reserve”. Like Grear, I find that at its best this young legal movement presses vital questions concerning “justice to the nonhuman” and requires us to “re-imagine our own state of being in a richer and more open way”. It is one aspect of what she memorably calls the “radical re-storying” of human-nonhuman relations that is now needed to shape “a future worth living”.

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Such “radical re-storying” is presently under way across culture, theory, politics and literature, as well as law. It is visible, for example, in the creative protests of Extinction Rebellion; in the “new animist” scholarship of Isabelle Stengers, Abram and Eduardo Kohn; in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s long-term project – drawing on her dual identity as plant scientist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation – of recovering a “grammar of animacy” by means of which kinship across species divides can be honoured in language; in forest ecology’s recent revelations concerning the underground mycorrhizal networks that connect individual trees into intercommunicating forests; and in campaigner and barrister Polly Higgins’s work, before her cruelly early death, to realise ecocide as a crime within international law. All these efforts, as Amitav Ghosh puts it, “seek to recognise something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors”.

A turning back towards “nonhuman interlocutors” has also occurred in recent fiction where “land” is encountered as sensate, memorious and even intentful, rather than a static stage set for human actions. From Australia there is the towering body of work – both novels and essays – by the lands-rights activist and indigenous writer Alexis Wright, which explore “special acts” of rights-giving to nature in both modern law and “ancestral stories”. In Britain, I think of Daisy Johnson’s dazzling Fen and Everything Under, Max Porter’s Lanny, Fiona Mozley’s Elmet, Zoe Gilbert’s Folk, Richard Skelton’s Beyond the Fell Wall, and Laura Beatty’s quietly brilliant Pollard and Darkling, in which trees grow through human lives in shaping ways.

In recent fiction ‘land’ is encoun­tered as memorious even intentful, rather than a static stage set for human actions

Place, in these works, is not a regressive repository for nativist truths or buried treasures; it is volatile and commotion causing. Land – to borrow Nan Shepherd’s wonderful verb – “bristles”; it morphs and causes metamorphosis. “The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted,” Mozley writes in Elmet, “then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives.” Johnson’s Fen is a book of jinking prose, in which no sentence or story ends as one might expect from its beginning, and place is the source of shift and transition. Porter’s landscapes remember, utter, worm into and through human bodies. These writers dispute what Stengers, in her essay “Rethinking Animism”, calls “the acceptance [of the] hard truth that we are alone in a mute, blind, yet knowable world – one that is our task to appropriate”.

A new-old animism is also advanced in Richard Powers’s magnificent novel The Overstory. The US environmentalist and author Bill McKibben said that he could not put The Overstory down because it was “a novel that took protest seriously”; it is also a novel that takes trees seriously. It is, really, a vast forest of a novel, with animism its sap. Powers has said that he was “trying to resurrect a very old form of tree-consciousness, a religion of attention and accommodation … that credits other forms of life – indeed, the life-process as a whole – with wanting something”. Some of the book’s finest scenes occur “two hundred feet above the surface of the planet”, in the crown of a California giant redwood nicknamed “Mimas”. Living up in the canopy for weeks, the protesters trying to prevent Mimas’s logging come to know the tree as a living community, a sky city. Animism is the driving force of their activism; a belief in the rights of more-than-human beings “to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve”.

Candlelit vigil at Vernon Oak … a protest against tree felling in Sheffield. Photograph: David Holmes

Reading Powers’s masterpiece, I was reminded of the Sheffield tree protests, ongoing since 2013, when communities mobilised to prevent their city’s deforestation when it emerged that up to 17,000 street trees might be felled under the blind logic of a Private Finance Initiative contract. The city’s trees were defended legally but also imaginatively. They gained names – “Vernon Oak”, “Duchess Lime” – and were studied, storied and sung to, becoming newly apprised as neighbours and co-citizens with human inhabitants of the city.

The Sheffield tree protesters and Powers are reacting in different ways to what Ghosh in The Great Derangement identifies as the doubled unsettlement of the Anthropocene; an epoch in which Earth is revealing itself as both acutely vulnerable and restlessly lively. “The uncanny and improbable events that are beating at our doors,” Ghosh writes, “seem to have stirred a sense of recognition … that humans were never alone, that we have always been surrounded by beings who share elements of that which we thought most distinctively our own: the capacities of will, thought and consciousness.”

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The most restlessly lively place I know is Orford Ness, a 10-mile-long shingle spit that curves south along the Suffolk coast like a bracket. The Ness is an offshore desert, an untrue island. Shaped by storm, tide and longshore drift, it is startlingly dynamic. Between 1812 and 1821 alone its length shifted by nearly two miles. If you could view the Ness as an aerial stop-motion film shot over several centuries, you would see its long stone tail whipping around in the North Sea. Because of its isolation, for 70 years (1913–83) the Ness was used by the Ministry of Defence for secret weapons testing; from air-gunnery and bombing during the first world war, to the environmental testing of British nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 60s. It is, therefore, a landscape produced by a collision of the human death drive and natural life. Now it is a conservation site like no other, unnerving in its juxtapositions, where decaying ferroconcrete test laboratories are recolonised by moss, bracken and elder to become “green chapels”, black-backed gulls build their nests in broken control panels, brown hares big as deer lope across shingle expanses cratered by explosions, and the wind sings in the wires of abandoned perimeter fences.

I have returned to Orford Ness dozens of times since my first visit some 15 years ago. There is no English landscape that has haunted me more deeply, or drawn me back more often. And for three years I wrote about it, making – with the artist Stanley Donwood – a 96‑page book called Ness. I don’t know quite how to describe it: a novella-length prose-poem written to be spoken aloud, perhaps – or a futile attempt to retell Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for the Anthropocene.

A former military building in Orford Ness, Suffolk. Photograph: Geography Photos/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Ness takes place on an unnamed shingle island, inside a dilapidating concrete structure known as The Green Chapel, where a brutal male figure called The Armourer is leading a nuclear ritual with catastrophic intent. Converging on The Green Chapel are five more-than-human beings, traversing land, sea and time to prevent the ritual’s fulfilment: “She nears Ness. Her skin is lichen & her flesh is moss & her bones are fungi & she breathes spores. She is wired into the world. There are miles of her in each pinch of soil … ”

The figure of The Armourer inevitably echoes certain male autocrats currently occupying seats of power, and Ness is surfacing into a contemporary moment of protest against the living world’s systemic annihilation. But its form was influenced by ancient precedents, including medieval mystery play cycles and the early Irish bardic poem “Buile Suibhne” (translated as “Sweeney Astray” by Seamus Heaney). It also has origins in my surprise, rereading Beowulf and the Epic of Gilgamesh, at how central natural destruction is to both these founding texts of literature. Gilgamesh travels to the Cedar Forest where he sets about felling the great trees. Beowulf leaves the mead hall to wage war on the “wildeór” (wild creatures) of marsh and moor. In Ness, this order is reversed. It wonders instead what happens when land itself comes alive and seeks to thwart human rapacity. Ness is eerie in the sense Skelton uses that word; “engaging with ‘the eerie’ is fundamentally an acknowledgement of life beyond our own species … about probing that complex, troubling relationship between humans and others.”

A recurring object in Ness is the “hagstone”; a pebble with a hole worn naturally through it. Many hagstones are cast up on the foreshore of Orford Ness. In folklore across Europe, to look through such a stone is to see into the future, the past or the afterlife. In Ness, the hagstone is an optic through which one can see nature come alive in its own right, with its own powers.

The biologist EO Wilson has warned that, as the extinction rate climbs, humans are entering “The Eremocene” – the Age of Loneliness. The most recent State of Nature report, published last month, found one in seven UK species to be at risk of disappearance. Research released in September showed North America to have lost 3 billion birds – 29% of total population – in 50 years. The dryads and naiads of classical myth, those lively spirits of trees and streams, have long since been driven out. Now birds, mammals, plants and insects are vanishing too, leaving humans increasingly alone in the world. The new animism, if we can call it that, of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, of The Overstory, of Ness, of Fen, of Sheffield, may be heard as a cry into – and against – such desolating solitude.

• This article was amended on 15 November 2019 because an earlier version incorrectly said that Toledo city councillors drew up the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. That document was drawn up by residents of Toledo.

• Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood is published by Hamish Hamilton. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.