Ein schönes Beispiel für eine Erörterung der intuitiven Grundlagen der Frage, ob man in einem naturreligiösen Sinne einen moralischen Status jenen zukommen lässt , die nach Ansicht des mechanistischen Weltbildes nur "Dinge" sind, ist der herrliche Aufsatz von Jeremy Harte: „Do elves have rights?“ Ich kenne Harte nicht und hatte noch keine Gelegenheit mich mit dem, was er schreibt, vertrauter zu machen. In seinem Aufsatz bringt er auf jeden Fall nette Beispiele aus Irland, Island, Australien oder von den Hybriden, die alle mit Konflikten in Bezug auf die Landnutzung „religiöser“ Plätze verbunden sind. Er macht darauf aufmerksam, dass - bis auf Island - die Argumentation zum Schutz oder zur Pflege von besonderen Plätzen immer anthropozentrisch geführt wird:

"The Scottish guidelines on development, for instance, try to weigh economic interests against ‘potential use for amenity, tourism and educational purposes’ How would you or I fare if the only thing that kept us from being destroyed for economic purposes was our potential use for amenity, tourism or education? The survival of sacred sites is the thing that matters. Any law which achieves that end is better than one which permits destruction, even if it means that the fairy hill is physically preserved by exorcising the last trace of respect for its real owners.
But the trauma of denying the sacred is not easily healed, even in a country like Ireland where the old veneration survives alongside the new talk of heritage. The father leaves a rath uncultivated because it is fairy ground, the son because it is a scheduled monument. Newgrange, which was once the numinous abode of the sidhe, has now been reworked as an interpretative centre for celebrating the deep historical roots of the Irish nation (1). This is not progress. What is so real about the Irish national interest, compared to Aengus Og and his hundred harpers? Turning the haunted mound into a vehicle for imparting the National Curriculum is an abuse of the rights of elves. They have no redress in court, which is strange when you consider how well other incorporeal entities have their rights protected there. Limited companies can go to law over intellectual property - invisible beings fighting over an intangible thing - while Puck and Hob stand non-suited outside the door.

(1) Ronayne, Maggie, 1997, ‘Wounded attachments: Practising archaeology from ‘the outside’’, Paper given at TAG 1997. "

Die Praxis aktueller naturreligiösen Kulturen gerät mit einer solchen anthropozentrischen Haltung zwangsläufig in Konflikt:

"In Australia, Aboriginal land claims have to be pursued through what is in origin a European legal system. Legal forms and ideas, evolved over centuries to determine questions of ownership, become absurd when they are required from claimants to whom ‘land’ and ‘people’ are not the objects and subjects of litigation, but a single community.
Aborigines face the paradox that the real plaintiffs are not allowed in court. The stones and trees themselves, having sent the Dreamings which define tribal custom, are not deemed fit to plead: instead, the people upon whom they have exercised their rights have to speak on behalf of them. Anglo-Australian judges are often well-intentioned - but they simply cannot conceive that a rock might have something to say."

Eine anthropozentrische Sichtweise mag zwar aus Sicht ihrer theoretischen Vertreter "aufgeklärt" sein, sie entspricht aber nur begrenzt den moralischen Intuitionen jener Menschen, die sich in der Praxis für Landschutz etc. einsetzen:

"The National Trust would not have come into being if its founders had not shared a Wordsworthian sense that landscapes were places, not just of amenity, but of transfiguring spiritual power - places which called out for people to acknowledge and care for them. In conservation, and in the Green movement generally, the motives which really stir people into action are not always the same ones which they will advance in debate with the cynics. The legal machinery for preserving the environment relies on pragmatic values - thriftiness, aesthetics, science, history, and health. But what really gets people going are the two unspoken motives - compassion and reverence (1). These are not anthropocentric. They imply a moral standing for nature in itself. The discourse of environmentalism, which began by extending the concept of rights from humans to (other) animals, has now come to touch on the ethical status of trees (2).

(1) RYDER, Richard (ed.) 1992, Animal Welfare and the Environment, Duckworth; 4, S. 205
(2) Thomas, Keith, 1983, Man and the Natural World, Penguin. S. 302"

Auch alte europäische Kulturen hatten in dieser Frage mehr Sensibilität:

"Entrepreneurial Protestants do not see that a church which has fallen into sacred ruins is still a church. Turning it into a bistro destroys the building, whatever it does to preserve the architecture. The secular state guards our most trivial worldly interests, while neglecting the great questions of salvation - which is just as well. No-one wants to live in a theocracy. But by redefining the traditional bounds of the political to exclude God, the modern state has also abandoned its protection of the thousand creatures of the lesser mythology. Pagan law protected the lares and the landvaettir, while ours behaves as if they did not exist."

Dabei könnte eine andere Sichtweise auch die Interspezies-Konflikte verringern:

"Clearly, therefore, supernatural beings can have a standing in law. Though courts have fought shy of accepting ghosts as litigants, judges have been careful not to deny their existence (1). The refusal to admit rights for the supernatural shows how much our legal framework is out of step with common perceptions of the numinous. In law, the field which contains the Rollright stones is freehold land, to be bought and sold. ‘This is a strange concept’, says John Attwood, spokesman for the real world. ‘I don’t believe that you can "own" a stone circle any more than you can own a cat. Apparently, though, the law says you can’ (2).

From the popular perspective, the stones have rights - or what comes to the same thing, the fairies which sneak out to dance around the King Stone on Midsummer Night have rights in that stone. At the very least they require that the stones be left undisturbed, and any human infringment of this right will be met by calamity - it is a standard motif in the folklore of ancient sites (3). Like terrorists everywhere, the elves are making sporadic attacks on people and property in order to assert rights which they are denied by the state. If they were given standing in the courts, they could defend their interests there, and not with elf-arrows whistling in the dark.

(1) Dennis, Andrew, 1997, ‘Spirit of the law’, Fortean Times No.103 pp22–24.
(2) Attwood, John, 1997, ‘Updating the Rollrights’, Northern Earth No.72 pp26–27.
(3) Bord, Janet and Colin, 1976, The Secret Country, Paladin. S. 191–210"