Future generations risk 'enslavement' without a vote now
The
issue of intergenerational justice underpins the need to act on climate
change. So would a "super-jury" stop us bequeathing a damaged and
dangerous planet to our descendants?
Protecting the world
so future generations can enjoy the same benefits requires their rights
to be expressed now, argues Rupert Read (Llyn Dinas in Snowdonia, Wales.
Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
It's a new year, so let's start with a new idea: a democratic
body to safeguard the basic needs and fundamental interests of future
people.
That is the proposal of Rupert Read, a philosopher at the University of East Anglia, in a report called Guardians of the Future for the think tank Green House. The core idea is both radical and straightforward: a council of "Guardians of Future Generations", chosen like a jury from the general public, would sit above the existing law-making bodies and have two core powers. A power to veto legislation that threatened the basic needs and interests of future people and the power to force a review, following suitable public petition, of any existing legislation that threatens the interests of future people.
After the UN climate change summit in Durban in December I wrote, our current glacial progress in tackling global warming is piling costs and hardship onto our descendents in a way that will make the current global debt crisis seem minor by comparison. The changes to our economic, food, energy and water systems needed to adapt to changing climate get more expensive the longer we leave them. So ideas about how to represent the interests of people yet to exist are welcome.
I asked Read why he took on the issue. "It came from the worry that it is clear that the current institutions of government are not working and are not future proof," he said. "It also came from a philosophical direction: seeking for a way take the future seriously and in a democratic way."
"The proposal being made here is that we give future people en masse the nearest possible equivalent to the vote," he says. The need for democratic representation of unborn people led Read to the idea of a "super-jury". "Random selection would emphasise that we all share this responsibility for future people, and that none of us and all of us are ideally placed to do this vital job," he writes in the report.
Read accepts the idea of a powerful legal body protecting future people will be seen as extreme. "It is a very radical idea but many great ideas in history were once seen as outlandish," he says. When the Green Party, of which Read is a member and a former councillor, started promoting recycling in the 1970s and 1980s, he says "people laughed at and ridiculed us - now it is taken for granted."
Read also cites the abolition of slavery as an idea that was seen as ludicrous for centuries and draws a parallel with the rights of future people. "You could say, in effect, that we are at risk of enslaving future people by condemning them to a future far worse than now. They will have to work far harder to live and that is, in effect, slavery."
The idea of Guardians of Future Generations joins a number of radical ideas which are starting to make small but real impacts in the world. Hungary appointed an Ombudsman for Future Generations in 2008. The concept of the crime of ecocide is being considered by the UN. And Bolivia has passed laws giving nature equal rights to those of humans.
Read says he wants to get people talking about the idea of protecting the rights of future generations, rather than set in stone specific structures. "This is an attempt to start a debate, rather than present a definitive proposal," he says.
However, as the report itself notes, the issue is an old one, with Edmund Burke writing in 1790: "[Society is] a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." With the threat of climate change looming ever greater, is it finally time to turn these ideas into action?
The Guardians for Future Generations will be launched at the House of Commons on 10 January 2012, with the meeting hosted by Caroline Lucas MP, leader of the Green Party, and addressed by Liberal Democrat minister Norman Baker MP and Labour's Jon Cruddas MP. The report can be purchased now for £1.80 and will be available for free after 10 January on the Green House website.
by Cormac Cullinan
IT WAS THE SUDDEN RUSH of the goats’ bodies against the side of the boma that woke him. Picking up a spear and stick, the Kenyan farmer slipped out into the warm night and crept toward the pen. All he could see was the spotted, sloping hindquarters of the animal trying to force itself between the poles to get at the goats—but it was enough. He drove his spear deep into the hyena.
The elders who gathered under the meeting tree to deliberate on the matter were clearly unhappy with the farmer’s explanation. A man appointed by the traditional court to represent the interests of the hyena had testified that his careful examination of the body had revealed that the deceased was a female who was still suckling pups. He argued that given the prevailing drought and the hyena’s need to nourish her young, her behavior in attempting to scavenge food from human settlements was reasonable and that it was wrong to have killed her. The elders then cross-examined the farmer carefully. Did he appreciate, they asked, that such killings were contrary to customary law? Had he considered the hyena’s situation and whether or not she had caused harm? Could he not have simply driven her away? Eventually the elders ordered the man’s clan to pay compensation for the harm done by driving more than one hundred of their goats (a fortune in that community) into the bush, where they could be eaten by the hyenas and other wild carnivores.
The story, told to me by a Kenyan friend, illustrates African customary law’s concern with restorative justice rather than retribution. Wrongdoing is seen as a symptom of a breakdown in relationships within the wider community, and the elders seek to restore the damaged relationship rather than focusing on identifying and punishing the wrongdoer.
The verdict of a traditional African court regarding hyenacide may seem of mere anthropological interest to contemporary Americans. In most of today’s legal systems, decisions that harm ecological communities have to be challenged primarily on the basis of whether or not the correct procedures have been followed. Yet consider how much greater the prospects of survival would be for most of life on Earth if mechanisms existed for imposing collective responsibility and liability on human communities and for restoring damaged relations with the larger natural community. Imagine if we had elders with a deep understanding of the lore of the wild who spoke for the Earth as well as for humans. If we did, how might they order us to compensate for, say, the anticipated destruction of the entire Arctic ecosystem because of global climate change, to restore relations with the polar bears and other people and creatures who depend on that ecosystem? How many polluting power plants and vehicles would it be fair to sacrifice to make amends?
“SO WHAT WOULD A RADICALLY DIFFERENT law-driven consciousness look like?” The question was posed over three decades ago by a University of Southern California law professor as his lecture drew to a close. “One in which Nature had rights,” he continued. “Yes, rivers, lakes, trees. . . . How could such a posture in law affect a community’s view of itself?” Professor Christopher Stone may as well have announced that he was an alien life form. Rivers and trees are objects, not subjects, in the eyes of the law and are by definition incapable of holding rights. His speculations created an uproar.
Stone stepped away from that lecture a little dazed by the response from the class but determined to back up his argument. He realized that for nature to have rights the law would have to be changed so that, first, a suit could be brought in the name of an aspect of nature, such as a river; second, a polluter could be held liable for harming a river; and third, judgments could be made that would benefit a river. Stone quickly identified a pending appeal to the United States Supreme Court against a decision of the Ninth Circuit that raised these issues. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had found that the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund was not “aggrieved” or “adversely affected” by the proposed development of the Mineral King Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains by Walt Disney Enterprises, Inc. This decision meant that the Sierra Club did not have “standing” so the court didn’t need to consider the merits of the matter. Clearly, if the Mineral King Valley itself had been recognized as having rights, it would have been an adversely affected party and would have had the necessary standing.
Fortuitously, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was writing a preface to the next edition of the Southern California Law Review. Stone’s seminal “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects” (“Trees”) was hurriedly squeezed into the journal and read by Justice Douglas before the Court issued its judgment. In “Trees,” Stone argued that courts should grant legal standing to guardians to represent the rights of nature, in much the same way as guardians are appointed to represent the rights of infants. In order to do so, the law would have to recognize that nature was not just a conglomeration of objects that could be owned, but was a subject that itself had legal rights and the standing to be represented in the courts to enforce those rights. The article eventually formed the basis for a famous dissenting judgment by Justice Douglas in the 1972 case of Sierra Club v. Morton in which he expressed the opinion that “contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.”
Perhaps one of the most important things about “Trees” is that it ventured beyond the accepted boundaries of law as we know it and argued that the conceptual framework for law in the United States (and by analogy, elsewhere) required further evolution and expansion. Stone began by addressing the initial reaction that such ideas are outlandish. Throughout legal history, as he pointed out, each extension of legal rights had previously been unthinkable. The emancipation of slaves and the extension of civil rights to African Americans, women, and children were once rejected as absurd or dangerous by authorities. The Founding Fathers, after all, were hardly conscious of the hypocrisy inherent in proclaiming the inalienable rights of all men while simultaneously denying basic rights to children, women, and to African and Native Americans.
“Trees” has since become a classic for students of environmental law, but after three decades its impact on law in the United States has been limited. After it was written, the courts made it somewhat easier for citizens to litigate on behalf of other species and the environment by expanding the powers and responsibilities of authorities to act as trustees of areas used by the public (e.g., navigable waters, beaches, and parks). Unfortunately, these gains have been followed in more recent years by judicial attempts to restrict the legal standing of environmental groups. Damages for harm to the environment are now recoverable in some cases and are sometimes applied for the benefit of the environment. However, these changes fall far short of what Stone advocated for in “Trees.” The courts still have not recognized that nature has directly enforceable rights.
COMMUNITIES HAVE ALWAYS USED LAWS to express the ideals to which they aspire and to regulate how power is exercised. Law is also a social tool that is usually shaped and wielded most effectively by the powerful. Consequently, law tends to entrench a society’s fundamental idea of itself and of how the world works. So, for example, even when American society began to regard slavery as morally abhorrent, it was not able to peaceably end the practice because the fundamental concept that slaves were property had been hard-wired into the legal system. The abolition of slavery required not only that the enfranchised recognize that slaves were entitled to the same rights as other humans, but also a political effort to change the laws that denied those rights. It took both the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to outlaw slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment, in turn, played a role in changing American society’s idea of what was acceptable, thereby providing the bedrock for the subsequent civil rights movement.
In the eyes of American law today, most of the community of life on Earth remains mere property, natural “resources” to be exploited, bought, and sold just as slaves were. This means that environmentalists are seldom seen as activists fighting to uphold fundamental rights, but rather as criminals who infringe upon the property rights of others. It also means that actions that damage the ecosystems and the natural processes on which life depends, such as Earth’s climate, are poorly regulated. Climate change is an obvious and dramatic symptom of the failure of human government to regulate human behavior in a manner that takes account of the fact that human welfare is directly dependent on the health of our planet and cannot be achieved at its expense.
In the scientific world there has been more progress. It’s been almost forty years since James Lovelock first proposed the “Gaia hypothesis”: a theory that Earth regulates itself in a manner that keeps the composition of the atmosphere and average temperatures within a range conducive to life. Derided or dismissed by most people at the time, the Gaia hypothesis is now accepted by many as scientific theory. In 2001, more than a thousand scientists signed a declaration that begins “The Earth is a self-regulating system made up from all life, including humans, and from the oceans, the atmosphere and the surface rocks,” a statement that would have been unthinkable for most scientists when “Trees” was written.
The acceptance of Lovelock’s hypothesis can be understood as part of a drift in the scientific world away from a mechanistic understanding of the universe toward the realization that no aspect of nature can be understood without looking at it within the context of the systems of which it forms a part. Unfortunately, this insight has been slow to penetrate the world of law and politics.
But what if we were to imagine a society in which our purpose was to act as good citizens of the Earth as a whole?
What might a governance system look like if it were established to protect the rights of all members of a particular biological community, instead of only humans? Cicero pointed out that each of our rights and freedoms must be limited in order that others may be free. It is far past time that we should consider limiting the rights of humans so they cannot unjustifiably prevent nonhuman members of a community from playing their part. Any legal system designed to give effect to modern scientific understandings (or, indeed, to many cultures’ ancient understandings) of how the universe functions would have to prohibit humans from driving other species to extinction or deliberately destroying the functioning of major ecosystems. In the absence of such regulatory mechanisms, an oppressive and self-destructive regime will inevitably emerge. As indeed it has.
In particular, we should examine the fact that, in the eyes of the law, corporations are considered people and entitled to civil rights. We often forget that corporations are only a few centuries old and have been continually evolving since their inception. Imagine what could be done if we changed the fiduciary responsibilities of directors to include obligations not only to profitability but also to the whole natural world, and if we imposed collective personal liability on corporate managers and stockholders to restore any damage that they cause to natural communities. Imagine if landowners who abused and degraded land lost the right to use it. In an Earth-centered community, all institutions through which humans act collectively would be designed to require behavior that is socially responsible from the perspective of the whole community.A society whose concern is to maintain the integrity or wholeness of the Earth must also refine its ideas about what is “right” and “wrong.” We may find it more useful to condone or disapprove of human conduct by considering the extent to which an action increases or decreases the health of the whole community and the quality or intimacy of the relationships between its members. As Aldo Leopold’s famous land ethic states, “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” From this perspective, individual and collective human rights must be contextualized within, and balanced against, the rights of the other members and communities of Earth.
ON SEPTEMBER 19, 2006, the Tamaqua Borough of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, passed a sewage sludge ordinance that recognizes natural communities and ecosystems within the borough as legal persons for the purposes of enforcing civil rights. It also strips corporations that engage in the land application of sludge of their rights to be treated as “persons” and consequently of their civil rights. One of its effects is that the borough or any of its residents may file a lawsuit on behalf of an ecosystem to recover compensatory and punitive damages for any harm done by the land application of sewage sludge. Damages recovered in this way must be paid to the borough and used to restore those ecosystems and natural communities.
According to Thomas Linzey, the lawyer from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund who assisted Tamaqua Borough, this ordinance marks the first time in the history of municipalities in the United States that something like this has happened. Coming after more than 150 years of judicially sanctioned expansion of the legal powers of corporations in the U.S., this ordinance is more than extraordinary—it is revolutionary. In a world where the corporation is king and all forms of life other than humans are objects in the eyes of the law, this is a small community’s Boston tea party.
In Africa, nongovernmental organizations in eleven countries are also asserting local community rights in order to promote the conservation of biodiversity and sustainable development. Members of the African Biodiversity Network (ABN) have coined the term “cultural biodiversity” to emphasize that knowledge and practices that support biodiversity are embedded in cultural tradition. The ABN works with rural communities and schools to recover and spread traditional knowledge and practices.
This is part of a wider effort to build local communities, protect the environment by encouraging those communities to value, retain, and build on traditional African cosmologies, and to govern themselves as part of a wider Earth community.
These small examples, emerging shoots of what might be termed “Earth democracy,” are pressing upward despite the odds. It may well be that Earth-centered legal systems will have to grow organically out of human-scale communities, and communities of communities, that understand that they must function as integrated parts of wider natural communities. In the face of climate change and other enormous environmental challenges, our future as a species depends on those people who are creating the legal and political spaces within which our connection to the rest of our community here on Earth is recognized. The day will come when the failure of our laws to recognize the right of a river to flow, to prohibit acts that destabilize Earth’s climate, or to impose a duty to respect the intrinsic value and right to exist of all life will be as reprehensible as allowing people to be bought and sold. We will only flourish by changing these systems and claiming our identity, as well as assuming our responsibilities, as members of the Earth community.
The United Nations has devoted this year’s Human Rights Day to "the rights of all people...to make their voices heard in public life and be included in political decision-making." What better time to acknowledge the global movement raising its voice for human rights in childbirth. As cesarean rates skyrocket around the world, and women exchange stories of coercion and force in obstetric care, it should come as no surprise that people are organizing to demand change.
What are human rights in childbirth? Every health care system in the world faces the same essential questions. Who decides how a baby is born? Who chooses where a birth takes place? Who bears the ultimate responsibility for a birth and its outcome? What are the legal rights of birthing women? What are the responsibilities of doctors, midwives and other caregivers in childbirth? What are the rights and interests of the unborn, and who has the authority to make decisions on its behalf?
I
n
2010, Hungarian mother Anna Ternovszky took these questions to the
European Court of Human Rights. After the healthy, safe, and empowering
birth of her firstborn, at home, with the midwife Agnes Gereb, Anna
objected to the fact that her ability to hire Agnes a second time was
affected by the threat of legal sanction against Agnes for attending her
at home. In the decision of Ternovszky v. Hungary,
the Court held that birthing women have a fundamental human right to
choose the circumstances in which they give birth. The foundations for
this right include the rights to privacy, to autonomy, to control over
our own bodies, and the right to make decisions for our children even as
we are giving birth to them. Ternovszky is only binding on
European nations, but this fundamental human right applies to all women
everywhere. As a birthing woman, you have the right to meaningful choice
and genuine support for your personal needs around and during
childbirth, whether those needs are for planned cesarean section or
undisturbed home birth with reliable medical backup.
As a birthing woman, nobody can tell you that you "must" do anything. Nobody can "let you" or "not let you" do anything. Nobody can pressure or force you into a cesarean section that you do not believe is in the interest of yourself and your baby. Nobody can cut an episiotomy if you do not consent to one. Nobody can do anything to your body or your baby without discussing it with you first and asking for your consent. You have the right to be the ultimate authority over everything that occurs around your body's birth of your baby.
These are the fundamental human rights of the birthing woman. And yet, these rights are so commonly violated, that most women are not even aware that they have them. In both the developed and the developing world, women are too often treated with disrespect and abuse, including subjection to unnecessary, damaging, and costly surgical interventions. They are told what will happen to them, or not even asked. As women raise awareness of problems in birth care common to most modern obstetric systems, they are realizing that many of these problems could be addressed by acknowledgment of the woman’s right to make the decisions of childbirth, of her ultimate authority over the birth process.
Many disagree that pregnant women retain the fundamental human rights applicable to healthcare. In only the last month, vocal proponents of medical birth called the cl
aim that birthing women have a human right to autonomy “unethical” and “morally grotesque.” What I find unethical and morally grotesque is the assertion that a doctor, making decisions about a patient
, has more authority over an unborn baby than the woman who has grown
it out of her own flesh and blood. Especially a doctor with a 35%
cesarean section rate.
In the article linked above on moral grotesquerie, media darling “Dr. Amy” revealed her opinion that physiological birth, undisturbed maternal-newborn bonding, and the right to avoid unnecessary abdominal surgery have a value equal to manicures. I disagree, and I am not alone. Women are ready to stand up for the simple right to respectful support in childbirth. Dr. Amy claims that the right to autonomy in childbirth is a wealthy, western white woman’s concern, and she will not be the last to say so. Every woman’s movement has met this charge: “There are women dying in poverty, women who can’t feed their children, and you spoiled bitches dare to make a fuss about the right to own property/ right to vote/ right to education/ right to equal work and equal pay? You obviously have too much time on your hands.” It is true that one cannot fight for more than survival, when survival is in question. But that doesn’t mean that women have a right to survival alone. As nations challenge their birth care systems to meet Millennium Development Goal 5, they can do so in a way that replicates the institutional human rights violations of Western obstetrics, or they can evolve birth care to respect the fundamental human rights of the women they aim to assist. Ask women in the developing world if they are unconcerned with disrespect and abuse in childbirth.
The idea that the doctor, and not the woman, holds authority over decision-making in childbirth is so entrenched that it will take a paradigm change to put the woman back at the center of birth care. The momentum is building, around the world, capable of generating this transformation. The hundreds of people energized by the 2012 Human Rights in Childbirth (HRiC) Conference in The Hague became tens of thousands of people inspired by the 1000 global screenings of Freedom for Birth on September 20th. In the next week, the circle of activists will expand with the release of a 15-minute free version of Freedom for Birth and the launch of new functionalities on the HRiC website that will help people from around the world to find and join the organizations working to improve birth where they live.
If you believe Martin Luther King, Jr. that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” then there is reason to hope that the fundamental human right to autonomy and authority in childbirth will be recognized. But the only way this will happen will be if birthing women demand their rights. As Anna Ternovszky, the plaintiff who asked justice of the ECHR, said in Freedom for Birth, “Now is the time to let our voices be heard.”
Hermine Hayes-Klein was the organizer of the Human Rights in Childbirth Conference in the Hague on May 31-June 1st of this year.
About the obirth blog: The Orgasmic Birth weblog shares the opinions of Orgasmic Birth, Sunken Treasure Publishing and the obirth team as well as weblogs submitted by our readers or guest blogs that may or not be the opinion of Orgasmic Birth. Obirth believes it is time to be BOLD in sharing our thoughts and perspectives, to challenge others to think in new ways and whether we agree or disagree, hopes to have a discussion where we can look at childbirth in new and old ways. “These are the best of times and the worst of times.” Opportunity is here to transform maternity care practices and it will take a village. We appreciate your voice and thoughts, along with resources when possible so that together we can contribute to a larger discussion where women, men and communities are empowered to Take Back their Birth!
That is the proposal of Rupert Read, a philosopher at the University of East Anglia, in a report called Guardians of the Future for the think tank Green House. The core idea is both radical and straightforward: a council of "Guardians of Future Generations", chosen like a jury from the general public, would sit above the existing law-making bodies and have two core powers. A power to veto legislation that threatened the basic needs and interests of future people and the power to force a review, following suitable public petition, of any existing legislation that threatens the interests of future people.
After the UN climate change summit in Durban in December I wrote, our current glacial progress in tackling global warming is piling costs and hardship onto our descendents in a way that will make the current global debt crisis seem minor by comparison. The changes to our economic, food, energy and water systems needed to adapt to changing climate get more expensive the longer we leave them. So ideas about how to represent the interests of people yet to exist are welcome.
I asked Read why he took on the issue. "It came from the worry that it is clear that the current institutions of government are not working and are not future proof," he said. "It also came from a philosophical direction: seeking for a way take the future seriously and in a democratic way."
"The proposal being made here is that we give future people en masse the nearest possible equivalent to the vote," he says. The need for democratic representation of unborn people led Read to the idea of a "super-jury". "Random selection would emphasise that we all share this responsibility for future people, and that none of us and all of us are ideally placed to do this vital job," he writes in the report.
Read accepts the idea of a powerful legal body protecting future people will be seen as extreme. "It is a very radical idea but many great ideas in history were once seen as outlandish," he says. When the Green Party, of which Read is a member and a former councillor, started promoting recycling in the 1970s and 1980s, he says "people laughed at and ridiculed us - now it is taken for granted."
Read also cites the abolition of slavery as an idea that was seen as ludicrous for centuries and draws a parallel with the rights of future people. "You could say, in effect, that we are at risk of enslaving future people by condemning them to a future far worse than now. They will have to work far harder to live and that is, in effect, slavery."
The idea of Guardians of Future Generations joins a number of radical ideas which are starting to make small but real impacts in the world. Hungary appointed an Ombudsman for Future Generations in 2008. The concept of the crime of ecocide is being considered by the UN. And Bolivia has passed laws giving nature equal rights to those of humans.
Read says he wants to get people talking about the idea of protecting the rights of future generations, rather than set in stone specific structures. "This is an attempt to start a debate, rather than present a definitive proposal," he says.
However, as the report itself notes, the issue is an old one, with Edmund Burke writing in 1790: "[Society is] a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." With the threat of climate change looming ever greater, is it finally time to turn these ideas into action?
The Guardians for Future Generations will be launched at the House of Commons on 10 January 2012, with the meeting hosted by Caroline Lucas MP, leader of the Green Party, and addressed by Liberal Democrat minister Norman Baker MP and Labour's Jon Cruddas MP. The report can be purchased now for £1.80 and will be available for free after 10 January on the Green House website.
If Nature Had Rights
What would people need to give up?
by Cormac Cullinan
Drawings by Amy Falstrom
Published in the January/February 2008 issue of Orion magazine
Read an extract from the author’s book Wild Law.
IT WAS THE SUDDEN RUSH of the goats’ bodies against the side of the boma that woke him. Picking up a spear and stick, the Kenyan farmer slipped out into the warm night and crept toward the pen. All he could see was the spotted, sloping hindquarters of the animal trying to force itself between the poles to get at the goats—but it was enough. He drove his spear deep into the hyena.
The elders who gathered under the meeting tree to deliberate on the matter were clearly unhappy with the farmer’s explanation. A man appointed by the traditional court to represent the interests of the hyena had testified that his careful examination of the body had revealed that the deceased was a female who was still suckling pups. He argued that given the prevailing drought and the hyena’s need to nourish her young, her behavior in attempting to scavenge food from human settlements was reasonable and that it was wrong to have killed her. The elders then cross-examined the farmer carefully. Did he appreciate, they asked, that such killings were contrary to customary law? Had he considered the hyena’s situation and whether or not she had caused harm? Could he not have simply driven her away? Eventually the elders ordered the man’s clan to pay compensation for the harm done by driving more than one hundred of their goats (a fortune in that community) into the bush, where they could be eaten by the hyenas and other wild carnivores.
The story, told to me by a Kenyan friend, illustrates African customary law’s concern with restorative justice rather than retribution. Wrongdoing is seen as a symptom of a breakdown in relationships within the wider community, and the elders seek to restore the damaged relationship rather than focusing on identifying and punishing the wrongdoer.
The verdict of a traditional African court regarding hyenacide may seem of mere anthropological interest to contemporary Americans. In most of today’s legal systems, decisions that harm ecological communities have to be challenged primarily on the basis of whether or not the correct procedures have been followed. Yet consider how much greater the prospects of survival would be for most of life on Earth if mechanisms existed for imposing collective responsibility and liability on human communities and for restoring damaged relations with the larger natural community. Imagine if we had elders with a deep understanding of the lore of the wild who spoke for the Earth as well as for humans. If we did, how might they order us to compensate for, say, the anticipated destruction of the entire Arctic ecosystem because of global climate change, to restore relations with the polar bears and other people and creatures who depend on that ecosystem? How many polluting power plants and vehicles would it be fair to sacrifice to make amends?
“SO WHAT WOULD A RADICALLY DIFFERENT law-driven consciousness look like?” The question was posed over three decades ago by a University of Southern California law professor as his lecture drew to a close. “One in which Nature had rights,” he continued. “Yes, rivers, lakes, trees. . . . How could such a posture in law affect a community’s view of itself?” Professor Christopher Stone may as well have announced that he was an alien life form. Rivers and trees are objects, not subjects, in the eyes of the law and are by definition incapable of holding rights. His speculations created an uproar.
Stone stepped away from that lecture a little dazed by the response from the class but determined to back up his argument. He realized that for nature to have rights the law would have to be changed so that, first, a suit could be brought in the name of an aspect of nature, such as a river; second, a polluter could be held liable for harming a river; and third, judgments could be made that would benefit a river. Stone quickly identified a pending appeal to the United States Supreme Court against a decision of the Ninth Circuit that raised these issues. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had found that the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund was not “aggrieved” or “adversely affected” by the proposed development of the Mineral King Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains by Walt Disney Enterprises, Inc. This decision meant that the Sierra Club did not have “standing” so the court didn’t need to consider the merits of the matter. Clearly, if the Mineral King Valley itself had been recognized as having rights, it would have been an adversely affected party and would have had the necessary standing.
Fortuitously, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was writing a preface to the next edition of the Southern California Law Review. Stone’s seminal “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects” (“Trees”) was hurriedly squeezed into the journal and read by Justice Douglas before the Court issued its judgment. In “Trees,” Stone argued that courts should grant legal standing to guardians to represent the rights of nature, in much the same way as guardians are appointed to represent the rights of infants. In order to do so, the law would have to recognize that nature was not just a conglomeration of objects that could be owned, but was a subject that itself had legal rights and the standing to be represented in the courts to enforce those rights. The article eventually formed the basis for a famous dissenting judgment by Justice Douglas in the 1972 case of Sierra Club v. Morton in which he expressed the opinion that “contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.”
Perhaps one of the most important things about “Trees” is that it ventured beyond the accepted boundaries of law as we know it and argued that the conceptual framework for law in the United States (and by analogy, elsewhere) required further evolution and expansion. Stone began by addressing the initial reaction that such ideas are outlandish. Throughout legal history, as he pointed out, each extension of legal rights had previously been unthinkable. The emancipation of slaves and the extension of civil rights to African Americans, women, and children were once rejected as absurd or dangerous by authorities. The Founding Fathers, after all, were hardly conscious of the hypocrisy inherent in proclaiming the inalienable rights of all men while simultaneously denying basic rights to children, women, and to African and Native Americans.
“Trees” has since become a classic for students of environmental law, but after three decades its impact on law in the United States has been limited. After it was written, the courts made it somewhat easier for citizens to litigate on behalf of other species and the environment by expanding the powers and responsibilities of authorities to act as trustees of areas used by the public (e.g., navigable waters, beaches, and parks). Unfortunately, these gains have been followed in more recent years by judicial attempts to restrict the legal standing of environmental groups. Damages for harm to the environment are now recoverable in some cases and are sometimes applied for the benefit of the environment. However, these changes fall far short of what Stone advocated for in “Trees.” The courts still have not recognized that nature has directly enforceable rights.
COMMUNITIES HAVE ALWAYS USED LAWS to express the ideals to which they aspire and to regulate how power is exercised. Law is also a social tool that is usually shaped and wielded most effectively by the powerful. Consequently, law tends to entrench a society’s fundamental idea of itself and of how the world works. So, for example, even when American society began to regard slavery as morally abhorrent, it was not able to peaceably end the practice because the fundamental concept that slaves were property had been hard-wired into the legal system. The abolition of slavery required not only that the enfranchised recognize that slaves were entitled to the same rights as other humans, but also a political effort to change the laws that denied those rights. It took both the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to outlaw slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment, in turn, played a role in changing American society’s idea of what was acceptable, thereby providing the bedrock for the subsequent civil rights movement.
In the eyes of American law today, most of the community of life on Earth remains mere property, natural “resources” to be exploited, bought, and sold just as slaves were. This means that environmentalists are seldom seen as activists fighting to uphold fundamental rights, but rather as criminals who infringe upon the property rights of others. It also means that actions that damage the ecosystems and the natural processes on which life depends, such as Earth’s climate, are poorly regulated. Climate change is an obvious and dramatic symptom of the failure of human government to regulate human behavior in a manner that takes account of the fact that human welfare is directly dependent on the health of our planet and cannot be achieved at its expense.
In the scientific world there has been more progress. It’s been almost forty years since James Lovelock first proposed the “Gaia hypothesis”: a theory that Earth regulates itself in a manner that keeps the composition of the atmosphere and average temperatures within a range conducive to life. Derided or dismissed by most people at the time, the Gaia hypothesis is now accepted by many as scientific theory. In 2001, more than a thousand scientists signed a declaration that begins “The Earth is a self-regulating system made up from all life, including humans, and from the oceans, the atmosphere and the surface rocks,” a statement that would have been unthinkable for most scientists when “Trees” was written.
The acceptance of Lovelock’s hypothesis can be understood as part of a drift in the scientific world away from a mechanistic understanding of the universe toward the realization that no aspect of nature can be understood without looking at it within the context of the systems of which it forms a part. Unfortunately, this insight has been slow to penetrate the world of law and politics.
But what if we were to imagine a society in which our purpose was to act as good citizens of the Earth as a whole?
What might a governance system look like if it were established to protect the rights of all members of a particular biological community, instead of only humans? Cicero pointed out that each of our rights and freedoms must be limited in order that others may be free. It is far past time that we should consider limiting the rights of humans so they cannot unjustifiably prevent nonhuman members of a community from playing their part. Any legal system designed to give effect to modern scientific understandings (or, indeed, to many cultures’ ancient understandings) of how the universe functions would have to prohibit humans from driving other species to extinction or deliberately destroying the functioning of major ecosystems. In the absence of such regulatory mechanisms, an oppressive and self-destructive regime will inevitably emerge. As indeed it has.
In particular, we should examine the fact that, in the eyes of the law, corporations are considered people and entitled to civil rights. We often forget that corporations are only a few centuries old and have been continually evolving since their inception. Imagine what could be done if we changed the fiduciary responsibilities of directors to include obligations not only to profitability but also to the whole natural world, and if we imposed collective personal liability on corporate managers and stockholders to restore any damage that they cause to natural communities. Imagine if landowners who abused and degraded land lost the right to use it. In an Earth-centered community, all institutions through which humans act collectively would be designed to require behavior that is socially responsible from the perspective of the whole community.A society whose concern is to maintain the integrity or wholeness of the Earth must also refine its ideas about what is “right” and “wrong.” We may find it more useful to condone or disapprove of human conduct by considering the extent to which an action increases or decreases the health of the whole community and the quality or intimacy of the relationships between its members. As Aldo Leopold’s famous land ethic states, “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” From this perspective, individual and collective human rights must be contextualized within, and balanced against, the rights of the other members and communities of Earth.
ON SEPTEMBER 19, 2006, the Tamaqua Borough of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, passed a sewage sludge ordinance that recognizes natural communities and ecosystems within the borough as legal persons for the purposes of enforcing civil rights. It also strips corporations that engage in the land application of sludge of their rights to be treated as “persons” and consequently of their civil rights. One of its effects is that the borough or any of its residents may file a lawsuit on behalf of an ecosystem to recover compensatory and punitive damages for any harm done by the land application of sewage sludge. Damages recovered in this way must be paid to the borough and used to restore those ecosystems and natural communities.
According to Thomas Linzey, the lawyer from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund who assisted Tamaqua Borough, this ordinance marks the first time in the history of municipalities in the United States that something like this has happened. Coming after more than 150 years of judicially sanctioned expansion of the legal powers of corporations in the U.S., this ordinance is more than extraordinary—it is revolutionary. In a world where the corporation is king and all forms of life other than humans are objects in the eyes of the law, this is a small community’s Boston tea party.
In Africa, nongovernmental organizations in eleven countries are also asserting local community rights in order to promote the conservation of biodiversity and sustainable development. Members of the African Biodiversity Network (ABN) have coined the term “cultural biodiversity” to emphasize that knowledge and practices that support biodiversity are embedded in cultural tradition. The ABN works with rural communities and schools to recover and spread traditional knowledge and practices.
This is part of a wider effort to build local communities, protect the environment by encouraging those communities to value, retain, and build on traditional African cosmologies, and to govern themselves as part of a wider Earth community.
These small examples, emerging shoots of what might be termed “Earth democracy,” are pressing upward despite the odds. It may well be that Earth-centered legal systems will have to grow organically out of human-scale communities, and communities of communities, that understand that they must function as integrated parts of wider natural communities. In the face of climate change and other enormous environmental challenges, our future as a species depends on those people who are creating the legal and political spaces within which our connection to the rest of our community here on Earth is recognized. The day will come when the failure of our laws to recognize the right of a river to flow, to prohibit acts that destabilize Earth’s climate, or to impose a duty to respect the intrinsic value and right to exist of all life will be as reprehensible as allowing people to be bought and sold. We will only flourish by changing these systems and claiming our identity, as well as assuming our responsibilities, as members of the Earth community.
Read an extract from the author’s book Wild Law.
To buy that book, go here, which is reported to be the ONLY in-stock source for Wild Law in North America.
Now Is the Time to Let Our Voices Be Heard
Submitted by Rachel on December 10, 2012 - 4:20pm Submitted by: Hermine Hayes-KleinThe United Nations has devoted this year’s Human Rights Day to "the rights of all people...to make their voices heard in public life and be included in political decision-making." What better time to acknowledge the global movement raising its voice for human rights in childbirth. As cesarean rates skyrocket around the world, and women exchange stories of coercion and force in obstetric care, it should come as no surprise that people are organizing to demand change.
What are human rights in childbirth? Every health care system in the world faces the same essential questions. Who decides how a baby is born? Who chooses where a birth takes place? Who bears the ultimate responsibility for a birth and its outcome? What are the legal rights of birthing women? What are the responsibilities of doctors, midwives and other caregivers in childbirth? What are the rights and interests of the unborn, and who has the authority to make decisions on its behalf?
I
n
2010, Hungarian mother Anna Ternovszky took these questions to the
European Court of Human Rights. After the healthy, safe, and empowering
birth of her firstborn, at home, with the midwife Agnes Gereb, Anna
objected to the fact that her ability to hire Agnes a second time was
affected by the threat of legal sanction against Agnes for attending her
at home. In the decision of Ternovszky v. Hungary,
the Court held that birthing women have a fundamental human right to
choose the circumstances in which they give birth. The foundations for
this right include the rights to privacy, to autonomy, to control over
our own bodies, and the right to make decisions for our children even as
we are giving birth to them. Ternovszky is only binding on
European nations, but this fundamental human right applies to all women
everywhere. As a birthing woman, you have the right to meaningful choice
and genuine support for your personal needs around and during
childbirth, whether those needs are for planned cesarean section or
undisturbed home birth with reliable medical backup.As a birthing woman, nobody can tell you that you "must" do anything. Nobody can "let you" or "not let you" do anything. Nobody can pressure or force you into a cesarean section that you do not believe is in the interest of yourself and your baby. Nobody can cut an episiotomy if you do not consent to one. Nobody can do anything to your body or your baby without discussing it with you first and asking for your consent. You have the right to be the ultimate authority over everything that occurs around your body's birth of your baby.
These are the fundamental human rights of the birthing woman. And yet, these rights are so commonly violated, that most women are not even aware that they have them. In both the developed and the developing world, women are too often treated with disrespect and abuse, including subjection to unnecessary, damaging, and costly surgical interventions. They are told what will happen to them, or not even asked. As women raise awareness of problems in birth care common to most modern obstetric systems, they are realizing that many of these problems could be addressed by acknowledgment of the woman’s right to make the decisions of childbirth, of her ultimate authority over the birth process.
Many disagree that pregnant women retain the fundamental human rights applicable to healthcare. In only the last month, vocal proponents of medical birth called the cl
aim that birthing women have a human right to autonomy “unethical” and “morally grotesque.” What I find unethical and morally grotesque is the assertion that a doctor, making decisions about a patient
, has more authority over an unborn baby than the woman who has grown
it out of her own flesh and blood. Especially a doctor with a 35%
cesarean section rate.In the article linked above on moral grotesquerie, media darling “Dr. Amy” revealed her opinion that physiological birth, undisturbed maternal-newborn bonding, and the right to avoid unnecessary abdominal surgery have a value equal to manicures. I disagree, and I am not alone. Women are ready to stand up for the simple right to respectful support in childbirth. Dr. Amy claims that the right to autonomy in childbirth is a wealthy, western white woman’s concern, and she will not be the last to say so. Every woman’s movement has met this charge: “There are women dying in poverty, women who can’t feed their children, and you spoiled bitches dare to make a fuss about the right to own property/ right to vote/ right to education/ right to equal work and equal pay? You obviously have too much time on your hands.” It is true that one cannot fight for more than survival, when survival is in question. But that doesn’t mean that women have a right to survival alone. As nations challenge their birth care systems to meet Millennium Development Goal 5, they can do so in a way that replicates the institutional human rights violations of Western obstetrics, or they can evolve birth care to respect the fundamental human rights of the women they aim to assist. Ask women in the developing world if they are unconcerned with disrespect and abuse in childbirth.
The idea that the doctor, and not the woman, holds authority over decision-making in childbirth is so entrenched that it will take a paradigm change to put the woman back at the center of birth care. The momentum is building, around the world, capable of generating this transformation. The hundreds of people energized by the 2012 Human Rights in Childbirth (HRiC) Conference in The Hague became tens of thousands of people inspired by the 1000 global screenings of Freedom for Birth on September 20th. In the next week, the circle of activists will expand with the release of a 15-minute free version of Freedom for Birth and the launch of new functionalities on the HRiC website that will help people from around the world to find and join the organizations working to improve birth where they live.
If you believe Martin Luther King, Jr. that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” then there is reason to hope that the fundamental human right to autonomy and authority in childbirth will be recognized. But the only way this will happen will be if birthing women demand their rights. As Anna Ternovszky, the plaintiff who asked justice of the ECHR, said in Freedom for Birth, “Now is the time to let our voices be heard.”
Hermine Hayes-Klein was the organizer of the Human Rights in Childbirth Conference in the Hague on May 31-June 1st of this year.
About the obirth blog: The Orgasmic Birth weblog shares the opinions of Orgasmic Birth, Sunken Treasure Publishing and the obirth team as well as weblogs submitted by our readers or guest blogs that may or not be the opinion of Orgasmic Birth. Obirth believes it is time to be BOLD in sharing our thoughts and perspectives, to challenge others to think in new ways and whether we agree or disagree, hopes to have a discussion where we can look at childbirth in new and old ways. “These are the best of times and the worst of times.” Opportunity is here to transform maternity care practices and it will take a village. We appreciate your voice and thoughts, along with resources when possible so that together we can contribute to a larger discussion where women, men and communities are empowered to Take Back their Birth!
Organizations Focused on Human Rights Approaches to Environmental Issues
- Center for Human Rights and Environment
- Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment
- Journal of Human Rights and the Environment
- Environment and Human Rights Advisory
- Rights Based Approach to Conservation
The Toxic Air Burden From Industrial Power Plants
This
map shows the facilities with industrial power plants that, according to
the EPA, will need to meet emission limits under the Maximum Achievable
Control Technology (MACT) Standards
Related Documents
White Paper:
The Toxic Air Burden From Industrial Power Plants
The Toxic Air Burden From Industrial Power Plants
Press Contact
What You Can Do
- Support Earthjustice's efforts to reduce public exposure to airborne toxics
- Stay up to date with Earthjustice news and action alerts
About Industrial Boilers
Industrial power plants provide heat and electricity to major industrial facilities like chemical plants and oil refineries.
Industrial
power plants are the nation's third largest source of mercury
pollution. Their emissions of fine particles—which penetrate deep into
people's lungs—kill as many as 8,100 people every year.
Listen to the episode ‘Breaking Down Boilers’ from Earthjustice’s environmental news podcast, EJ90:
Health Impacts
Chromium
A known carcinogen, emissions have been linked to breathing problems and lung disease in some workers.
A known carcinogen, emissions have been linked to breathing problems and lung disease in some workers.
Lead
Can cause developmental delays and adversely impact memory and behavior. It is also linked to cardiovascular and kidney effects, anemia, and weakness of the extremities.
Can cause developmental delays and adversely impact memory and behavior. It is also linked to cardiovascular and kidney effects, anemia, and weakness of the extremities.
Hydrochloric acid
Can cause eye, nose and respiratory tract irritation, ulceration, coughing, chest tightness and shortness of breath.
Can cause eye, nose and respiratory tract irritation, ulceration, coughing, chest tightness and shortness of breath.
Mercury
A potent neurotoxin that is linked to lower IQs in young children and other developmental delays. It is so potent that less than one teaspoon can contaminate an entire 20 acre lake.
A potent neurotoxin that is linked to lower IQs in young children and other developmental delays. It is so potent that less than one teaspoon can contaminate an entire 20 acre lake.
PM2.5
Also known as fine particulate matter or soot, exposure can harm the cardiovascular and respiratory systems and lead to premature death.
Also known as fine particulate matter or soot, exposure can harm the cardiovascular and respiratory systems and lead to premature death.
Update:
On March 8, 2012 the Senate rejected an amendment that would have
exempted industrial power plants—the nation's second worst toxic air
polluters—from the Clean Air Act.
Learn more about this important victory for public health
Thank you Senator Brown for keeping clean air standards alive and breathing in Ohio:Protecting Our Health From A Toxic Threat
Though
smaller than regular plants, industrial power plants are the U.S.'s
third largest source of mercury pollution. The dirtiest of these
facilities released more than 160 million pounds of toxic air pollutants
like mercury, lead, benzene and acid gases in 2010 alone. Earthjustice
has worked for more than a decade to reduce health threats from
pollution caused by industrial power plants - also known as industrial
boilers.
In
2011, under a court-ordered deadline, the EPA issued revised Clean Air
Act emission standards for these plants that will save thousands of
lives each year and prevent widespread sickness and suffering. Industry
groups, including the Koch brothers, SPI: The Plastics Trade
Association, and others, have launched an attack on Capitol Hill in an
attempt to permanently block these protections. If they succeed, the
pollution and subsequent health damage will continue unabated.
The EPA has stated that there are approximately 1,750 industrial
power plants nationwide that will need to meet emission limits for
hazardous air pollutants under the new standards often referred to as
the "boiler MACT". Research by Earthjustice identified that there are
1,753 industrial power plants located at 758 individual facilities in 44
states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands that will need to meet
emission limits.The baseline emissions of these industrial power plants, according to data from the EPA, exceed:
- 10,000 pounds/year of mercury;
- 215,000 pounds/year of lead;
- 123,000 pounds/year of chromium;
- 100 million pounds/year of hydrochloric acid; and
- 100 million pounds/year of fine particulate matter.
These numbers illustrate the tremendous
capacity of industrial power plants to pollute our air. The owners of
these industrial power plants, along with their congressional allies,
have sought time and again to kill these standards. Two bills were
introduced in 2011—S. 1392 in the U.S. Senate and H.R. 2250 in the House
of Representatives—that would permanently exempt industrial power
plants from the Clean Air Act. These bills have also been attached
repeatedly as "riders" to unrelated, must-pass budget and payroll tax
bills, a disingenuous strategy to undercut badly needed public health
protections by trading them off against legislation designed to provide
economic relief.
“EPA’s
new standards are not perfect, but they will save thousands of lives
every year and they will prevent tens of thousands of heart attacks and
asthma attacks by finally bringing the pollution from these
extraordinarily dirty industrial power plants under control”
— Earthjustice Attorney James Pew
— Earthjustice Attorney James Pew
Where Are The Most Poisonous Facilities?
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Key Findings
- 16 states (AL, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, MI, MN, NC, NY, OH, PA, SC, TN, VA, WV) are in the top 20 for all of the following: baseline emissions of mercury, lead, chromium, hydrochloric acid and fine particulate matter from industrial power plants.
- 80 percent of the facilities with the highest baseline emissions of mercury from industrial power plants are in the two highest categories of potential risk to human health from airborne toxics, according to data compiled by National Public Radio and the Center for Public Integrity.
- 75 percent of the facilities with the highest baseline emissions of lead from industrial power plants are in the two highest categories of potential risk to human health from airborne toxics.
- 70 percent of the facilities with the highest baseline emissions of chromium from industrial power plants are in the two highest categories of potential risk to human health from airborne toxics.
- 65 percent of the facilities with the highest baseline emissions of hydrochloric acid from industrial power plants are in the two highest categories of potential risk to human health from airborne toxics.
- 90 percent of the facilities with the highest baseline emissions of PM2.5 from industrial power plants are in the two highest categories of potential risk to human health from airborne toxics.
Rivers and Natural Ecosystems as Rights Bearing Subjects
by: Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, Robin Milam Posted on: January 06, 2013
Editor’s Note: Should nature be integrated into our social contracts? Should we be empowered to dissent on her behalf? Read on to learn where these ideas have already been implemented. Written by the Administrative Director for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, this piece is filed under our Community Rights section because some argue that communities have a right to grant rights to the natural ecosystems they depend upon.In a historic preliminary agreement between the Whanganui Iwi (Maori people) and the New Zealand Crown (Elizabeth II) announced in August 2012, the Whanganui River is being granted legal personhood rights. The river is a major commercial route on the North Island and is sacred to the Iwi. The proposed agreement, which has taken decades of negotiation, assigns shared guardian responsibilities for the river to the Iwi and officials representing the Crown. This landmark move is a first for New Zealand but not for the world.
Across the Pacific, Ecuador’s Vilcabamba River has also been recognized as a rights bearing subject of the law. In 2008 Ecuador became the first country in the world to include Rights of Nature in its Constitution. The Constitution states that Nature “… has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” Furthermore, the people of Ecuador have the legal authority and responsibility to enforce these rights on behalf of ecosystems including rivers. In 2011, a major development project impacted the flow of the Vilcabamba River. Local residents filed a suit against the developer on behalf of the river. At the conclusion of a court trial, the river won. The judge awarded damages to the river and restoration is currently in process.
Granting legal standing to natural ecosystems is not isolated to these two cases. Recognizing Rights of Nature and natural ecosystems is the focus of a global grassroots movement. In 2010 in Cochabamba, Bolivia over 35,000 climate justice, indigenous rights, human rights and other civil society activists came together at the Peoples Conference for Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth and acclaimed the Universal Declaration for Rights of Mother Earth. A copy of the declaration with 120,000 supporting signatures was presented to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June 2012. Also in 2010, the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature was formed to provide a global hub for empowering the movement.
The premise of recognizing Rights of Nature has been advanced for decades through the writings of Thomas Berry1, Cormac Cullinan2, Christopher Stone3 and others. Nonetheless, nature as a rights bearing subject of the law took root in 2006 in the small rural community of Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, USA. In less than a decade almost three dozen communities in the United States have passed local laws that recognize Rights of Nature. In addition to the United States and Ecuador, Rights of Nature laws are being implemented in Bolivia and proposed in other countries.
The story of Tamaqua Borough is an example of one of the ways communities from Maine to Washington State and California are
organizing to assert Rights of Nature. Coal has provided the economic base for the Borough of Tamaqua for much of the last century. As coal mining in the region declined, mining companies began to look for other sources of profit by using their abandoned mine pits as toxic waste dumpsites. Industrial waste and agricultural sludge or “biosolids” were being dumped into the large unlined pits. In time, toxic waste began to leach into the surrounding rivers and aquifers. When residents learned the coal companies planned to fill the pits with fly ash—the poisonous dust residue from coal mining—they rallied together. Attempting to protect their community, the Borough Council had an abrupt awakening as they began to understand that the environmental regulatory systems did not provide protection they so desperately wanted and needed. Because the rivers and aquifers had no standing in the law and the contaminating pits were owned by the mining corporations, the community had no recourse for protecting themselves or their local ecosystems under the current laws and regulatory system. The permit process permitted the contamination.
With the assistance of Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF.org), Tamaqua Borough passed a rights-based ordinance that recognized the rights of the natural ecosystems that were being polluted and the rights of the community to decide on issues affecting them. The ordinance declares that “It shall be unlawful for any corporation…to interfere with the existence of natural communities or ecosystems or to cause damage…Ecosystems shall be considered to be ‘person’ for the purpose of enforcement.” The Borough of Tamaqua and its residents are granted standing to represent natural communities and ecosystems.4
Other communities are driven by a variety of galvanizing issues. The City of Pittsburgh, PA has passed a local ordinance recognizing the rights of the local ecosystems and natural communities while limiting corporate personhood rights, so as to prevent hydrofracking within the City. For Santa Monica, CA a resolution including recognition of the Rights of Nature is part of the City’s overall Sustainability Plan. In Shapleigh, Maine, the City Council moved to protect the city’s ground water resources from corporate extraction and exploitation, to bar companies such as Nestle from bottling its water. Food sovereignty, the Tar Sands pipeline, threat of toxic contamination, and other emerging issues are uniting communities to stand for the rights of both their human and natural communities.
The move is a fundamental change from the current position of most modern legal systems, which treat nature as property to be bought, sold, and consumed often under commerce laws. The underlying Rights of Nature premise recognizes our human interdependence with the natural ecosystems we are a part of. These interrelated values are integral to ancient indigenous wisdom around the world but are ignored by modern law’s anthropologic framework.
This is a movement that transcends political values and ideologies. If you are inclined to assume the movement is the work of a bunch of left winged progressive tree huggers, think again. Many of the cities and townships in the US who have embraced Rights of Nature are conservative, right wing communities. Citizens across diverging political ideologies are emboldened to take a stand once they fully understand that the U.S. Constitution and/or current environmental protection laws do not protect the natural communities which sustain healthy, human life or our rights as communities to make the quality of life choices that are ours to make.
The time has come to recognize that We the People are an integral part of the natural communities that sustain us. It is time to recognize the rights of our natural ecosystems not only to exist, but to sustain their natural, healthy balance for the benefit of all life.
For more information on Rights of Nature and the foundational principles behind the movement:
- Global Alliance for Rights of Nature: http://therightsofnature.org/
- Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF): http://celdf.org/
- Rights of Mother Earth Signature Campaign: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/yes-to-rights-of-nature//
1. Book: The Great Work: Our Way into the Future by Thomas Berry http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Work-into-Future/dp/0609804995
2. Book: Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice: by Cormac Cullinan http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/wild_law:paperback
3. Book: Should Trees Have Standing? by Christopher Stone http://www.amazon.com/Should-Trees-Have-Standing-Environment/dp/0199736073
4. Book: Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community: http://www.amazon.com/Be-The-Change-What-Community/dp/1423605616
5. Collection of Essays: Rights of Nature: Planting Seeds of Real Change down load free at http://www.globalexchange.org/communityrights/resources/rioreport
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