Time to place the rights of nature at the heart of a new Irish constitution
This blog post by Dr Peter Doran, School of Law, Queens University Belfast, Mari Margil, Associate Director, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, appeared on #Think32 on August 11th, 2019.
On the evening of 6th August, An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar TD, speaking at Féile an Phobail in Belfast, confirmed what many of us have long suspected. A new union on the island of Ireland will be an historic constitutional moment, heralding a “new state” and a “new constitution”: an opportunity to re-imagine and reshape an island for all its peoples, and for generations to come.
Just a few miles away, Jonathon Porritt, one of the most influential environmental campaigners of our times, was a guest of the Linen Quarter Business Improvement District. In his characteristic uncompromising style, Porritt outlined the transformational challenges for politics and the economy of the climate emergency and ecological collapse.
The choice confronting us, it seems, is this: we can choose to accept the current environmental crises or shape a new constitution that protects all our futures by extending rights to the species and ecosystems of the island itself. It is time to consider embedding the rights of nature in any new island constitution.
The prospect of a new civic and political union has sparked anticipation of a rare constitutional moment that speaks of integrity and of regeneration: human and ecological. As recent election results have demonstrated alongside the rise of Extinction Rebellion and the Friday school strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg, there is a new wave of green activism. Young people across the island are joining their voices with the cries of the earth that have been ignored and trampled on by large parts of our political and economic establishment.
(To read the rest of this post at #Think32 please click HERE.)