We’re still treating a living, life-sustaining, crucial being as property: the ecosystem. And in the process, we’re choking our own habitat—that is to say, ourselves—to death.
This article by Robert C. Koehler was published on Common Dreams on October 10th, 2019.
“When the U.S. Constitution was ratified, women, indigenous peoples, and slaves were treated as property, without rights.”
This isn’t over yet. In the same vein of exploitative ignorance, we’re still treating a living, life-sustaining, crucial being as property: the ecosystem. And in the process, we’re choking our own habitat—that is to say, ourselves—to death.
But as Mari Margil, who is quoted above, points out: “. . . that is beginning to change, thanks to the Rights of Nature movement.”
It’s happening, literally, all around the world. It began more than a decade ago, in South America, when Ecuador and then Bolivia gave constitutional recognition to Pachamama—Mother Earth—declaring that she has the right to live. And the movement continues to bubble, at levels both national and local.
Sweden, for instance, has recently proposed a constitutional amendment giving nature the right to “exist, flourish, regenerate and evolve.” And tribespeople and municipalities all across the planet are demanding that legal personhood be recognized for imperiled natural resources: the Klamath River in California; the River Frome in England; the Whanganui River in New Zealand; even Lake Erie (the Great Lake whose waves caressed my childhood), long poisoned by toxic agricultural runoff, which has spurred voters in Toledo, Ohio, to pass a Lake Erie Bill of Rights.
This is just a sampling of the demands being made for governmental acknowledgement of the need for environmental sanity, which, of course, is only part of the global climate movement. Indeed, it’s more than just clenched fists and protests in the streets. These actions create specific and immediate changes, forcing the world’s legal systems to broaden the contexts in which they function. Yet the movement is also paradoxical almost to the point of absurdity: giving rivers, lakes, Mother Nature herself, the same sort of legal status that . . . corporations have?
(To read the rest of this article at its original source please click HERE.)