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Laguna de Cuicocha, Imbabura, Ecuador
By sara y tzunky on Flickr under noncommercial use Creative Commons
Author’s note: I inadvertently left this chapter and a few others out of Namaste: If Not Now, When? and have decided to include them. The previous chapters in the book can be accessed here in my diaries or at my blog.
Ecuador is a democratic republic situated on the west coast of South America. Small and wedge-shaped, it straddles the equator bordering Colombia to the north and Peru to the south. Ecuador also owns the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean 620 miles west of Guayaquil, the nation’s largest coastal city and port. The Andes mountain range traverses the middle of the country from north to south separating it into three distinct regions: coastal plain, highlands, and Amazonian jungle.
Quito, the capitol, is in the highlands at an altitude of 10,000 feet and even though it is less than ten kilometers south of the equator, the weather year round is mild with daytime temperatures in the upper 60s and low 70s and nighttime temperatures in the 40s and low 50s.
I lived in Quito when I was in 6th and 7th grade; my father was a Foreign Service Officer employed by the United States Department of State. I remember Quito very well. It’s one of the most beautiful places I have ever been and I hope to return there someday.
In September 2008, the citizens of Ecuador went to the polls and rocked the world approving a new constitution, the first in world history to recognize that Pachamama, or Nature is not a thing to own and exploit at will. The Constitution recognizes that she has the inalienable right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate her vital cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes. The Constitution provides,
Rights for Nature
Article 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.
Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.
Article 2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.
In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including the ones caused by the exploitation of non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.
Article 3. The State will motivate natural and judicial persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.
Article 4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.
The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is prohibited.
Article 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and form natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.
Ecuador’s new constitution also created an independent federal human-rights ombudsperson who can only be removed by the legislature for cause — not for political reasons. The position is called the Public Defender, a person who serves a five-year term that may be renewed once and, although the office has no prosecutorial powers, the constitution grants it the power to investigate and expose all human-rights crimes, whether committed by the government or by others.
Native and maternal traditions have long recognized that the Earth is our mother. The ancient Greeks did too and they named her spirit Gaia, goddess of the primordial Earth. In the 1960s while he was employed by NASA and working on methods to detect life on Mars, James Lovelock developed the Gaia hypothesis, which proposes that living and non-living parts of the earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.
Gaia is the fabled Garden of Eden and in the spirit of Ubuntu, we are diminished whenever one of us diminishes her.
Not long after Ecuador officially granted Gaia environmental personhood, the RATS on the United States Supreme Court (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia, plus Kennedy the swing man) legitimized raping Gaia for profit and killed our democracy in the Citizens United case when they held that corporations are persons with First Amendment rights to buy elections.
Two decisions, one in Ecuador and one in the United States illustrate two societies headed in opposite directions. We must find a way to reverse course. Our survival and Gaia’s survival depend on it.
The banksters and their neoliberal criminal class will reduce our Garden of Eden to a lifeless cinder circling the Sun, if we fail.
Namaste
Photograph of the Tree That Owns Itself taken by Bloodofox of the Wikipedia Research Project in 2005 and posted in the Wikipedia Commons, released without restriction. Special thanks to thatvisionthing (see comment below) for providing a link to the story about the tree in Wikipedia.
Cross Posted at my blog and the Smirking Chimp.
11 Comments
Nice, Mason, and rec’d.
In April, Bolivia also granted Mother Nature personhood. Pretty damned evolved move. I’d say.
If corporations are persons, why shouldn’t the environment also be regarded as a person under the law with the right to investigate and sue corporations and individuals who harm it?
Yep.
In fact, South America is considerably more evolved than we are. Don’t forget that Argentina and Brazil told the IMF to take a hike and their economies are doing much better now that they rejected idiotic and greedy neoliberalism.
Better than ours, that’s for sure and they have instituted safety nets, which our country is getting rid of.
I often describe myself as a one-issue person: the environment.
At least it is good to know that there are places on the planet that make sense, because this country currently does not make a whole lot of sense.
Special thanks to Crane-Station who found the beautiful photo of the Laguna de Cuicocha up top and showed me how to use it.
BTW, Quito was the northern capitol of the Inca Empire. Fresh saltwater fish from the coast were delivered by relay runners, each runner running about a mile and handing off the fish to another and so on eventually delivering the fish in Quito.
The Incas were masters of terraced agriculture and they built a system of roads through the Andes that are still used today. In fact, they served as the basis for the modern roads.
The native people are descendants of the Incas and speak Quechua as their primary language.
It is a remarkable place.
Christopher Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing?” As I recall (Swiss cheese head here), Stone wrote a paper that got published just as the 1972 Mineral King? case was being heard by the Supreme Court, and the idea got picked up on by one of the justices, William O. Douglas I think — and ALMOST got the necessary votes, but things went another way. His point was that inanimate objects like ships have legal standing, but not natural objects like trees, rivers, or mountains, whatever, an approach where I’m like “Bingo!” The trouble for Mineral King was that no one had standing to defend it from development — grasping here — not even the Sierra Club? Just republished and updated.
http://www.callawyer.com/story.cfm?eid=912351&evid=1
Mason, another diary please? An interview with Stone at USC? One of the reader reviews on Amazon said Ecuador was inspired by it and built on it.
It’s what I was thinking of when I said “Vote for a whale, send Tony to jail” last summer — a better way to say “none of the above” when none of the candidates would focus on the planet. Write in your issue, write in whale. Counter corporate person with natural person. I thought registrars of voters would have to report the tallies and the message would be heard. Now I’m watching Stephen Colbert unable to get a tally for Parry votes distinct from Perry votes.
Meanwhile, in Georgia there is a Tree That Owns Itself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself
Bingo.
Thanks for the links.
The wiki story about the tree that owns itself touched my soul and warmed my heart. What a great gift! Thanks.
I am posting a photograph of the tree at the end of my post that I obtained from the Wikipedia Commons. It was taken by Bloodofox at the wikipedia project in 2005 and released into the public domain without restriction.
Thanks again.
Your link to the California Lawyer book review by Stanford University law professor, Deborah A. Sivas, of Christopher D. Stone’s essay collection entitled, Should Trees Have Standing, is quite informative.
He is a law professor, BTW, at the University of Southern California School of Law and she is the Director of the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic. For the other readers, here is a quote from her review, dated November 2010,
“As was true of his original essay, Stone ultimately raises more questions in this collection than he answers. But in the face of, at best, mixed judicial reaction to novel “rights of nature” arguments, he attempts to put some more meat on the bones of the concept. Several of the newer essays call for the creation of natural resource guardians or trustees, financed by environmental trust funds, to advocate for the rights of nature and the rights of future generations, somewhat like guardians ad litem.
The idea of an environmental trust fund is hardly a new one, of course. BP, for instance, agreed in June to establish a $20 billion claims fund for Gulf disaster relief and restoration, to be administered by an independent trustee. But a guardian who actually speaks for the trees – or in the case of the Gulf, for the turtles and jellyfish and zooplankton – is a more ethically fraught notion. Who is the beneficiary or client? How does the guardian know what is best for a species or, especially when there are conflicts between species, for an entire ecosystem? How does nature’s lawyer decide what strategies to pursue when the client cannot speak for itself? And how do the rights of future generations factor into these decisions?
To his credit, Stone does not shy away from these morally and legally troublesome issues. He confronts them head-on, often at length, and even takes his best stab at resolving some of them. Although this book does not provide all the answers (nor could it), it does give the reader plenty to ponder.”
Crane-Station and I are PADI certified open water scuba divers and back in the days when we were flush with money, we spent our vacations diving in the Cayman Islands, Sea of Cortez, and Hawaii. The diving was phenomenal with great visibility.
One of the places we want to dive, assuming our financial circumstances improve sufficiently to allow it, is the Galapagos Islands. A good friend of ours went diving there and showed us some awesome photos that he took above and below the waves.
No wonder that Darwin was entranced by the place.
BP’s Macondo Well blowout, which is still leaking BTW, has raised our collective conscious awareness of the imperiled oceans that are dying. They are increasingly polluted by crude oil from oil-well leaks, fertilizers, pesticides, and weed killers from agricultural runoff, and trash. They also are overfished by commercial net fishing and sound pollution appears to be playing a role in dolphin and whale beaching suicides. The coral reefs are also dying.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to overstate the threat to our oceanic ecosystems and if we are going to save them, we are going to have to act now. Corporations certainly are not going to spend a dime or make any effort to reverse the destruction and mass extinctions.
We have no time to waste.
This toxic American exceptionalism that we are bathed in would lead us to believe no other country could have a modern constitutional movement that could succeed, LET ALONE innovate so spectacularly as to include the rights of Mother Earth (originally advanced by the originators of democracy, whom we also overlook … the Greeks)!
Phenomenal. Thank you for this knowledge.