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.

As some of you may recall, I’ve been working on this and now that we are at a crisis, here it is for your perusal and comment.

THE GAIAN INDEPENDENCE & SOCIAL JUSTICE PARTY

Mission Statement

The Gaian Independence and Social Justice Party recognizes that our mother Gaia is an interconnected living system of which we are a part; that all humans who live on Gaia are created equal with equal rights to life, liberty, education, employment, independence, dignity, freedom of worship, and the pursuit and enjoyment of happiness; and that all humans have a duty to protect Gaia from the ravages of war and rapacious corporate greed and destruction. We reject violence and war and we dedicate ourselves daily to following the Golden Rule in all our interactions with Gaia, her life forms, and each other, no matter where we live, the language we speak, or the religion we practice.

War and International Justice

Because the Cold War is over and terrorism is best handled by law enforcement agencies cooperating with each other, we pledge to do the following:

1. Abolish and criminalize acts that are intended to interfere in the internal affairs of foreign nations;

2. Abolish the use of assassination squads and prosecute people who have engaged in those activities;

3. Declare an end to the Global War On Terror (GWOT) and;

4. Repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force;

5. End the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan immediately;

6. Withdraw all of our troops from foreign countries and bring them home immediately;

7. Close all military bases in foreign countries;

8. Oppose all future wars and reduce the size of our armed forces to a level reasonably required to defend our homeland from attack;

9. Treat terrorism as a law enforcement problem and assign the primary responsibility for solving it to the FBI;

10. Repeal the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the recently passed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (2008);

11. End all domestic spying and wiretapping unless it complies with the Fourth Amendment, the Title III Electronic Surveillance Act, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (2000);

12. Abolish the Central Intelligence agency;

13. Repudiate the use of torture for any purpose;

14. Release all prisoners seized as part of the GWOT who are not scheduled to be tried in federal court and release the ones who are acquitted;

15. Abolish the use of military tribunals;

16. Abolish the Department of Homeland Security;

17. Appoint an independent prosecutor to commence a federal grand jury investigation to determine whether probable cause exists to indict, and if so to prosecute and convict members of the Bush and Obama administrations, including the President and Vice President of both administrations, their various Attorney Generals and lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, for violating and covering up violations of provisions of the Geneva Convention and the laws of the United States regarding initiating aggressive wars without justification in Afghanistan and Iraq and the conduct of those wars by the United States military and all of its various private subcontractors, the Joint Special Operations Command, and the Central Intelligence Agency, intentionally and recklessly slaughtering innocent men, women, and children, kidnapping, detaining, torturing, and murdering innocent people;

The Financial Crisis, Economic Justice, and Creation of a Consumer Protection Agency

18. Establish, respect, and recognize the right of every person to house, clothe, and feed themselves with a job.

19. Abolish corporate socialism and the too-big-to-fail doctrine.

20. Enforce antitrust laws and breakup any business entity previously deemed too big to fail.

21. Reimpose Glass—Steagall.

22. Outlaw predatory, fraudulent, deceptive, and usurious bank practices and establish a national Consumer Protection Agency and authorize it to promulgate and enforce regulations.

23. Government must spend money to create jobs and put people back to work repairing infrastructure such as highways and bridges following the model established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression with the Civilian Conservation Corps before engaging in deficit reduction strategies.

24. Establish and maintain a nationwide network of high-speed railroad transportation that connects with municipal light rail transportation systems.

25. Promote clean and safe alternatives to fossil fuel consumption and nuclear energy plants

Health, Education, Social Justice, and Civil Rights

26. Reject free market capitalism theories as predatory, destructive, and a threat to human freedom, happiness, and survival.

27. Enact single payer healthcare for all.

28. Permit drug reimportation without penalties so that consumers in the Unitrd States no longer are required to pay more for drugs manufactured in the United States than consumers in foreign countries.

29. Abolish the antitrust exemption for health insurance companies.

30. Reaffirm Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose whether to abort a pregnancy.

31. Reaffirm the separation of church and state.

32. Reaffirm, create, and support public schools.

33. End the use of government vouchers to attend private schools.

34. Keep religion, religious beliefs, and religious practices out of public schools and affirm the supremacy of science over religious beliefs like creationism.

35. Support and fund scientific research.

36. Reaffirm that all humans are created equal, prohibit discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, handicap, or religious belief, and provide equal opportunities for all.

37. Abolish human trafficking.

38. Abolish the death penalty.

39. Abolish the War on Drugs, declare amnesty for everyone convicted of a non-violent drug offense, release every such person whose liberty is restrained by such a conviction, expunge all such convictions, and restore civil rights.

40. Declare drug addiction to be a health problem and treat it accordingly.

41. Legalize the possession and use of all drugs, tax their sale, and apply up to 50% of the revenues to drug treatment with the remainder to the general tax fund of the states.

Global Warming, Gaia, and an Environmental Bill of Rights

42. Recognize that our planet Gaia is an interconnected living system that we have a duty to protect from rapacious corporate greed and destruction.

43. Establish a bill of legally enforceable rights for Gaia and the environment.

44. Establish, maintain, and fund a guardian ad litem system so that Gaia is provided with legal representation in all legal proceedings to protect her legal rights.

45. Accept that global warming, are the most serious problems we have and commit to solving them.

46. Develop and adopt strategies designed to eliminate human behavior and practices that injure and threaten Gaia’s existence, such as global warming, habitat destruction, and species extinction.

47. Expand our system of national forests and parks and prohibit individuals and corporations from exploiting natural resources located within their borders.

48. Create or expand existing parks within city limits for beauty, recreation, and bicycle paths.

49. Establish green pedestrian zones that prohibit motorized traffic within commercial downtown areas of cities and provide bus or light rail transportation to nearby parking areas.

50. Promote small is beautiful and energy self-sufficient strategies.