As Earth Day approaches, can we envisage for ourselves a future based not on exploiting nature as property but upon recognizing that nature has inherent rights to exist, thrive, and evolve? A growing number of people in the Rights of Nature movement are saying, “yes, we can – and we must! “

Global Exchange is excited for the release of a new book next week, Rights of Nature: Making a Case for the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, co-developed by Global Exchange, the Council of Canadians, and Fundacion Pachamama. This revolutionary new book reveals the path of a movement that is driving the cultural and legal shift that is necessary to transform our human relationship with nature away from being property-based and towards a rights-based model of balance. The book gathers the unique wisdom of indigenous cultures, scientists, environmental activists, lawyers, and small farmers to make a case for how and why humans must work to change our current structures of law to recognize that nature has inherent rights.

New Book: Rights of Nature

The question of Rights for Mother Earth will be introduced to the United Nations on April 20th in New York during a session on ‘Harmony with Nature’.  Put forward by Bolivia, it is the first step toward what many believe will culminate in the adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth in the months to come. At the U.N., Speakers including Dr. Vandana Shiva, Maude Barlow, Cormac Cullinan, Martin Kohr, Ambassador Pablo Solon, among others, will be making a case for nature’s rights. A companion piece for the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, this emerging Declaration – backed by enforceable laws around the world – seeks to wholly redefine our human relationship with all other species from one of dominance to one of harmony.

Please join us for two very special book launch events around the Rights of Nature coming up this month, in New York and in San Francisco. Both events will also feature the launch of the 2nd edition of Cormac Cullinan’s cutting-edge book, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice. Join esteemed environmental activists and co-authors of the book including Maude Barlow, Bill Twist, Pablo Salon, Vandana Shiva, Cormac Cullinan, and Shannon Biggs for a conversation around the emerging Rights of Nature movement at these East and West coast launches:

New York book launch: Nature Has Rights

  • When: Wednesday, April 21st 6:30-8 p.m.
  • Where: CUNY Graduate Center, Proshansky Auditorium, 656 5th Ave (corner of 34th street) New York, NY.

San Francisco book launch: Nature Has Rights

  • When: Wednesday, April 27th 7:00-9:00 p.m.
  • Where: The First Unitarian Universalist Church – located at 1187 Franklin Street (at Geary) San Francisco, CA

Both events are free and open to the public.

For more information or to order a copy of the book:

Contact Kylie Nealis – kylie@globalexchange.org. The book price is $15 including shipping within the US. For international orders email Kylie Nealis – kylie@globalexchange.org for shipping price.

Does a river have a right to flow? What if the Gulf could sue BP for the damages to its ecosystem that have been caused as a result of the oil spill disaster? Entire human societies, our global economic system and indeed our structures of law, have been built from a colonial mindset that places humans not just apart from, but actually above nature. But there is a movement emerging today that is shifting the way we view our relationship with nature from being property-based to rights-based. By working to change our existing structures of law and culture, a new framework has emerged recognizing that nature itself actually possesses rights.  And this movement is starting to gain some serious momentum.

From this new paradigm questions are emerging before us: can we envisage for ourselves a future based not on exploiting nature but instead recognizing that nature has inherent rights to exist, thrive, and flourish? How different would our human societies, economies, and structures of law look as part of a connected, earth-centered community? And, how do we get there?

Global Exchange is pleased to announce the upcoming release on April 21st of a new book that explores these questions and more.  Co-developed by Global Exchange, Council of Canadians and Fundacion Pachamama, the book titled Rights of Nature: Making a Case for the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, begins to reveal the path of a movement that is driving the cultural and legal shift that is necessary to transform our human relationship with nature away from being property-based and towards a rights-based model of balance.

The book gathers the unique wisdom of indigenous cultures, scientists, environmental activists, lawyers, and small farmers in order to make a case for how and why humans must work to change our current structures of law to recognize that nature has inherent rights.  It includes essays and interviews from esteemed thought leaders such as Maude Barlow, Vandana Shiva, Desmond Tutu, Cormac Cullinan, Edwardo Galleano, Nimo Bassey, Thomas Goldtooth, and Shannon Biggs.

The proposed Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth (a companion to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) around which the book is written will be presented to the UN General Assembly by the Bolivian Ambassador to the UN, during a session on creating ‘harmony with nature’ on April 20th in New York.

In the face of corporate power today, the struggle for real, lasting change and the efforts to assert real people’s rights over  corporation’s ‘personhood’ rights is being championed by some very special communities throughout the US.

These communities describe to a different approach to the traditional regulatory system, one that says plainly and clearly: NO, we do not want corporations to have the right to make the decisions where we live! Rather, that right is reserved exclusively for us, the people.

We get frequent calls from citizens across California asking us for help in asserting their communities’ rights. They want to know how to take the right to decision making in their community away from profit-driven corporations and put it back into the hands of the people.

We figure, what better way to help those wondering than to share what a handful of communities are doing to assert their rights? So below are two excellent pieces published this week that highlight some of the cutting-edge work being done to change the rules for corporations and empower people to get what they want in the places they call home.

For a look at how citizens are standing up to corporate power in real and meaningful ways, check out these articles from YES! Magazine and AlterNet:

 

 

By Shannon Biggs, Global Exchange Community Rights Director (January, 2011)

 

 

Whose Supreme Court?

If the Supreme Court had never granted “personhood” rights to corporations, would they still be trammeling the rights of citizens and riding roughshod over communities and nature?  Would we have democracy?

By deciding 5-4 in the Citizens United case, the US Supreme Court expanded corporations’ ability to spend money to influence our elections, and reignited the controversy over corporate personhood. A bevy of campaigns have emerged to challenge it, through litigation or via a Constitutional amendment.

Abolishing corporate personhood is necessary, but our entire system of law is engineered to keep decision making out of the hands of the people.  The unelected Supreme Court, which created corporate monsterhood, would still exist and wealthy interests would continue to shape that judiciary and the debates before it. The Commerce and Contracts clause of the Constitution would continue to place corporate interests over citizens’ rights. The legislature would still be influenced more by Fortune 500 powerbrokers than voters.  State laws that “preempt” communities from making decisions about their local welfare in favor of corporate interests would still be in effect, and regulatory laws would still be written largely by the industries to be regulated.

Perhaps corporations are not even the real problem. The corporation is just the current tool for exploitation: once upon a time Lords and Barons ruled. After jettisoning them in the Revolution, the Constitution guaranteed the slave system.  And in the same breath that law ended human property, the courts made property (corporations) “persons” as a vehicle for the wealthy to continue to maintain power over the many.

Changing the status quo and creating a living democracy will take grassroots organizing.  Even if we start with abolishing corporate personhood, how will we get there?  Past people’s movements for rights suggest we cannot merely ask for change from those who hold the reigns. The Declaration of Independence says that our rights are inalienable, we’re born with them—they do not come from law. We must not relinquish our rights, but exercise them in the face of unjust laws—what some call civil disobedience. Susan B. Anthony cast her ballot and went to jail. The underground railroad ignored the slave laws, and the lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights struggle remains a powerful symbol of a movement for change. Today’s movement for the inherent rights of people and nature and against corporate power is no different.

At the forefront of this movement stand communities of people confronted by corporate GMOs, water theft, mountaintop removal, and on and on.  They find that it is the law itself that enables corporations to determine their destiny.

GX’s Community Rights program, in partnership with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), works with California citizens in a growing number of communities to challenge unjust law through local lawmaking.  These local ordinances strip corporations of their legal privileges and assert the rights of people to make governing decisions.

Concerned about water in her pristine mountain community, Angelina Cook of Mount Shasta, CA is one of those leading the charge for rights in partnership with Global Exchange. “Our ordinance is designed to reverse the dangerous momentum of business as usual by placing citizen rights ahead of corporate interests.  Our ordinance will prohibit corporate cloud seeding and ground water extraction for resale within city limits.  In addition to preventing further degradation, it will transform our existing submissive private-public dynamic.”  The citizens’ group formed to pass the ordinance has spent the winter knocking on neighbors’ doors in freezing temperatures to talk about rights, and to gather the petition signatures needed to put the ordinance on the ballot this year.

Citizens in Mt. Shasta are organizing to assert their community’s rights!

Meanwhile, the 125+ communities who have passed these ordinances in others states have begun to take this work to the next level—organizing to create new state constitutions based on the legitimate rights of people, while also stripping unjust laws protecting corporate privilege; and from there, national reform. What will those solutions look like? That is for We the People to decide.

Take action:

 

Interested in Rights based organizing or want to assist the Mt. Shasta campaign? Contact Shannon@globalexchange.org or 415.575.5540