The fundamental birthright of all living beings to peacefully coexist with each other



"Human rights" urged for whales and dolphins

OSLO, May 23, 2010 (Reuters) - Whales and dolphins should get "human rights" to life and liberty because of mounting evidence of their intelligence, a group of conservationists and experts in philosophy, law and ethics said Sunday.

Japan, Norway and Iceland, the main whaling nations, oppose such arguments that would outlaw hunting or even keeping the mammals in marine parks. They have long said there is no real evidence that they are smarter, for instance, than cows or pigs.

Participants at a University of Helsinki conference said ever more studies show the giant marine mammals have human-like self-awareness, an ability to communicate and organize complex societies, making them similar to some great apes.

"We affirm that all cetaceans as persons have the right to life, liberty and wellbeing," they said in a declaration after a two-day meeting led by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS).

Thomas White, director of the Center for Ethics and Business at Loyola Marymount University in California who was at the Helsinki talks, said dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror, an ability rare in mammals that humans only acquire at about 18 months of age.

"Whaling is ethically unacceptable," he told Reuters. "They have a sense of self that we used to think that only human beings have."

Hal Whitehead, a biology professor at Dalhousie University in Canada and an expert on deep-water whales, said there was more evidence that whales have human-like culture.

SPERM WHALES

He said that sperm whales have sonars to find fish that are so powerful that they could permanently deafen others nearby if used at full blast. Yet the whales do not use sonars as weapons, showing what Whitehead called a human-like "sense of morality."

"It's like a group of human hunters armed with guns," he told Reuters. "There's a clear sense of how the sonar can be used."

Nations in the International Whaling Commission will debate a proposal to approve limited hunts for 10 years by the main whaling nations at a meeting next month, relaxing a 1986 moratorium imposed after many species came close to extinction.

"We want a shift to putting the individual at the center of conservation," said Nicholas Entrup, of the WDCS. That would mean giving minke whales, relatively plentiful and most often hunted, the same protection as endangered northern right whales.

But one expert biologist, who was not at the conference, said many researchers had wrongly concluded that whales and dolphins were smart because they have big brains.

"There's nothing to separate them from other mammals -- seals, lions or tigers," Paul Manger of Johannesburg's University of Witwatersrand, told Reuters. They had evolved big brains largely to keep warm in the chill waters.

Saying whales were not especially bright was not the same as advocating hunts, he said. "We protect fish stocks even though no one argues that they are intelligent," he said.

(Editing by Maria Golovnina)

Resolved that nature has certain inalienable rights



"The indigenous idea of agency in the more-than-human world"

touches the modern world in a number of ways—perhaps most strikingly in the Ecuadoran constitution, influenced by the Pachamama, an activist group started at the initiation of indigenous elders. Pachamama is an indigenous term for the (sacred) personhood of nature, and in the Ecuadorian constitution, Pachamama and her natural cycles are given comparable legal standing to humans.

Here are words from the Constitution of Ecuador, overwhelming passed by Ecuadorians in fall of 2008:

Rights for Nature (tr. from the Spanish)

  • Art. 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 bodies. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.
  • Art. 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.
  • Art. 3. The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.
  • Art. 4. The State will apply precaution and restrictive 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.
  • Art. 5. The persons, people,communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and from natural wealth that will allow well-being. The environmental services cannot be appropriated; their production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the State.

Legal Rights for Nature

“We talk about the state sovereignty and the tribal sovereignty, but those ant communities under the big fir trees are sovereign too.. some nights you can’t see the stars at all [because of city lights]. That’s wrong. Those stars are sovereign. They have a right to be seen”. Billy Frank, Jr.
OUR EARTH/OURSELVES

Dolphins as self-aware Persons

Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as non-human persons

In light of that, some ethicists are advocating for a special classification and legal status for dolphins. To understand more about how the dolphin brain works, and this new recognition, listen to CBC radio The Current, Part 2. Jan. 19, 2010.about extending our concept of personhood to dolphins and other species

Dolphins as Persons - Ethics

Thomas White is one of the people pushing to have dolphins recognized as "non-human persons." He's a professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University. He's also the author of In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier.


Tell the Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands and the Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs that the whale and dolphin slaughter in the Faroe Islands needs to stop immediately. Stop the Whale and Dolphin Slaughter in the Faroe Islands

Ecuador’s Constitution Gives Rights to Nature


Cyril Mychalejko

In September 2008 Ecuador became the first country in the world to declare constitutional rights to nature, thus codifying a new system of environmental protection.

Reflecting the beliefs and traditions of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador, the constitution declares that nature “has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.” This right, the constitution states, “is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people that depend on the natural systems.”
The new constitution redefines people’s relationship with nature by asserting that nature is not just an object to be appropriated and exploited by people, but is rather a rights-bearing entity that should be treated with parity under the law.

Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Environmental Legal Defense Fund, worked closely over the past year with members of Ecuador’s constitutional assembly on drafting legally enforceable Rights of Nature, which mark a watershed in the trajectory of environmental law.

Ecuador’s leadership on this issue may have a global domino effect. Margil says that her organization is busy fielding calls from interested countries, such as Nepal, which is currently writing its first constitution.

For all of the hope and tangible progress the Rights of Nature articles in Ecuador’s constitution represent, however, there are shortcomings and contradictions with the laws and the political reality on the ground. A fundamental flaw in the constitution also exists due to Correa’s refusal to include a clause mandating free, prior, and informed consent by communities for development project that would affect their local ecosystems.

“I expect them [the multinational extractive industries] to fight it,” says Margil. “Their bread and butter is based on being able to treat countries and ecosystems like cheap hotels. Multinational corporations are dependent on ravaging the planet in order to increase their bottom line.”

The new Mining Law, introduced by Ecuador’s own President Rafael Correa and backed by Canadian companies, which hold the majority of mining concessions in Ecuador, is a testament to Margil’s forecast. The Mining Law would allow for large-scale, open pit metal mining in pristine Andean highlands and Amazon rainforest. Major nationwide demonstrations are being held in protest, with groups accusing Correa of inviting social and environmental disaster by selling out to mining interests.

Carlos Zorrilla, executive director of Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag, who has been a tireless defender of the environment against transnational mining companies, says that while the new constitution looks good on paper, “in practice governments like Correa’s will argue that funding his political project, which will bring ‘well being and relieve poverty,’ overrules the rights of nature.”
Yet even as Ecuadoran President Correa embraces the extractive economic model of development, the inclusion of the rights of nature in a national constitution sets inspiring and revolutionary precedent. If history is any indicator, Ecuadorians will successfully fight for the Rights of Nature, with or without their president.

Update by Cyril Mychalejko
When Ecuadorians drafted and passed a new constitution, which gave nature inalienable rights, the US media largely ignored this historic development. In the case of the Los Angeles Times, one of the few mainstream outlets to cover the story, the newspaper’s editorial board trivialized the development (“Putting Nature in Ecuador’s Constitution,” September 2, 2008) by suggesting it sounded “like a stunt by the San Francisco City Council” and that it seemed “crazy.”

“As ecological systems around the world collapse, we need to fundamentally change our relationship with nature. This requires changes in both law and culture, and ultimately our behavior as part of nature,” said Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Defense Fund, who is disappointed in how the US media largely ignored the story.

In Ecuador, at the time of the constitutional vote, the optimism over how the “Rights of Nature” clauses would translate into policy was guarded.
“As exciting as these developments are, it was also inevitable that the people in power would, and will, find ways to circumvent, undermine, and ignore those rights,” said Carlos Zorrilla, executive director of Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag.

According to Zorrilla, a major disappointment has been President Rafael Correa’s new mining law.

“The law takes rights-to-nature loopholes and widens them so that giant dirt movers could easily drive through them,” said Zorrilla, who has been working with communities of Ecuador’s Intag region to resist mining and promote sustainable development. “To mention a couple of examples, the law does not prohibit large-scale mining in habitats harboring endangered species, nor the dumping of heavy metals in rivers and streams.”

Indigenous leaders responded by filing a lawsuit before Ecuador’s Constitutional Court in March 2009, seeking to overturn the mining law, which they believe is unconstitutional. Article 1 of the “Rights of Nature” clauses states: “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.”

Regardless of the ongoing struggles to ensure that the true meaning and scope of the constitution is upheld, Dr. Mario Melo, a lawyer specializing in Environmental Law and Human Rights and an advisor to Fundación Pachamama-Ecuador, believes that the nature clauses which reflect the traditions of indigenous peoples could offer a path to an ecologically sustainable future.
“I consider that the recognition of the ‘Rights to Nature’ as a progress on a global scale and one that deserves to be globally broadcast and commented on as a contribution from Ecuador towards the search of new ways of facing the environmental crisis due to climate change.”

The struggles of Ecuadorian social movements and the Ecuadorian government to uphold the “Rights of Nature” and to create a new development model that places human beings as interdependent parts of nature, rather than dominant exploiters of nature, is something we should continue to monitor and learn from.

Sued by the forest

Should nature be able to take you to court?

By Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

July 19, 2009

Last February, the town of Shapleigh, Maine, population 2,326, passed an unusual ordinance. Like nearby towns, Shapleigh sought to protect its aquifers from the Nestle Corporation, which draws heavily on the region for its Poland Spring bottled water. Some Maine towns had acquiesced, others had protested, and one was locked in a protracted legal battle.

Shapleigh tried something new - a move at once humble in its method and audacious in its ambition. At a town meeting, residents voted, 114-66, to endow all of the town’s natural assets with legal rights: “Natural communities and ecosystems possess inalienable and fundamental rights to exist, flourish and naturally evolve within the Town of Shapleigh.” It further decreed that any town resident had “standing” to seek relief for damages caused to nature - permitting, for example, a lawsuit on behalf of a stream.

Shapleigh is one of about a dozen US municipalities to have passed measures declaring that nature itself has rights under the law. And in 2008, when Ecuador adopted a new constitution, it recognized nature’s “right to exist, persist, maintain itself and regenerate its own vital cycles, structure, functions and its evolutionary processes.” A campaign is also underway in Europe for a UN Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights, which would attempt to enshrine such principles in international law, following the model of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

These developments are part of a small but growing movement that aims to reorient the relationship between the earth and the law. Advocates argue that natural objects should not be treated as mere property, vulnerable to exploitation or destruction as owners see fit, but as rights-bearing entities with intrinsic value. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit, works with communities such as Shapleigh to protect local ecosystems, and more towns are considering ordinances in the same vein. The Center for Earth Jurisprudence, established in 2006, works with two Florida law schools, developing a legal philosophy based on respect for the planet, and seeking avenues in current law to advance that goal.

“Someone needs to be able to represent the rivers,” says Patricia Siemen, director of the Center for Earth Jurisprudence. “Someone needs to be able to represent the forests.”

Of course, the notion will strike skeptics as preposterous. Would we need to worry about offending litigious shrubs? With a boulder, or a swamp, as a witness in the proceedings? Critics dismiss the idea as grandstanding that could clog the courts with frivolous cases.

But proponents see it as part of an ongoing progression, an expansion of rights that slowly brings about an increasingly just society. After all, not so long ago, slaves and women were in some legal regimes deemed property, just as nature is today. Now we all accept universal human rights. The concept of animal rights has also become familiar, if much more contested. Advocates of this agenda see the extension of rights to ecosystems as the natural next step. And they believe it could spark a profound shift in our relations with nature, leading to more effective environmental protections.

“The language of rights has a great deal of currency. It’s the most powerful of our ethical terms,” says John Baird Callicott, a philosophy professor at the University of North Texas. “Rights shift the burden of proof from those who are defending nature to those who want to exploit it.”

In the view of proponents, the idea is less outlandish than it may seem. Other nonhuman entities have long enjoyed certain rights under our legal system: ships and corporations are two examples of entities entitled to “personhood,” meaning they can bring lawsuits to court. What’s more, proponents say, the extension of rights invariably seems absurd before it happens. When the economy depended on slave labor, emancipation was unfathomable even to many who abhorred slavery. In retrospect, though, it seems morally imperative and historically inevitable.

Yet bestowing rights on nature poses considerable practical and philosophical challenges. In the case of the declarations in towns like Shapleigh, it isn’t always clear how they will be enforced. (So far, Nestle has not attempted to set up operations in Shapleigh, but it’s hard to say whether that is a result of the ordinance.) Granting standing - the ability to sue in the name of a natural object - is a more modest, specific goal, but stipulating “inalienable rights” strikes some legal experts as both vague and infeasible. Critics also argue that because the language of rights is indeed potent, we ought to be wary of diluting that force by spreading rights too thin. And they question whether the concept of rights and interests can be applied to nature in any meaningful way.

“All the interests in nature conflict. Trees fight each other for sun and water,” says Mark Sagoff, an environmental philosopher at the University of Maryland. “Granting rights to nature would just be a distraction from the policy progress we’ve made.”

The debate ultimately centers on the basis of legal rights. Historically, they have been strongly associated with human beings. All of the formerly rightless entities who now seem so clearly deserving of rights - infants, for example, or women, or African-Americans - share one conspicuous trait: they’re people. (Corporations and ships, it could be argued, represent conglomerations of people.) When extended to animals, rights have often been based on affinities with humans: sentience, the ability to suffer. The question is how starkly we distinguish between human and nonhuman life. Is membership in the biosphere alone enough to merit rights?

The notion of nature’s rights has long been cherished in environmentalist circles; the idea cropped up in the writings of Sierra Club founder John Muir in the late 19th century and the influential ecologist Aldo Leopold in the mid-20th century. But the first sustained legal argument is usually attributed to Christopher Stone, a law professor at the University of Southern California. In 1972, Stone wrote an article entitled “Should Trees Have Standing?”, which laid out the case for expanding rights that is now commonly cited. (The essay, originally published in the Southern California Law Review, will be reissued by Oxford University Press in 2010.)

Stone lamented that although one could sue to protect nonhuman life, one had to prove “injury” to humans. Damages, when awarded, went to compensate the human plaintiff, not to restore the natural object. He argued that natural objects themselves should be eligible to be plaintiffs (represented, of course, by human trustees or guardians). Furthermore, the natural objects should benefit directly from a favorable judgment - funds should go to restoring the damage wrought. Stone drew an analogy to the legal status of “incompetents,” such as children or senile elders, who may not be able to articulate their interests: guardians can make informed judgments about those interests and represent them in court.

As it happened, a highly pertinent case was before the Supreme Court at the time. In Sierra Club v. Morton, argued in 1971, the Sierra Club tried to stop Walt Disney Enterprises from building a ski resort in a pristine California valley called Mineral King. The Court decided that the Sierra Club itself lacked standing, although it could sue on behalf of its members, who could claim they suffered recreational or aesthetic injuries (for example, from the lost opportunity to hike in the area).

Serendipitously, Justice William O. Douglas had been slated to write the preface for an issue of the Southern California Law Review, and Stone had rushed his article into that issue, hoping that the justice would read it. The strategy worked: Douglas dissented, echoing Stone’s thesis. “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation,” he wrote. “This suit would therefore be more properly labeled as Mineral King v. Morton.”

For a time, the idea appeared to gain some currency. In 1973, the Endangered Species Act became law, including a provision for “citizen suits” on behalf of listed species. The provision, Professor Callicott has argued, grants de facto standing to the endangered wildlife (although this view is controversial). In any case, the law implicitly recognized the worth of life that has no instrumental use for people.

In 1974, Laurence Tribe, the prominent Harvard law professor, elaborated on Stone’s reasoning in an article for the Yale Law Journal. He wrote that the legal system’s focus on human injuries reinforced anthropocentric values, creating a vicious circle that could further increase callousness to other life forms: “What the environmentalist may not perceive is that, by couching his claim in terms of human self-interest - by articulating environmental goals wholly in terms of human needs and preferences - he may be helping to legitimate a system of discourse which so structures human thought and feeling as to erode, over the long run, the very sense of obligation which provided the initial impetus for his own protective efforts.”


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