Earth Jurisprudence & Rights of Nature News

CFEJ

August 4, 2011 
 

The Center for Earth Jurisprudence has published a teaching monograph entitled An Introduction to Earth Jurisprudence: Guiding Principles and Wild Law Possibilities. The monograph collects foundational works in the field of Earth Jurisprudence, providing a succinct, accessible format that facilitates teaching , reflection, analysis, and discussion. It is good for classroom or group discussion. You can access it at Intro to Earth Jurisprudence 7-28-11.

Global Exchange Hosts a Rights of  Nature Summit

Twenty-one climate change and rights of nature activists convened on July 29-30 in San Francisco for a strategy summit. See an insider’s perspective by checking out this post featured on the Global Exchange blog written by Meera Karunananthan, National Water Campaigner for the Council of Canadians.

Waterkeeper Magazine, Summer 2011 features an article by Linda Sheehan, Executive Director of the California Coastkeeper Alliance, “Rights of the Waterways.”

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature announces the first successful case of the Rights of Nature implementation in Ecuador.

See recent blog of Begonia Filgueira,  And About Time for Rights to Nature? on the UK Human Rights Blog.

Global Exchange and the Council of Canadians have published new book, Rights of Nature: Making a Case for the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Order your copy by emailing kylie@globalexchange.org.

TransCanada Says Keystone Pipeline Could Be Used for Bulk Water Removals

Council of Canadians

August 16, 2011

Ottawa and Washington, D.C. — The Council of Canadians and Food & Water Watch are sounding the alarm over TransCanada’s speculation that the Keystone Pipeline could potentially be used for bulk water removals from the Ogallala aquifer.

TransCanada pipelines operations director Jim Krause testified at the Nebraska state assembly earlier this year that the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline could be used in the future to mine or transport water, potentially from the Ogallala aquifer. Krause is quoted as testifying that, if approved, the pipeline would only be decommissioned “if the pipeline is not needed for oil somewhere down the road and there is no other use for any other product to go through that pipe, let’s say gasoline, or maybe by that time in the future, water” [emphasis added].

Overheard: Asia's View of Alberta, Tar Sands and Pipelines

If this insider is right, Gateway is purely a ploy and Canadians are rubes.

By Michael Byers
TheTyee.ca16 August 2011

"The small Canadian oil companies have been windfalls for us. They won't work with the majors. They don't trust them. And they don't know anything -- they want to export bitumen to Asia!"

The East-West Center is a U.S. government-funded think tank that has been promoting cooperation with Asia for half-a-century. I'm the only Canadian at a Honolulu workshop about the financial picture for Asian shipping and energy companies. We're in a coffee break, and dozens of Korean, Chinese and Japanese executives and academics are diligently exchanging business cards.

The voice that attracts my attention belongs to the chairman of a Singapore-based consulting firm that operates at the highest levels of the global oil and gas industry. He's talking about Alberta's tar-like crude oil, so incredibly thick that it has to be mixed with natural gas condensate before it will flow through pipelines.

Jaitapur, India: a New Nuclear Folly

By Danielle Sabai

Asia Left Reporter

August 16, 2011 

The Fukushima disaster has highlighted the fact that insecurity is inherent to nuclear energy. It is quite simply not possible to predict all the technical or human malfunctions or the outbursts of nature. 

This disaster, of a magnitude unequalled since Chernobyl and the extent of whose consequences is still not known, has reopened in India the debate on the safety of civil nuclear power and the Indian government’s policy of nuclear expansion.

Book Excerpt – Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet

All content below is excerpted from the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith, and Derrick Jensen

Excerpt from Part I: Resistance

The Problem
by Lierre Keith

A black tern weighs barely two ounces. On bodily reserves less than a bag of M & Ms and wings that stretch to cover twelve inches, she’ll fly thousands of miles, searching for the wetlands that will harbor her young. And every year the journey gets longer as the wetlands are desiccated for human demands. Every year the tern, desperate and hungry, loses, while civilization, endless and sanguineous, wins.

A polar bear should weigh 650 pounds. Her biological reserves may have to see her through nine long months of dark, denned gestation, and then lactation, giving up her dwindling stores to the needy mouths of her species’ future. In some areas, the female’s weight has dropped from 650 to 507 pounds. Meanwhile, the ice has evaporated like the wetlands. When she wakes, the waters will stretch impassably opened, and there is no Abrahamic god of bears to part them for her.

Read more HERE.

Fighting the Minerals-Petroleum-Coal Complex’s Wealth and Woes

Patrick Bond, Khadija Sharife

Znet

August 2011

Ecocide by the "minerals-energy complex" should be faced by a broad-based opposition, focusing on sanctions against neo-colonial exploitation, and international solidarity with the communities affected.

When African National Congress youth leader Julius Malema recently proposed the mining industry’s partial nationalization – and last week asked, quite legitimately, ‘what is the alternative?’ to those in the SA Communist Party (SACP) and Business Leadership South Africa who threw cold water at him – a debate of enormous ideological magnitude opened in public, which workers, communities and environmentalists have already joined in their myriad struggles.

For those of us in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, awareness of mining’s foibles is vital for several reasons, including new scientific findings about overestimated coal industry reserves; SACP leader Jeremy Cronin’s recent useful suggestion to ‘phase out aluminum smelters’ at the vast Richards Bay port (and we might add, at Durban’s killer-manganese Assmang at Cato Ridge which alone chews a third of our city’s electricity); and the global climate summit that Durban hosts in November-December.

Shifting from ego-centricism to eco-centricism

By Jim Harding
No Nukes
August 15, 2011

World-renowned biologist, Rene DuBos, coined the now familiar phrase “Think globally, Act locally”. In Wooing of Earth he suggested that “Humanized environments give us confidence because nature has been reduced to the human scale…” He continued “…but the wilderness in whatever form almost compels us to measure ourselves against the cosmos.”

Perhaps this is why anthropocentric religion was so influential in the emergence of industrial society, with its naive attempt to “tame” nature. Seeing natural systems in human terms means that natural systems simply aren’t seen. And it ensures that the unknowability and unpredictability of nature remains threatening to us. Yet, we arise out of natural systems, are sustained by them, and return “to them” when our individual fire goes out. We never really leave nature, not even when we fly out of the biosphere on a spacecraft.

Proposed coal plant avoids crucial emissions regs

Maxim Power Corp. receives final approval for a new coal fired plant and effectively a 45-year free pass to pollute.

NUPGE News

Ottawa (12 August 2011) – More than 40 diverse civil society organizations from across Canada have signed a letter calling on federal Environment Minister Peter Kent to protect the integrity of Canada’s forthcoming coal regulations by ensuring that this proposed new coal plant is not permitted to evade Ottawa’s rules.

The letter makes the case against building new conventional coal plants in Canada, instead supporting the development of renewable energy like wind and solar. The signatories request that Kent ensure that the Maxim proposal is not fast tracked to evade Ottawa’s pending regulations.

Video: La Via Campesina in Movement...

La Via Campesina

Mark Ruffalo Supports the Tar Sands Action

Tar Sands Action

Actor Mark Ruffalo, who has been an outspoken activist on fracking in his home state of New York and across the country, is lending his support to the Tar Sands Action in Washington, DC this August. To join the action, click here to sign up.

Nearly 2,000 people are already registered to take part in an ongoing sit-in at the White House this August 20 – Sep 3 to pressure President Obama to stand up to Big Oil and deny a permit for the Keystone XL, a 1,700 mile pipeline from the tar sands in Canada to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

“I’ve seen the kind of damage that out-of-control energy development can do to water and to communities near my own home, where fracking for natural gas is causing widespread pollution,” Mark says in the video. “All these problems are connected—we need to get off fossil fuel.”

As Mark concludes, the Tar Sands Action is a chance for all of us to “put our values into action.” Hope to see you all in DC this August!

Capitalism's terminal crisis and the global cooperation of eco-socialists

By Grant Morgan
Unity (Aotearoa)
July 23, 2911

Global capitalism faces a constellation of existential crises similar to those which collapsed every previous civilization. This terminal crisis will in the years to come bring about profound social, ecological and political upheavals.

Evidence of the crises propelling the world system towards it’s collapse in a historically short timeframe can be seen in trends visible to us today:

• ongoing financial upheavals in Europe and America, along with the dangers of an asset bubble collapse in China, any of which could again plunge the world into economic slump, and right now are sparking trans-continental outrage among victims of government austerity plans;

• willingness of oppressed majorities in the Arab world to risk their lives to topple undemocratic neoliberal regimes;

•  moves within the global scientific community to identify specific extreme weather events with the onset of climate change;

• the ever upwards spikes in energy prices towards economically and socially catastrophic levels as peak oil is passed and capitalism comes up against the physical limits of fossil fuel industrialization;

• insane leveraging of financial instruments as the global marketplace becomes ever more dependent on profits made from money (M - M+) rather than commodities (M - C - M+), creating a system that limps onwards only by undermining its historic basis of survival, which is commodity production;

• escalations in global food prices in the wake of climate change events, oil price hikes, water shortages and futures speculation in farm products, sparking fears, shortages and riots in many countries, and

• mired in the bog of war across the Middle East, with the greenback weakening as the world reserve currency, US imperial hegemony is ebbing away ever more quickly, yet China is beset with economic, political, social and ecological problems which are growing at a faster pace than the global reach of its Communist Party rulers, creating a leadership vacuum at the heart of the world system, and

These and other world historic upheavals, in combination, point towards the end times of the 500-year-old civilisation we know as "global capitalism".

The world's social, economic, political, ecological and ideological conditions are pushing the international left towards a single imperative: cooperate or become spectators to historic events. Either promote a Global Uniting, or see a socialist alternative perish along with capitalism.

To organise sufficiently large-scale change, a qualitatively large number of eco-socialists must get beyond the idiocies of "left competition". And this must happen on a world scale, since only a Global Uniting will be able to save humanity from the catastrophes of collapsing capitalism.

Video: A Changing Environment