THE EMERGENCE OF THE NEW EARTH DEMOCRACY
By Avi Davis

Imagine for a moment that  that you are a creek, gamboling happily through a landscape that the city fathers, in their wisdom, have slated for development.  Imagine further that you have been flowing perenially  through this same landscape for many thousands of years, far longer  than any members of the human communities who are now threatening to turn you into gurgling pipe, have inhabited
the land. Imagine that an attorney, who has stumbled on your case, now wishes to take it on and obtain a restraining order to prevent your redevelopment, not as a cause based on the harmful impact your removal might have on the environment, but rather on your fundamental constitutional right to exist.  As  the presiding judge deliberates over your case, not only is he required by statutory law to take into account your value to the community, but also your dignity, right to life and ….. your feelings.

Could only happen in  a Shel Silverstein children’s book?   Think again.  According to the citizens of Ecuador or the legislators of Switzerland, this might be a movie coming to a theater near you.  In both countries not only are  trees, rivers, plants, sheaves of wheat and even wild grasslands being accorded new environmental  protections, they are being handed legal identities which provide them with the American equivalent of  inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In Ecuador, in late September, the citizens of that country voted by nearly two thirds for a new constitution which included language making Ecuador the first nation to legislate rights for nature.  According to  Article 7 of the new Constitution “Nature or Pachamama [the Andean earth goddess], where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to 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 recognition of rights for nature before the public bodies.”

This means, in essence, that whenever anyone in that country feels that any aspect of nature is threatened by development, pollution or environmental degradation, they can sue the  would-be perpetrators in an Ecuadoran court on behalf of the aggrieved natural elements who in themselves have legal standing.

This development follows the release in Switzerland of the findings of a panel of philosophers, lawyers, geneticists and theologians on the meaning of flora's dignity.   The panel, in issuing its report , found that “  vegetation has an inherent value and that it is immoral to arbitrarily harm plants by, say, "decapitation of wildflowers at the roadside without rational reason." In the 1990s, the Swiss constitution was amended in order to defend the dignity of all creatures  against unwanted consequences of genetic manipulation. When the amendment became the Gene Technology Act,  it remained silent on floral protection.  But earlier this year, the government asked the ethics panel to correct that oversight by coming up with rules for plants as well.

On the question of genetic modification, most of the panel argued that the dignity of plants could be safeguarded "as long as their reproductive and adaptive abilities are ensured.” In other words, it's wrong to genetically alter a plant and render it sterile.

The panel’s findings, having now passed into law, requiring  plant geneticists to undertake rigorous procedures  to safeguard plant dignity.  It has led to situations which have exposed the Swiss government to ridicule.   On October 10, the Wall Street Journal interviewed Dr. Yves Poirier, a molecular biologist at the laboratory of plant biotechnology at the University of Lausanne.    "Where does it stop?”  he asked.  "Should we now defend the dignity of microbes and viruses?"

Seeking clarity, Dr. Poirier recently invited the head of the ethics panel to his university. In their discussion, Dr. Poirier asked where seedless grapes, which cannot reproduce, stand in the dignity hierarchy.  The discussion became surreal when some panel members revealed their opinions that plants have feelings.

The United States has not been shielded from the inherent absurdity of this movement.  On September 19, 2006, the Tamaqua Borough of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, passed a sewage sludge ordinance that recognizes natural communities and ecosystems within the borough as legal persons for the purposes of enforcing civil rights. It also strips corporations that engage in the land application of sludge of their rights to be treated as “persons” and consequently of their civil rights. One of its effects is that the borough or any of its residents may file a lawsuit on behalf of an ecosystem to recover compensatory and punitive damages for any harm done by the land application of sewage sludge. Damages recovered in this way must be paid to the borough and used to restore those ecosystems and natural communities.

In July I wrote of the alarming anti-human trends within the environmental movement ( see The Rise of the Enviro-Dictatorship ) and the decision of the Spanish government to extend human rights to apes.  Much like that decision,  the drive for “an earth democracy”, wherein all life forms have equal  protection before the law, is a direct assault on classical liberal theories of government which view rights as possessed only by individual human beings.  The concept that the Earth has its own set of inalienable rights, is in fact drawn from ancient African, Australian  and Latin American tribal traditions which view human beings as belonging to the earth, rather than the other way around.

But the movement does not merely seek to place the Earth and its bio-diversity on the same moral, legal and political footing as human beings.  It goes much beyond that, insisting that where human needs and desires are in conflict with the environment, it is the environment’s rights which should always prevail.  Therefore potential life saving medications which could be drawn from plants are scotched; irrigation projects which would dam a river but help hundreds of thousands of farmers improve their crop yields are resisted; oil drilling which could reduce dependence on foreign energy supplies and therefore provide a vital plank in the war against terror supporting states, are bitterly denounced.

And no one should ignore the political impulses of this movement.  In its efforts to become the Earth’s savior, it has also become anti-Western, anti-corporate, anti-capitalist and anti- free trade  in design and intent, focused on punishing the international fiends who have shackled the natural world to the world of finance.  As  an example, the pro-nature aspects of the Ecuadoran constitution have their roots in resentment towards international companies who have allegedly exploited the country’s natural resources and left pollution and poverty in their wake. But the language in these provisions was written with heavy input from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a far left  Pennsylvania-based group providing legal assistance to governments around the world who  seek to elevate the legal status of eco-systems to defend against human greed and destructiveness.

Therefore we should not mistake the political motor which generates the movement for an earth democracy.  This ostensibly pro-environment ideology is actually anti-human in purpose.   In seeking to impose collective liability on humanity for restoring damaged relations with the larger natural community, it sweeps aside the notion of human exceptionalism and ridicules any notion that natural resources have a vital role to play in the continuing welfare and progress of mankind.   Environmental protection for the benefit of the human race is one thing.  But the protection of  the environment for its own sake is in fact  a threat to human freedom and  will result, ironically, not in advancing Nature’s dignity,  but  in an unrelenting assault on the very concept of humanity itself.

The Western Word - An International Weekly Digest   10-17-2008