Supporting the Wild Law Movement

Calls for equal legal rights for nature
Graham Readfearn
September 16, 2011

#1 Environmental Law program online Complete in just 18 months!
Under the emerging global legal movement known as “wild law”, things like the ocean are given rights.

Under the emerging global legal movement known as “wild law”, things like the ocean are given rights.

Australia's rivers, forests, ocean waters, flora and fauna should have their own legal rights, according to environmental experts meeting in Brisbane today.

Lawyers, academics and researchers from across the world will gather at Griffith University to discuss this emerging global legal movement, known as “wild law”.

The movement calls for laws to not just protect species and properly manage environments, but to actually hand legal power over to flora and fauna.
Advertisement: Story continues below

Conference organiser Michelle Maloney, the convener of the new Australian Wild Law Alliance, said the movement's successes in South America had come about because indigenous groups were strongly represented in senior leadership positions within governments.

“At this point in time, all western legal structures and governance systems are based on a belief that humans can do whatever they wish and that most things out there in the world are simply for our use,” she said.

Australian speakers will include New South Wales Land and Environment Court Chief Justice Brian Preston, Greens Senator Larissa Waters and representatives from nine universities.

International speakers for the three-day conference, which starts today, have travelled from the United States, India, South Africa, Austria, Ireland, New Zealand and Iran.

Brendan Mackey, of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University, said wild law was the "next step in the evolution of environmental law”.

“This is about how law needs to evolve so that it's adequate to meet these big environmental challenges we are facing,” he said.

Professor Mackey will speak about the role of international environmental laws and agreements.

“We have 780 of them,” he said, citing conventions such as the Law of The Sea, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and conventions restricting the movement of hazardous waste.

“It's not that we lack international environmental law. We have a system, but how can we make it work more effectively? There are still big problems that fall through the gaps."

Ms Maloney, a researcher at Griffith University's Socio-Legal Research Centre, says wild laws balance the rights of humans with the rights of nature.

“Wild law suggests we look at the world as a community of subjects – that we are only one of many players in the ecological sphere," she said.

The movement has gained some significant success in South America, where indigenous groups have a strong connection to “mother earth”.

In 2008, Ecuador became what is believed to be the world's first nation to include rights for nature in its new constitution.

Earlier this year, a team of lawyers used the country's new laws in court to force a government to repair damage to a river from a road-building project.

In Bolivia, the government passed wide-reaching laws in April, granting nature equal rights to humans.

Conference speaker Chris McGrath, a barrister and senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, likened the conference to any gathering on human rights.

“Here we have environmental lawyers talking about how we improve the maintenance of the environment and our ecosystems," Dr McGrath said.

"How do we integrate ecology into mainstream decision making?”

Dr McGrath said Queensland's Wild Rivers legislation was one example of positive environmental law that was “trying to protect the wilderness values of river systems".

“But I think wild law goes beyond any single piece of legislation," he said.

"It's really trying to reform how we think about the world.”

But researchers and lawyers interested in wild law were not necessarily calling for more laws, but rather reforms to those laws already in place.

“The current laws manage human activities and don't reflect that the environment has rights,” said Ms Maloney.

“We need to fit our legal structures within the natural limits of the world.”

twitter Follow Brisbane Times on Twitter: @brisbanetimes

twitter Be our fan on Facebook: /brisbanetimes

Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/environment/calls-for-equal-legal-rights-for-nature-20110915-1kbit.html#ixzz1YE2Gml8D

Supporting the Rights of Nature
by Elaine Cimino
Have you ever tried to protect your community’s quality of life and natural environment you would soon discover that you have little, to no say, in what environmental destruction goes on in your community. You would soon discovered that governmental staff and politicians were in business to protect something else.
If you ever pushed those issues into the courts you find tha corporations have more finanical resources and the court findings are on the sides of business interests. When you begin to realize the meaning of what has transpired over the last 80 years in American history, your quick civics lesson reveals that the middle class is slipping fast into the working poor and poverty is higher than it has ever been in America. The reasons for this are many and recognizing the intrinsic rights of the natural world to exist and not be subject to solely economic purposes for humans is crucial in order for us to address the predominate threat to our biosphere and to solve our economic challenges.
The over lying cause has to do with corporation given carte blanc access to resources nearly everywhere in the world whether it is in oil and gas drilling, coal mining, banking, auto manufacturing or insurance. The last 40 years of failed neoliberal policy,which has increased the quality of life for the richest lifestyles in the richest countries while pushing millions to the brink of poverty and in the process causing the climate to change. As a result we are losing the planet to a political culture that has no moral foundation in ethical lifestyle values. We are treading a thin-line of losing our democracy in the process.
Despite the Neo-liberal policy fostered by American financiers and perpetuated on a global scale the tide is turning. The first leap was seen not in America, Americans are having to be dragged with heels dug-in while throwing a terrible two year-old tantrum. The tidal wave is being pushed by the social democratic countries in South America.

Ecuador wrote into their Constitution the premise of supporting the right of nature to exist first over that of the need of western societies to reap resources.
The Rights of Nature, in order from a more perfect union humanity must move forward the principles of democracy and strengthen include nature. Something that many indigenous communities have known to be intrinsic and what the writers of constitutions past did not take into account. The goods news is that there are solutions working in various rural and mid size cities around the United States. There are a group of environmental attorneys and historians in the Mid-Atlantic states teaching in townships and counties to take responsibility in protecting their home ground. Under professorial tutelage a non-profit was created called, Citizen Environmental Legal Defense Fund, CELDF.org by attorney Tom Linzey and Richard Grossman. CELDF and company has helped over a 100 counties in Pennsylvania take back their right to self-govern and are rebuilding democracy from the ground up and they have won this despite the State Attorney General filing law suits against them. Now CELDF leaders are training people in 20 states teaching Democracy Schools. A revisit of American civics that you teacher failed to disclose to you – a course on real democracy and how the rights were hard fought, women suffrage, a right to a five day work week and civil rights came to fruition. This a the history that should be taught in high school democracy course and in political sciences courses.
More people are finding that complacency has its price. It is only when the oil drillers are knocking at the front gate that citizens realize that their have rights to protect their home or their community is threatened. Yes, corporations rule government and its regulators. One does not live in a democracy until they start standing up and challenging the law and writing it so that is protects not the property they own but the right of nature to exist over the economic need of resource reaping.
I first found out about Democracy School when I received a call from our friendly holisitci town dentist asking me to try to attend this workshop. He knew that I had been working on local water issues and that I had experienced the gamut of the regulatory chute outcomes, all of which favors developers and municipalities. I was a hamster on a cage wheel running in place and never getting anywhere, unless you shamed people into doing something for the common good, hardly anything to feel good about or to bring about change that have the teeth in real governance.
I found that what Tom Linzey and Richard Grossman said made perfect sense. As fellow Democracy School graduates, Jerry Fuentes and I, decided to take this idea to the Democratic Party in New Mexico to present it as a platform. The party would not even bring it up in a committee meeting to talk about it, in either Santa Fe or Rio Arriba County.
Tom Linzey was right about how people need to see that the system doesn’t work for themselves, until they have a oil derrick going up in their front yard or a corporate hog farm going in next door, then they come to this realization only after they jump through all the regulatory hoops, only then they agree to start down another path. As long as people support a corrupt system, a system that throws them only crumbs from the table that is only what they will ever get, crumbs fallen from the table while corporations continues business-as-usual.
This has been enlightening for me because I don’t play that game any longer. I don’t waste my time. Instead I am checking in with local groups to see if they gotten the message. Unless people are ready to make real change with law that has real teeth will we be able to actually accomplish protecting the intrinsic rights of nature.
Everyday environmental groups continue to violate the rights of nature by endorsing fraudulent corporate driven policies. One such practice comes in the form of partaking in a process by selling “carbon offsets”. See the CES page on Carbon Rebates.
Supporting the ‘Rights of Nature’ is what an ever-increasing amount of developing countries are considering because of the industrialized nations grab for resources including water, forests and minerals without compensation or sustainable practices or without consideration of the impact of the action. Ecuadorian placed resources have been under threat for many years by a public-private corporations attempt at grab resources while scouting for a possible US military base in the Galapagos under the auspices of protect American national security on the high seas.
The ordinance model Tom Linsey used to frame the re-written Constitution of Ecuador can be found below.
The idea that communities by right may govern themselves is central to the notion of democracy. Layers of bureaucracy, regulatory agencies, state and federal statutes and judicial decisions have created a sediment of law that smothers and snuffs out self-governance by the people who, all state constitutions acknowledge, are the source of governing authority.
For over one hundred years, a simmering home rule movement has been haltingly created the framework for communities to take charge of their future, by drafting into law local constitutions, or home rule charters. It is time for this movement to take center stage in American politics and governance, in order to fulfill the barren promises of real democracy. This concept has been adopted in 45 states constitution and 8 states have municipal jurisdiction that have adopted Home Rule, an idea that started to form in 1898. New Mexico is a Home Rule state and can make these changes more easily than those how have not made this step forward.
“Local federalism would reverse the legal doctrine of the past half century. Instead of residual powers of government being vested in the states, with the cities receiving crumbs from their table, local federalism would place the residual powers with the cities, giving the state authority necessary to enable them to provide for matters of strictly of states concern. The government that is nearest to the people would be authorized to enter any field not occupied by the state by a specific declaration of intent. In its extreme form, the range of state functions might be restricted to those specifically granted by the constitution.”- Home Rule for America's Cities - 1949 – Rodney L. Mott
Climate change is an obvious and dramatic symptom of the failure of human government to regulate human behavior in a manner that takes account of the fact that human welfare is directly dependent on the health of our planet and cannot be achieved at its expense.
Imagine laws that could be established to protect the rights of the entire biological community, instead of only the humans “property” and a wider effort that encourages communities to attain the values and build on the Gaia Hypothesis premises: a theory that the Earth Regulates itself in a manner that keeps the composition of the atmosphere and average temperature within a range conducive to life. It was Dr. James Lovelock and Dr. Lynn Margulis who framed the debate of understanding the universe “that no aspect of nature can be understood without looking at it within the context of the systems of which it forms a part.”
"The notion of the biosphere as an active adaptive control system able to maintain the earth in homeostasis we are calling the 'Gaia' hypothesis" -- (Lovelock and Margulis 1974).
Such a legal system would hold responsibility and prevent humans from ‘driving other species to extinction or deliberately destroying the functioning of ecosystems’
Despite the regulatory system that is suppose to protect ecosystems just the opposite has occurred. The Earth’s democracies are the foundation of support for the ideas of ‘Localism’ for the right for a river to flow the right for a climate to self regulate and the right to respect and value intrinsic to the existence of all life. Our future depends on creating the space for nature through our legal system and a role of local governance. Once we understand the importance and allow ourselves to evolve our governance systems to include our role as Earth stewards, to adopt a flourishing ecological based economy, we then would be on track to have an Earth democracy to allow homeostasis Earth to function.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.