Discuss: If Nature Had Rights

In the “overdeveloped” world, millions of people emit vast amounts of greenhouse gas, while billions of people the “underdeveloped” world produce scant emissions.

The overdeveloped world is showing a decline in the growth rate of absolute human population numbers, while the underdeveloped world is witnessing a continuing explosion in its population numbers. 

In the overdeveloped world, millions of people are moving toward the stabilization of their populations, while billions of people in the underdeveloped world are rapidly growing their numbers.

A person in an overdeveloped country like the USA consumes 32 times more resources than a person in an underdeveloped country.

These unsustainable patterns and gross imbalances need to become primary sources of immediate concern for the human community, I suppose, because global overgrowth activities of human species could soon produce either an economic breakdown or an ecologic collapse or both in these early years of Century XXI. 

What leaves me with a sense of foreboding has to do with something within the psyche of the family of humanity that is making it difficult for the leaders of our species to recognize and come face to face with the threats to life as we know it and to the integrity of our planetary home which are posed to humankind by the gigantic scale and rapid growth of unrestrained consumption, unbridled production and unchecked propagation activities of the human species now overspreading the surface of Earth.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

I have seen the print issue and there are more images by this artist with it. I find them so compelling. The image online here is a disembodied human eye looking at a tangled thread-like thing. At first I didn’t notice, but the thread disappears under water (out of view of the eye?), then I realized it is attached to the rear of the eye, like an optical nerve. The human eye is observing its own “tangle”.
Yet the birds (Nature itself) seem to be doing the job of untangling. Then I saw the faint title under the image: Undoing.

I could ponder this for quite sometime. I guess a picture does speak a thousand words. I love that Orion includes art like this.

I understand the desire for a “Trust” to oversee the parts of the Earth, but would you really trust the Trust? Who would be on these Trusts? Who would appoint the Trust members?

You see the problem? In a world of greed, abuse, incompetence, selfishness, etc. forming an organization that would eventually succumb (if not at the onset) to politics could become just another reason to curse humanity’s stupidity.

Consider that the United States for instance would probably insist on control of all the parts of the Earth that by border, it could legitimately claim. In fact, that is what nations do. They claim the airspace, the land, the waters within and around and every resource. Then after placing these things under a sort of Trust, we know darn well it would become argument laden.

The chance that the US would ever join in some sort of global trust seems slight at this time. The US won’t even sign the Kyoto Agreement. The US just doesn’t like the rest of the world helping in decisions, particularly in regards to its’ own property. But other nations can be selfish too.

Any nation in the world understands basic economics. There really is no growth without the Earth’s freebies. All resources are given to humans by the Earth. Humans don’t have to give something in exchange for the resource. This is what enables human economics to grow. So all nations attempt to extract anything from the Earth to turn into economic growth.

I’m surprised that no one has figured out a way to charge us for the air we breath, because I’m sure people have spent time thinking about it. I suppose the government by taking taxes from us has indirectly charged a breathing fee.

If the government decided to have an “Air Trust” to oversee the atmosphere above us, couldn’t you just imagine the board of directors consisting of ex-members of the smokestack industries or the auto industry? Isn’t that how they usually stack the regulatory agencies these days?

To really reach the “trust” goal, it’s going to take a large change of attitude. More than likely, and history has shown this to be true, it won’t happen until the last minute or when disaster actually affects nearly everyone.

They didn’t bother to clean up polluted rivers in the US until the water became undrinkable and unsafe to touch. They didn’t bother with the visible offensive smog in major cities until people couldn’t breath the air. In both of these cases though, they didn’t repair it to the original state. People still have trouble breathing in Los Angeles for instance.

There is no doubt that Nature has rights and is in the process of currently enforcing them through the acceleration in the increasing entropy of our finite system, eg. climate warming, overpopulation, consumerism. Hence, it seems to me that if we have any wish to keep homo sapiens as a viable species then we have to recognize and respect the infinite powers inherent in these rights and try for a more symbiotic relationship. Our Courts, laws, edicts and whatever provide no answer, tis each and everyone of us that have the answers within self. The time is after midnight. Nature has shown once again unless we make peace we will be gone. Forget not, we are now in a position where we need our lifegiver and protector. She hardly needs us.
“Peace Brother”. Like Yesterday.
Garth Condor

History teaches us empires come and go, rise and fall; but history provides no evidence for the existence of so huge, and soon to become unsustainable, an empire, one that actually threatens to engulf the surface of our planetary home in the way the seemingly endless expansion of the “economic globalization empire” is doing in our time.

The gigantic scale and rapid growth rate of the unbridled, global big-business empire, the one we recognize as the predominant human construction on Earth, appears to be approaching a point in history when this economic empire irreversibly degrades Earth’s frangible ecosystems, dangerously dissipates its limited resources, and recklessly diminishes Earth’s capacity to offer a fit place for human habitation by our children and coming generations.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001

Wow, nice very educated responses.
You guys really think your something don’t you.
Nature, As human we were a part of nature and we broke away when we became civilized. Now as humans we are supposably fighting against nature because of our use of it’s recources. But whether we use them or not nature will always survive, the only thing humans can do with nature is destroy themeselves. Nature will live on whether humans are here or not.

Humans are part of nature, but arguing if we are better than it doesn’t seem relevant to me. Does it matter if a tree is chopped down and someone is paid for the damages?  There is no way to restore that tree, it’s dead, the person or “guardian” that Cullinan refers to would just use that money for something else, of no benefit to the tree. People exist in nature to use nature and that is what makes nature survive.  In Alaska, hunters are allowed to take a certain number of moose each year, the hunters use this meat and it provides food for their family. If we weren’t allowed to kill some moose to help us live, then there would be a larger population of moose, eating the habitat that provides for other species as well and also the bear population would boom due to lots of yummy calfs to feast on. Since bears are a dangerous predator in Alaska, humans and nature would lose a lot more than moose calfs if the bear population went out of control.  Nature needs humans as much as humans need it. So in a way, yes, humans are a part of nature, but we are also a completely seperate system.  And both systems depend on eachother to run.What would we give back to nature? Clean it up? Repair the damages when possible? People already realize that they need nature in order to survive. Maybe it did take a few disasters to teach us this but for a person to think that they don’t need trees or water or the natural produces offered by nature is absurd. Nature doesn’t need to be treated like an infant. It gives to humans much more than an infant does and knows much more about survival than humans do.  Maybe that is wy it takes a disaster to make us realize, its nature’s way of reminding us just how powerful it can be and just how much more we need to appreciate it.  It doesn’t need a protecter, it just needs someone to use it.

Dear Livy,

Something is worrying me, something that appears self-evident, clear and simple.  The Earth need not be treated like an infant, as you suggest, but neither can the human species behave much longer as an insatiable infant, recklessly suctioning the resources from the bosom of Mother Earth, I suppose.

Human beings inhabit a relatively small, finite, noticeably frangible planet we wishfully think of, and magically regard, as if ‘our’ tiny Earth is actually some sort of cornucopia that will forever fulfill each and every human desire.

Surely we can agree that the human species is not like a suckling babe and the Earth not like an endlessly providing teat.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001