Posted by Shannon Biggs in Building Positive Alternatives, Community Rights, People Power, Not Corporate Power, World News & Events on 28th June, 2012 | 4 Comments
The United Nations Rio + 20 Summit on Sustainable Development was a dismal, if predictable, failure. Global Exchange’s Community Rights Director Shannon Biggs reports on the news from Rio—the not so bad, the bad, and the ugly and points to some inspiring youth voices that could be heard above the din.
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Posted by Kylie Nealis in Community Rights, Featured, People Power, Not Corporate Power on 18th June, 2012 | No Comments
Community Rights Program Director, Shannon Biggs, is on the ground in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil this week to launch Global Exchange’s new report, “Rights of Nature: Planting the Seeds of Change.” The report explores how recognizing the Rights of Nature provides an alternative cultural and legal framework to the official corporate-led ‘Green (or Greed) Economy’ agenda being put forward by the UN.
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Posted by Kylie Nealis in Community Rights on 25th April, 2012 | No Comments
I celebrated Earth Day along with hundreds of other earth-minded individuals at San Francisco’s Civic Center/UN Plaza. Everyone came out that day under a common idea: we live in a wondrous community of life that is planet Earth and that community deserves our awe, respect, and attention. I participated in a panel discussion at the celebration on Sunday around the question of “co-creating our sustainable future – what are the successful tools for coalition building and collaboration both within and beyond your organization’s work?”
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Posted by Kylie Nealis in Community Rights, People Power, Not Corporate Power on 21st March, 2012 | No Comments
The international peasants and farmers organization, La Via Campesina, ends their global Call to Action for the upcoming June 16-18 Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) with ‘GLOBALIZE THE STRUGGLE!! GLOBALIZE HOPE!!!’
The stakes are high in Rio. As Via Campesina points out, “Twenty years later, governments should have reconvened to review their commitments and progress, but in reality the issue to debate will be the “green economy” led development, propagating the same capitalist model that caused climate chaos and other deep social and environmental crises.”
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Posted by Kylie Nealis in Community Rights on 8th March, 2012 | No Comments
Last week our friends at the Earth Island Journal published an article on the Rights of Nature in their spring issue. The article, titled Natural Law: From Rural Pennsylvania to South America, a Global Alliance is Promoting the Idea that Ecosystems Have Intrinsic Rights; takes a deep look at the evolution of the movement grant legal rights to nature from its origins in the small community of Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, to the ground-breaking developments in Ecuador in 2008 when it became the first nation to recognize nature’s rights in an amendment to its national constitution, up to the present moment as environmental and climate justice activists gear up to advocate for nature’s rights at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil this June.
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Posted by Shannon Biggs in Community Rights, Global Exchange News & Events on 24th May, 2011 | No Comments
The following originally appeared on Alternet. — Our environmental laws and regulations, rather than put in place protections for the environment, instead seem to be written to exploit it. Here’s what can we do about it. The following is excerpted from the recently released book, The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration »
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