2,000 people make a human banner on the beach in Rio. Photo credit: Amazon Watch

With over 50,000 accredited participants registered, Rio+20 was the largest gathering in the history of the UN. And yet, despite the participation of heads of state officials, experts, media, corporate titans and tens of thousands of civil society representatives, the United Nations Rio + 20 Earth Summit was a tragic, if predictable, failure. Get a recap of what was at stake in Rio here.

Predictable because the outcome document was all but written before the heads of state entered the RioCentro compound, a mere 2-hour journey by taxi or shuttle bus from the People’s Summit — itself a 2 mile stretch of bustling action, noise, confusion and speakers tents along the Flamenco beach.

Participants convene at the People’s Space

Tragic because rather than shifting course, the so-called Green Economy strategy unveiled at the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development drives nature further into the global marketplace by defining an economic value on what the Earth “does” for humans, detachedly called “ecosystem services.” Proponents of this scheme of “commoditizing” soil, forests, and fresh water profess that by putting a price on the natural world, it can be ‘saved’. The reckless drive for unlimited growth on a finite planet is itself a legalized Ponzi scheme perpetrated on communities around the globe, future generations and Earth’s biosphere.

The future we want banner at Rio+20

The Future WHO wants?

The official negotiated outcome document was largely an uninspired retread of ideas from the original Earth Summit in 1992, with very little new, other than a commitment to  fulfill the corporate wishlist of commoditizing (pricing) nature’s processes, paving the way for the commodification (selling) of those “services.” As ETC Group’s Neth Daño noted, “Many delegations are genuinely embarrassed by the title of their outcome document, ‘The Future We Want,’ which sets sights on a future that can’t be achieved by the haplessly short-sighted initiatives proposed.”

Shannon at the People’s March

Over at the Peoples Summit, with its beautifully hectic congestion of platforms—from women’s issues, to economic solidarity, to poverty, to food sovereignty to land grabs and more were unified in protesting the Green Economy and the financialization of nature, and diverse in presenting visions for change—though far from the UN site, speaking truth to power seemed remote, and networking somewhat haphazardous.  The People’s March, though a bit drizzly, was emblematic of both the chaos and harmony of civil society present at Rio. Thousands lined the streets, signing, dancing and chanting in favor of a new world order, however colorfully defined.

At the Indigenous Kari-Oca venue

At the Indigenous Kari-Oca venue, an additional 45 minutes from the official RioCentro space, over 500 grassroots Indigenous Peoples held their own summit, ceremonies, events, press conferences and gatherings, and wrote their own The Declaration of Kari-Oca, condemning the UN agenda: “We see the goals of UNCSD Rio+20, the ‘Green Economy’ and its premise that the world can only ‘save’ nature by commodifying its life-giving capacities as a continuation of the colonialism that Indigenous Peoples and our Mother Earth have faced and resisted for 520 years.” Download the entire declaration here.

• To read the People’s media and updates from Rio visit the Global Justice Ecology Project’s Climate Connections website.

Rights of Nature Presents an Alternative

Global Exchange blogged from Rio about the activities of the various members Global Alliance for Rights of Nature on the ground, including a symbolic signing ceremony of the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth and the release of the GX report Rights of Nature: Planting Seeds of Real Change  featuring visionary thinkers such as Maude Barlow, Vandana Shiva, Thomas B.K. Goldtooth, Pablo Solon, Cormac Cullinan, Mari Margil and others who address questions like: What would it look like to truly take on the root causes of climate change and put forward a system of law that places humankind in living balance with the carrying capacity of the Earth’s systems?

• View and download a copy of the report here.

Watch our video blog from Rio+20:

Indigenous groups sign the Universal Declaration on Rights of Mother Earth

The signature campaign gathering  over 120,000 signatures in support of the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth was turned over to UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-moon, and there was growing synergy with rights of nature advocates and large portions of the civil society.  Strategy meetings with new allies were held, interviews were taken, and some progress was made towards introducing rights of nature language within major groups of the UN, including the Womens Major group, in which GARN member Osprey Orielle Lake and WECC held a special heartfelt and inspiring forum entitled Women Leading the Way.

Altogether our experience was mixed as activists seeking to put forward laws recognizing rights for ecosystems.

Finding Inspiration at Rio + 20

Youth respond to UN outcomes document. Photo Credit: Ben Powless

Somewhere between shuttling back and forth to the Peoples Space and the UN site, frustratingly spotty internet connections and getting my wallet swiped on a public bus, there were moments of exhaustion, exasperation and yes, doubt.  Doubt that as a civil society we will ever be bold enough to leave the comfort zone of summit hopping, critiquing the world as corporate elites designed it, and truly just dig in, work together and just create the world we want. Doubt that we will grab the reigns, and impose the laws that make our ideas real in the world, and defend our right to live within the carrying capacity of the Earth, no matter what the Monsantos, the Exxons and the Pepsi Co’s of the world dictate.

Yet at the Women Leading the Way forum, I was first introduced to a spark of light at Rio 20 —a beautiful, poised 11-year old soul named Ta’Kaiya Blaney. From the stage of the Forum, with Ted Turner in the audience and the likes of movement superstar Dr. Vandana Shiva on stage with her, Ta’Kaiya, a member of the Sliammon First Nation spoke eloquently about the need for a different path—humans recognizing their own existence depends on our growing interconnectedness with the natural world, and the idea that corporations may currently rule, but that the youth of tomorrow have different ideas in mind. Watch Ta’kaiya speak here.

Ta’Kaiya Blaney tearing up the UN outcomes document. Photo credit: Ben Powless

As the youth gathered to pronounce the failure of the Rio + 20 outcomes document, it was Ta’Kaiya, hoisted on the shoulders of her First Nations brother Clayton Thomas Muller and sister  Kandi Mosset from IEN that spoke most clearly, for me, and for thousands of others gathered in the moment of anger and seeking solace in solidarity. “Join me in Earth Revolution,” she beckoned. Indeed those five little words, if we hold true to them in our hearts and our actions, are our way forward.

The following is a guest post written by Dr. David Korten, leading up to the Rio + 20 Earth Summit which took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from June 20th – 22nd June 2012. It originally appeared on yes!magazine.org.

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RIO+20: A Defining Choice

Next week, 20 years after the 1992 UN Rio Earth Summit, representatives of the world’s governments will gather again in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to frame a global response to the Earth’s environmental crisis. Debates leading up to Rio+20 are focusing attention on a foundational choice between two divergent paths to the human future.

The Money Path

For money path advocates, money is the defining measure of value. Profit and growth in financial assets are the bottom line measures by which they assess the performance of both the firm and the economy.  They value natural wealth by the price it will fetch in the market and look to global financial markets as the preferred mechanism to organize our human relationships with one another and nature.

They propose that the best way to save nature is to price her assets and sell them to wealthy global investors to hold and manage as their private property. Privatization, commodification, monopolization, and financialization, they assure us, will drive up prices and thus create an incentive to provide for their proper care to maximize a perpetual flow of earnings.

The Life Path

For life path advocates, Earth is our living Mother; sacred and beyond price. Her health and vitality are essential to our well-being and are therefore a priority bottom line measure of economic performance. In return for Earth mother’s gifts, we have a sacred obligation to future generations to protect and restore to full health the wondrous generative systems by which she replenishes her air, water, fertile soils, fish, forests, and grasslands and maintains the stable climate on which our health and well-being in turn depend.

Because we receive Earth’s abundance as a gift, we must assure it is shared to meet the needs of all.  None among us created this abundance and no one of us has a right to claim it for our exclusive personal benefit.

Money, which is basically a system of accounting, is only a tool useful in facilitating human exchanges beneficial to people and nature. To use financial results as the bottom line indicator of economic performance makes no sense and leads to disastrous results.

Illusions of the Money World

Ignoring the reality that money in itself is nothing but a number, the institutions of money have created a fantasy world economy grounded in a grand illusion that money is real wealth and that making money creates real wealth to the benefit of all.

Since financial logic favors current returns over future returns and values natural systems only for the financial return they generate, it can lead to dangerously myopic short-term thinking. Here are three examples:

1. Money in the bank is more valuable than trees in the ground. Some years ago the minister who managed Malaysia’s forests explained to me why Malaysia should clear cut its forests and sell the timber. The interest from the sale would grow faster in the bank than the trees grow in the forest. I imagined a lifeless Malaysian landscape populated only by banks housing computers faithfully calculating the interest payments on Malaysia’s savings deposits.
2. Financial bubbles create wealth. A 1996 article in Foreign Affairs, “Securities: The New World Wealth Machine” argued that the key to wealth creation  is no longer the production of real goods and services, but rather the inflation of financial bubbles based on securitized assets. The argument was so absurd I at first thought the article was a joke. It wasn’t. The article circulated widely on Wall Street and reportedly helped inspire the mortgage securitization frenzy that crashed the economy in 2008.
3. Your fishery collapsed? No problem. A1997 article in the culinary section of The New York Times urged readers not to worry about the collapse of Atlantic fisheries, because abundant supplies of delicious fish were being flown in each day from Chile and Thailand and were even cheaper than local varieties because of cheap labor. No mention of a global decline in fish stocks as the number of hungry mouths in the world continues to grow.

Since it evaluates all decisions based on financial returns to people who already have money, financial logic also assures that whatever remains of Earth’s natural wealth will be controlled by the 1%, who are looking for the right moment to make a quick profit from a speculative sale.

Serious change in the relationship between humans and nature begins with the commitment to a new bottom line that recognizes we humans are living beings and that converting Earth’s living capital into financial assets in the accounts of the 1% in the belief this enriches us all is a suicidal act of collective delusion.

“How can we allocate Earth’s natural resources to maximize financial return?” is the wrong question. In the real world of Earth Community the operant question is, “How do we best meet our human needs in a way that maintains or enhances the health and vitality of the natural systems on which we depend?” We do well to answer that question by asking “What would nature do?” or more specifically “What does the biosphere do?”

Life and Earth Community

The biosphere, Earth’s extraordinary interconnected layer of life, is an exquisitely complex planetary-scale fractal structure comprised of countless trillions of individual organisms—each of which depends on and contributes to the life of the whole. It provides a natural systems model for a New Economy with the capacity to meet the needs of Earth’s seven billion humans, bring our species into balance with Earth’s living systems, and create truly democratic societies.

Earth’s biosphere, the product of three and a half billion years of trial and error learning, is global in scale yet truly local everywhere and organizes from the bottom up. Continuously repurposing and recycling; nothing is wasted. These system characteristics give it an extraordinary capacity to adapt to local conditions and to optimize the local sustainable capture, exchange, storage, and recycling of energy, water, and nutrients—the key to its impressive resilience and productivity. It meets the needs of all the world’s living organisms without the equivalent of money, global corporations, any central authority, or the climate destabilizing use of fossil fuels.

Because each local subsystem balances its consumption and reproduction with local resource availability, the global system maintains a healthy, dynamic balance with Earth’s total water, energy, and nutrient resources.

Providing for our human needs while bringing ourselves into balance with our living home in space depends on creating a New Economy that aligns and works in symbiotic partnership with the biosphere’s structure and dynamics to optimize the health and well-being of all. This economy would consist of a planetary system of resilient, locally rooted, self-reliant bio-regional economies comprised of human-scale, locally-owned enterprises that work in symbiotic partnership with their individual local ecosystems to meet local needs with local resources. As each local economy comes into balance with its own place on Earth, the global economy will, in turn, come into balance with Earth.

This system would place decisions regarding Earth’s care in the hands of people who depend for their livelihoods and those of their children for generations to come on the generative capacity of their local natural systems. This creates direct and a natural incentive to assure the continuing good health and productivity of these systems. Either people maintain the productivity of their local fisheries or face the prospect of doing without.

Local people will naturally assess the performance of their local economies by the outcomes they actually want using living indicators of the health and vitality of local people, communities, and natural systems. One model might be the Gross National Happiness indicators developed and used by the nation of Bhutan as the basis for its economic policy making.

The transition to a new economy needs the support of the frameworks and tools of new economics discipline that begins not with money, markets, and pricing, but rather the system structure and dynamics of Earth’s biosphere.  Creating such an economics was the original intention of ecological economics before it become distracted by a futile effort to gain respectability among mainstream economists. The appropriate goal of those devoted to creating a new ecologically grounded economics should be to gain the attention of real world policy makers and politically active citizens.

Rights of Earth Mother

The transition from treating Earth as a commodity to treating her as a sacred being with inalienable rights begins in our minds as we embrace a new story of our true human nature and our place in the grand scheme of creation. Education, the arts, and religion all have critical roles. The needed new story is emerging and gaining traction as we experience a spreading spiritual awakening grounded in a cosmology of the integral spirit affirmed by the wisdom of indigenous peoples, the teachings of the religious mystics, and the findings of quantum physics and the new biology.

The work of revising our legal frameworks is also underway backed by a global social movement devoted to gaining legal recognition for the inalienable rights of nature. Presumptuous though it may be for us humans to grant rights to our sacred Earth Mother, it is a necessary step in redefining our human relationship with her.

Those who live by the logic of finance will surely oppose efforts to grant rights to nature on the ground that it conflicts with the natural rights and interests of the human individual. In reality, the presumed conflict is only another example of the distortions created by myopic money world illusions. In the real world, the rights and interests of nature align remarkably well with the rights and interests of future human generations.

The real conflict is not between humans and nature. It is between current and future human generations. When the actions of current generations reduce or destroy the generative capacity of Earth’s natural living systems for a quick financial return or gratuitous shot of material gratification, we do not borrow from future generations. We steal from them. Because of the profound implications for their well-being, this may be the ultimate crime against humanity. We are just beginning to realize it may as well be a crime against creation.

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Given current environmental politics and the record of previous UN environmental summits there is little prospect that Rio+20 will produce an international agreement of substance to guide us to a just and sustainable human future. We can, however, consider it a victory for people and nature if proposals by Wall Street interests seeking to advance the commodification and financialization of nature are clearly and publically rejected and the call for a new framework based on recognition of the rights of nature and acceptance of our moral obligation to our scared Earth Mother gains further traction.

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Dr. David Korten (livingeconomiesforum.org) is the author of Agenda for a New Economy, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, president of the Living Economies Forum, and a member of the Club of Rome. He holds MBA and PhD degrees from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and served on the faculty of the Harvard Business School.

The new “Rights of Nature: Planting Seeds of Real Change” report

The following post was collaboratively written by Shannon Biggs, Kylie Nealis and Megan Devlin.

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Rights of Nature Advocates in Rio

Global Exchange’s Shannon Biggs is on the ground in Brazil this week for the Rio +20 Earth Summit to present our new report, “Rights of Nature: Planting the Seeds of Real Change” and to promote the rights of nature movement alongside allies.

The new “Rights of Nature: Planting Seeds of Real Change”  report directly challenges Rio +20’s Green Economy capitalism and examines the power and possibility and logic of a rights-based framework.

‘Rights of Nature’ is a movement capable of actually changing culture and law to institute new economies based on community values and Earth rights. The report explores how recognizing Rights for Nature provides an alternative cultural and legal framework to the official corporate-led ‘Green (or Greed) Economy’ agenda being put forward by the United Nations.

Shannon Biggs (far right) joins fellow members of the Global Alliance in Rio.

If adopted, the agenda of  Rio +20 will drive nature further into the global marketplace by “defining” (in economic terms) what  the Earth “does” for humans,  called “ecosystem services.” Proponents of this scheme to put a price on soil, forests, and fresh water believe that putting a price on the natural world can “save” it.

It is time for new thinking, new direction, and new actions. That’s why climate justice activists, community organizers, indigenous peoples movements and social justice organizations have come together at the Rio+20 to dispel the belief that the earth “belongs” to humans.

Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth

Ceremonial signing of the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth

On Sunday June 17 allies participated in a ceremonial signing of a so-called Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.

The Universal Declaration defines legal rights for ecosystems “to exist, flourish and regenerate their natural capacities.” This is just one demand of the Rights of Nature movement, which challenges the idea embedded within most laws that nature is seen solely as property.

While not asking to stop development entirely, recognizing legal rights for nature requires that new growth practices do not interfere with the existence and vitality of ecosystems. The idea of ‘living well’ as opposed to ‘living more’ is a key piece of the movement for nature’s rights.

Inside Peek at the New Report on Rights of Nature

The report – Rights of Nature: Planting Seeds of Real Change  features visionary thinkers such as Maude Barlow, Vandana Shiva, Thomas B.K. Goldtooth, Pablo Solon, Cormac Cullinan, Mari Margil and others who address questions like:

What would it look like to truly take on the root causes of climate change and put forward a system that places humankind in living balance with the carrying capacity of the Earth’s systems?

If we are to truly reconnect within the system of creation, we must also reawaken our own humanity and love for Mother Earth and act as if what we do next matters. Because it does.

TAKE ACTION!

• Read and download the report here.
• Help Global Exchange engage youth in the movement for nature’s rights. Vote for us to win $5,000 for a Rights of Nature youth summit!
• Stay tuned for more updates from Rio +20 right here on our People to People blog.
  
• Check out pictures from Rio+20 Earth Summit on our Facebook page.
  

Should a river have the right to flow? Do trees have the right to grow? What does it mean to recognize the inherent rights of nature and how different would our world look if we did? These are just a few of many questions youth will come together to discuss this summer at our Rights of Nature Youth Summit — with your help.

Last week, the Community Rights Program entered the “Doing GOOD This Summer” challenge for a chance to win $5,000 to create social and environmental change. But here’s the catch — only the idea with the highest number of votes can win. We need your vote to make our “good” vision a reality.

Today’s youth must bare the future consequences of our current approaches to protecting and conserving the planet’s resources. Young people, who have been collectively termed The “Waking Up” Generation, have a unique potential to do just that: be strong advocates for nature’s well-being and wake everyone else up to a rights-based framework that is necessary to ensure a just future for the earth. We must strive for truly sustainable development and laws that respect nature, instead of exploiting it, for market-based financial benefits. It is up to the younger generation to move this vision forward.

Our proposal is to host a Rights of Nature Youth Summit that gives young people the tools to initiate campaigns in their communities that will protect the environment and assert their democratic power. We will introduce youth to a new rights-based framework of organizing that more than 140 communities across the U.S. have adopted in order to assert their rights to local self-governance and prohibit unwanted corporate activity where they live.

Help Global Exchange start the youth movement with your VOTE for our proposal and the chance to win $5,000 for a Rights of Nature Youth Summit: http://goodsummer.maker.good.is/projects/Rights-of-Nature

Youth will learn about the emerging global movement of Rights of Nature and how recognizing legal rights for nature provides us with tools for protecting the environment. By exploring the concepts of community and nature’s rights, law and democracy, participants can begin to recognize the inherent rights of nature, understand how to apply these new ideas to their local communities and strategize ways to assert their self-governing rights over corporations.

Ideally, the Youth Summit would be held in a community meeting space that also has an on-site ropes course. We would begin with team-building exercises at the ropes course in order to begin building the people-to-people relationships that are central to rights-based work. Through experiential learning, youth will participate in a combination of interactive exercises and sessions that incorporate learning pieces of rights-based organizing, the history of corporate power, the limits of current environmental regulatory law, and what the movement for communities and nature’s rights currently looks like.

Our goal is to create a space where youth can lead discussions on how they can use Rights of Nature as a tool for protecting their local environments and generate ideas and action plans for how they can engage in Rights of Nature work after the summit — and personalize it for their own communities.

Vote today! Voting is open now through Friday, June 29 at 12:00 PM (PDT). Spread the word to friends, colleagues, allies and other networks to keep the energy going around this exciting opportunity for Global Exchange to empower youth about how to create a more sustainable future!

If you’re on social media, consider posting the following:

• Twitter: VOTE to help @globalexchange win $5,000 for a Rights of Nature Youth Summit – http://goodsummer.maker.good.is/projects/Rights-of-Nature

• Facebook: What does it mean to give rights to nature, and how different would our world look like if we did? Help @Global Exchange win $5,000 to host a youth summit to move this vision forward. Vote NOW – http://goodsummer.maker.good.is/projects/Rights-of-Nature

• Join the public Facebook event and invite your friends!

P.S. Check back next week for the launch of our newest report, Rights of Nature: Planting the Seeds of Change

(Here’s a taste of what’s in the report. The full report will be released online following the Rio+20 Conference.)

Leading up to the Rio Summit on June 18th, Global Exchange is joining a growing number of online activists to storm the web via Twitter to demand an end to fossil fuel subsidies.

This online action is organized by our friends at 350.org and you too can take part. Here’s more about the Twitter Storm, from 350.org:

A twitter storm is brewing. This June, world leaders will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the UN’s Rio+20 Conference on the environment. Tweet #endfossilfuelsubsidies on June 18th to demand that they end fossil fuel subsidies now!

While we deliver the results of our fossil fuel subsidies petition offline, we’ll be organizing a simultaneous online mobilization to really drive home the point. Our goal is to deliver tens of thousands of messages to world leaders so they know we demand action—and if we get enough support, we might even hit the Guinness World Record for the “most widespread social network message in 24 hours.” To top it off, we’ll be projecting tweets with #endfossilfuelsubsidies in iconic public spaces in the real world, both in Rio and in capital cities around the globe.

Twitter connects world leaders, opinion makers, and regular activists all on one network. If we work together and aim high, we can make sure the right people see and hear this grassroots uprising. We don’t believe the internet will save the world—we believe that people will. Now let’s use this digital bullhorn to make some noise.

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TAKE ACTION: JOIN THE TWITTER STORM JUNE 18th!

• Join the Facebook event for highlights and updates. Then invite your friends!
• Prefer email or want to get more involved? Join their Social Media Team for updates, tips, and deeper engagement.
• 350.org has sample tweets, a tweet celebs tool, shareable graphics, and more!

If you take part in this Twitter Storm, remember to check the “Find your local time” page first to identify the correct time for you to send your tweets out.

Global Exchange is excited to take part in 350.org’s Twitter Storm. Will you join us?

–Audrey Shenandoah, Clan Mother of the Onodaga Nation.

June 20th-22nd, 2012 Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

If you’re old enough to recall, think back to 1992: the year of the original Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Way back then—in the days before space-age smart-phones, when newspapers were delivered daily by a kid on a bike, and college tuition was within reach for the working class—the human race was concerned about what we were doing to the planet. The attention of a hopeful world was focused on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for a historic gathering of nations, tasked with developing solutions for the emerging crisis of climate change, environmental degradation and increasing poverty.

There, under the watchful gaze of Corcovado’s Cristo, the United Nations Earth Summit took place.  Leaders gathered in the spirit of international cooperation: promises were made, treaties and accords were signed, protocols were developed. The term “sustainable development” rang out as the mantra ushering in a new era for  “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Countries fell like dominos to the theory that a growing economy led by big business benefits the poor, and that once developed, countries could afford to protect the environment.

Students (like me) read about it in school, heaving a collegiate sigh of relief at a rather-unfathomable crisis averted, and took national pride in the leadership role we had played in such a monumental global undertaking.

Now fast-forward 20 years.  Commitments made at the Rio Earth Summit have long since been broken.  Turns out a “rising tide” absolutely does NOT lift all boats, and true environmental protection cannot be achieved alongside a corporate-led model of unlimited economic growth. As proof of that fact, we are rapidly approaching the tipping point—a 4º C rise in temperature, which will threaten everything we know about life on the only planet we call home.

Faith in the UN as a global “justice league” has all but been shattered.  Critiques range from calling out the UN as a flaccid institution to the more cynical view that it has been co-opted, branded and sponsored by corporations.

So why should we care about the Rio+20 (years) Earth Summit this June? 

For many activists currently packing their bags for Rio, the goal is to protest the “Green Economy”, the name given to the primary agenda for the Rio + 20 negotiators. What could be wrong with a Green Economy, you may ask? Haven’t environmental activists been promoting such a thing for years?

The Green Economy put forward by the United Nations Environment Program (nicknamed the “Greed Economy” by many) is about promoting the idea that we can only “save” nature by putting a price tag on what nature “does” for us. Proponents call it “ecosystem services” and from forests generating the air you breathe to the decomposition process resulting in the ground you walk upon, everything has its price, and corporations are wringing their hands with anticipation of what the Greed Economy could do for profit margins.

But the human connection to the rest of our living system is not contained in the calculation of the “flow of value to human societies.” Our Earth’s value is not merely that which serves people.  You cannot put a dollar value on what is truly lost when island nations like the Maldives succumb to the rising tides of climate change, or when the seas themselves are void of fish—both of which are projected to occur in the next 50-100 years.  So how is it possible to put a price on the system that governs all life, or break down an ecosystem into units of “service” and to what end?

Confronting the Greed Economy: The Rights of Nature goes to Rio

Rights of Nature: Planting Seeds of Real Change report being released for Rio+20

Those of us working on the rights-of-nature framework are seeking to reconnect humanity with the rest of species. We seek to change human law that can only “see” nature as a thing — separate and apart from us, property to be owned and destroyed at will. We seek to change the law because our own salvation can only come from a cultural mindset enforced by an earth jurisprudence that we are a part of nature.

Global Exchange and our partners at the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN), a growing network we co-founded, don’t believe putting a price on nature is the path to protecting nature, and in fact is a faster-track to privatizing and commodifying nature.  But we’re not showing up just to stand up for what we’re against, but to articulate what we’re for, and to build the movement for Rights for Nature. We’ll be blogging from Rio, convening strategy meetings with new allies, talking with media and unveiling our new report at a special panel and signing ceremony for the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.

Rights of Nature Speakers:

·Nnimmo Bassey – Environmental Rights Action / Friends of the Earth, Nigeria

· Shannon Biggs – Global Exchange, USA

· Cormac Cullinan – EnAct International, South Africa

· Tom Goldtooth – Indigenous Environmental Network, USA

· Natalia Greene – Fundación Pachamama, Ecuador

· Osprey Orielle Lake – Women’s Earth and Climate Caucus

· Linda Sheehan – Earth Law Center, USA

· Dr. Vandana Shiva – Navdanya, India

· Pablo Solon – Focus on the Global South, Former Ambassador to the UN, Bolivia

The report directly confronts the notion of the Gree(d)n Economy of course, and is full of examples from around the world.  But it is also a call out about what a true rights of nature framework would offer the world—and includes examples and updates of the growth of this movement, and new laws taking hold. And lastly, the report asks: if nature had rights, how different would our organizing look around water, Tar Sands extraction and Indigenous rights? And what would the economy look like?  Contributors to the report include Dr. Vandana Shiva, Pablo Solon, Tom B.K. Goldtooth, Mari Margil and many others.

The report, Rights of Nature: Planting Seeds of Real Change will be available for free download from our website on June 15. Until then, we’ve selected two chapters for free preview and download now:

• Pablo Solon: At the crossroads between green economy and rights of nature (.pdf)
• Tom B.K. Goldtooth: Indigenous Sovereignty, “Green” Economy and the Rights of Mother Earth (.pdf)

Our work at Global Exchange with our partners at CELDF  is to assist communities, native tribes, activists, and governments put these ideas into law.  Confronting the Greed Economy alone won’t get us where we want to go—we’ve got to move beyond that, and fast.

Building a movement capable of actually changing culture and law to institute new economies based on community values and Earth rights is the civil rights struggle of our time.  Changing the structure of law and shifting our culture toward a new way of living in balance with nature is the hardest work imaginable. But if we are really to change the course of humanity, we must be bold and believe we are able and strategic enough to know that building a real movement is not about ownership of an idea, but working together in solidarity toward a common goal in myriad ways.

• For more information on Global Exchange’s Community Rights Program and our international work advocating for Rights of Nature, please visit our website.

• For a full calendar of Rights of Nature events at the upcoming Rio+20 Earth Summit, go here.

• The Community Rights Program has entered a contest to win $5,000 towards advancing our work around engaging youth in the Rights of Nature movement! Please vote for our project on the Doing Good This Summer website. Voting begins Friday June 8th at 12pm and ends Friday June 29th at 12pm.

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Shannon Biggs is the Director of the Community Rights program at Global Exchange. She recently co-authored two books, Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grass Roots and The Rights of Nature. Her current work focuses on assisting communities confronted by corporate harms to enact binding laws that place the rights of communities and nature above the claimed legal “rights” of corporations.

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.”

Critiquing the focus on corporate ‘Green Economy’ evident in the march to Rio documents and planning, Via states:

“Today the “greening of the economy” pushed forward in the run-up to Rio+20 is based on the same logic and mechanisms that are destroying the planet and keeping people hungry. For instance, it seeks to incorporate aspects of the failed “green revolution” in a broader manner in order to ensure the needs of the industrial sectors of production, such as promoting the uniformity of seeds, patented seeds by corporation, genetically modified seeds, etc.

The capitalist economy, based on the over-exploitation of natural resources and human beings, will never become “green.” It is based on limitless growth in a planet that has reached its limits and on the commoditization of the remaining natural resources that have until now remained un-priced or in control of the public sector.

In this period of financial crisis, global capitalism seeks new forms of accumulation. It is during these periods of crisis in which capitalism can most accumulate. Today, it is the territories and the commons which are the main target of capital. As such, the green economy is nothing more than a green mask for capitalism. It is also a new mechanism to appropriate our forests, rivers, land… of our territories!

Since last year’s preparatory meetings towards Rio+20, agriculture has been cited as one of the causes of climate change. Yet no distinction is made in the official negotiations between industrial and peasant agriculture, and no explicit difference between their effects on poverty, climate and other social issues we face.

The “green economy” is marketed as a way to implement sustainable development for those countries which continue to experience high and disproportionate levels of poverty, hunger and misery. In reality, what is proposed is another phase of what we identify as “green structural adjustment programs” which seek to align and re-order the national markets and regulations to submit to the fast incoming “green capitalism”.

Investment capital now seeks new markets through the “green economy”; securing the natural resources of the world as primary inputs and commodities for industrial production, as carbon sinks or even for speculation. This is being demonstrated by increasing land grabs globally, for crop production for both export and agrofuels. New proposals such as “climate smart” agriculture, which calls for the “sustainable intensification” of agriculture, also embody the goal of corporations and agri-business to over exploit the earth while labeling it “green”, and making peasants dependent on high-cost seeds and inputs. New generations of polluting permits are issued for the industrial sector, especially those found in developed countries, such as what is expected from programs such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD++) and other environmental services schemes.

The green economy seeks to ensure that the ecological and biological systems of our planet remain at the service of capitalism, by the intense use of various forms of biotechnologies, synthetic technologies and geo-engineering. GMO’s and biotechnology are key parts of the industrial agriculture promoted within the framework of “green economy”.

The promotion of the green economy includes calls for the full implementation of the WTO Doha Round, the elimination of all trade barriers to incoming “green solutions,” the financing and support of financial institutions such as the World Bank and projects such as US-AID programs, and the continued legitimization of the international institutions that serve to perpetuate and promote global capitalism.

In April 2011 Global Exchange, in collaboration with the Council of Canadians and Fundacion Pachamama, released a book called The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, which featured a chapter by then-Ambassador to the UN for Bolivia, Pablo Solon, titled ‘The Green Economy Versus the Rights of Mother Earth’. In it, he states,

“…From the point of view of these proponents of the green economy, in order to re-establish equilibrium with Nature, we must assign an economic value to the environmental “services” nature provides. An underlying assumption is only that which can be owned and profited from deserves stewardship.”

“…We are facing a debate in the United Nations among those that believe we need to strengthen the capitalist logic as it related to Nature, and others that suggest we should recognize the Rights of Nature. These are two very different conceptions. One advocates the path of the market, and the other the past of recognizing and respecting the larger system of the planet Earth on which we all live. The future of humans and Nature depends on the path humanity chooses.”

Global Exchange will be on the ground in Rio – promoting the Rights of Nature. Read more about the Community Rights Campaign here and join Via Campesina in the Call to Action. They:

… declare the week of June 5th, as a major world week in defense of the environment and against transnational corporations and invite everyone across the world to mobilize:

•    Defend sustainable peasant agriculture;
•    Occupy land for the production of agroecological and non-market dominated food;
•    Reclaim and exchange native seeds;
•    Protest against Exchange and Marketing Board offices and call for an end to speculative markets on commodities and land;
•    Hold local assemblies of People Affected by Capitalism;
•    Dream of a different world and create it!!

Global Exchange stands with Via Campesina to ‘GLOBALIZE THE STRUGGLE!! GLOBALIZE HOPE!!!’

• Live in the Bay Area and want to learn more about the call for the Rights of Mother Earth at Rio+20? Attend the upcoming Rights of Nature seminar hosted by the Women’s Earth and Climate Caucus in Marin County April 13th-14th.