(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.

Global Exchange’s Community Rights program director Shannon Biggs returns from the UN Climate conference in South Africa where she, along with climate justice advocates including former Bolivian Ambassador to the UN, Pablo Solon, Indigenous leader Tom Goldtooth, South Durban community activist Desmond D’sa and international colleagues from the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature held a series of activities in Durban to advance the Rights of Nature as an alternative framework to the corporate-led agenda of the COP 17 and the global economic system now being called environmental (or climate) apartheid.

South African civil society leader Desmond D’Sa participates in mass disruption of climate negotiations as negotiators fail to reach agreement. Photo Credit: Project Survival Media.

Accompanied by a cynical shrug, “Durban-shmurban,” sums up the sentiments of those who have long given up hope that the best and brightest (or the 1% and corrupted) among this league of nations could ever unite to solve the human-induced climate crisis. After all, other than vowing to drive less and become greener consumers, the grand scale and technical scope of reducing atmospheric greenhouse gasses is beyond the rest of us to solve.

For those paying attention, including thousands of NGOs who came to South Africa to play a role in preventing the worst outcomes of the COP 17 (or to protest the process itself), it’s been alliteratively billed as the “Durban Disaster,” following previous UNFCCC conferences: 2010’s “Catastrophe in Cancun” and 2009’s  “No-penhagen” in Denmark.

So why should anyone pay attention to what happened at the UN climate talks? The failure of international leaders to come to agreement in Durban South Africa sounds like business as usual, and it is—but make no mistake: officially choosing inaction now is a guaranteed death sentence for millions of people and ecosystems.  If the lesson of Durban is that climate change is the symptom, and not the problem, this may be our game-changing call to action.

First, the bad news

On the final scheduled day of negotiations in Durban, the UNFCCC stunned even seasoned observers with a plan tantamount to genocide. Country emissions targets were dropped far below what science dictates; loopholes for the worst offenders to avoid their commitments, and most critically, most decisions were put off until 2020.

Rights of Nature activists at press conference (L-R Desmond D'Sa, Tom Goldtooth, Shannon Biggs, Natalia Greene, Cormac Cullinan and Pablo Solon

As environmental activist Nnimmo Bassey explained, “Delaying real action until 2020 is a crime of global proportions. An increase in global temperatures of 4 degrees Celsius, permitted under this plan, is a death sentence for Africa, Small Island States, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide. This summit has amplified climate apartheid, whereby the richest 1% of the world have decided that it is acceptable to sacrifice the 99%.

Apartheid is the Afrikaans word for “apartness,” and applied to the climate and ecosystems, it begins to get at what is behind the DNA-level failure of the UN’s COP process to achieve its stated goal of reducing greenhouse emissions.  Climate change is merely a byproduct of treating nature as human property (and therefore apart from us), to be destroyed at will. Our global economic system is property-based and driven by a value system of “endless more.”

As Pablo Solon stated at a press conference hosted by Global Exchange: “We can throw our garbage to the air and nothing happens. But we’re all part of one system, and the atmosphere is part of that system.   We have to respect the natural laws of this system. Because we have broken the vital cycle of carbon, its not only a matter of how big immediate reductions are, but how we change our relationship with nature.”

• Read results of exclusive, closed meetings in Durban here
• Global Exchange Human Rights Award winner Pablo Solon discusses outcome on DemocracyNow!

Occupying climate negotiations in the ICC official space.

Following news of the outcome, credentialed protesters gathered and filled the halls, stairwells and lobby of the ICC (official space).  When UN Security began to remove the activists, Anne Petermann, executive director of the Global Justice Ecology Project, sat down. “If meaningful action on climate change is to happen, it will need to happen from the bottom up,” she said. “The action I took today was to remind us all of the power of taking action into our own hands. With the failure of states to provide human leadership, and the corporate capture of the United Nations process, direct action by the ninety-nine percent is the only avenue we have left.” For more, click here.

Redefining the problem is a game changer.

As long as it was accepted that climate change is the problem, it made a lot of sense to turn to international institutions like the UN as the driver for change.  This has tethered much activism to seeking concessions in a rigged game of false solutions, because the UNFCC is based not on the root causes of environmental exploitation—but ‘market fixes’ to the same corporate-led economic model and ‘endless-more’ value system that have driven us to the cliff’s edge.

Kudzu vine

Like the slow strangulation of a creeping kudzu vine, our activism has been constrained to a smaller and smaller patch of sunlight, options and regulatory schemes that weren’t even of our design. In this sense, the utter failure of Durban can be quite freeing—if we chose it—because it means we can actually address root causes of climate change, chiefly, our cultural and legal traditions of dominating the Earth for profit.

Occupy is the other game changer.

We Are Not Asking, We Are Demanding

Occupiers and revolutionaries from Egypt to Wall Street and around the world have woken up millions of the disillusioned, and inspired them to find their own voice, their own power. Once awakened, we will seize this moment and shift the system itself that places corporate interests above our shared values of justice, equality, good jobs, healthy resilient vibrant communities and ecosystems.  In Durban, Anne Petermann and others sat down to remind us that we the 99% do have the power to change the rules. We can chose another way if we believe we can.

The Rights of Nature offers a platform for action to challenge the market-based approach that dominates the UN COP process.  “Why bring RON to climate change conference?” Pablo Solon was asked,  “Because if we are going to address climate change, we must address the issue of a new relationship between humans and nature. Its not just a problem with how many particles of CO2 emissions, it’s a problem of why does this happen?”

Where do we go from here? The Good news

A new framework for global action based on the needs of people and the planet already exists. The People’s Accord and the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth are key outcomes of the 2010 People’s Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, hosted by Bolivia and led by Indigenous communities and civil society. For more on this from the perspective of Durban see CJN! media release.

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 that we are a part of nature. Such a fundamental shift will require new laws that enforce and enable those cultural values.

•  Watch our Durban rights of nature press conference here
• Read our Durban Press release for rights of nature here

A People’s call to action, local national and global

While we take from nature the strength of diversity, we can remain diverse while uniting around the rules set forth by Mother Earth. We have in the past found solace strength and cohesion in broad strokes alignment with peasant farmers, landless workers, unions, Indigenous and non-indigenous communities.  That’s not going to be easy, but there is a lot of common ground.  For example, on the issue of rights of nature versus Indigenous rights, there are many different opinions among native traditions.  But there is tremendous Indigenous support for changing the dominant culture, and the fossil fuel economy that UNFCC is based on.

Shannon Biggs with Tom Goldtooth at the Global Day of Action in Durban

As Indigenous leader Tom Goldtooth says, “Our earth is our Mother, creator of everything, including two-legged people. Life as we know it is changing, we can no longer ignore the evidence, and it is our responsibility to be caretakers, guardians of our Mother. New economies need to be governed by the absolute carrying capacity of Mother Earth. More equitable, self-sustaining communities, with rights and respect.”

• For more see Council of Canadian’s System Change Not Climate Change “Rights of Nature” portal

The United Nations is not going anywhere, but our messaging to the UNFCCC might change (though it is worth saying that next year’s conference has been scheduled in the zero-tolerance-for-protesting capitol of Qatar).

From Pablo Solon: “Well, if there is no pressure from civil society, there won’t be the possibility to have any kind of agreement that is in some makes a difference. If you want to change the system, there has to be a huge movement developed outside of the main structures. We must open the discussion. We have a mandate that the Rights of Nature must be part of the discussion in climate negotiations.”

At the national level, in addition to Ecuador and Bolivia who have passed laws recognizing rights of nature, as many as half a dozen countries are working with the Global Alliance on the Rights of Nature and are seriously considering rights of nature laws, and how Constitutional provisions, like Ecuador’s could be transformational and provide new ways to protect ecosystems. Some of those concersations were moved forward in Durban.  They tell us that creating a vibrant global civil society movement of campesinos, workers, unions, Indigenous and non Indigenous communities, women’s movements, peace, climate and social justice activists can support their efforts at changing laws to reflect a new relationship with the Earth.

Oil refinery in South Durban

At the community level, campaigning around climate change and even climate justice is often hard. After all, we cannot feel the burden of atmosphere weighted by carbon storage or truly know where in the world accumulations of CO2 were manufactured.  But we can feel the burden of society’s inventions that leave polluted rivers, cancer clusters, poverty, and tons of carbon emissions in their wake.

From the oil refinery fence line in South Durban, the gathering of international experts offers no solutions on the ground. Desmond D’Sa lives and works in Durban South Africa, the dirtiest city in South Africa, and ironically, host city to the COP 17. There, he is the director of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), an environmental justice network. Over 300 toxic industrial plants — including two oil refineries — operate in and around the city, particularly concentrated in the neighborhoods of south Durban, an area particularly disadvantaged by the legacy of apartheid. Explosions, accidents, spills, and other toxic exposures are part of daily life there, and the reason why Desmond has begun to introduce the idea of rights for nature and residents in South Durban.

• See the toxic tour of South Durban, including the first ever rights of nature community action in South Africa.
• For more on Durban and Desmond, read Shannon Biggs’ article in Tikkun ‘A community perspective on rights of nature’

As a rights-based organizer in California, I, along with my legal and organizing partners at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) assist communities to pass groundbreaking new laws that place the rights of residents and nature above the interests of corporations.

We’ve often heard the takeaway from the COP processes in Copenhagen and Cancun is that the same corporate-led system that created climate change cannot be part of the solution. From Durban, we add that a relationship of apartness with the system governing our wellbeing cannot continue. The lessons from Cochabamba and Occupy Everywhere are that we have an alterntative vision, and we have the power to make it real.  To change the course of humanity, we must be bold enough to believe we are capable, and strategic enough to know how to use the ecological principle of unity of diversity to work in solidarity in myriad ways.

Download the report: Does Nature have rights? Transforming grassroots organizing to protect people and the planet. This report calls for action from the community-level to the U.N., and offers case studies of legal changes already underway in favor the Rights of Nature.

More GRITtv

The all-day interactive dialogue, sponsored by the Plurinational State of Bolivia, was packed with global UN delegates. In his opening remarks, Bolivian Ambassador to the UN (and 2011 Global Exchange Honoree), Pablo Solon said,

“Humanity finds itself at a crossroads: Why should we only respect the laws of human beings and not those of nature? Why do we call the person who kills his neighbor a criminal, but not he who extinguishes a species or contaminates a river? Why do we judge the life of human beings with parameters different from those that guide the life of the system as a whole if all of us, absolutely all of us, rely on the life of the Earth System? Is there no contradiction in recognizing only the rights of the human part of this system while all the rest of the system is reduced to a source of resources and raw materials – in other words, a business opportunity?”

Leading civil society thinkers, activists Martin Khor, Vandana Shiva, Cormac Cullinan and others spoke about the need to promote a holistic approach to sustainable development in harmony with nature. Scientists also shared their national experiences on criteria and indicators for measuring sustainable development in harmony with nature.

This dialogue stands as the first step toward what many believe will culminate in the adoption of the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, and as Maude Barlow, water activist and Chairperson for the Council of Canadians says, history will serve as “a companion piece to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as one of the guiding covenants of our time.”

The Council of Canadians, Global Exchange, and the Fundacion Pachamama also released our book The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Copies were made available to all UN missions.

Contact Global Exchange for your own copy of the book: Rights of Nature. Or make a donation of $50 or more to Global Exchange, and received your own signed copy of the book.

Global Exchange is excited for the release of a new book next week, Rights of Nature: Making a Case for the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, co-developed by Global Exchange, the Council of Canadians, and Fundacion Pachamama. This revolutionary new book reveals the path of a movement that is driving the cultural and legal shift that is necessary to transform our human relationship with nature away from being property-based and towards a rights-based model of balance. The book gathers the unique wisdom of indigenous cultures, scientists, environmental activists, lawyers, and small farmers to make a case for how and why humans must work to change our current structures of law to recognize that nature has inherent rights.

New Book: Rights of Nature

The question of Rights for Mother Earth will be introduced to the United Nations on April 20^th in New York during a session on ‘Harmony with Nature’.  Put forward by Bolivia, it is the first step toward what many believe will culminate in the adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth in the months to come. At the U.N., Speakers including Dr. Vandana Shiva, Maude Barlow, Cormac Cullinan, Martin Kohr, Ambassador Pablo Solon, among others, will be making a case for nature’s rights. A companion piece for the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, this emerging Declaration – backed by enforceable laws around the world – seeks to wholly redefine our human relationship with all other species from one of dominance to one of harmony.

Please join us for two very special book launch events around the Rights of Nature coming up this month, in New York and in San Francisco. Both events will also feature the launch of the 2^nd edition of Cormac Cullinan’s cutting-edge book, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice. Join esteemed environmental activists and co-authors of the book including Maude Barlow, Bill Twist, Pablo Salon, Vandana Shiva, Cormac Cullinan, and Shannon Biggs for a conversation around the emerging Rights of Nature movement at these East and West coast launches:

New York book launch: Nature Has Rights

• When: Wednesday, April 21^st 6:30-8 p.m.
• Where: CUNY Graduate Center, Proshansky Auditorium, 656 5^th Ave (corner of 34^th street) New York, NY.

San Francisco book launch: Nature Has Rights

• When: Wednesday, April 27th 7:00-9:00 p.m.
• Where: The First Unitarian Universalist Church – located at 1187 Franklin Street (at Geary) San Francisco, CA

Both events are free and open to the public.

For more information or to order a copy of the book:

Contact Kylie Nealis – kylie@globalexchange.org. The book price is $15 including shipping within the US. For international orders email Kylie Nealis – kylie@globalexchange.org for shipping price.