Transcript

The rights of nature: Patricia Siemen at TEDxJacksonville

[Music] some years ago I was working for a not for profit housing Corporation and we were going to build affordable housing for migrant Farm Workers working in South Florida and as we looked at the land that we were going to purchase some people told us that it was an occasional habitat for the endangered Florida scrub jay now I kept walking that land and saying Over My Dead Body is some bird going to stop our building housing for people in need and so several days later when the state inspector came to look at the at the landscape I said to him you know even if the Scrub Jays do Nest here I've been praying that they better not show up today they didn't the housing got built so as a Catholic sister I have spent a good number of my years really working to alleviate human suffering and I didn't realize that I was missing some other other populations I became a lawyer in order to represent underserved people I said populations but I really meant people so several years later I'm in a car and listening to a talk driving across North Carolina and listening to a talk by Thomas Barry and he is describing the incredible ecological devastation happening because of our insatiable Drive of fossil fuels and then he talks about the scarring of the landscape as we consistently extract minerals from the from the earth and what he says next is that the primary cause of this destruction is our human perception that we are separate and not a part of the natural world and that this sense of Separation he said was actually the cause of the environmental crisis and that this environmental crisis was also a spiritual crisis because we have forgotten who we are and we have forgotten that we belong so I can still oh I can still remember the next thing Thomas said to me see to me I was listening to a tape but I really and he said you know I believe that if we had a true Earth democracy and all the other species could vote they would vote us off the planet I nearly drove off the road that was a very shocking idea to me at that time but as I think back I can still feel how the the the the the disturbing impact that Thomas's words had on me and he literally changed my life and so like a seed that germinates Thomas's Concepts that nature had rights to exist in flurry started to take roots in me and from not immediately but because until that time I had never ever thought about the other species remember the scrub J um and so I was totally engaged in a very important work of trying to alleviate human suffering and working for human rights but because of that I was so focused on that I actually ignored the rest of the community and who was missing all of the other beings that are in our neighborhood the trees and the and the plants that do our photosynthesis for us um the the bees and the butterflies and the insects that do our pollination our water all of all of which we can't live without and it just hadn't come to uh recognition in me so um Thomas's words really started to shift my Consciousness and Thomas if you don't know was a priest he was an author a scholar of world religions and and he called himself a geologi because he said he learned from the earth now Thomas is he was heavily influenced by tar de shardan and his core philosophy I would say is twofold number one he would say first of all we all belong to a single emergent community and secondly the perception that we humans think that we're separate from the rest of the natural world again is the cause of so much of our environmental destruction and furthermore Thomas would say that this destruction is is not you know we're not all that conscious about the effects of our behaviors but he said like our legal systems and that's how I got into it as a lawyer that our legal systems actually support that destruction if you do any environmental work you know you have to quote get a permit well that's what our law does it perits permits a lot of legal of environmental destruction and furthermore our economic system and business practices put their primary focus on short-term economic benefit and doesn't and does not look at long-term environmental cost and nor does it really take into consideration that we live on a finite confined Planet not everything is renewable so because we we live kind of in this unconscious way it's almost as though we had Amnesia and that we can't remember who we are and the consequences of our actions and so we keep repeating the same thing and the Earth keeps suffering now when I talk about the earth I mean people too because see most of us think if you're talking about the environment we're not talking about ourselves we're talking about we're all a part of it so I want to say that we absolutely have to continue to care for the wounded and hungry and people who are poor in our neighborhoods and communities but I ex invite us to extend that care to The Wider Community as well our culture reinforces this sense of human superiority and anthropocentrism and our institutions don't teach us that we are actually kin kin genetically and energetically to all other beings on the planet and so that reinforces this sense that we as humans are at the top of this pyramid of supposedly the great circle of life and so it's when we keep ourselves in that position then we cannot actually let ourselves communicate close enough to Nature that we really start caring about it to protect it so this Great Pyramid it reminds me that we often and think of ourselves as though the you know as though the Earth rotates around us not the Sun and so sometimes I I ask myself really was Cernic's wrong so this sense of our illusion of our separation is really very dangerous because it lets us live in a world viw that we we think that the laws of nature natur and even the laws of physics don't apply to us and therefore we can continue our actions of Destruction and we will see and we know but from our head up we know that our Glaciers are melting that the oceans are warming that small island nations are disappearing and we still continue to do the same behavior so it's as though we are antiz and we can't really change so you know it is time for change and a lot not of our indigenous brothers and sisters have been able to maintain their sense of mutuality respect and even reverence for the Earth and for the natural world but for those of us that live in in our Western society and culture it's going to take a major transformation of consciousness of culture and of economics and of legal systems to bring about the change if we're all going to go into the future sustainable so Aldo Leopold taught back in the 1940s that we we live in a single Community he called it the Land Community he was a conservationist and he created he was one of the first people to create a land ethic and he said that this land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include the soils the waters the plants the animals or collectively the land now you will notice that people are missing there see it's so it doesn't mean that the people aren't a part of that but it's it's so embedded in our Consciousness uh he wanted to raise up the rest of the members of the community so he called it the Land Community scientist Steven Harding calls this single home the animate Earth James Lovelock calls it Gaia Thomas Barry called it the Earth community in each of those the the unifying factor is that every being be there's differentiated rights to exist and to flourish now what are these rights look like well Thomas would say that the that the core rights of nature are three-fold we have the right to exist the right to Habitat and the right to flourish in ever uh ever evolving systems of the Earth process and when we do that we allow our ecosystems for example to become considered centrally as we are establishing sustainable communities and laws of nature will try to shift that sense of property so that we look at it differently and that we can we look at how we buy and sell product property as an object or a commodity and we're going to then give that property protection through guardianship of some way so that that property can't be bought and sold without its interests also being considered we're talking about balance so one of the leading Advocates of Earth democracy is vanana Shiva she's a renowned uh International environmental activist and physicist and she says that that human rights and Earth rights coexist and so if they coexist it's important for us to remember that human rights cannot cancel out the rights of other beings as well now what does this look like fortunately we have models emerging around the world in 2008 Ecuador adopted a constitutional they might adopted an entirely new constitution but in that Constitution they provided constitutional protection to its mountains Waters and land first country in the world to do that so what I'm talking about isn't only Theory it is actually beginning to be actualized and so that got tested in two in a couple years later 2010 and so the Villa kamba river which is at the picture of it here um was being filled in by a road building project and the Court ruled on behalf of the rivers right to flow freely first case in the world and so who was building the road the provincial government they had to take the debris out of the river and change the route of the road so Ecuador inspired many other governments and organizations and so in 2010 Bolivia hosted the conference the world's people's conference on the rights of Mother Earth and climate change um I was privileged to be there when that group of 35,000 people adopted the universal Declaration on the rights of Mother Earth and a couple of years like in the next year Bolivia took that to the United Nations and it's now been debated and some of that language is beginning to show up in its documents and resolutions just last year New Zealand was our second country to give a river legal rights the wanganui river long considered a sacred river by the by the eie Mori tribe and it was given the same rights as a corporation legal personhood with guardians to protect it so if we can have rights there why not here and let's start with the St John's which is so incredibly Cal to the identity of this community and when and let's give it Guardians to return it to its health and its historic flow and quality then let's move on to the itne river and I don't know if you've ever kayaked or paddle that is an incredible River and then the Swan River which is considered the Jewel of the South I work a lot on freshwater Springs let's give rights of nature to our Springs we know that our Waters in Florida are incredible incredibly degrad degradated and so what I want to say to you is that in 2018 Florida has a mandated constitutional revision commission we can work towards bringing bringing a Bill of Rights for water to the State of Florida so the rights of nature the rights of nature the time for it is now because indeed we all hold the fate of the Earth in our hands and I want you to hear the words of the poet Denise lto who so poignantly wrote we have only begun to love the Earth we have only begun to imagine the fullness of Life how could we Tire of hope so much is in Bud thank [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you