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Take five oil change hours12/7/2022 Another said that chemicals leaching from mine prospecting operations had killed off endemic acai and Brazil nut trees in the forest. One woman reported an increase in snake sightings and bites in her riverine community after a dam changed the ecology of the river. Greene is a central figure in the rights of nature movement and played a role in Ecuador’s 2008 constitutional recognition of the rights of nature. Natalia Greene, a quad-lingual Ecuadorian environmentalist and judge with the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, stands near the world’s largest iron ore mine located in Carajas, Brazil. “We want to raise your voices,” she told the men and women seated around them. climate summit in Copenhagen a year earlier. Still, legal systems remain mired in thinking like Bacon’s, and that, he says, has led to the world’s growing ecological peril.īy way of introduction to the Xingu villagers gathered on this humid summer night, Natalia Greene, an Ecuadorian environmentalist, explained that the tribunal had come to take testimony and evaluate violations of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, a document adopted during a 2010 people’s conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia, following a disappointing U.N. Quantum physics shows that the universe is a singular whole composed of many interconnected parts, and Cullinan often compares humanity to one leaf on a tree of life. That logic assumes that human beings are separate from and superior to nature. He is the founder of Cape Town’s oldest environmental law firm and spends most of his time defending the rights of local communities and fighting environmentally destructive projects by invoking conventional environmental protection laws-work that Cullinan calls “pulling babies out of the river,” referring to the story of Moses.īut his real passion-why he is here in Brazil-is “going upstream” to stop “why babies are being thrown into the river in the first place.” For Cullinan, laws around the world are based on a flawed logic that became popular during the Industrial Revolution, perhaps best characterized by Francis Bacon’s late-16th-century notion that nature should be “tortured” or “put on the rack” to reveal her secrets. Credit: Katie SurmaĪn anti-apartheid activist in his youth, Cullinan is now best known as the author of “Wild Law,” a seminal 2002 book championing the rights of nature that has since made him a leading light in that movement. Cormac Cullinan authored a 2002 book championing the rights of nature. One older man, an agroforester, wore black leather shoes, dress pants and a crisp white oxford shirt-noticeable because everything else on the veranda behind the house was lightly powdered with the dry season’s rust-orange dust. Men and women from the Xingu River basin had come long distances from their farms and fishing villages to meet with him and other members of the tribunal. Aside from the passport and travel documents stuffed into his breast pocket, it was hard to tell that he had been traveling for two days straight. In Re: The AmazonĪrriving at the country house in Altamira, Cormac Cullinan felt a shot of adrenaline as evening fell on a thin slice of the Amazon. They would ask questions no one else was really asking, and listen the way no one else was really listening, hoping to change the way the world works. They would meet with Indigenous people and traditional communities whose intimate relationships with the Amazon allowed them to speak on the forest’s behalf. They had come under the banner of the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, promoting a legal movement based on the premise that nature-forests and rivers and wild animals and ecosystems-has inherent legal rights to exist and regenerate, just as humans possess human rights by virtue of their existence.Īnd so these lawyers and justice advocates assembled one hot night in July at a wooden country home down a long red dirt road 30 minutes outside Altamira to hear an audacious case: The Amazon, “a living entity under threat.” The judges would take testimony over 10 days, much like a United Nations fact-finding delegation, and deliver their findings at the 10th Pan-Amazon Social Forum in the provincial city of Belém. The plan was to meet in Altamira, Brazil, and travel 1,000 miles across the northern Amazon as a kind of people’s court.
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