Constituional Rights for Nature: Ecuador Leads the Way!

Papa Imbabura and Mama Cotacachi will have rights, if the new Ecuador Constitution is approved!

A 130 member constitutional committee has prepared a new draft of a constitution that will fundamentally change the way humans relate to nature.  This new document will be voted on on September 28.  If approved, Ecuador will become the first country in the world to determine that nature has inalienable rights protected by law.   Five articles of the constitution are listed in the blogs, Green Change, and Climate and Capitalism.

Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.

Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

Art. 2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.

In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including the ones caused by the exploitation on non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.

Art. 3. The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.

Art. 4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.

The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is prohibited.

Art. 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and form natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.

The environmental services are cannot be appropriated; its production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the State.

The concept that nature itself can possess rights runs counter to the classical liberal theories of government that hold sway throughout much of the West, which view rights as possessed only by individual human beings. But Ecuador is not the first country to propose granting rights to nonhuman entities: Many countries, including the United States, have long held that corporations possess many of the same rights - such as the rights to free expression and to due process - that human beings have.–Green Change.

But, as an editorial in the Los Angeles Times observes, Ecuador’s extension of rights to nature may represent a larger shift in how humans view their place in the world:

“No other country has gone as far as Ecuador in proposing to give trees their day in court, but it certainly is not alone in its recalibration of natural rights. Religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop of Constantinople, have declared that caring for the environment is a spiritual duty. And earlier this year, the Catholic Church updated its list of deadly sins to include polluting the environment.

Ecuador is codifying this shift in sensibility. In some ways, this makes sense for a country whose cultural identity is almost indistinguishable from its regional geography - the Galapagos, the Amazon, the Sierra. How this new area of constitutional law will work, however, is another question. We aren’t ready to endorse such a step at home, or even abroad. But it’s intriguing. We’ll be watching Ecuador’s example.”

Linda and I live in Ecuador, and have for nearly two years.  We see more grass roots, true democratic action in Ecuador that we have seen in any country in the world that we have visited in the last 12 years (more than 20 countries).  This new move to give a voice to the environment is a natural bi-product of a people who are thinking sensibility about their lives.    Ecuador is a developing country, and it has its problems.  And there is political opposition to some of the activities that the government is promoting, as there should be.

But all in all, we are very happy to be active participants in the formation of what appears at this time to be a new model of how life on this planet can be.  To us, this move relative to the environment is an out-growth of  Participatory Democracy, as developed here in the Canton of Cotacachi, and which we have written about earlier.

One hundred thirty cantons of the 215 cantons in the country are now using this grass-roots model, and calling it the “new Socialism.”  To me, it is not new socialism, it is true democracy, where the people decide their priorities and the government implements them.

Respect for the rights of the earth and all her inhabitants?  What a concept!!   It’s a far cry from “drill, baby drill.”  (you had to watch the Republican Convention to get this one)    Every day, we see new ways in which the people of this small South American country are speaking to, and leading the world.

Filed under: About Ecuador, Cotacachi, Ecuador Constitution, Ecuador Culture, Ecuador Laws, Ecuador News, Ecuador Politics