Sound Of Sirens

Biodiversity is the diversity of life at various levels of organisation,ranging from genes, species, ecosystems, biomes and landscapes. As far as we can tell, the Earth just before the appearance of modern humans was the most biodiverse it has ever been during the 3.500 million years of life’s tenure on this planet, … We are haemorrhaging species at a rate up to 1.000 times the natural rate of extinction, or, more prosaically, every day we are losing 100 species, mostly in the great tropical forests because of our endless desire for petroleum, timber, soya, palm oil and beef. …

Stephan Harding in ‘Animate Earth’

Today, on the 21st of June 2008 we have an estimate of the world population of the human species of 6.704.922.712 people - growing momentarily at a rate of about 15.000 people every ten minutes. Check: (World Population Clock Projection)

Also: There is no habitat on earth that has not been seriously degraded by humans. More than 50% of wild habitat has been destroyed in 49 out of 61 Old World tropical countries.

I do not intend to play out ‘good’ against ‘bad’. But I would like to emphasize and support a radical shift in our perception of the world, since:

This devastation (and development) is currently being protected and fostered by legal and political establishments that exalt the human community while affording no protection to the non-human modes of being. …

The well-being of each member of the Earth community is dependent on the well-being of the Earth itself. Within this context, the following principles, expressed in terms of rights, should be recognised in national constitutions and in courts of law.

“It is our responsibility to make these principles the foundation of the new legal system all over the world. The time has come when human laws and Earth laws must be brought together”. (Thomas Berry, Rights of the Earth, 2002)

1. The natural world on the planet Earth has rights, which come with existence. These rights come from the same source from which humans receive their rights, from the universe that brought them into being.
2. Every component of the Earth community has three rights: the right to be, the right to habitat, and the right to fulfil its role in the ever-renewing processes of the Earth community.
3. All rights are specific and limited. Rivers have river rights. Birds have bird rights. Insects have insect rights. Humans have human rights. Difference in rights is qualitative, not quantitative. The rights of an insect would be of no value to a tree or a fish.
4. Human rights do not cancel out the rights of other modes of being to exist in their natural state. Human property rights are not absolute. Property rights are simply a special relationship between a particular human ‘owner’ and a particular piece of ‘property’ so that both might fulfil their rules in the great community of existence.
5. Since species exist only in the form of individuals, rights refer to individuals and to those natural groupings of individuals into flocks, herds, packs, not simply in a general way to species.
6. These rights are based on the intrinsic relations that the various components of Earth have to each other. The planet Earth is a single community whose members are bound together with interdependent relationships. No living being nourishes itself. Each component of the Earth community is dependent on every other member of the community for the nourishment and assistance it needs for its own survival. This mutual nourishment, which includes predator-prey relationships, is integral with the role that each component of the Earth has within the comprehensive community of existence.

A number of other documents have been produced with ‘guiding principles’ for those working on Earth Jurisprudence. These include the Airlie Principles (2001) and the Botswana Principles (2004).

www.earthjurisprudence.org