by Geoff Olson

Mountains, lakes, rivers and streams with legal representation? Animals and plants with their own ministry? It’s not a Gary Larson cartoon or a Yann Martel plotline – it’s a long overdue concept. In September of 2008, Ecuador passed a constitution granting rights to living things and their environment. “Nature has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution,” the document states. The Ecuadorian government must take “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.”

As for mainstream media’s response to this historic moment in constitutional law and environmentalism? Tumbleweeds and crickets, with a lone wolf howling in the distance. Project Censored voted this 18th of its Top 25 Censored Stories of 2009. One of the few mainstream outlets to clue in to the story, the Los Angeles Times, trivialized the development in Ecuador, noting it “sounded like a stunt by the San Francisco city council.”

There was more to come. On April 22 of this year, Bolivia passed “The Law of Mother Earth” (Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra). With Bolivia choosing Earth Day to riff off Ecuador’s legal template, the global media stopped hitting the snooze button and woke up to the whiff of something new. Clearly, something strange and possibly disturbing was going on with the Empire’s hired help in the Southern Hemisphere. Something even bigger than fair trade coffee or Shakira.

Translated from Spanish, the new Bolivian law states of Mother Earth: “She is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos. She is comprised of all ecosystems and living beings and their self-organization.”

The Bolivian constitution formalized the belief system of the indigenous people of the Andes, who pay homage to Pachamama, the female spirit of nature. This isn’t just a modest constitutional tweak or a publicity stunt to draw in Roots-attired ecotourists. It’s meant to have real-world effects. “No commercialism,” states one article in the document: “Neither living systems nor processes that sustain them may be commercialized, nor serve anyone’s private property.”

For transnational corporations operating in the area, these provisions are probably about as welcome as the return of Che Guevera as a 50-foot Transformer with a mortar-proof beret. Yet the Law of Mother Earth isn’t about back-engineering some imagined Pre-Columbian paradise or introducing a Stalinist game preserve for coffee growers and capybaras. It encourages the development “of policies to ensure long-term energy sovereignty, increased efficiency and the gradual incorporation of clean and renewable alternative sources into the energy matrix.”

Immediately after the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to designate April 22 “International Mother Earth Day,” the newly elected President of Bolivia addressed the press. “If we want to safeguard mankind, then we need to safeguard the planet. That is the next major task of the United Nations,” Evo Morales stated. Thinking globally, but acting locally, Morales ran with the ball himself.

In speaking about Bolivia’s initiative, Canadian activist Maude Barlow told Postmedia News, “It’s going to have huge resonance around the world. It’s going to start first with these southern countries trying to protect their land and their people from exploitation, but I think it will be grabbed onto by communities in our countries, for example, fighting the tar sands in Alberta.”

Mari Margil, associate director of the Environmental Legal Defense Fund, says the high profits of transnational corporations depend on treating “countries and ecosystems like cheap hotels.” For the indigenous people of Bolivia, the tension between ancient beliefs and foreign intervention is more than a historical debating point. It’s represented on the horizon as the Potosi Mountain. The gold and silver the Spanish looted from the Aztec and Incan empires was just the beginning; Potosi was the gift that kept on giving to European powers. Historians estimate that over the three centuries of silver mining at the mountain, more than a million Andeans died at their labours.

The Industrial Revolution was largely financed by the riches of the New World, noted Karl Marx and the economic historians that succeeded him. “An indispensable condition for the establishment of manufacturing industry,” Marx wrote in 1847, “was the accumulation of capital facilitated by the discovery of America and the importation of its precious metals.” Genoese and German bankers, who backed the Spanish conquests, found themselves enriched by melted-down gold and silver. Looking to increase their wealth through compound interest, they turned to northern Europe where they financed shipbuilding, munitions industries and other armament-related ventures. Armed to the teeth through riches that originated with slave labour, the great powers were soon preparing for the First World War of the 20th century. In a spin of the karmic wheel of international relations, Potosi’s silver contributed to the blowback of borderless capital on the battlefields of Europe.

The exploitation games in the southern hemisphere have gone from precious metals to “blue gold.” In November of 2001, the US firm Bechtel sued Bolivia for $25 million for cancelling a contract to manage the water system of Cochabamba, the third largest city in the country. The local people took to the streets to protest the huge price hikes for water and the insane new restrictions for collecting rainwater from rooftops, which required a permit.

For years, the World Bank had pressured Bolivia to privatize its state enterprises. Bechtel was one of the beneficiaries of this pressure, but only temporarily. In another spin of the Karmic wheel of international relations, the protests spread across the country, chasing the white, US-endorsed presidential candidate onto a plane to Washington and sweeping into office the dark-skinned socialist Evo Morales, who led the massive protests. Bechtel dropped the lawsuit in 2006.

The two opposing points of view about property, from the Old World and the New World – “the land and its resources belongs to us” versus “we belong to the land and its resources” – have been like matter and antimatter in the centuries-long experiment in colonialism and neocolonialism. It seems these two world-views could never coexist without one side destroying the other (the winners almost always being the ones with guns, germs and steel).

Capitalism has been called a “machine for destroying limits.” Yet it is now banging up against the limits of the biosphere itself. The planet’s animals and plants are physically embedded in all there is, or ever will be, until the Sun dies out. Yet through the technical brilliance of hairless monkeys with opposable thumbs, Earth is now in its “sixth great extinction.” The disappearance of natural capital and the loss of thousands of species is the mortgage we’re paying on an unsustainable future.

For centuries, hunter-gatherer populations saw firsthand the results of their hunting behaviour on the local flora and fauna. They overshot the mark on a regular basis, but they tacitly understood resource limits better than pinstriped executives playing with financial derivatives and other faith-based initiatives. So-called ‘primitives’ weren’t removed several times over from the biological sources of their labour and their destructive capacity was checked by their technological limits.

Yet how do constitutional rights for nature translate into actual policy? In a Project Censored update, Ecuadorian Carlos Zorrilla, executive director of Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag, said he expected resistance. “As exciting as these developments are, it was also inevitable that the people in power would, and will, find ways to circumvent, undermine and ignore those rights.” Zorrilla indicated President Rafael Correa’s new mining law, “which takes rights-to-nature loopholes and widens them so that giant dirt movers could easily drive through them.”

Ecuadorian President Correa, a nominal leftist, presided over the signing of the Law of Nature. Now, he must perform a balancing act with foreign mining interests, which contribute much of the economic activity in Ecuador, as they do in Bolivia. In the subjective weighing of costs to nature against benefits to the local economy, the legal wrangling is sure to be heated and prolonged. In a June 2011 update posted on Decoin.com, Zorrilla writes of the “mining mayhem” in the Intag area, and legal challenges of native Ecuadorians against the world’s largest cement company, Lafarge. There is a new lawsuit underway by 141 persons affected by the activities of the company.

The last word won’t be from lawyers, but from Pachamama herself. Nature is as much about savagery as sustenance; in fact, she can be a monstrous bitch, as anyone ever caught in an earthquake or tornado can attest. Most Earth-based mythologies over time have acknowledged nature’s creative and destructive aspects. Even without human intervention, animal populations crash and burn on a regular basis. Life does not exist in balance, but in a state of ‘dynamic disequilibrium,’ ecologists tell us. It’s a complicated, glorious mess, a billion year spree of chance and necessity. Yet for all the chaos, a balance prevails on the planetary scale. For billions of years, life on Earth has performed the amazing trick of homeostasis, keeping concentrations of atmospheric gases at optimal conditions for its own existence.

Skeptics will say there is nothing to guarantee that a mystical, Earth-based worldview can’t devolve into a reactionary, even totalitarian, system of thought. What of the Mayans and Aztecs, for example? Neither of these pagan civilizations was known for peaceful coexistence with their neighbours and many scholars believe the sudden collapse of the Mayan civilization somewhere between the eighth and ninth century AD came about through resource depletion. Both civilizations combined a permanent war economy with a state-level enthusiasm for human sacrifice. So we cannot presume that goodness and light will logically follow from any given belief system. Not only that, but a variation of the Law of Mother Earth could be co-opted by powerful First World interests for their own purposes, as is happening now with investment banks and carbon credit schemes.

Yet these are long-range concerns and the people of the global south have an immediate problem facing them, as we all do.

Skeptics will question the wisdom of bringing what writer Terence McKenna once called “the archaic revival” to state level. But is granting legal rights to Pachamama or Mother Earth any more quixotic than the Fourteenth Amendment, which grants US corporations the legal status of personhood? Is the idea that jaguars, pythons and leafcutter ants should have rights any stranger than the notions of former Fraser Institute head Michael Walker, who once insisted that every square inch of the planet, every cubic foot of air and water, should be privatized and owned by somebody – even if the ‘somebody’ is defined as an account number in the Cayman Islands?

Others will question the wisdom of projecting feminine status onto the environment, and claim this takes gender bias to biospheric levels. Yet anthropomorphizing the planet as maternal figure isn’t quite so backwards as some may think. Motherhood and the birth process, with its commingling of joy and pain, is a convenient shorthand for the fecundity of nature. Beyond that, “mother” and “matter” – the stuff of the material world – originate from same Indo-European root word: the Sanskrit “ma.” This single phoneme is usually the first word from the mouths of babes everywhere. Mother, madre, mater… the various derivations of “ma” are found in languages the world over.

The ‘ur-mother,’ the womb of biological matter, is Earth herself. Yo’ mama and mine. The Ecuadorians and Bolivians get it.

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www.geoffolson.com

photo © Monika Wisniewska