Thursday, April 28, 2011

The Sacred and the Dead

I read recently that third-world countries, where people are more in touch with what is happening with the weather, are aware of and concerned about global warming/climate change because their lives are noticeably adversely affected by it.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/28-3

Published on Thursday, April 28, 2011

by Robert C. Koehler
How do values enter politics?

The Bolivian national legislature, pressured by a movement of indigenous people and small farmers, may be about to birth a stunning global precedent in the creation of an environmentally sane future: establishing legal rights for Mother Earth.

On the one hand, huh? How can we reduce nature itself — the entirety of the universe beyond humanity’s small outpost of self-importance — to an entity that requires bureaucratic recognition? On the other hand, Mother Earth — Pachamama, in indigenous Andean parlance — is humanity’s vulnerable context, without which, though the universe will go on, we will not. As Bron Taylor, author of Dark Green Religion: Nature, Spirituality and the Planetary Future, put it: “Ecologically maladaptive cultural systems . . . eventually kill their hosts.”

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The law’s specific requirements, Buxton writes, include: a transition from non-renewable to renewable energy; the regulation and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions; research and investment of resources in energy efficiency, ecological practices and organic agriculture; and the development of new economic indicators that would assess the environmental impact of economic activities. Under the law, companies and individuals would be held accountable for any environmental contamination they cause and be required to repair the damage.

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Beyond places such as Bolivia and Ecuador — which two years ago incorporated the rights of nature into its new constitution

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