Today, in commemoration of Earth Day, and under the shadow of the one year anniversary of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf, the United Nations General Assembly will discuss implementing new international standards that afford rights and legal standing not just to individuals and businesses adversely affected by the exploitation and damage to natural resources, but to nature and ecosystems themselves. The discussion follows the adoption into law of similar protocols by over a dozen American municipalities as well as into the federal laws in Bolivia and Ecuador.
The reaction from media?
FOX News reports today, “United Nations diplomats on Wednesday will set aside pressing issues of international peace and security to devote an entire day debating the rights of ‘Mother Earth’. A bloc of mostly socialist governments lead by Bolivia have put the issue on the General Assembly agenda to discuss the creation of a UN treaty that would grant the same rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Mother Nature. … UN critics slammed the decision to devote an entire day debating Mother Earth legislation as not only a waste of time and resources, but a major blunder.”
Right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh notes this FOX News report on his website and adds, “Mostly socialist governments, it says here, in case there was still any doubt about the real agenda at work behind the green movement.”
New York Daily News columnist S.E. Cupp writes this morning, “Amid all the crises now gripping the world – human rights atrocities, poverty, famine, disease, genocide – the United Nations will devote at least some of today’s agenda to debating the inalienable rights of ‘Mother Earth’. Maybe that’s because Earth Day is on Friday. Or maybe it just has nothing better to do. Bolivia’s madcap coca farmer-cum-president, Evo Morales, is leading the charge to create a UN treaty that would give our planet, that mass of molten lava and rock, as well as all of the creatures that inhabit it, the same rights as humans. This is the same Morales who believes that ‘the central enemy of Mother Earth is capitalism’, just in case you were wondering.”
In Canada, National Post columnist Rex Murphy writes, “It means that tics that suck the blood, the choking sulphur pits of volcanic vents, the indestructible cockroach, the arid desert wastes and the bleak frigid spaces of the planet’s poles – everything from the locusts that despoil, to the great mountain ranges, the earth and all that is in it, are to have rights.”
And Brian Jones, the desk editor at the St. John’s Telegram, writes, “Mother Nature can be downright cruel. She will put a tree in front of a skier, or a cliff in the way of a hiker, and feel not a tinge of conscience or regret. She will bring up the sun the next morning as if nothing happened, and were it not for a story in the paper detailing the tragedy, no notice at all might be taken of yet another human’s demise at her homicidal hands. It’s well and good to give Mother Earth rights, but it gets trickier if we demand the corollary — responsibilities. ‘Mother, you stand accused of murdering millions. How do you plead?'”
Government reaction so far?
A spokesman from the British Mission to the UN says about Bolivia’s proposal, “The concept Mother Earth is not universally accepted. In general, our view is that we should focus on tackling important sustainable development issues through existing channels and processes.”
