Yes, yes, my bad; I’m late for Earth Day, but here, via Religion Dispatches, is a piece that discusses the ‘rights’ of the Earth, the eco-system and, well, just about everything. Yes, it’s an absurd premise, and one for which the writer clearly has some sympathy, but this extract from the new (2008) Ecuadorian constitution is still worth noting:
Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain itself and regenerate its own vital cycles, structure, functions, and its evolutionary processes. Any person, people, community, or nationality, may demand the observance of the rights of the natural environment before public bodies.
This somewhat sinister drivel is presumably largely presumably partly reflects the influence of the work of Bolivia’s somewhat sinister president Morales, the man who, in 2009, was declared by the president of the United Nations General Assembly, one Rev. Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, to be a “World Hero of Mother Earth”.
Doctor Who didn’t get the call, apparently.
Corrected (and this is really my bad): Morales is, of course, president of Bolivia, not Ecuador. My apologies. I also have added the date of the new Ecuadorian constitution.
The "rights of the earth" is a ridiculous attempt to avoid the ethical framework of family, especially the duties of generation.
We have a duty to our generations now living (the old and the young) and the future generations yet to be: that is the basis of our duty to steward the earth, namely the corresponding rights of humanity present and future.
Claiming the earth has rights is animism in pursuit of shirking any ethical acknowledgment of our duties to procreate, educate, protect, and sacrifice for the next generations who will inherit the earth. They want the environmental duties without granting the rights to the not-yet-living, because those rights go beyond the environmental scope into s@xual ethics.
Call it aborto-environmental-animism....
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMorales is the president of Bolivia, Correa is the president of Ecuador. Which country has this in their constitution? When I lived in Ecuador, they were talking about this, so it could be Ecuador,....
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBolivia...Ecuador...whatever...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIndeed, MTM.
The left has done a brilliant job of mal-educating a couple of generations to nod their heads in agreement with this nonsense.
As if the earth won't be here, teeming with life, long after we are gone, as it was long before we were here.
Meanwhile, "Save the baby humans!"
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDoes all this business of equal rights for Mother Earth and bugs mean I can sue Mother Earth when a tornado or hurricane hurts me or sue a bug when it bites me? What gibberish!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMy Senator (kyl) would be 90% proud of your command of the facts. My other Senator McCain once believed in global warming until your crowd magically made all the money disapear from any party member that didn't toe the mineral extraction industry's talking points.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr. Stuttaford: Well, of COURSE Bolivia, not Equador. Every single one of your readers immediately caught that mistake at first read-through, and we all tsk-tsked and shook our heads wondering how you could have made such an obvious error.
(Note to NRO editors: It would use useful to enable \sarc on\ and \sarc off\ html codes for comments like this one.)
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse(At this rate, soon you won't even be current on who's the second alternate town councilman from Pantagonian Chubut.)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnimism ftw.
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