Good News From Bolivia

Unlike at Copenhagen, the gathering in Bolivia was willing to address not just the narrow cause of climate change, but the systemic structure that created the problem, indeed all of our environmental problems:

The capitalist system has imposed on us a logic of competition, progress and limitless growth. This regime of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating human beings from nature and imposing a logic of domination upon nature, transforming everything into commodities: water, earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of peoples, and life itself.
 
It is imperative that we forge a new system that restores harmony with nature and among human beings… We propose to the peoples of the world the recovery, revalorization, and strengthening of the knowledge, wisdom, and ancestral practices of Indigenous Peoples, which are affirmed in the thought and practices of “Living Well,” recognizing Mother Earth as a living being with which we have an indivisible, interdependent, complementary and spiritual relationship.  

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which helped draft Ecuador’s pathmaking constitutional guarantee of the Rights of Nature, was represented in Bolivia by Mari Margil, who addressed us last year at Bioneers. Groups like the CELDF help communities to seize back the power from the corporate order, an undertaking at the heart of the Bolivian conference.
 
Given that the huge lion’s share of greenhouse gases are produced in industrialized nations, it’s more important then ever that the whole world pay better attention to the people and places that have avoided the destruction to the climate that “more developed” nations have wrought. After all, they, and not the narrower interests represented in gatherings like Copenhagen, are the majority stakeholders in our shared atmosphere.