Animals

http://www.ecojustice.ca/blog/ecojustice-delivers-a-big-win-for-the-canadian-orca-population

This ruling fills me with jubilation. In my 1998 book The Living Beach, I took a look at the idea that natural phenomena should have legal rights. Bolivia has passed a landmark law on this topic -- and here's a Canadian court asserting the duty of Canada to protect the habitat of a wild animal.

    Geologist Stanley Riggs suggests that we might begin by giving legal rights to beaches and other natural objects. He proposes that beaches themselves should have legal standing in the courts; they should become "jural persons," with rights which the courts would be obliged to consider. The idea is disorienting at first, but then so is the present situation. If I sue my neighbour over ownership of some dune land, is there not something absurd about the fact that the law considers my interests and my neighbour's, but not those of the dunes? Surely Gaia is also a party to this dispute.

   Of course, the courts already consider the legitimate interests of persons who are unable to speak for themselves -- infants and the mentally incompetent, for instance. Other entities which are,literally, legal fictions are "persons" in the courts, including corporations, trusts, estates and nations. In many jurisdictions, animals have at least minimal rights, such as the right not to be
treated cruelly. Even ships are sometimes treated as jural persons.

   If a ship or an estate, why not a beach, a mountain, a stream?

The Green Interview recently posted a long conversation with renowned primatologist Dame Jane Goodall. Goodall is world-famous not only for her trailblazing research with wild chimpanzees, but also for her international environmental advocacy and for her youth organization, Roots and Shoots.

“She was particularly brilliant on the relationship between a healthy environment and a robust economy,” says host Silver Donald Cameron. “People often talk as though we had to choose between job creation and respect for the environment. The truth is, if you wreck your environment, you also wreck your economy. Jane and her people have been doing a spectacular job of enlisting people around the chimpanzee preserve in Tanzania in the task of restoring their sustainable lifestyle by restoring their clear-cut forest.”

Stephen Best's Bright Green Interviews

Stephen Best is a film-maker, environmental consultant and animal rights activist who has produced several lovely green interviews himself. Details below – but first a bit about Stephen Best.

I met Stephen Best in 1975, on the ice north of Newfoundland, where we were both covering the seal hunt. I was a contributing editor of Weekend magazine then, and Best was working for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

Best went on to a distinguished career with a variety of environmental organizations, particularly in the field of animal rights. He is a ruthless realist who recognizes that the basic source of change is power, so he has spent his life gaining and using power by mobilizing people, raising funds and taking actions that force change, like the campaign that resulted in the European ban on the importation of seal products. For a deeper introduction to Best and his work, look at Farley Mowat's Rescue the Earth! Conversations with the Green Crusaders,which includes a long interview with him.

I've never participated in a Council of All Beings. Not yet.

Councils of All Beings were designed by proponents of “deep ecology” to give people a direct emotional experience of their profound connection with the rest of the natural world. Deep ecology holds that the world was not made for human exploitation, that all its features have intrinsic value, and that our most urgent task is to re-discover our proper place among the life-forms that share this green and spinning planet.

That task requires that we transform ourselves socially, politically, intellectually, spiritually and emotionally. The toughest part is the spiritual and emotional piece – and that's what the Council of All Beings is about. It is one thing to understand intellectually that we are profoundly interconnected with the features and creatures that we are destroying. It is quite another thing to feel it on your skin and in your hair, and within your heart and spirit.

“Canada,” said the US journalist, “is heading toward becoming an authoritarian state to an extent that surprises observers even in China.”

Another comment on Bev Oda and the garrotting of Kairos? Nope. A reflection on the Harperites' infatuation with harsh sentences and larger prisons? No. Kyoto, Afghan detainees, the G20 repression, the flouting of the Supreme Court in the Omar Kadr case? Our humiliating defeat in the UN Security Council election? Could have been, but in fact it's none of the above.