Indian court awards legal rights of a person to entire ecosystem

Posted by Conspiracy Cafe on April 30, 2017 at http://www.conspiracy-cafe.com/apps/blog/show/44509173-indian-court-awards-legal-rights-of-a-person-to-entire-ecosystem

Published on 03/04/2017, 6:10pm

An Indian state has awarded full legal status to an entire ecosystem. But can such a right be protected?

The Bhagirathi River where it flows through Gangotri, Uttarakhand. The Indian state's high court has just issued the river, the glaciers that feed it, its wellsprings and the entire ecosystem the legal rights of a person. (Photo: Atarax42)

By Omair Ahmad

Expanding on a previous judgment in which it recognised the Ganga and Yamuna rivers as legal entities, the High Court of the Indian state of Uttarakhand now grants legal rights to the ecosystem.

In a broad ruling on March 30, 2017, the High Court of the Indian state of Uttarakhand stated:

We, by invoking our parens patriae jurisdiction, declare glaciers including Gangotri & Yamunotri, rivers, streams, rivulets, lakes, air, meadows, dales, jungles, forests wetlands, grasslands, springs and waterfalls, legal entity/ legal person/juristic person/juridicial person/ moral person/artificial person having the status of a legal person, with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person, in order to preserve and conserve them. They are also accorded the rights akin to fundamental rights/ legal rights.

This followed from an order on March 20, 2017 – startling in itself – in which the Uttarakhand HC had declared the Ganga (Ganges) and Yamuna rivers as legal entities based on the fact that they are considered sacred to Hindus. Based on that order, a group of citizens had petitioned the court that the “Himalayas, Glaciers, Streams, Water Bodies etc. [be declared] as legal entities as juristic persons at par with pious rivers Ganga and Yamuna.”

A much more comprehensive order

The earlier order, 12 pages in length, dealt primarily on whether the state of Uttarakhand had the powers, under a federal constitution, to direct the central government (according to the order, it did) and whether rivers, as sacred entities, could be considered legal entities under Indian law.

This second order, 66 pages in length, is focussed on the ideas of parens patriae as a juridical concept for the states within a federal structure defending their environment, and cites, in a comprehensive manner the idea that nature has rights. The judgement spends six pages citing quotations from a book, “Secret Abode of Fireflies: Loving and Losing Spaces of Nature in the City”, which the judges have quoted from before in a case involving forest fires and forest management.

There is a chapter on the rights of nature by Vikram Soni & Sanjay Parikh that the judgment cites at length, then goes on to detail the special flora and fauna, including endangered species found in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region.

The judgment then goes on to quote, in full, two important UN declarations that form the bedrock of international environmental agreement, namely the 1972 Stockholm declaration and the 1992 Rio Declarations. It also quotes the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, signed in 1973, as well as the Bali Action Plan, formulated in 2007.

The judgment acknowledges the passage of the “‘Te Urewera Act 2014’ whereby the ‘Urewera National Park’ has been given the legal entity under Section 11 of the Act,” while building up to the argument that, “The Courts are duty bound to protect the environmental ecology under the ‘New Environment Justice Jurisprudence’ and also under the principles of parens patriae.”

The judgment then spends another 15 pages quoting American jurisprudence on the use of parens patriae – the guardianship of the state of the rights of entities that are unable to fight for their own rights – by states within a federal structure, to assert their rights when their rivers have been polluted, or diverted, or their environment has been otherwise harmed. There is no reference to the use of such law within India.

Precedence in legislation, Ecuador Constitution, and law



In some ways it seems that the Uttarakhand HC is anticipating the way that the role of environmental practice is going. Just as human rights expanded from “civilised people” to all humans, and then came the movement to abolish slavery, women’s suffrage, give rights to animals, the process towards whole ecosystem rights seems well underway.

In its judgments the Uttarakhand HC emphasised more than once that the river was a living entity, and dependent on glaciers, waterfalls and other natural aspects. It would be impossible to protect one aspect without protecting the whole.

Nor would India be the first country to extend these rights. While New Zealand passed legislation only recently giving legal rights to the Whanganui river ecosystem, Ecuador had already given legal rights to nature in its Constitution adopted in 2008.

In fact the first enunciation of such legal rights of nature happened in thefamous Sierra Club v. Morton case of 1972, in the US (which the Uttarakhand HC does not cite). While the judgment went against the Sierra Club, in his famous dissent US Supreme Court Justice William Douglas stated:

Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation…

Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole – a creature of ecclesiastical law – is an acceptable adversary, and large fortunes ride on its cases. The ordinary corporation is a “person” for purposes of the adjudicatory processes, whether it represents proprietary, spiritual, aesthetic, or charitable causes.

So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes — fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it. Those people who have a meaningful relation to that body of water – whether it be a fisherman, a canoeist, a zoologist, or a logger – must be able to speak for the values which the river represents, and which are threatened with destruction.

Many lacunae

Unfortunately the dissent by Justice Douglas is only one of the things that the Uttarakhand HC judgment overlooks.

The first is the example of what has happened in cases where rights have been thus granted. In Ecuador, while there have been some small victories under the new constitution, there have been many more failures, including development in areas that would lead to extinction of species. Even when nature’s rights are embedded in the constitution it seems that states will overlook them, or interpret them flexibly, in the case of economic development.

The second gap is the way that the application of parens patriae has turned out in practice in India. In the most (in)famous such case, of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy in 1984, which led to thousands dead, and many more than that injured, and land contaminated, the Indian government forcibly inserted itself using the parens patriae clause. This was a “disaster” for the case, one anticipated as early as 1988, and with continued failure.

In its wisdom the Uttarakhand HC has declared certain people in charge of protecting the new rights granted to ecosystem. Given the experience of Bhopal, it is legitimate to ask why the government will perform better in this case than before.

Who, precisely, will be prosecuted?

More troubling, though, is the question of who will be acted against when the “rights” of these entities are compromised. The judgment mentions that the glaciers are receding, including due to global warming. Will the officers then place cases against those contributing CO2 or other greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere? The fear is that the government and its officers are more likely to act against the poor and marginalised.

As Prakash Kashwan notes in his book, Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico, India developed strong forestry laws primarily during the colonial period which deprived forest dwellers of their lands and rights. This has continued in post-independence India.

The judgment tries to balance this by giving the chief secretary of Uttarakhand the ability to co-opt, “seven public representatives from all the cities, towns and villages of the State of Uttarakhand to give representation to the communities living on the banks of rivers near lakes and glaciers”. Going by the history of environmental action that Kashwan documents, these are likely to be privileged groups, not those already marginalised.

It does not help that the judgment includes the directive, “The District Magistrate, Haridwar is directed to ensure that the Beggars are not allowed to be present on the Ghats.” Is it only the poor that will be prosecuted?

Lastly, the judgment, like the one that preceded it, does not clarify anything about what exactly is to be “preserved”. Will dams be removed, irrigation systems dug up? Will the ambitious river interlinking project of the central government be opposed, since so many experts have pointed out that it is catastrophic to the health of the rivers?

The order is so broad as to encompass everything, “Plucking of one leaf, grass blade also damages the environment universally.” This is a recipe for confusion, not clarification, and confusion is of no real help to the environment.

This article was originally published on The Third Pole.

http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/04/03/indian-court-awards-legal-rights-person-nature/

Nature as a legal person

WHAT’S UP DOWN THERE IN ANTARCTICA?

It's beginning to be the case that I almost need a special "Antarctica" tab for this website, because it seems the strangeness of stories coming out of there just keeps coming. This week, so many people saw one version or another of this story that I know they were thinking what I am thinking: could this be the reason for the strangeness of the stories about the place lately?

Possibly. But before we get to all that, a brief memory refresher. Regular readers of my books and of this website know just how peculiar Antarctica really is, not so much because it's covered in ice, and is inaccessible, but rather because a very strange list of people are associated with it, and with those people, there are also strange stories. By now, we can probably recite the list of strange people associated with Antartica by heart:

(1)  Rudolf Hess, (2) Hermann Goering, (3) Admiral Byrd, (4) King Juan Carlos, (5) Prince Harry (or was it William... they all look the same), (6) Secretary of State John Kerry, (7) the Patriarch of Moscow, Kiril III, (8) Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and, lest we forget, the elements of the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet are scheduled for a visit.

The stories have been almost as strange as the list. Admiral Byrd and Operation High Jump, as readers here know, returned from an expedition to the continent that was supposed to have lasted months, after only a few weeks. Along the way back home, Byrd reportedly gave an interview to a reporter for El Mercurio of Santiago de Chile, in which he warned that the United States would have to prepare to defend itself against "enemy fighters" (leaving the enemy unspecified) that could fly from pole to pole with tremendous speed. And of course, there are the stories of secret Nazi flying saucer bases under the ice (a story I've never bought, incidentally), a couple of Adolf Hitler survived in Antarctica stories. President Clinton contributed his own bizarre story by holding a press conference during his administration about a meteor from Mars that was allegedly found in Antarctica, which meteor also evidently contained microbial sized fossilized life.

As if it couldn't possibly get any stranger, there were also those stories several years ago that the Russians had "found something" near their installations at the vast under-ice lake Vostok; there were emergency evacuations at that time of people becoming suddenly sick (which of course fueled the rumor mill); perhaps the weirdest of all the stories was that the Saudis found something during an excavation around the Grand Mosque at Mecca, something which so terrified them that they turned it over to the Russians, who promptly (so the story goes) took it to Antarctica where Patriarch Kiril "performed ancient rituals" over it. Well, needless to say, I don't buy that story either (the part about the Saudis finding "something" and then turning it over to the Orthodox Christian "infidels" just isn't washing with me), but I mention it for the sake of completeness.

Then Buzz Aldrin decided, within mere days of Secretary John Kerry's visit, to visit the southern continent, and before boarding the flight in South Africa that would take him there, he tweeted he was getting ready to "go to the launchpad," a statement that I pointed out at the time could be taken as "astronautese" for boarding the airplane, or that it might mean that Antarctica was the "launchpad." Then, while in Antarctica, Aldrin gets sick, and has to be evacuated. A variant on the story also had him tweeting that what had been discovered was some "absolute evil."

Oh, and let's not forget, Lockheed Martin of Black Projects Fame also has a presence in Antarctica. Buzz Aldrin, John Kerry,  Kiril III, Herman Goering, Rudolf Hess, and Lockheed Martin.

That's quite a line-up. The stuff of a bad Hollyweird B movie.

Well, now we might finally have a glimpse of what all the ruckus has been about:

Mysterious shapes and patterns discovered in Arctic and Antarctic sea floor

Of course, there is the usual blather that all this represents nothing strange or bizarre at all: all those polygons and so on are merely what happens when minerals and ice freeze. No argument from me.  But of course, this doesn't really explain why Mssrs Kerry Kiril and Aldrin would be so keen to visit beautiful scenic Antarctica. I suspect, however, in the case of the second image, that the freezing-polygon explanation falls "a little short," for I don't know about you, but something sure looks artificial to me. And - what the heck - I'm willing to crawl out to the extreme end of the twig of speculation on this one, and say that my first thought, when I saw this picture, was that it looked like an electrical coil or installation of some sort. We're given no idea of the scale of what we're looking at, but it looks like "input, coil, output" to me.

In short, it looks like a "something", and that certainly would account for Kerry, Aldrin, Kiril, and Lockheed-Martin and the Russian Baltic Sea fleet. The real question is, did Hess and Goering have similar information, and if so, how did they come by it?          https://gizadeathstar.com/2017/05/whats-up-down-there-in-antarctica/

The Top 3 Reasons Why the System Keeps Perpetuating Itself                                                      http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/system-perpetuation-top-3-reasons/

The System, the Matrix or whatever you call it will perpetuate itself until we wake up to how we’re upholding it.

The System, The Matrix, The Establishment –

whatever name you call it by – seems to keep perpetuating itself no matter what. Puppet politicians come and go, but the System they serve remains fully in place, long after many of these misleaders and control freaks have used up their 5 minutes of fame by bossing people around. In many cases, the politicians forward another aspect of the Agenda (i.e. Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, the New World Order agenda) only to disappear into obscurity, leaving us with yet more laws, rules and regulations to strangle our freedom. Have you ever wondered why nothing ever really changes, despite the fact that so many people spend massive amounts of energy cheering for either a left or right jackboot to come down upon their throat during election circus time? The truth is that the Government always gets in, no matter who you vote for. It is becoming broadly known that the System is run by the unelected Deep State, Parallel Government or Shadow Government (think about all the COG [Continuity of Government] plans on the books). Elections count for very little in terms of overall freedom.
Yes, the System appears to continue no matter what. Why? The reasons are to be found embedded in our psychology. Our unconscious mental attitudes and beliefs shape the world. To dethrone the tyrant from the outside world, you must must remove him from your mind. This is where we need to start if we truly wish to transition from a society based on monopolistic governmental force to one based on voluntary exchange and association. Below are the top 3 reasons why the System perpetuates itself.

Rule me! Rule me!

People holding up the System during a Hitler speech.

1. Participate in and Enforce the System – Because One Day You’ll Be at the Top

Exploitative or criminal systems, including financial Ponzi schemes like the entire fiat currency system, have a tendency to cunningly protect themselves by offering to “buy in” people who question them. For example, people in rigid hierarchical systems (like the military) are encouraged to accept hardships when they enter, because soon, they’ll be advancing up the ranks and will then enjoy the benefits of the System. Have cramped quarters now but later get your own private room. Get poor pay now but later get a big fat salary. In some cases, this rationale is offered to justify brutality, e.g. if you take beatings and whippings now, later on you’ll get to dish them out. Fun, huh? For a less violent example, some rich private schools have a system of “prefects” where selected students are given more privileges and power than others, and the system is kept in place because most people are fooled into secretly hoping that they will be the ones to get selected, so they vote to uphold it rather than remove it.
Put more simply, a system is set up whereby some people get to have more power over other people – then that system is justified by dangling the carrot in front of all people and telling them that if they are strong, smart, beautiful or lucky enough, they will be the chosen ones that get to ascend to the position which affords them power over others. Meanwhile, those running the system know that it’s a mathematical impossibility for everyone to be at the top. It’s like the line about how Americans are not divided into rich and poor – they are divided into rich and “those about to be rich”. People are goaded along into accepting an unjust system just because they think that, one day, they will ascend to the top of it.
Besides, even if everyone did get a chance to “be at the top”, what about the ethics of it? Is okay to suffer exploitation because one day you’ll be the exploiter rather than the exploited? This is the classic perpetrator-victim cycle where yesterday’s victim becomes today’s perpetrator (see Israel). Albert Einstein, a Jew himself, recognized this concept when he wrote the following about the impending visit of Menachim Begin (former Israeli Prime Minister, warmonger and founder of the Likud Party which rules Israel today) to the USA in 1948:

“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.” – Albert Einstein, Dec. 4th, 1948

I am reminded of a quote attributed to the Rothschilds which perfectly sums up how they sought to perpetuate their fraudulent money system (fractional reserve banking) and thus became the richest family in the world:

“The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from its profits or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class.”

So, in other words, if everyone understands the nature of an evil system, it fails; if only a relatively small amount understand the nature of an evil system, the susceptible ones can be bought off (bribed or blackmailed) to dilute the resistance to it.

The System relies utterly and completely on belief in authority, which is akin to the Ring of Power in the Lord of the Rings.

2. The Belief in Authority (The Ring of Power)

Following on from the first point above, the System can only perpetuate itself if people agree to its sales pitch. The System says: “Keep upholding me, and suffer at the bottom for a short time, then soon you’ll get to be one of the powerful ones at the top”. People only agree to this if they already hold, deep within their psyche, the idea that someone or something outside of themselves has the right to rule. In other words, they harbor a deep-seated belief in authority. They believe that it’s necessary to have a ruling class, and almost always, that this ruling class is allowed to have extra privileges, rights and powers (including exemption from normal moral laws) that ordinary mortal people are not allowed to have.
Well known anarchist or voluntaryist Larken Rose explains this point beautifully in a speech entitled “So Small a Thing”, where he draws an analogy between the blind belief in authority and the Ring of Power in the fictional series Lord of the Rings. He highlights how the entire power of the System – with all its guns, laws and surveillance data – hinges on the widespread belief of its subjects that the government has the right to rule them. Without that belief, the government would collapse, because no one would execute, enforce or obey its decrees. What seems so powerful is actually dependent on a (tiny) belief – so small a thing – a belief which is a lie, since in the ultimate reality, no one has authority to rule you just as you have no authority to rule anyone else.
Larken talks about how the Ring of Power always corrupted whoever touched it. This is a brilliant analogy – evidently the author Tolkien understood that the entire concept of the Ring of Power (the right to rule) is fatally flawed. No matter how well intentioned someone was, no matter how much they thought they would use the Ring for good, once they touched it, they became evil. The Ring has only one master. The good wizard Gandalf was wise enough to recognize this, and even refused to take the ring, for he knew that it would corrupt him. Therefore, the humble hobbits (who had no ambition to rule anyone) were the ones who had to take it. Another striking aspect of this analogy was that the Ring could only be destroyed by being taken back to its place of origin and “unmade”. Perhaps this is a indication that we must dig deep within to “unmake” our false assumptions and distorted perceptions about authority, reality and the world? Larken says:

“It’s so tempting to look at Washington and say ‘there’s the problem’, look at all those evil people … you don’t have to do anything to Washington DC … what you have to do is take that so small a thing out of the minds of the livestock, so they stop imagining that these rulers have any legitimacy.”

The system depends on our cognitive dissonance.

3. Cognitive Dissonance

It is a common moral principle that 2 wrongs don’t make a right, or to put it another way, that the end doesn’t justify the means. Many people say they believe in this principle, yet also claim to believe in statism (i.e. in authority, in a ruling class and in the legitimacy of government). There is an inherent contradiction here, because government operates by force and claims the moral right to do what ordinary people cannot morally do. Government routinely operates by forcing people to do things (i.e. pay tax), which is form of theft (the first wrong), to provide services and benefits to others. Does theft justify generosity? Can the end justify the means?
This is an example of cognitive dissonance, where people hold 2 opposing views simultaneously that contradict each other. The earliest Western philosopher Socrates was famous for his ability to elicit peoples’ opposing views out into the open during discussions, where they could be exposed (and hopefully resolved). Some people didn’t take too kindly to being schooled and embarrassed via the Socratic method, and the great thinker was eventually poisoned.
The truth is that, when you look closely, the so-called political authority of government does not bear well under careful sructiny. As I explained in the article Getting the Idea of Government & Political Authority Out of Your Mind, there’s really no way to justify the legitimacy of government, regardless of whether you try the arguments of social contract, implicit consent, consent of the majority or consequentialism. None of them hold up. We are left with the uncomfortable truth that we were born into a System where the ruling class is simply the strongest or slickest gang that holds the monopoly on the initiation of violence in a given geographical area.

Conclusion: Do You Really Want to Play a Part in Perpetuating the System?

The belief in authority is the fulcrum upon which government rests. Remove that, and you remove the government’s last attempt at claiming rightful power. We already know that it is morally, rationally and logically impossible to prove the legitimacy of government. Yet, without a thorough examination one’s beliefs, it is all too easy to move through life with cognitive dissonance and with unresolved contradictions floating around in your head. Most people do not only accept the government’s specious claim to rule them; they act as cheerleaders for this tyranny out of some kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome! They believe in the Ring of Power because they think it can be used for good, or they think their guy or their tribe can get in power and change the world in the way they want to see it changed – even though this necessarily means handing over godlike powers to politicians.
The point is that a coercive ruler-slave relationship is dysfunctional and co-dependent. You can’t have one without the other. It’s an energetic polarity. Change one pole and you transform (and eliminate) the entire relationship.
Hopefully, this article and many others like it will play a small role in jolting people out of their slumber to realize the futility of upholding the System – in their minds. Dethrone the inner tyrant before you dethrone the outer tyrant. Realize that anarchy doesn’t have to mean chaos. Anarchy means organization and cooperation without coercion, trusting that the voluntary impulses of humanity will lead us to trade and associate in a harmonious way.
To let go of the indoctrination that we have to have rulers is to step into a world without rulers and slaves, where everyone is equal to everyone else, and where everyone is required to act responsibly so as to reduce and eliminate the need for a parasitic ruling class.

*****

Sources:
*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/banned-un-report-israeli-apartheid/
*https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Rsc7lrxA8
*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/political-authority-no-real-basis/