[News] Galeano - Nature’s Rights Are Also Human Rights

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Message to Bolivia: Nature’s Rights Are Also Human Rights

By <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/eduardogaleano>Eduardo Galeano

Monday, April 19, 2010

[Message of the author of the Open Veins of Latin 
America to participants of the First World 
Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and Rights of 
Mother Earth in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba 
from April 19 to 22, as an alternative to the 
Copenhagen Climate Change Summit]

Sadly, I will not be able to be with you. 
Hopefully, all that is possible, and also the 
impossible, will be done so that the Summit of 
the Mother Earth becomes the first phase towards 
the collective expression of people who do not 
direct world polices, but suffer from them.

Hopefully, we will be able to carry forward the 
two initiatives of companion Evo (Morales, 
President of Bolivia)­ the Climate Justice 
Tribunal and the World Referendum against a 
system of power founded on war and on waste, 
which scorns human life and auctions our worldly goods.

Hopefully, we will be able to speak less and do 
much. The wordy inflation, which in Latin America 
is more damaging than monetary inflation, has 
done us, and keeps inflicting, grave damages. And 
also, and above all, we are fed up with the 
hypocrisy of the rich countries, which is leaving 
us without a planet while it delivers pompous 
discourses to conceal the hijacking.

There are those who say that hypocrisy is the 
homage that vice pays to virtue. Others say that 
hypocrisy is the only proof of the existence of 
the infinite. And the babble of the so-called 
“international community”, that club of bankers 
and war-makers, proves that both the definitions are correct.

I want to celebrate, for a change, the force of 
the truth that words radiate and the silences 
born of human communion with Nature. And it is 
not by chance that the Summit of the Mother Earth 
is being realised in Bolivia, this nation of 
nations that is rediscovering itself after two 
centuries of a life of falsehood.

Bolivia has just celebrated ten years of a 
popular victory in the water war, when the people 
of Cochabamba were able to defeat an all-powerful 
Californian company, owner of the water by the 
grace of a government which said it was Bolivian 
and was very generous to those from afar.

That water war was one of the battles that this 
land saves for the defence of its natural 
resources: that is in defence of its commonness 
with Nature. Bolivia is one of the American 
countries where indigenous cultures have been 
known to survive, and those voices now resound 
with more force than ever, despite the long 
period of rejection and persecution.

The world, bewildered as it is and stumbling like 
a blind person in a shoot-out, will have to hear those voices.

These tell us, mere humans, that we are part of 
Nature, related to all that have legs, feet, wings or roots.

The European conquest condemned the indigenous 
people who lived in that communion for idolatry 
and, for believing in it, were whipped, beheaded or burnt alive.

 From the time of the European Renaissance, 
Nature was converted into a merchandise or into 
an obstacle to human progress. And till now, that 
divorce between Her and ourselves has persisted, 
to the point that there still are people of good 
faith who are moved by poor Nature, so badly 
treated, so hurt, but they see Her from the 
outside. The indigenous cultures see Her from the inside.

Seeing Her, I find myself. Whatever I do against 
Her, is done against myself. In Her, I find 
myself; my legs are also the road that it walks.

Well, we celebrate this Summit of the Mother 
Earth. And if only the deaf do listen: human 
rights and the rights of Nature are two names of the same dignity.

Translated by Supriyo Chatterjee

Source: <http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=104276>Rebelíon





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