[News] Eduardo Galeano - Earth [in response to recent wounds driven by avarice]

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Eduardo Galeano - Earth [in response to recent wounds driven by avarice]

By Eduardo Galeano, April 22, 2008 [edited]

[with apologies for taking some license from 
<http://www.progressive.org/mag_galeano042208>http://www.progressive.org/mag_galeano042208
with the intent of being more timely]

Nature knows full well that even the best human laws treat her as a 
piece of property, never as a holder of rights. But the revindication 
of nature is under way. Nature Is Not Mute.

The world is painting still-lifes, forests are dying, the poles are 
melting, the air is becoming unbreathable, and the water undrinkable, 
flowers are food and becoming increasingly plastic, and the sky and 
earth are going absolutely insane.

Nature has a lot to say, and it has long been time for us, her 
children, to stop playing deaf.

For thousands of years, almost all people had only the right not to 
have rights. In reality, quite a few remain without rights today, but 
at least now the right to have rights is recognized, and this is 
considerably more than a gesture of charity by the masters of the 
world to comfort their servants.

And nature? In a way it could be said that human rights extend to 
nature because she is not a postcard meant to be viewed from afar. 
But nature knows full well that even the best human laws treat her as 
a piece of property, never as a holder of rights.

Reduced to no more than a source of natural resources and good deals, 
she can legally be gravely wounded and even exterminated without her 
complaints being heard, and there is no law preventing those who harm 
her from acting with impunity. At the most, in the best of cases, it 
is the human victims who can demand a more or less symbolic 
indemnity, and this will always come after the damage has been done, 
though the law neither prevents nor deters assaults on the earth, 
water, and air.

It sounds odd, doesn't it, that nature could have rights? Sheer 
madness. As if nature were a person. And yet it sounds perfectly 
normal in the United States that major businesses take advantage of 
human rights. In 1886, the U.S. Supreme Court, that model of 
universal justice, extended human rights to private corporations. 
They were recognized as having the same rights as people, the right 
to life, free expression, privacy, and all the rest, as if companies 
could breathe. More than 120 years have passed since then and it is 
still the same. Nobody has paid attention to it.

Since the days when the sword and the cross made their way into the 
Americas, the European conquest punished the adoration of nature, 
which was seen as the sin of idolatry, with the punishments of 
whipping, hanging, and burning. The communion between nature and 
people, a pagan custom, was abolished in the name of God and later in 
the name of Civilization. Throughout the Americas, and the world, we 
are paying the consequences of this divorce.




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