The Earth Can Sue

From the Globe & Mail July 23, 2009

“Last February, the town of Shapleigh, Maine, population 2,326, passed an unusual ordinance,” The Boston Globe reports. “Shapleigh sought to protect its aquifers from Nestle Corp., which draws heavily on the region for its Poland Spring bottled water…[The town] tried something new – a move at once humble in its method and audacious in its ambition. At a town meeting, residents voted, 114-66, to endow all the town’s natural assets with legal rights: ‘Natural communities and ecosystems possess inalienable rights to exist, flourish and naturally evolve within the Town of Shapleigh.’ It further decreed that any town resident had ’standing’ to seek relief for damages caused to nature – permitting, for example, a lawsuit on behalf of a stream.”

Dump Site 41 in Tiny Township on Georgian Bay might consider this too.

See also, Michel Serres: The Natural Contract

We are using up the earth

There was an article in the Globe and Mail newspaper this weekend which was an excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s new book, The Year of The Flood. “…back to the post-apocalyptic future” were some of the words in the byline heading up the item and I think this diminishes not only Atwood’s work but also the legitimate feelings of fear and unease about environmental disaster that many people have and which Atwood is able to give words to.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/were-using-up-the-earth/article1276475/

It also put me in mind of Caryl Churchill’s remarkable play “Seven Jewish Children” where different parental voices over ten minutes tell how to explain to their children what happened at Gaza this year and in these ways possibly be able to deny their own passive complicity. Because sometimes our silence(s) are interpreted by our children as complicity. (listen to it here http://politics-infozone.com/audio/7jewishChildren.mov on cbc with intro by Michael Enright and make up your own mind, it takes about 15 hypnotic minutes)

Atwood gives words to the silence, the unspeakable. What do we tell our children about our own complicity in the atrocities regularly committed against the “more-than-human-world”?

Tell them we didn’t know.

Tell her we couldn’t know.

Tell them it wasn’t us.

Tell them we had to have that stuff.

Tell her we were doing our best.

Tell them we wanted to protect them.

Tell them the animals didn’t feel anything.

Don’t frighten her.

Tell her  god’s on our side.

Tell her  it was the economy.

Tell them we were misinformed.

We didn’t know about the deaths.

Tell her it’s not our fault.

etc.  Yes, there were fantastic creatures when we were children, but they “disappeared”

Tell them they disappeared.

post script, Sept 9th Globe and Mail front page:   Grizzlies Starve as Salmon Disappear

Tell them they disappeared.

Tell them they are absent.

from the article: The grizzlies are absent this year. “I’ve never seen anything like this…I’ve been doing this for 11 years and this is the worst I’ve seen it… Last year on the Mussel River, I saw 27 bears. This year it’s six. That’s an indication of what it’s like everywhere… I’ve never seen bears hungry in the fall before, but last year they were starving… I noticed in the spring there weren’t as many bears coming out, but I felt it was premature to jump to any conclusions… but now there just aren’t any bears. It’s scary. I think a lot are dead. I think they died in their dens [last winter].  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/grizzlies-starve-as-salmon-disappear/article1279874/

Writing the disaster is scary. Climate change? Who can be against change? Why not call it global ecological disaster,   and jump to some conclusions.

conventional farming is “an insult to history” (Eduardo Sousa)

I tuned into TED; one of my thesis advisors recommended I check this out. We’d been talking about the local organic duck place outside Ottawa, Mariposa Farms. It is a fascinating story, and almost mystical and if you’ve ever had foie gras, you know deeply what a guilty pleasure  is. Chef Dan Barber tells the story of his visit to Eduardo Sousa’s farm where he nurtures the geese and they nurture him in return. Sousa designed electric fencing that would keep “humans and other predators” out. He did this because the geese “told him” that they felt manipulated by being imprisoned. When he changed the fencing, they ate 20% more. As Barber says, “the most ecological choice for food is also the most ethical, and almost always, the most delicious”.