Editor,
After decades of exile to environmentalism’s legal fringes, the notion that natural systems could have legal rights is receiving serious attention.
Bolivia’s Law of Mother Earth is set to pass.
“Each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new entity, the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable,” wrote University of Southern California professor Christopher Stone. “This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of us.”
Stone stated that until recently African Americans (the previously rightless) were perceived to have been put on Earth to be used as the White people saw fit.
In some countries today, women are still perceived to be rightless and are used as men see fit. There are far too many humans beings who perceive that all those who do not share our limited, and limiting, perception of reality deserve no rights (and are rightless).
As long as “Might makes Right” remains the way some humans perceive reality, any group, or anything that some group has the illusion of control over, will be deemed rightless, and thus available for the powerful group to use (or misuse, or abuse) as they choose. This includes anyone or anything on this planet and the planet itself.
This misperception of reality, which is an illusion that only exists in the minds of some human beings, must be shifted to the reality that all things in our universe are interconnected and interdependent. Otherwise, this planet won’t be able to sustain us as a species, and we will pass from the cosmic scene and be replaced by another species.
This new species will have the opportunity to prosper by expanding its consciousness to the degree that it interacts with all that exists in the universe as having the same rights.
Yes, they will accept that all things in the universe have equal rights (nothing is rightless) and therefore they will, unlike us, not be just another species that became extinct
Robert Gardiner
UNM community member
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