NATURE IS NOT MUTE
Eduardo Galeano
APRIL 2008 (IPS) - The world is painting still lifes, forests are
dying, the poles are melting, the air is becoming unbreatheable, and
the water undrinkable and at the same time Ecuador is debating a new
constitution that opens up the possibility for the first time ever of
recognising the rights of nature, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan
writer and journalist and author of The Open Veins of Latin America,
Memories of Fire and Mirrors: An Almost Universal History.
It sounds odd, doesn’t it, that nature could have rights? Yet in 1886
the U.S. Supreme Court extended human rights to private corporations.
They were recognised as having the same rights as people, the right to
life, free expression, privacy, and all the rest.
But there is nothing odd or abnormal about the bill that would include
the rights of nature in the new Constitution of Ecuador. This country
has suffered repeated devastation over its history. To give just one
example, for more than a quarter of a century, until 1992, the Texaco
oil company vomited 18,000 gallons of poison into the rivers, land,
and the people. Once this gesture of beneficence in the Ecuadorean
Amazon was completed, the company, which was born in Texas, was
married to Standard Oil. By then Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had
changed its name to Chevron and was being run by Condoleezza Rice.
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