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Ladies and gentlemen,
good afternoon and welcome to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
My name is Alessandro Pelizzon.
I'm a lecturer at Law at Southern Cross University,
and it's a great honour for me to welcome you all to this talk.
If you haven't done so,
can I remind you to switch off your mobile phones, please?
And if you wish to tweet, please feel free to do so. The code is #fodi.
Now, given today's topic, it is particularly important for me
to begin by acknowledging the country that we are sharing,
the country that the ancestors
have entrusted the Gadigal people with looking after,
and in so doing, I want to recognise all the political implications
of this act.
Namely, this act raises questions
about any competing hegemonic claim to country.
But most importantly for today's talk,
I would like to remind us all that 'country' for Aboriginal people
is far more than a sense of belonging to an abstract geopolitical entity.
In the words of Deborah Bird Rose,
"Country is the nexus of interconnectedness,
"relationships and identity,
"country is all the beings that surround us,
"all the phenomena that binds us and shape us,
"country is all the relations among and with such beings and phenomena,
"and country is all the stories
within which such relations are encoded."
It is with this in mind
that I would like to pay my respect to the owners of such stories,
the elders past, present and future.
And since country is not only inscribed in space, here,
but also in time, now,
I'd like to thank Cormac for his time with us today.
But I would also like to thank you all for your time with us today,
and in the words of the Lakota people of North America,
mitakuye oyasin, 'all is relations'.
Now, in 1972
Professor Christopher Stone asked a very provocative question -
should trees have standing,
or in other words, should trees have rights
that can be represented in a court of law?
Many eyebrows were raised back then.
Three decades later,
ecotheologian Thomas Berry took the ideas a little bit further
and suggested that since we are all part of an interconnected system
of beings and phenomena,
and since the wellbeing of each member of the system
is dependent on and connected to the wellbeing of the system as a whole,
it makes sense that we shift from an anthropocentric perspective,
in which we look at the wellbeing of a few members of the system,
to a more holistic ecocentric perspective.
Now, Berry's and Stone's ideas, and many others',
were finally encoded and encapsulated
in the words of anti-apartheid activist, environmental lawyer,
legal practitioner and part-time enthusiast dancer Cormac Cullinan.
Cormac argued in his book 'Wild Law' in 2002
that the wilderness, as we know,
is not a place of randomness and disorder,
but rather is a place of ultimate order,
and, as a result, our legal system should learn from such a place
rather than trying to regulate it at all costs.
Cormac's words were instrumental
in triggering a number of legislative initiatives in the last five years.
In 2006, the Tamaqua borough in Pennsylvania
granted legal standing to its local ecosystem.
In 2008, Ecuador inscribed nature as a subject with and of rights
in its constitution.
In 2010, that was followed by the Bolivian law of Mother Earth
and by the Universal Declaration of Mother Earth,
which was drafted quite heavily by Cormac himself.
And among many other examples, a more recent one
is the one from New Zealand two months ago
where the Whanganui River was granted legal rights.
So in order to discover what happens when Mother Nature can sue,
please join me in welcoming Cormac Cullinan.
(APPLAUSE)
Thank you very much.
I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to be here
in such a crowd of dangerous thinkers.
It's a really rare privilege
and also not only to be in this beautiful city,
but also in this amazing country,
and particularly to start with the acknowledgement of country
which I was very struck by when I visited Australia last year,
and I think it's incredibly important
because it reminds us of the intimate connection
between each one of us and Earth,
and it also reminds us of the importance of respect,
respect not just for Earth,
but also for those who are entrusted with speaking for Earth
and guarding Earth, protecting Earth,
and this will be very much the subject of my talk today.
So what I'm going to propose
is not only that Mother Earth, nature, if you like,
should be allowed to litigate in a court of law,
but that, in fact, if we don't give Mother Earth the rights
and allow those rights to be enforceable in a court of law,
then the case for humanity's continued participation
in the Earth community will be lost.
Put another way, recognising rights of nature is a necessary precondition
to establishing ecologically sustainable societies.
And I also want to touch upon what I think are the revolutionary
or perhaps evolutionary implications of this thinking.
I think that what may at the moment appear to be a small ripple
on the ocean of global...of global affairs and discussion
could well be a forerunner of a huge change in consciousness
which is rising to the surface,
and I think that that in many ways is perhaps even more interesting
than the rights of nature, which is the tip of that...
of one of the ripples from that emerging consciousness.
But before I get into the meat of the discussion
I think it's important to contextualise this discussion
because we live in extraordinary times.
And let's imagine for a moment
that we had industrial civilisations in the dock -
we had the dominant civilisations of the world today -
and instead of being in the dock in a conventional court,
we had them in a court which applied the laws of nature,
and instead of the prosecutor representing the state,
the prosecutor was representing Mother Earth herself.
Well, you can imagine the charge sheet would be a lengthy one.
There would be charges of enslavement of other beings
and by 'beings' I'm not being metaphysical.
I mean, all that has come into being and exists.
There would be charges of genocide, of causing extinction, of ecocide,
there would be possibly a charge of robbery from future generations,
of intentional infliction of grievous bodily harm
on a multitude of species and ecosystems,
charges of recklessly contravening
the duty to observe ecosystem limits and planetary boundaries,
and perhaps a charge of recklessness...endangerment
of life as we know it.
So if one were the defence counsel
charged with defending our civilisations, what would we say?
What would we plead in defence?
Perhaps we could try ignorance of the law.
"My Lord, nobody told us
"that putting so much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere
"was going to destabilise the planet.
"Nobody told us it was bad to cut down the rainforests
"and drive species to extinction,
"to poison the earth, to use up the topsoil, to pollute fresh water."
It's not going to work, is it,
because not only is ignorance of the law not an excuse,
but it's highly implausible because we've been getting warnings
about all of these things for a very long time
and Earth is turning up the volume.
The warnings are getting daily more strident and more urgent.
Well, perhaps we could try self-defence.
"My Lord, we looked around us
"and admittedly observed initially an incredibly beautiful,
"fecund, diverse,
"sumptuous universe of unbelievable beauty.
"But, My Lord, after a while we looked closer
"and we noticed, My Lord, that it was wild.
"Yes, My Lord, uncontrolled, risky,
"dangerous, unmanageable.
"In short, My Lord, it was dangerous to human beings.
"So what we did is we canalised it.
"We cut the forests down,
"we burnt anything that got in our way,
"we killed the fierce creatures that might harm us,
"we waged chemical warfare on all the insects and other creatures, My Lord.
"But, yes, in retrospect, My Lord,
"it may have been perhaps a little...
"foolish perhaps, My Lord,
"to imagine that a tiny elite of a single species
"could, in fact, control and run this incredibly complex planet.
"But, My Lord, you must...
"But you must understand, the fear was real.
"The fear - we were driven by fear
"against this wild and dangerous planet in which we found ourselves.
"Yes, My Lord, it is true
"that perhaps the degree of violence used in self-defence
"was a tad excessive, My Lord, but it was well-meant."
You begin to get the picture.
The defence is very, very weak and...
But, of course, fortunately...
fortunately, we don't have to run that defence, do we?
I mean, it really isn't going to wash
because in our courts we don't apply the laws of nature.
We apply our laws.
And fortunately, in the real world
all of the things that I'm describing,
almost all of them are perfectly legal.
It's quite legal to do the things that cause climate change.
It's quite legal to do almost all of the things
that have caused this destruction.
So... And in fact, of course, in our laws, nature doesn't have any rights.
Mother nature doesn't have any rights
and so we don't have any legal duties to observe them.
So fortunately,
we don't have to take this responsibility in real life,
which is quite fortunate because in the court of evolutionary history
the sentence for modifying your habitat
in a way that makes it less likely that your progeny will survive
is usually death.
And that's exactly what we've been doing.
But unfortunately for us,
it turns out that we aren't separate and superior to nature,
as we had hoped.
We are, of course, embedded in nature.
We are an inextricable part of the Earth community.
And this delusion of separation and superiority
has led us to believe that we could ignore the rights of nature,
has blinded us to the reality
that the laws of nature will always trump human laws,
that these are a higher law, that they are non-negotiable.
They're higher than the constitution
and no amount of pleading or bribing or gerrymandering
or any other such political shenanigans
that we normally get up to to change our laws is going to help us
because the problem that we now see is that the legal, political
and economic systems of our civilisations,
the governance structures of our civilisations,
are not fit for purpose,
and they are simply incapable of dealing with the issues
that we face today.
And part of the reason that they are not fit for purpose
is because of the purpose which underlies them,
which I'll return to in a moment.
Because essentially, what we have been...
what we have done is we have set up systems
which are...which are designed
to reflect a particular world view
in which the humans are separate from and superior to the system.
But before I explore that in more detail,
I think it's important from a contextual perspective
to recognise that we are facing...
..challenges of enormous magnitude.
The... We have initiated the sixth period of mass extinction.
The last time that happened was about 65 million years ago.
So we are talking about changes in the planet
which are significant not on historic timescales,
but on geological timescales.
We also need to appreciate that this is not a problem which arises
from a faulty, defective part of the system that we can replace, etc.
We are talking about a systemic problem.
There's a design fault here
because almost all that we do is causing these problems,
and the methods that we are using to stop them,
like environmental law, aren't working,
and I believe that the answers to these problems
do not lie within the frame of reference, within...
in other words, within the world view
of the dominant industrial civilisations.
I want to turn now to the idea of law
because why is law important in this discussion?
Well, we think, of course, of law
being primarily about command and control -
you may do this and you may not do that.
But law has many other functions. In particular, it frames society.
Whenever a group of people get together,
whether as a sports club or a nation,
they start out establishing a constitution,
and that constitution frames...records their view of life,
it records how power is to be exercised,
and it controls how change happens.
And unfortunately for us,
our legal systems reflect a perspective of life
which was...originates in the Age of Enlightenment
in the 16th and 17th century in Europe.
This is a perspective which sees the world as a machine,
a mechanistic world where we...where human beings can control it
and drive it for their own purposes,
and the purpose for which this system has been designed,
our governance system has been designed,
is essentially to facilitate and legitimate the exploitation of Earth.
Now, that might sound a bit harsh.
But if you think about it, what we've done
is we've defined everything that is not a human being or a corporation
as property, as a thing.
So that means that the only...
And, of course, 'things' are not capable of holding legal rights,
so effectively we have defined the whole of nature...
We've put it in the same category as we put slaves.
Now, it was very easy to see that when you have a slave owner,
who is recognised in law as a person with all the legal rights,
and a slave, who is an object in law with no rights,
there will always be an exploitative relationship
between the slave owner and the slave,
and that is exactly the relationship that we have hardwired
between human beings and all of nature.
And this one could characterise
as a kind of colonial mind set
because one of the characteristics of exploitative relationships
is that they are one-way relationships -
one party benefits and the other party loses -
and that is inherently unsustainable.
You know from yourself, if you've got a friend
and there's...only one person is enjoying the friendship
or benefiting from the friendship, it doesn't last.
You need a two-way flow of benefit
and one of the obstacles that is preventing us seeing
that the really important thing about this planet
is this amazing web of relationships
which creates and constitutes this Earth community,
and that we need to focus
on maintaining mutually beneficial relations
with all the members of that community...
and we are blinded to that
because we don't recognise anything else as subjects.
It's all objects.
And why are rights important?
Because, of course, rights aren't natural. We made them up.
We do on occasion pretend they're natural,
but we did really make them up.
And one of the important things about rights
is that they establish social norms.
They say, "We, a society, accept that this is appropriate behaviour
"and you have the right to behave in that way."
It also enables us to use the machinery of the state
to support and enforce certain important relationships.
So it's important for society that parents look after their children
and that children, when they get older, look after their aged parents,
so we establish a reciprocal duty of support
and we use the machinery of the state to support that.
Now, the other important thing about rights
is that they create correlative duties,
and in this context the rights of nature...
one of the most important aspects of recognising that nature has rights
is to give rise
to the correlative duty on humans to respect those rights
because from our perspective what's more important
is that we ensure that that duty of respect is observed.
And if you think of the concept of human rights,
the idea of human rights has been incredibly important
in the history of the world.
After the horrors of the Second World War, people came together and said,
"There has to some basic standard of humanity,"
and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
was drafted and adopted.
And we claim human rights not because our governments give them to us,
or because the courts rule on them, but because we exist as human beings.
We say that we are entitled to those rights
as a result of coming into being as a human being.
But what we've forgotten
is that we are but one branch on the tree of life,
and we've got into this ridiculous situation
where we're sitting up in the branches
and we are saying that we are not going to stop people
chopping away at the roots of the tree or the trunk of the tree
or lopping off a branch here or there
because they've got the right to do that.
They are property owners or whatever. "We're not going to do that."
And, of course, this is a mad idea,
that you would say...that you're sitting in the branches
and you're allowing the very basis for life
to be cut away from underneath you,
and you're not preventing it on the basis of human rights,
which are wholly dependent on the rights of the whole tree to exist.
We don't even recognise that nature has the right to exist,
that a river has the right to flow,
that a forest has the right to play its role
in the ecological functioning of an ecosystem.
And what is the good of the human right to life
if you don't have water?
And you won't have water
unless you protect the entire hydrological cycle,
which includes the flowing river, the mountain and the forest.
So what I'm going to suggest to you
is this idea that there is a conflict
between human rights and the rights of nature
and that human rights should trump the rights of nature in some way
is a dangerous idea.
In fact, that is a really wacko idea, and yet that's the idea
on which our legal and governance systems are built.
But what if we tried a completely wild and dangerous idea of our own
and decided we were going to change our governance systems
and come up with laws as if Earth mattered?
In other words, we would...
In other words, if we decided -
"Instead of assuming that we can control and operate the planet
"on this mechanistic world view,
"we are going to accept what the scientists are telling us,
"what the great wisdom...traditions throughout the world are telling us,
"and what indigenous people have been begging us to hear,
"that we are an integral part of this amazing community of life.
"Our future is completely inseparable from the future of this community."
As Father Thomas Berry has said,
"The universe is not a collection of objects.
"It is a communion of subjects."
It is the amazing interrelationship between everything,
this wonderful dance of existence, of symbiosis,
which makes this planet so wonderful.
And if we accepted that
and embraced the reality that we, for reasons which we can't understand,
have the most incredible pleasure, the most incredible privilege
of being born into the most beautiful community of life
we have been able to discover anywhere in the entire universe...
That is an unbelievable privilege
and we should embrace our participation in that community.
And imagine if we decided
that instead of trying to dominate and subjugate it,
we were going to abandon that colonial perspective
and we were going to embrace our participation,
if we changed the theory of law so instead of a colonial jurisprudence,
we had an Earth jurisprudence
which privileged the maintenance of the whole
above the narrow interests of any particular group.
Imagine if we had wild laws,
laws that didn't seek to canalise and subjugate and dominate,
but that seek to strengthen the connection
between us and the rest of the community of life.
Wildness, as we know, is deeply associated with creativity.
It's part of our nature.
Wildness is what...is that thread,
that vital thread that runs through us,
connecting human nature with the greater nature outside.
So if we had laws which were specifically designed
for a different purpose, to enable mutually beneficial relations
between humans and the planet,
instead of seeking to dominate and subjugate...
Well, that was a kind of a vision
which I tried to express in the book 'Wild Law'.
But, of course, many people said, "Well, you know, that's a nice idea,
"but what are the chances of it happening?"
And it's very interesting because...
..I think when I...initially, when I wrote the first edition,
I wasn't really sure whether this was likely to happen or not.
I was simply trying to point out
that if one is...if one is a subset of a larger Earth system,
it seemed to me inescapable
that if you didn't align your governance system
with how the system as a whole worked that there was going to be a problem,
and that we were basing our governance systems
on understandings of the law,
understandings of how the universe works
that have long since been discredited in scientific circles.
But in the last four years
I have been amazed at the changes that have been happening,
and I have been...I feel, in a sense, very much more positive now
than I did 10 years or so ago.
Now, I think the jury is very much out...
still out on this question on the future of humanity,
so I'm not wanting to be a Pollyanna
and saying that everything's definitely going to change.
But I think that the chances of this perspective, this world view -
which in law would be reflected in what I've called 'wild law'
but which would affect every aspect of civilisation -
I think the prospects of this happening are increasing,
and I'll give you a couple of reasons why.
One is that I think that the ranks of the disaffected
are swelling by the day.
People are no longer buying into the current system
in the way that they once did and I'll give you an example.
Earlier this year, I was in Rio de Janeiro
for the Rio+20 Conference
and the governments of the world put a document on the table
called 'The Future We Want'.
That was the theme of the conference
and this was the great future that the governments were crafting for us,
and all of the NGOs and all of the major groups,
indigenous people, women, youth, etc.,
rejected that document in its entirety,
which is rather interesting because it raises the question,
"Who's the 'we'?"
because the governments are supposed to be representing us.
And when they put forward a vision for the future
all the other civil society organisations said,
"Sorry. That's not the future that we want,"
and the future that was put on the table
was a version of the green economy,
I think, that we found difficult to accept.
I think all of us were supporters
of the original idea of the green economy, where you try and do things
in a way which is ecologically sustainable etc.,
but this particular version of the green economy
that was being touted at Rio involved the commodification of everything.
In other words, the answer was that now we have traded
all the physical commodities of nature,
the timber, the fish, etc., the minerals,
now we must move on to the intangible ecosystem services
and we must commodify and trade those as well.
And one of the interesting things is that...
I mean, to me it sounds like... It reminds me of that...
What a British politician famously used to say is that, you know,
"The most important thing when you're in a hole is to stop digging,"
and that looked like a lot more digging to me.
And...but one of the interesting things
is that the push back from global civil society
is increasingly reflecting this 'rights of Mother Earth' approach
because it is not about commodification.
People can't come... The rich can't come and buy your rights.
It's inherently a more democratic perspective.
But most importantly, it reflects the understanding
that we do not live in a dead world of natural resources.
We live in an animate universe.
The other point for hope, I think,
is that the current system is going to deteriorate anyway,
and I listened...
many of you may have listened to Richard Heinberg's talk yesterday
where he talked about energy
and debt and climate change and the nexus between those,
and that was a good example, I think,
of the kind of forces that are operating,
which means that the current system will decay anyway,
and in doing so, create vacuums for new approaches.
The other point, I think, is that adaptive strategies, I believe,
are more likely to succeed than maladaptive strategies,
and I'm meaning in a Darwinian sense,
that the species that are most adapted to the changed circumstances
will tend to tend to do better.
And I believe that this approach
of recognising that we are a part of the whole
and seeking to adapt ourselves, to adapt human governance systems,
to adapt human societies to fit in with the whole
is working with the grain of nature and not against nature,
and is much more likely to succeed than a kind of colonial empire model
because empires are expensive to run, they take a lot of energy,
and they tend to collapse.
I think also it's true to say
that the old gods are losing their power,
in other words, the gods of...
where we worship technology and money, in particular,
because the great dream of the industrialised society
was that it was going to bring wealth to everybody,
that we were going to have technology that meant we'd hardly have to work,
we'd have huge amounts of leisure, we would banish poverty, etc.
And these were noble ideals and they fuelled a lot of the creation
of the industrial civilisations,
but we can see now that that's not going to happen.
And so the old gods,
the mythology that has driven this particular form of civilisation,
I think, is deteriorating and draining away.
But I think that perhaps what's most hopeful and in some ways surprising
is that the change is already happening,
and in mysterious ways it is bubbling up all over the world.
Alex has already alluded to some of them,
particularly the adoption in 2008 by Ecuador
of a constitution that expressly recognises the rights of nature,
and it does so, interestingly,
within a context of a completely different development model.
Instead of the society seeking to maximise GDP growth,
it aims to ensure that people live well in harmony with nature.
They have a concept of 'el buen vivir'.
It's something like 'living well' or 'wellbeing',
which is 'sumaq kawsay' in the Quechua indigenous language.
But from this perspective, the role of the state
is to ensure that the conditions for living well are maintained
and then people must take it from there,
and as one Bolivian explained to me -
sorry, this is common to both Ecuador and Bolivia -
is that if you want...
He said, "Having healthy people is a bit like a plant.
"So if you imagine the person is like a leaf on the plant,
"in order for that person to have a healthy and fulfilled life,
"that per...that leaf must be attached to a healthy plant,"
which is analogous to society or community.
In order for that plant to be healthy
it must be rooted in fertile, well-watered soil,
and have sunlight, etc., what we would call the environment.
And so from that perspective,
the fundamental obligation of the state is to protect...
to ensure that communities can persist and regulate themselves
without undue external interference,
that there's clean water and clean air, etc.
So a very different understanding.
And so from that perspective,
every aspect of nature not only has rights,
but there are positive obligations on the state to protect those rights,
and, in fact, one of the most interesting things
was that last year the Vilcabamba River in Ecuador won a case.
So what was involved was -
there is a valley with a road going down the side
and the river at the bottom of the valley.
They were widening the road and tipping the spoil into the river
which upset the flow of the river and caused erosion downstream,
and some people living downstream took the matter to court
but they sued in the name of the river,
and the court found that this was an unjustifiable infringement
of the rights of the river to flow.
Now, one can...
The important thing about this
is that under our existing legal systems,
if we were to have a case like that -
and I speak as an environmental lawyer
who has to deal with these cases very often -
we end up arguing legal technicalities.
It becomes an administrative law matter.
We have to...we have to try and find some little mistake
in the environmental impact assessment procedure
which preceded the granting of the authorisation
to widen the road or whatever,
and we end up arguing about section 3.1, sub. 2, Roman III
and whether or not three days notice was given or two.
That's not what it's about.
The crucial issue is -
is this infringement of the rights of the river...
is it justified on the basis of the human need?
One can imagine there might be a situation
where you needed to build this road to get to a hospital or something
when the infringement on the rights of the river to flow
were justifiable.
In this case, it was not necessary to dump the spoil in the river
and the river won.
Now, that is...represents a fundamental shift.
It's not just about tweaking the law.
It's fundamentally shifting
how one understands the relationship of human beings
within the community of life.
But to give you some idea of how these ideas have been accelerating...
So September 2008's the Ecuadorian constitution.
The next year, on the 22nd of April,
the Bolivian president Evo Morales gets the United Nations to agree
to adopt the 22nd of April as Mother Earth Day,
and on that occasion he makes a speech and he says,
"What we need is we need to contextualise
"the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
"by having a universal declaration of the rights of Mother Earth
"because while we only recognise human rights
"we create an imbalance in the community of life."
A year later exactly to the day, a conference which he had convened,
a Peoples' World Conference on Climate Change
and the Rights of Mother Earth
attended by 35,000 people who travelled to Cochabamba in Bolivia,
adopted the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth,
which I had the privilege of working on,
and this document is interesting because it's a people's document.
It is adopted by the people.
It calls upon the United Nations and other Nations to adopt it,
but it derives its validity from the fact
that people from throughout the world were present there and supported it.
And in some ways, it's an articulation
of an indigenous world view - I mean, a world view
which sees us as embedded within this community of life -
which has been translated into law
so that the international community can understand it.
That resulted in, a few months later,
the formation of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature,
which was founded in Ecuador
but which is spreading throughout the world.
The following year, in April, 2011,
myself and people like Doctor Vandana Shiva from India
were privileged to address the United Nations General Assembly
on these issues.
Now...
So in a couple of years it's gone from something
which is not at all visible internationally
to the agenda of the General Assembly.
Look, it's not likely to be adopted any time soon,
but it's still evidence of the rapid uptake of these ideas.
And then, as I mentioned, in this year at Rio
we can see it's being adopted by global civil society,
the peasants' movement, La Via Campesina,
indigenous peoples' organisations acro...throughout the world
increasingly coming together around these ideas as a common manifesto.
But what does this mean?
Well, I think it means that at a practical level
we are literally talking about laws which recognise the rights of nature,
as has been done at local level in the United States
and various other countries.
But that is the tip of the iceberg,
and the iceberg is changing the fundamental ideas
that industrialised civilisations have about human beings
and what it means to be human.
It means changing the idea that our role is to be a dominant oppressor
and accepting the...the understanding
that our role is to participate in this amazing community of life
and to build mutually beneficial relationships within it.
It's not about tweaking the legal system.
It's about changing two fundamental things
about our whole governance systems.
The first is the frame
because we established the frame when we set up our constitutions.
We established them and inside that frame were people and corporations,
legal entities,
and nature and all other beings were outside that frame,
and once you've been looking...
once you've had your view framed for you for a long time
you forget to look at what's outside the frame.
But, of course, it's one system.
What happens within the frame is influenced
by what happens without the frame,
and what we have to do is enlarge the frame to, in Einstein's words,
"widen the circle of compassion",
so that we are dealing with a governance system
which recognises the reality that we are in a web of relationships
with the entire planet and the wider universe.
And the second point, of course, is to change the purpose
because while our...of our governance systems.
Our governance systems may be fit
for the purpose of exploiting and subjugating the Earth,
and if we could *** the Earth and then get on a spaceship
and fly off to our home planet which was pristine, that might work.
But as the protesters at Copenhagen said, "There is no planet B."
This is it.
And I think what that means
at a fundamental and perhaps a more personal level
is we're moving into a different way of seeing ourselves in the world.
We need to shift our allegiances
away from states, from political parties, etc,
and...and to the land
because, if you think about it, what makes you Australian is the land.
It's your connection with the land.
And those of you, as many of you have,
who have lived away from your home country,
you don't pine for your favourite politician.
-(LAUGHTER) -You know?
What you remember are the smells and textures of your childhood,
of the intensity of the sunlight, of the call of the birds in the bush.
Those are the things that stir us, that connect us,
that make us who we are, that give us our identity,
and that's why country is so important,
and I think we all need our allegiance to country.
And you here in Australia are so fortunate
that you have people, you have traditions, Aboriginal traditions,
people who can read and listen to country
and have an understanding of country in an incredibly deep way
from which those of us
whose cultures have moved away from those understandings can now...
We can now come back and have...find elders to teach us.
So in conclusion, what do we need to do?
Well, I think what we've got to do is we have to...
we have to work against the syst...
The system of industrialised societies
is built on this mad idea of separation and superiority,
which, I might add, was the basis of apartheid in my country.
Apartheid literally means 'separation' and it's an ugly thing
and it leads to ugly systems of domination and control,
and in the same way
as the small white governing party elite in South Africa believed
that the only way to...or the best way of maximising their wellbeing
was to deny rights to the community as a whole and to exploit them,
in the same way, those of us who live in industrialised societies
have been born into that same role of oppressor.
We believe, unconsciously perhaps,
that we need to deny the rights of nature
and exploit the rest of the community in order to maximise our happiness.
What we need to do is to connect.
The antidote to separation is connection.
And we all know you can walk into a wild place, etc.
There are many ways of connecting with nature
and that puts one in touch
with this membership of this community as a whole.
And above all, we need to start creating the societies
that we want to see right now.
There's no point in waiting for the governments.
If you go to one of those international meetings,
it is absolutely clear that the kind of creativity
and boldness and vision that we need to deal with these problems
is almost entirely absent, and even if you introduce it into those fora
it will be incredibly watered down by the time it emerges.
We don't need anybody's permission to do this.
We need to just go ahead and start to take a leaf...
Er...
I've just forgotten the name of the person who said this but it was...
He had an amazing saying.
He essentially said,
"What one must do is instead of trying to tear down the system,
"we must just create something which makes it obsolete,"
and essentially that's what we've got to do.
We need to look at our lives, look at our communities,
and work out how to live practically as good Earth citizens,
as citizens that have...that owe relationships of respect,
not only to other human beings, but also to the community as a whole,
the Earth community as a whole.
So, ladies and gentlemen, it may appear
that this is just about whether or not one can stand up in court
and represent a river or a tarantula or a shark,
as has happened in Ecuador,
but, in fact, I believe that this is the tip of a much bigger idea
and an idea whose time has come.
Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
Thank you and thank you, Cormac.
I've listened to your talks quite a few times
and every time I feel always inspired.
So thank you for this.
Now, we have time for quite a few wild questions, hopefully.
So we have two microphones,
one at the bottom of the stairs and one in the mezzanine level, I think.
Can I just remind you to keep the questions succinct,
also in fairness to the rest of the participants
so that we can actually have more questions.
And if you just want to proceed to the two microphones to begin.
And I can actually begin with one question myself, actually,
'cause assuming that nature has rights,
and let's assume that you are the lawyer representing nature -
let's say a tree, for the sake of the argument -
how do you as a lawyer...
are going to get instructions from your client?
'Cause a tree might have rights but it certainly has no vocal cords.
CORMAC: That's a very good question
and, in fact, it's a question which I think led many people
to simply reject the idea out of hand initially.
But as far back as 1972...
You mentioned the article by Christopher Stone.
He pointed out that your lawn can communicate with you.
If your lawn starts going yellow, you know it's unhappy,
there's something wrong with it.
And I think the mistake that we make
is we expect to get our instructions in English, in written English.
And it's not that nature, our client in this situation,
is not communicating with us.
It's that we have...we are blinded by our arrogance
about the mode of communication
because nature communicates with us all the time,
but it speaks a lang...many different languages.
It speaks in sensation,
it speaks in the feel of the wind, the smell of the air,
through fear, through joy, through beauty.
And, of course, we are capable of observing,
and our scientific knowledge helps us,
as well as the knowledge of people
who have very close and intimate relationships
with a particular place.
We are able to listen to our clients
and hear the knowledge of indigenous people or local people
who have very close relationships,
intimate relationships with the land...are the most important
because their ability, their training
enables them to listen to the client much more accurately.
But I think that certainly there's a flow of communication there
which we can teach ourselves to listen to.
-Thank you. -(APPLAUSE)
ALESSANDRO: Can I also invite you to say your name first
and then ask the question?
My name is Raymond. I have a question...
I'll preface by saying I agree with a lot of the things you're saying.
Two points I feel weren't touched upon enough in your speech
was, first of all, you were talking about the rights of nature.
The flip side of the coin of having rights is responsibilities.
Given the inherent violence of nature
and that everything is trying to kill you,
not because it hates you, but because it wants something to eat,
how exactly do you intend
on enforcing the responsibilities of nature not to kill you?
I have to confess,
I don't feel that nature's trying to kill me all the time,
and, you know,
I've been on trails in areas in South Africa,
walking trails where you sleep on the ground and they're open,
you don't have a tent or anything,
and there are, you know, there are all the big predators there,
lions, elephants, hippos, rhinos, buffalo, etc.
And animals are remarkably respectful, actually.
They don't come and look for trouble.
But I do accept your point that nature...
there are aspects of nature who would, you know...
animals that would quite happily feed off me.
The point is...
The point is the problem is not with, let's say,
the crocodiles not knowing how to be good crocodiles.
They've got that sussed.
It's us that are the problem.
So I think that the real issue is controlling human behaviour
and it's not...
it doesn't really help to sue the hurricane that injures you.
It's not about equality.
It's about saying that the fundamental rights are
that that which has come into being must have the right to be, to exist.
We're an integrated whole. It's a bad idea to destroy parts of the whole.
And secondly, that everything has a right
to play its role within the ecosystem.
Now, part of the role
of, let's say, a zebra or an antelope or something like that
is to be eaten, sadly.
But it's true.
The webs, the ecosystems, the food chains hold the whole thing together.
So it's not about absolute rights, but it's about balancing rights
in a way that ensures that the integrity of the whole is maintained.
So how I would see this playing out
is not about giving humans the right to sue forests, etc.,
but saying that if you're going
to infringe upon the right of a river to flow
or the right of a forest to maintain its integrity,
there has to be a balancing between your rights and the rights...
and you must have pretty strong rights
before you outweigh
the rights of existence of another aspect of the whole.
I'm not sure if I've answered it sufficiently clearly?
I want to just redirect very quickly, very succinctly
'cause I know there are people behind me.
You were talking about, at the very beginning, about rights
and the fact that the zebra is...its role is to be eaten.
Then, however, in humanity as a society, we protect the weak.
If you have a person who is mentally disabled
or physically disabled or elderly,
we protect them instead of giving them to the lions
because I'm sure the lions wouldn't worry about an easy meal,
or even the spiders who are much less concerned with that.
By not infringing on rights...
You're saying we can't infringe on the rights of nature.
But if we were to play it the way nature plays it
whereby those who can't protect themselves get eaten,
that's going contrary to the entire societal norm of protecting the weak.
That's just not being human.
CORMAC: I don't have a problem
with protecting weak and vulnerable members of society.
I don't think it infringes on the rights of the lions
to eat old people.
(LAUGHTER)
So in other words, I think that that's fine to do that.
I don't see it as an infringement of the rights of nature.
So I'm not suggesting that we...
that this is about trying to live like other animals.
We are... We are different from lions.
We have our own cultural understandings
and we can do whatever...we can shape our cultures as we like.
But we have to recognise that it's live and let live.
There's a point at which our infringement on other species
becomes damaging to the whole and that's exactly what we're seeing,
and, of course, once it's damaging to the whole it's also damaging to us.
ALESSANDRO: Thank you. One question from above.
MAN: My name's Lindsay Kelly.
I'm just wondering whether our governance system lacks courage.
In Australia,
we have these things called environmental impact statements
that are done, particularly done for the opening of a new mine,
or before the opening of a new mine.
So there's millions of dollars spent on these documents
where somebody then says the mine may proceed,
given the local environmental matters.
But what's not considered in that document
is the impact of what all that coal that's extracted is going to do
for the planet.
I agree completely.
I mean, our environmental impact assessment system in South Africa
is also very unhelpful because it doesn't...
I think it's the same in Australia.
It doesn't ask the fundamental question
because if you think about society,
we're heading in this direction, which is towards unsustainability,
which means ultimately collapse of what we're doing.
It can't be maintained.
And let's say, for example, there's a sustainable future over here.
So the key issue becomes changing direction.
The environmental impact assessments look at a particular project and say,
"How can we make it a bit less harmful?"
But they don't ask, "Is it on this road or is it on this road?"
and that's the key question.
So we carry on...
We say we'd like to be sustainable but we carry on approving projects
which lead us further and further down this way,
and then we have things like coal seam gas or fracking or whatever
and we say, "Hey, this is cheap," you know, "Let's do some more of this."
But the fact that the ticket for the wrong bus is cheap is irrelevant.
-It's still going that way. -(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
ALESSANDRO: Thank you for that.
(APPLAUSE CONTINUES)
-ALESSANDRO: Please. -WOMAN: Hi, my name's Kirsten.
I actually have...I have another question,
but I've just got something to say about that.
Surely...
What about when they say, "Oh, environmental assessment.
"We're gonna dig up the earth and destroy it
"and then we're gonna put it right again?"
Is that OK?
You know, if they put it back to where it was,
if they say, "OK, and then after we've dug it up
"we're gonna put it back to nature.
"We're going to grow all these trees and we're gonna manage it and..."
CORMAC: Yeah.
I mean, in theory,
I guess if one could restore something to integral health
it might be justified.
But my experience of it is that...is that the way they understand it
is in very physical terms.
In other words, if we take off 10 tons of topsoil,
we put back 10 tons of topsoil.
That's not the issue. The issue's the relationships, you know?
It's that integrated...that web of life that existed in that ecosystem
and that is normally what you can't put back.
You can put back, you know...
So in other words, we tend to understand these things
from the mechanistic, reductionist perspective, as opposed to -
"Can we extract whatever from this ecosystem
"in a way which doesn't impair
"the integrity and functioning of the ecosystem in the long-term?"
So it's a shift from looking at the pieces
to looking at the relationships between the beings,
if I can put it that way?
-KIRSTEN: Um... -ALESSANDRO: Sorry to interrupt.
Can we actually maybe grab two questions
and then we'll just keep them in mind and we'll try to answer them both?
So if you go ahead with the question and then we also grab the next one,
and then we let Cormac respond, yeah?
OK, so my question was about...
Australia recently brought into fruition a carbon tax
and the country's very divided over it, and I just wanted to know
do you think that that's a step in the right direction or what?
ALESSANDRO: OK. Thank you. And can we also have the next one?
My name is Annie Neilson and I had a similar question,
so it might work quite well.
I've been concerned about the environment
ever since I read 'Silent Spring' by Rachel Carson back in the '60s,
and I see that there are a few things that happen that are good
but then we seem to go backwards.
And I'm also concerned about the climate change
because no matter what we do about the ecosystems,
climate change is going to really drastically change those ecosystems,
and so I think we are really fighting a losing battle.
Could you please comment?
ALESSANDRO: The first one.
Yeah, I don't know the details of how the Australian carbon tax works,
but in general, I think it's a good idea to disincentivise carbon use,
so I would suspect that it will help.
But I know that when you get into offsetting, etc.,
you can sometimes have perverse results.
So I'm not sure of the details of that,
but generally I would be in favour
of disincentivising carbon-intensive activities.
The other point about environmental law and what we're doing...
I mean, one of the reasons
I started as a specialist environmental lawyer about 20 years
because I believed we could fix the problem with better laws
and I really, you know...I thought I was one of the good guys,
and then I realised
that the environmental laws are not working.
I mean, after the first Rio conference 20 years ago
we had an amazing amount of environmental laws
at the international level and at the national level
over the decade that followed,
and I went to a conference of environmental lawyers in South Africa
just before the Rio+10 conference, and everybody...but...had to admit
that the environmental conditions, the planet was worsening,
the health of the planet was worsening despite all of this,
and most people said, "Oh, no. It's because we're not enforcing it."
Well, I went to another one just before the Rio+20.
This time these were environmental lawyers from all over the world
and nobody was arguing that it was just enforcement.
I mean, people have realised that it's not...
Environmental law...
Having environmental law's better than not having any,
but it really isn't working nearly well enough
and it's certainly not going to work and it's a bit like...
To go back to my slavery analogy,
it's a bit like if you passed a law which said, you know...said,
"Some slave owners are flogging their slaves to death," you know,
"just treating them terribly.
"So we're going to pass a law
"that says you can only flog your slave once a day
"instead of 10 times a day."
Now, that's a bit better for the slave.
But the real problem is not the flogging.
It's slavery as an institution. You've got to abolish slavery.
And that's what the difference between environmental law is
and Earth jurisprudence or 'wild law'.
We're trying to go to the heart of the problem.
And the second question actually dealt with whether we're losing...
fighting a losing battle.
Sorry. Yeah. I mean, undoubt... Sorry, I didn't...
Undoubtedly, environmental law isn't working well enough.
The proof of the pudding's in the eating.
And that's why, although it would be nice
if we could just tweak the system,
I think we have to fundamentally change it
in the way that I've described.
I don't think that...that the solutions are available
within the frame of reference that we've created.
We have to enlarge the frame and change the purpose.
ALESSANDRO: Now, in line with some prior talk
we have time either for two small questions or one large one.
(LAUGHTER)
ALESSANDRO: So please.
WOMAN: Hi, my name is Sadi.
Cormac, these are powerful ideas that you're expressing
and my question is to do with what do you think is the best approach
for persuading people?
And I can see two different possible approaches in what you're saying.
The first is that nature has intrinsic value
and the other idea is the anthropocentric argument,
that there's value in giving rights to nature from a human perspective
because ultimately the way the system is weighted
doesn't serve human purposes and is unsustainable.
But my question is - is taking the anthropocentric argument,
even though it might be more effective at persuading people...
does it risk us collapsing
back into this one-sided system that we've got at the moment?
It's a good question.
I think that there may be situations
where for tactical reasons you might choose to phrase your argument
in that it's in...it's enlightened self-interest for you to do this,
in other words, which is kind of an anthropocentric argument.
But I think that fundamentally...
fundamentally, the mental model that we're using
that underlies our governance systems is inaccurate.
It's...
Quantum physics, everything tells us that everything's interrelated.
Ecology tells us that.
The more we learn, the more we're amazed
about how interrelated everything is,
and what blinds us is the fact that we think that we're the top dog
and that we're separate.
So it's the same battle
that was fought against Galileo and Copernicus
because the church opposed the idea
that the...that the Earth moved round the sun instead of vice versa
because this was the proof that humans were the most important.
We were the middle of the Earth, the Mediterranean,
and the sun went round us and the whole universe went round us,
and it was...that was a politically important point.
And we still find this today.
At the Rio conference,
the Holy See is still resisting - among others, many others -
still resisting the idea
of putting in non-anthropocentric language into documents
because of these kind of reasons.
So I do believe that...that we do have to be very strong
in saying we have to go beyond a narrow anthropocentrism,
that that's important.
And also the other thing, just in terms of the future,
which I didn't mention and perhaps should have mentioned,
is that what's really important is to spread these ideas
and infect existing organisations with these ideas,
and there is a global movement growing.
But we have to organise
because if we don't build a global movement that is strong enough
to push these ideas through, it's not going to happen.
The governments might start following us once we start moving,
but it...we are talking about a global movement of many organisations
coming together to work in advancing these ideas.
And the difference, though, is that it's perhaps not a revolution
in the sense of it's no point in seizing the government
or the leaders of power and trying to operate in that same kind of way.
It's not about changing the deck chairs on the 'Titanic'.
It's about getting on to another ship, you know?
We need an entirely different approach.
So although I sometimes talk about it being revolutionary,
it's probably more evolutionary,
in the sense that we have to make the shift in consciousness
to get us out of this evolutionary cul-de-sac
that we've created for ourselves,
and we don't have time to, you know, grow other appendages and things
that would help us survive in the bad conditions.
So the ecolog...the evolutionary leap that we have to make, I believe,
is in terms of consciousness.
ALESSANDRO: We have time for one very small question.
Yep. Please.
MAN: I've worked in heavy industry lots of my working life,
being in the science game, and making great major changes.
Many people like to talk at the moment
like coal and other things is causing things that are causing the problem.
But when you look at the greater stage
of things we interfere with in most really heavy industry
the number one in weight is air and number two is water,
and they're the two things we interfere with,
and after we've finished interfering with them
they still continue to affect, as happened to the Blue Mountains
with contamination of the water supply towards Sydney.
I think it's very true
and one of the problems is that climate change is such a big issue
that it's blinded us to the fact
that we have to solve all of these issues simultaneously.
You know, you could solve climate change
and we would still have problems with fresh water supply and pollution
and, you know, the many other problems that we have.
But the good thing, to finish on a positive note, is that...
You know the saying that 'necessity is the mother of invention'?
There's something about putting human beings under pressure
where they have to...that makes them more creative,
and if necessity is the mother of invention
we've really got the mother of necessity now,
and I think that we could see...
If we embrace this challenge
and instead of trying to hang on to the old ways of doing things,
we decided to move into the future and embrace that,
we...these are the conditions which could literally spark a renaissance
of new ideas, of creativity.
In fact, you're beginning to see it
with more and more green technologies, etc, coming through.
But we must remember that it's not just a revolution
that can be solved externally by hard...by technology.
It has to be changing our understanding
of ourselves and the role of humans, the internal,
and it has to be changing our governance systems as well.
So on this very positive note,
can I invite you to join me in thanking Cormac for the presentation
and all of you for being here today?
Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
(APPLAUSE CONTINUES)
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Now, if any of you would like to talk further with Cormac
or have a book signed, it's outside in the foyer.
Cormac will be there for the next half an hour. Thank you.