Musings on Climate, Common Pool Resources, and the Rights of Nature

Today is the International Day of Climate Action....I guess my first act in support of halting climate change is to write this blog, in which I have already called attention to the climate change issue and its implications on several occasions. A second effort will be to listen to the live broadcast of the Peruvian and American youth from the Potato Park in Peru. The most serious commitment one can make regarding climate change is lifestyle change...and the most difficult. Perhaps knowing this is the International Day of Climate Action I will manage to convince myself to do my errands on my bicycle, though the day is gray and cold and windy. Our Earth’s climate is a “common pool resource” for human societies and for all other creatures. To avoid the tragedy of the commons, as biologist Garret Hardin memorably termed it, we need human institutions that instill in us an ethical concern for others, and which act to provide guidelines or rules to govern our behaviour. Such behaviours are not the individual short term maximization of benefits attributed to “Homo economicus”, the “Economic Man” [note gender] of classical economical modeling. Perhaps it is a hopeful sign that Elinor Ostrom recently was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for her decades of research on common property institutions and governance. She is the first woman to have won this award.
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Well, I did the cycle to the store.....it was OK with sweater, vest, Andean tuque and a windbreaker. Good to get some exercise too. One small pedal for the planet, and a bit of aerobic exercise for me.
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Back to Elinor Ostrom’s contributions- the concept that communally managed property was not managed efficiently dates back to the Enclosure movement of the 17th century in England and Scotland, where the gentry argued that the common folk were not managing communal traditional tenures well, and that they should enclose the land [limit access and exclude the peasants] and should scientifically manage and improve their herd of sheep, goats etc. This was the original privatization. After Garrett Hardin’s eloquent expose of the tragedy of open access abuse, which he mis-called the tragedy of the commons, in the late 1960’s, economists and ecologists alike have assumed that privatization, or government regulation, were the only pathways to “good” [scientific, rational] management of common land and other goods and services, The notion being that enlightened self interest and market competition will, in the case of privatization, result in cost efficient and improved service, seen as a win-win situation. It is clear, however, that one difficulty with such market driven analyses are what is “in” the calculation and what is not- the so called “externalities”--- which include things like the cost of cleaning polluted water downstream to enable re-use, the cost of reclaiming mercury out of used computer monitors, the subtle and not-so-subtle environmental consequences of pipeline construction, and the effect of the CO2 released by the airplane you flew to Hawai’i on, or the 18 wheeler used to bring consumer goods to Walmart. This is where sets of social norms, ethical standards that are internalized as “right”, must come in. We must all internalize an environmental ethic. We don’t dump sewage into the creek because it is wrong rather than because we are concerned about whether we will be fined, the risk of which we might then balance against the cost of installing adequate sewage facilities. Ostrom’s original book Governing the Commons, the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action , published by Cambridge University Press in 1990. contained fascinating case material on self regulation of Spanish traditional irrigation systems, and how water was allocated fairly and the labour of system maintenance was shared . She laid out a synopsis of the conditions under which sustainable institutions of commons management could evolve, and also called attention to conditions that would destabilize these institutions, causing degradation of communally held or public lands. One key necessity for the evolution of stable commons institutions is access limitation. You need to have a community of users in place, who have the ability to enforce norms or regulations for the common good, and who can exclude outsiders who do not have the incentive to play by the rules. Hardin’s original mistake in his formulation of the tragedy of the commons, was that, as a biologist, the study of social institutions was not his forte, and he conflated commons which is communally owned and managed property, such as the village grazing commons and field lands of England, subject to traditional institutions which regulate use and access and tenure, and open access lands and resources, which exist in a social vacuum with individual users, who are not part of a shared community, and who can take as much as they can get. Unfortunately, with social and political and economic shifts and instability, commons can be converted to open access wild west shows, and local and regional environments and social institutions can be destroyed.

A related issue which I’ve been thinking about for a while is rights of nature. Many traditional cultures conceive of humans as part of a community of beings, a society, that includes both humans and non human entities. In such societies, there may be strongly felt reciprocal rights and duties, such that animals give their lives for human sustenance, and humans in turn are obliged to treat the animals’ remains respectfully and to use the flesh, organs and hides appropriately, to enable animals to return. Similarly, plants must be harvested with respect, prayer, and perhaps an offering. Or rituals are held to ensure the rains come and the success of the garden, as described by Eugene Anderson in his 2009 chapter on Maya landscape ecology in Landscape Ethnoecology, Concepts of Physical and Biotic Space (Berghahn Books 2009, L. M. Johnson and E.S. Hunn eds.) and his 1996 book Ecologies of the Heart, and by numerous other authors writing about Maya cultures. As some have pointed out, Western culture seems to be one of the few that divides Nature from Culture, and assumes that humans have been given dominion over nature. Western environmentalists are in this arena more in line with members of other cultures and societies in assuming that wild species, plants, trees and environments are worthwhile in themselves, and should be protected or have “rights”. Anthropologist Kay Milton wrote a very interesting book called Loving Nature, which examines English environmentalists’ perspectives on Nature. Some years ago, there was an attempt to establish the standing of natural objects like trees in court in the United States so that their rights to exist could be argued to counter developers. These legal cases were discussed in a 1997 book by Christopher Stone: Should Trees Have Standing?: And Other Essays on Law, Morals and the Environment. A new version of the book will be released in April 2010 according to Amazon.ca . A recent development which extends this debate is the new 2008 Constitution of Ecuador, which extends rights under law to “ecosystem structures” http://www.celdf.org/Default.aspx?tabid=548 In their September 28 News Release, the Community Environmental Defense Fund wrote:

“By an overwhelming margin, the people of Ecuador today voted for a new constitution that is the first in the world to recognize legally enforceable Rights of Nature, or ecosystem rights.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is pioneering this work in the U.S., where it has assisted more than a dozen local municipalities with drafting and adopting local laws recognizing Rights of Nature.

Over the past year, the Legal Defense Fund was invited to assist the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly to develop and draft provisions for the new constitution to put ecosystem rights directly into the Ecuadorian constitution “Ecuador is now the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights,” stated Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
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“Article 1 of the new “Rights for Nature” chapter of the Ecuador constitution reads: “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public bodies.”’

The Wikipedia article on the Constitution quotes more of the Rights of Nature Section in English Translation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Ecuador:
“Chapter: Rights for Nature

Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.
Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognition of rights for nature before public institutions. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

Art. 2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation of natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.
In case of severe or permanent environmental impact, including that caused by the exploitation of non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for restoration, and will adopt adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.

Art. 3. The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.

Art. 4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.”
The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter the national genetic heritage in a definitive way is prohibited.

Art. 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and from natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.
The environmental services cannot be appropriated; their production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the State.”

I have not read whether any material shift in the Ecuadorian State’s relationship to the environment has occurred since adoption of the new constitution, but the strength of reverence for Pachamama within the Andean region was very apparent to me when I was attending the 2008 International Congress of Ethnobiology just a few hundred kilometers south of Ecuador. As we as a species impel ever more and more rapid change in our earth system, it will become more and more necessary for all human societies to begin to recognize rights for nature alongside rights for humans.

The Ethnobiology of Thanksgiving

Local varieties of potatoe at the village of Huito, District of Pitumarca, Peru (upper photo) and Woman with turkey at the market in Toluca, central Mexico 1968 (lower photo)
The quintessential symbol of Thanksgiving as we celebrate it in North America is the turkey, a new world domesticate, and a wild bird hunted by Indigenous peoples in New England where the legendary first Thanksgiving occurred.
Scientifically the turkey is Meleagris gallopavo- the “rooster-peacock Guineafowl” . Meleagris is a name for guinea fowl, according to the Wikipedia article I checked to confirm the scientific name, while gallus is the rooster and pavo is the peacock. Turkeys were new to the colonists when they arrived in the Americas, and their true relationships were not immediately apparent...so the Europeans likened them to edible domestic fowl of three distinct families (guinea fowl are Numidae, roosters are Gallidae, the family to which turkeys in fact belong, and the peacock, in the genus Pavo, is in the Faisanidae or pheasant family). Turkeys are apparently named “turkey” because Turkey symbolized the exotic, and it was also a name for Guinea fowl. In Mexican Spanish, turkeys are called “guajolote” an onomatopoetic name derived from the Nahuatl guajolotl [in Spanish the ‘j’ is pronounced like an ‘h’). Turkeys were domesticated in what is now Mexico, and are still the basis of a number of delicious Mexican specialties like mole poblano, a delicious concoction of cooked turkey or chicken, chili and spices and chocolate, and other ingredients like sesame butter and raisins.
The next most iconic food at Thanksgiving is the cranberry Vaccinium macrocarpon, a tart round red fruit of a leathery leafed plant in the heather family that grows in the peat bogs of New England. These tart fruits remain edible after freezing, and with the addition of some sweetening, make a tart sauce to counteract the richness of rich meats. As I discussed earlier, the lingonberry (V. vitis idaea) of the circumboreal North has a similar flavour, but much smaller fruits, and grows in the mossy understory of coniferous forests. The large and now domesticated cranberry of our Thanksgiving table also has smaller wild relatives. I have harvested bog cranberries from sphagnum bogs in northwestern British Columbia, and also recorded stories from some of my Witsuwit’en Elder friends about harvesting this cranberry. This species is called Vaccinium oxycoccus. When I first moved to Northwest British Columbia more than 30 years ago I used to harvest instead the highbush cranberries Viburnum edulis to make my holiday sauce.
In my school days stories of the first Thanksgiving, corn was also a feature of the meal, though I now associate it more with summer plenty. Corn, Zea mays is a grain, the seeds of a large erect grass. Much has been written about the unusual anatomy or corn, and about its inability to propagate itself at all without the assistance of people. There is a lot of fascinating archeobotany of corn and its gradual transformation into the large robust cobs we see today, and it is also a crop that has thousands of cultivated varieties of different textures, colours, and cooking qualities, a staple food from Peru through Mexico and much of the present United States, extending even to what is now Canada. In our ethnobotanical saga of Thanksgiving, I don’t want to get too distracted by the very rich literature on corn, so I’ll simply say here that it was grown by the indigenous peoples of coastal Massachusetts when the settlers arrived, in conjunction with beans and squash in mixed gardens, the so called Three Sisters. (I won’t discuss the beans today, and we’ll get to the squash shortly when we consider dessert....)
More typical of the Thanksgiving dinners of my childhood was candied yams, likely not a part of the celebration at Plymouth Plantation. Yams Dioscorea sp. and sweet potato (Ipomea batatas) - are both tropical starchy tubers. Apparently the orange fleshed tubers we buy as yams in North America are actually varieties of sweet potato and are thus also Ipomea batatas. Sweet potatoes apparently occurred in the south Pacific (where they are called kumara), and in South America, where they name was apparently also kumara, as well as in southeast Asia, suggesting there must have been some trade and contact across the Pacific before European exploration. In contrast yams of the genus Dioscorea were an important food of Australian Aborigines and of various tribal peoples of southern India. Incidentally Mexican yams were also the source of the plant steroids originally used to synthesize birth control pills.
Another typical part of today’s holiday meal, and likely not eaten by the Pilgrim colonists, is mashed potatoes. Potatoes are the tubers of Solanum tuberosum, a plant in the nightshade family (along with tomatoes and eggplants). Potatoes were domesticated in the Andes and altiplano of Bolivia and Peru, which is still the centre of agrobiodiversity of the potato, and taken to Europe after the conquest of Peru. The starchy tubers of potatoes come in many flavours and varieties from bitter (with higher levels of solanum glycoakaloids) to “sweet” (lacking noticeable amounts of the bitter compounds). As these plants can produce large amounts of food in relatively cold, damp and acidic soils, they were immediately popular in northern Europe, where they quickly became a food staple of the poor, and a well loved and traditional element of European cuisines, especially served with butter or cream from domesticated milk producing breeds of Bos taurus, traditional foods from Europe’s dairy culture.
One of my favourite parts of Thanksgiving dinner is pumpkin pie- pumpkins, orange fruits of Curcurbita pepo, are a type of squash and were domesticated in the New World. Squash seeds are found in some of the earliest agricultural remains in Mexico (Nee, M. 1990. “The domestication of Curcurbita (Cucurbitaceae),” Economic Botany 44(3: 56-68). Squash flowers as well as the large fleshy fruits are edible. Wild relatives of the squash protect their fruits from herbivores with bitter compounds, which were bred out over generations of selection for sweeter fruits. Squash require rich soils, so make good partners in cultivation with nitrogen fixing beans. Modern Thanksgiving pies combine cooked pumpkin with eggs, milk, cream, sugar, molasses and a range of spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger to make a rich and spiced custard filling for a wheat flower crust. Pumpkin pie is a thoroughly hybrid dish, as eggs, milk, cream and the spices and the wheat for the crust are all Old-World products while the pumpkin is a New-World native.
Wheat is so iconic of food in Europe and the Middle East that the Bible admonishes “Man shall not live by bread alone” to remind Christians that there is more than a full belly. Wheat is the seeds of a grass Triticum aestivum, a hexaploid hybrid, and its history too is a fascinating study in archeobotany and plant genetics (see Simpson and Ogorzaly’s 1986 Economic Botany pp156-158 for a brief and readable summary of its genetic history). It was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 years ago, and has been a foundation of European agriculture since it began, along with its fellow grains barley and rye.
Now we have considered the components of Thanksgiving dinner, but what of the significance of this special meal? Harvest festivals have been important in the calendrical cycles of agricultural peoples throughout history. They bring people together to celebrate and share the successful harvest. While most of us are far removed from harvesting the food we eat, and the Supermarket offers abundance year round without our efforts, Thanksgiving is still in its essence a harvest feast. Although its particular symbolism has been assimilated, in the United States, to the founding of the Nation, it still commemorates and gives thanks for the fruits of the earth...and can thus be seen as marking a relationship.
Canadian Thanksgiving is somewhat of an echo of the American version, but is less significant as a celebration of the founding charter of the state; and because of our more northerly location, is also held about 6 weeks earlier, at a time just after our own harvest season, and before winter really sets in. The menu is much the same as the American version, and for us the same general format seems to have generalized to other Canadian celebration holiday meals such as Christmas and Easter dinners, also typically marked by turkey.
Other traditions also have harvest feasts. The Jewish holiday of Sukkot or the Festival of Booths which ended today, is a week long celebration held out of doors in late September or early October (the 15th of the lunar month of Tishri). It follows Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which mark times of remembrance and atonement at the Jewish new year. There are some fascinating ethnobotanical aspects of Sukkot in the symbolism of plants carried in procession and/or used to construct the booths, which I don’t have space to elaborate here.
For people who obtain their harvest through hunting, fishing and gathering, harvest feasts, if you will, may mark the first harvest of fish or berries or roots in the year. Hunn and Selam describe this for the Sahaptin in Nichi W’ana, the Big River (University of Washington Press 1990) and the Gitksan and Witsuwit’en celebrate annual landmarks like the beginning of salmon harvest with “First Salmon” feasts. All of these celebrations really mark the relationship of people to the living earth with provides their sustanence....a relationship we need to cultivate to ensure the earth and its plants and animals continue to sustain us, and we them.