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.