We have
turned a corner on climate change-- a wrong turn-- and
it is happening more rapidly than we have predicted. Climate change is already disrupting society, ecosystems, and national economies. We have
altered so much of our Earth that we now threaten our own survival.
We know the catastrophic risks we are passing onto future generations
and we wonder, with anxiety and grief, what will become of our planet.
We ask ourselves, “what can I do?”
"The message that solutions to climate change and
environmental degradation is up to the individual directly conflicts
with what people are witnessing."
One of the key barriers to taking action on the paramount issues of
our time is that these problems are the end result of entrenched
cultural, economic and social systems. The message that solutions to
climate change and environmental degradation is up to the individual
directly conflicts with what people are witnessing: the health and
well-being of their bodies
and their communities coming a distant second to powerful economic interests.
Current economic calculations do not recognize the full cost to the
Commons – the cultural and natural heritage we share that is the
foundation of our economy.
Yet growing numbers of people are waking up to the reemerging Commons
ethic, which holds that human systems must be aligned to match
ecological ones.
People believe that future generations have the
inalienable right to a healthy planet, and many are now seeking ways to
withdraw their consent to the politics and policies that lead to a toxic future.
A
rights-based approach
to human systems like the economy allows us to open our discussion to
questions like: What is the economy for? What are the principles needed
to guarantee that we are fair to future generations? What tenets make
justice and the protection of the
Commons more likely?
The
Women’s Congress for Future Generations, to be held Nov. 7-9 in Minneapolis, is joining the groundswell of individuals and
organizations
calling for the arraignment of our capital-driven, infinite-growth
paradigms, and adopting different economic principles which many
Indigenous cultures have lived by for centuries. This gathering builds and extends on the first Women’s Congress held in Moab, Utah in September 2012.
Attendees of the Moab Congress drafted a
living Declaration of the Rights of Future Generations and corresponding Bill of Responsibilities of Present Generations.
The goal of the upcoming Congress in November is to infuse the
Declaration with an even deeper analysis of economic and environmental
justice.
Participants at the Congress will bring forward ideas to help shift
the way we care for and relate to our Earth--ideas such as moving
environmental law out of free market private property law into rights
law; caring for the Commons, the Precautionary Principle, and Free Prior
and Informed Consent. Congress goers-- both men and women--will imagine
different economic principles that counter dominant but destructive
paradigms.
Some of the new principles to be discussed are:
- The Earth is the source of our life and our economic activity.
- The
Commons, the cultural and natural heritage we share, are the foundation
of economics, which presupposes: a) a role of government as the trustee
of the commons; b) Laws and rules governing economic systems must first
protect the commonwealth; c) Concepts such as economic growth, which
ignore the cost to the commons are evolutionary dead-ends.
- Justice within generations and justice between generations must be linked to economic justice.
And these are a few of the tenets that flow from these economic principles:
- Measure the right things: Currently we do not measure the
health of the Commons. Pollution and disease count as good for the
economic GDP.
- Polluter Pays: The one who pollutes or damages the commons shall be held responsible and pay for restoration.
- No
Debt to Future Generations without a Corresponding Asset: We cannot
ask future generations to pay for our messes. We can share with them
the costs of assets like parks, art, clean air and water.
- Audit, Account for and Fund Commons Assets.
This is a conversation about the definition, boundaries, and acceptance of limits.
If one accepts the incontestable truth that present generations
inherit an Earth left from previous generations, and that we are all
eventually ancestors, then our lives are a simultaneously defined by
inheriting and bequeathing.
Facing another incontestable truth that our Earth is finite allows us
to expand our point of view to include a “bigger picture,” which tells a
story with a common goal: It is a story of an incredibly interconnected
living systems on which we are dependent, not dominant. The story of
human development that has recalibrated its systems to match those of
nature itself. The story of a civilization that thrives on stewardship
and care, generation after generation into the far future.
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