Global climate change and biodiversity loss
The climate crisis and the extinction crisis have been building up since the industrial revolution — for a long time unrecognized.
Concern about the loss of — mostly vertebrate and megafauna — species due to overexploitation, pollution and habitat loss, led to the foundation of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, also 75 years ago, on Oct. 5, 1948. However, at the time, there was neither much awareness of how deficiencies in human rights could have repercussions for many realms of human activity, nor of what crucial roles many invertebrates and microbes occupy in the web of life.
Moreover, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sounded rather abstract and did not seem universal at all to First Nations and other indigenous people. Rights of nature are deeply rooted in indigenous world views.
Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth
The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, adopted the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth on April 22, 2010. Several petitions have asked the United Nations as well as many countries and lower jurisdictions to endorse it.
EarthSolidarity!™ encompasses not only solidarity with all human beings, but explicitly solidarity with Mother Earth, with all its forms of live, and including good stewardship of all our planet’s resources necessary to sustain life.
In September 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize rights of nature in its constitution. As of 2022, nature’s rights laws existed in 24 countries. The City of Pittsburgh was the first major U.S. municipality to recognize rights of nature. At least seven tribal nations in the U.S. and Canada, and over 60 cities and counties throughout the United States have followed suit according to Wikipedia.
As defined by the Earth Law Center, “Earth Law is the idea that ecosystems have the right to exist, thrive, and evolve — and that Nature should be able to defend its rights in court, just like people can.
“Despite decades of environmental legislation, Earth’s health continues to decline. Because our current laws protect Nature only for the benefit of people and corporations, profit usually takes priority over Nature. Even when environmental issues are brought to court, people must prove that the environmental damage violates their own rights since the environment has no rights of its own.”
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund has an excellent Rights of Nature Timeline.
Global warming slowly gained credibility
Although the existence of the greenhouse effect was discovered 200 years ago, it was not much discussed among scientists until the 1970s. Some were more concerned air pollution may reflect enough sunlight away from Earth to cause a new period of glaciation. In the 1980s new concerns emerged that a global exchange of nuclear weapons might cause an extended nuclear winter.
By the 1990s most scientists agreed, further global warming was the most credible prospect in the absence of nuclear cataclysm or effective reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) became effective Mar. 21, 1994 upon ratification by 50 states. Since then the number of parties to the convention has risen to 194.
Acceleration of climate change, however, has outstripped moderate successes in reducing the output of greenhouse gases per unit of production by many industries; per monetary unit of some nation’s gross domestic product; even per capita in a few countries.
The IPCC has been projecting future climate patterns with increasingly more detailed studies and more sophisticated climate models. In every successive IPCC report, the average and the worst case outcomes for global warming have been superseded by more dire ones.
Burning embers diagrams are developed using expert judgement, based on available information about climate impacts. Risk levels at given temperatures have generally increased over time, owing to more comprehensive science. This diagram shows that aggregate impact that in 2001 were anticipated to occur if the temperature increase exceeds 3°C are now understood to be as likely below 2° warming. The risks of large-scale discontinuities forecast by the 2001 models to happen at about 5° warming may actually be encountered at 2° already.
If anyone expected governments to fix this problem, COP28 (the 28th annual Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC, Nov. 30 - Dec. 12), aka 2023 UN Climate Change Conference, exemplifies that such confidence was misguided. Some 80,000 people traveled to Dubai for it. The vast majority of them presumably by air, notwithstanding the massive emission of greenhouse gases released by air travel.
Hopes were further dimmed by reports about large numbers of special-interest lobbyists, suspicions of conflicts of interest among official delegates to the conference, and accusations of bad faith activities by the conference hosts. Positive outcomes of this conference may take little more than a few drops out of a rising ocean.
Top down or bottom up? We need both!
Top down laws, regulations, rules and other government actions take time to get implemented and enforced on the ground. Many goals cannot be mandated in a way that is satisfactory or even acceptable to the majority of people affected by them.
Developing new approaches from the ground up holds much promise
EarthSolidarity! dares all of us to introspectively assess how we can lower our personal ecological footprint. Ecological Footprint is a measure of human impact on the environment. It references the capacity of Earth’s natural resources to support people and their economies without getting overtaxed; future capacity remaining undiminished, i.e. assuring use within sustainable limits indefinitely.
In a fair and equitable world every person should have the right to an equal share of the planet’s capacity to sustain life. Sadly, many people who live in less-developed areas of the world have little money and thus next to no chance of claiming their share. Desperate measures they must take to survive lead to resource damages that often reduce an area’s capapacity to sustain future generations.
Consumers in highly developed countries, however, far exceed their fair share. Together, all of humanity uses as much ecological resources as if we lived on 1.75 Earths!
At the community level, people familiar with the local conditions have great potential to come up with, and implement, the most appropriate ways to avoid waste, reduce environmental damages and minimize social impacts. While grate changes in governmental programs are required and coordination at higher levels is indispensable, it will be impossible to overcome the global polycrisis without decisive grassroots initiatives and massive public engagement in an all-hands multigenerational collaborative last stand.