July 15, 2011. Today is the halfway mark in Nepal’s Constituent Assembly’s extended three-month deadline to finish writing the country’s new Constitution. [break]
Contrary to popular belief, I do think that the committees in the CA have done a lot of work, producing hundreds of pages of documents and possibly proposing as many fundamental rights. But political deadlock has put things on hold, and the entire half of the extension is just starting.
That leaves enough time for our CA members to think about a lot of things, take many meaningful actions.
Here’s one: Nature and the Constitution.
Ecuador started working on its 20th Constitution in the fall of 2007. In September 2008, more than 63% of voters approved of the new version.
That Constitution is the first in the world to give Rights of Nature.
Then, on Earth Day, April 22, 2011, Bolivia passed the “Law of Mother Earth,” giving the natural environment legal rights.
Turkey has announced that they too are keen on adopting an “ecological Constitution.”
What is important, though, is to not just acknowledge these groundbreaking steps, but also consider why they might have been taken in a much larger context than what I may be able to present simplistically in this column.
According to Google Earth Layer on Deforestation (Data: World Resources Institute and Greenpeace), Ecuador ranked #9 in the list of Top 10 Countries for Deforestation between 1990 and 2005. Ecuador “witnessed 22% decline in forest cover since 1990.
” Nepal ranked #7, alongside North Korea. “The past two decades saw a 25% decline in forest cover,” the list noted about our country.
Things haven’t been that great post-2005, either; the last couple of years have seen a rise in illegal timber trade and deforestation within Nepal.
Ecuador, on the other hand, continues to try and heal itself from decades of ecological damages caused by oil companies in their forests.
Excerpts from Ecuador’s Constitution
Preamble: Celebrating nature, the Pacha Mama (Mother Earth), of which we are a part and which is vital to our existence.
TITLE VII: THE GOOD WAY OF LIVING SYSTEM
Chapter One: Inclusion and Equity
Chapter Two: Biodiversity and Natural Resources
Rights of the Good Way of Living
SECTION ONE
Water and Food
Article 12. The human right to water is essential and cannot be waived. Water constitutes a national strategic asset for use by the public and it is unalienable, not subject to a statute of limitations, immune from seizure and essential for life.
Article 13. Persons and community groups have the right to safe and permanent access to healthy, sufficient and nutritional food, preferably produced locally and in keeping with their various identities and cultural traditions.
The Ecuadorian State shall promote food sovereignty.
SECTION TWO
Healthy Environment
Article 14. The right of the population to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment that guarantees sustainability and the good way of living (sumak kawsay) is recognized.
Environmental conservation, the protection of ecosystems, biodiversity and the integrity of the country’s genetic assets, the prevention of environmental damage, and the recovery of degraded natural spaces are declared matters of public interest.
Article 15. The State shall promote, in the public and private sectors, the use of environmentally clean technologies and nonpolluting and low-impact alternative sources of energy.
Energy sovereignty shall not be achieved to the detriment of food sovereignty nor shall it affect the right to water.
The development, production, ownership, marketing, import, transport, storage and use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, highly toxic persistent organic pollutants, internationally prohibited agrochemicals, and experimental biological technologies and agents and genetically modified organisms that are harmful to human health or that jeopardize food sovereignty or ecosystems, as well as the introduction of nuclear residues and toxic waste into the country’s territory, are forbidden.
South of Ecuador, Bolivia’s Chacaltaya Glacier (5,300m) is rapidly melting.
The World Bank has reported that the glacier will disappear within 20 years, creating an unimaginable water crisis for more than 80 million people who depend on it, and an energy crisis for Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia which depend on hydropower for about half their electricity.
Surely this is something that will resonate in Nepal, which has used melting Himalayan glaciers to make its climate change case and point in the international arena.
When the policymakers, the indigenous groups, and the people of Bolivia got together to write and enact The Law of Mother Earth, they gave the natural ecosystem a series of rights, such as the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration, and the right to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities.
The law is also designed to require the country’s other laws to recognize nature’s limits, and make the needed adaptations in the country’s economy and society, a process in which indigenous communities are to play a central role.
What Ecuador and Bolivia have done is beyond writing clauses and articles about environment conservation.
They have established landmark moments in national policies on Rights of Nature that have helped shape international dialogues on human rights, conservation, and the idea of development and sustainability and our place in and relationship with this natural world.
In Nepal, the People’s Uprising in 2006 and the election in 2008 were not about our ecological problems or shaping international dialogues. But what the people hope delivered politically within our boundaries are intricately tied to nature and its sustainability within and outside of the federal states we hope to have, and the political borders that outline the Nepali territory.
Still, even respected scholars arguing, or hinting at, the need to consider these critical issues in the context of the Constituent Assembly have been dismissed, ridiculed, or only mildly indulged in Nepali politics.
“The debate at the heart of the Constituent Assembly in Montecristi [Ecuador] was complex. Several members of the Assembly…objected to the acceptance of the Rights of Nature and even called it “nonsense.” Outside the Assembly, the Rights of Nature were taken for “conceptual gibberish” by those preserving the legal status quo, who basically failed to understand the changes in progress,” wrote Alberto Acosta in his paper, “Toward The Universal Declaration of Rights of Nature” (August 2010, AFESE Journal).
Acosta is an Ecuadorian economist and a former Minister of Energy and Mines of Ecuador. He was the President of the Constituent Assembly and member of the Assembly from October 2007 to July 2008.
He continues: “The crisis triggered by exceeding Nature’s limits necessarily entails a questioning of the social-political institutionalism and organization.
Let us bear in mind that, “in an ecological crisis, ‘the resources of ecosystems’, as well as the ‘systems of social performance’ are overtaxed, distorted and exhausted, or, to put it differently: too much is expected from the institutionalized forms of social regulation; society becomes an ecological risk.” (Egon Becker 2001).
This risk amplifies exclusive and authoritarian trends, as well as disparities and inequality so typical of the capitalist system: “a system of values, a model of existence, a civilization: the civilization of inequality,” as understood by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter.”
Will the above paragraphs provide useful guideposts to the Honorable Members of Nepal’s Constituent Assembly while they are authoring the new Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal?
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