Who owns the Earth? | Environment/Nature |Axisoflogic.com

Part 1: Earth Ecology versus Global Economy

Vimes knew how you could own a pub, but he wondered how you could own a trout stream because, if that was your bit, it had already gurgled off downstream while you were watching it, yes? That meant that somebody else was now fishing in your water, the bastard! And the bit in front of you now had recently belonged to the bloke upstream; that bloated plutocrat of a fat neighbour now probably considered you some kind of poacher, that other bastard! And the fish swam everywhere, didn’t they? How did you know which ones were yours? Perhaps they were branded – that sounded very countryside to Vimes.

— Terry Pratchett, Snuff

Years ago I travelled in a friend’s car down to Devon to stay on an Exmoor farm. I was dropped off at the end of the lane to the valley were the farm lay. After so long cooped up in a small car full of people I walked slowly down the hill, filling my lungs with clean, fresh air. My senses were being cleansed. I saw more clearly and sniffed more keenly the scents blowing from the moor. And I listened.

I stopped and listened again, trying to trace what it was I could hear. It was all around me, a background whispering, soft creaks and cracks; not quite a conversation but something more. To my amazement I realised that what I was hearing was the sound of life. The banks and hedges were full of it; every tiny herb, each blade of grass, every hazel and hawthorn leaf in the hedges reaching towards the afternoon sun, were giving off this faint, busy, joyful sound of life growing.

It was a seminal moment in my life. I was no longer a human living on but apart from the Earth. I was, with every other form of life, a part of the Earth and essentially, with no more right to the resources of the Earth than any other being, whatever its form.

So I find it hard to think of rats or aphids, or anything you care to name, as ‘pests’ or vermin. We talk of ‘plagues’ of locusts simply doing what locusts do, but we never look at the world-wide plague that the human race has become. And in many ways that plague has been propagated by humanity’s ideas of and desire for ‘ownership’.

So – who owns the Earth, or rather, who owns the soil under our feet? Silly question. Of course, it is all those rich and powerful men, isn’t it? Most governments are made up of people who have far too much money. We are told we live in a democracy, but while the majority of us struggle and worry about the dire state of our finances, I do wonder why so many unthinkingly vote into power mega-millionaires. Have our wits gone begging that we should believe they can truly represent us, we with our little houses and they with their large estates? People like Tory MP Richard Benyon, who recently had to withdraw from an appalling property management scheme, and who owns land devoted to shooting for sport, rich men’s sport, that is.

A few days after Nicola Sturgeon became Scotland’s First Minister, the Scottish Government made moves to reactivate the land reform process which had been stalled for some years. Land reform in Scotland, a whole nation under the sway of privately owned ‘sporting estates’ would be, as one commentator put it, “bad news for 432 people but good news for 5,254,800 of us.”

That gives some idea of just how unbalanced money’s impact on the Earth and its inhabitants is. For the rich not only own land – soil, rock, water and minerals – they believe they ‘own’ all the life upon it, on the land, in the air or in the water. They ‘own’ the trout and the salmon, and ban anyone from taking a little canoe or rowing boat up ‘their’ stretch of the river in case it disturbs ‘their’ fish. They ‘own’ the grouse and the deer, and feel free to kill any life that gets in the way of their profits or their pleasure.

They think money buys them the right. Well, it doesn’t. They have simply assumed that right over centuries of abrogating to themselves too much power and self-importance, to the point where, as George Gunn wrote, “Now those who hoard wealth assume that democracy is their property.” And they place their cronies (usually with connections to big corporate business) in positions where they have no right to be. Look at the people who were given important posts in Defra by big-business friend Prime Minister David Cameron, he who promised to lead the greenest government ever:

Caroline Spelman, Environment Secretary – tried to sell off the nations’ forests to private buyers. She was also a co-owner of a lobbying firm for the food and biotechnology industry.
Richard Benyon, Wildlife Minister – tried to implement a policy of “controlling” buzzards to protect game birds – game birds being the targets for rich shotguns. Cameron’s parents-in-law own a big sporting estate in Scotland. Well, there’s a surprise!
Owen Paterson, Spelman’s successor – his brother-in-law is a major climate-change denier. Paterson promotes GM crops, fracking and, of course, the infamous badger culls.
Liz Truss, Paterson’s successor – after three disasters a nice safe bet, inexperienced and pretty well invisible where the badger cull is concerned. On the other hand, she wants to repeal the Hunting Act, as does her boss Cameron, who has ridden with the Heythrop Hunt.
Sir Philip Dilley, appointed to be chairman of the Environment Agency, is connected to the fracking industry. Cameron is on record as saying “we are going all out for shale gas”. How will this impact on the forthcoming climate change talks in Lima, shale gas being a fossil fuel that feeds climate change?
Andrew Sells (an appropriate surname), the recently appointed head of Natural England, has a background in investment banking and house building – one of those guys who’d like to build on ancient woodlands and SSSIs (Sites of Special Scientific Interest), and who probably thinks you can “offset” ancient woodland by planting new trees elsewhere.

And, if you think this is just about the United Kingdom, think again. Wherever you look, rich and corporate interests are trashing the Earth in pursuit of profit. The environment is only there to serve ‘the economy’, whatever that is. The President of the EU Commission Jean-Claude Juncker recently gave the post of Environment Commissioner to a Maltese politician – Karmenu Vella, who supports the shooting of thousands of migrating birds, something that Chris Packham has vigorously campaigned against. Vella’s brief is to make the environment, naturally bursting with business opportunities, economy-friendly.

Across the Atlantic, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has had a succession of high-ranking officers connected to Monsanto and Waste Management Inc., two companies the EPA is supposed to regulate. Its climate change expert defrauded the government by pretending to be a CIA agent. The current head Gina McCarthy comes via the White House rather than industry, but has a record of lying to, sorry, misleading Congress.

Wherever you go in the world, you’ll find this is how it is run; big business profits while the environment, with all that includes, suffers and dies. Speaking at an anti-badger cull demonstration in Winchester Chris Packham made the point that he doesn’t care for badgers above other animals. All wildlife is important. The totality, the ecology, is important. “But,” he added, “caring is not enough.”

How right he is. And one of the things the English badger culls have done is to connect many more people to the wildlife that is not just a part of the Earth, but to that particular bit of Earth where they too belong and have their home. People have become more active. The Hunt Saboteurs Association has seen a real surge in membership since the culls began. People are joining the dots between fighting for one species and fighting to protect all; going up against those humans for whom all aspects of our ecology are there to be obliterated for fun or profit.

Why did I start by telling you about that magic moment in Devon? Because it was a Mystery. Life, every single tiny bit of it, is a mystery. Mystery can provoke awe and sometimes terrify us. It can inspire us, change our lives and engender the kind of overwhelming love I have for this patch of Earth called Britain. The kind of love that demands I, and you, stand up and get in the way of those who think they ‘own’ what we know is precious and essential to our well-being; well-being that comes from the wholeness of life; life which for us is the Earth, which can only be owned by itself.

For there is one thing that humanity, with all its religions, its power, inventiveness, arrogance and greed, cannot do – it cannot ever own Mystery. It will always slip through our hands. All we can do is follow where it leads.

Part 2: People versus Power

We are now living outside of the laws of nature where nature is now turning against man and becoming the enemy.

— The Kogi Mamas

Last week the latest efforts to head off climate change started in Lima, Peru. The aim of this latest conference (the twentieth, would you believe) is to produce a draft agreement on action, to be finalised in Paris next year. With time running out it doesn’t look hopeful. The world is silent.

In 1990 Alan Ereira made a film for the BBC, The Heart of the World: Elder Brother’s Warning. After so many years of it being available online, in the last week this film has become unavailable due to “copyright issues”. Had it suddenly been resurrected by climate campaigners, and has been taken off by the powers that be because of the Lima Climate Conference? In it the Kogi people of Columbia, having seen serious signs of climate change in their territory, issued a plea to the rest of us: stop living in our thoughtless, selfish way and wake up to what we were doing to the Earth.

Apart from a procession of New Age eco-tourists flying out to Columbia thinking, wrongly, that the Kogi would welcome them, few took any real notice and they were soon forgotten. Some years later Alan visited Glastonbury with an updated film. The Assembly Rooms were full; almost all were young people asking questions about the Kogi’s sex lives. What? The Earth is being ruined and they wanted to know how the Kogi people screwed? I despaired.

I still despair at times, because the indigenous people of Central and South America are showing us the way ahead, if only we’d listen. Many of their countries have been paupered because of corporate-friendly interventions by the IMF and the World Bank. The result, to the annoyance of the US, is an increasing number of left-wing, socialist governments.

Indigenous people have died in their hundreds trying to protect rain forests from ranching, illegal logging, and mining, oil and gas companies, the latest death just days before a planned protest at the Lima talks. How convenient.

In 1994, in the Chiapas region of southern Mexico, the Zapatista revolution took place. These indigenous people objected to powerful outsiders taking control of their land via the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – ‘free trade’ standing for corporate profit. They haven’t yet won their battle. On the other hand the Mexican government has failed to control them. The Zapatistas govern by consultation. The decision to take up arms was a collective decision. They do not elect leaders; they select those who will best voice community views, something the government could not understand, as the film A Place Called Chiapas showed.

The US has tried to extend NAFTA into the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). There were massive demonstrations. Over 10 million Brazilians voted to withdraw from the negotiations. While governments negotiate, the people know that such deals will damage their lives and their beloved Earth. There are current trade agreements and almost all of them sideline the US and its corporate plans.

The Campesinos have created a worldwide movement of peasant farmers, indigenous peoples and fishermen from small beginnings in Paraguay, where they ‘illegally’ took over land in order to grow their food. Workers in Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere took over factories closed by absentee owners.

Many ‘peoples movements’ started in the Americas and right now members from across the world are attending the Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change, running parallel to the UN climate talks in Lima, parallel because their voices won’t be heard at the ‘big table’. Neither will young people be heard even though they will suffer more from climate change than those producing all the hot air. Other activists were prevented from attending but then, even the UK climate change Minister, Amber Rudd, has been barred from going.

And the talks themselves are almost invisible in the mainstream media. Apart from the environment-friendly Guardian, only the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times featured articles about it in the first week. Obviously the ‘economics’ of climate change are more important than the future of the planet.

The LA Times limped in with a story about clashes between rich and poor nations slowing down the talks. But that was basically it. The UN News site had several items, it being a UN Conference. All other news came from activists’ websites. The message? People care; power and politics don’t. They will simply go on making money as long as they are able.

To see how determined indigenous people can be in trying to protect their resources and the Earth, one should look at Bolivia.

In 2000 many Bolivians fought against a private water company taking control of their water. The Water War lasted for four months, at the end of which the company fled and later presented a large bill (compensation for lost profits) which remains unpaid. This was followed in 2003 by a Gas War, when the Bolivians resisted the corporate interests that wanted their vast natural gas resources.

This conflict rumbled on until 2005, when the millionaire President, known for speaking Spanish with an American accent, resigned. An indigenous left-wing politician, active in the Water and Gas Wars, was becoming prominent – Evo Morales. He was elected President and a whole new agenda appeared. Suddenly people were demanding rights for Mother Earth.

In 2009 Morales, backed by other nations, addressed the UN General Assembly in a heartfelt speech, pointing out that it is no use discussing the effects of the financial, energy, food or climate change crises, without ever looking at the cause:

The origin of this crisis is the exaggerated accumulation of capital in far too few hands. It is the permanent removal of natural resources and the commercialization of Mother Earth… Mother Earth gives life, water, natural resources, oxygen and everything that supports the well being of our people. If we talk, work and fight for the well being of our people we first have to guarantee the well being of Mother Earth; otherwise it will be impossible to guarantee the well being of our citizens. Mother Earth, Planet Earth, will exist without human life, but human life cannot exist without Mother Earth.

He sought a UN treaty that gave legal rights to Mother Earth. He asked for three things: that developed countries pay the climate debt they owe; that there should be a Court of Climate Justice; and that nations must declare and expand the rights of Mother Earth’s natural regeneration. We’re still waiting on all that, but the UN did designate 22 April as International Mother Earth Day. So that’s okay then.

In April 2010 Bolivia hosted a World Peoples Conference in Cochabamba. 35,000 people came from all over the world. It produced a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. This was followed by an international gathering in Ecuador at which the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature was formed.

In 2011 Bolivia passed into law an act protecting the rights of Mother Earth. It then took a draft treaty to the UN, prompting outrage among all the right-wing corporate interests. Last year, during a dialogue on harmony with nature , the General Assembly called yet again for real and rapid action that would protect the Earth and the future existence of humanity.

Also last year, a UN meeting on the rights of the indigenous peoples produced a document simply ‘inviting’, ‘requesting’ or ‘encouraging’ governments and corporations to listen to, engage with and recognise the knowledge that indigenous people have to offer. More hot air and no action. In June this year Morales hosted a G77 Summit which produced a Declaration titled “For a New World Order for Living Well”.

Unknown to the average person there have been many attempts, some successful, to bring our treatment of the Earth within the law. What Morales and his fellows have done is to keep pushing the Earth’s rights into the debates. But debates alone will not heal the Earth or guarantee our future.

And all this is looked upon with scorn by our governments and their corporate allies. Who cares about peoples’ movements or Bolivia? And Morales himself is the first full-blood indigenous leader, for God’s Sake! What does he know about running the world? Come to that, what does man’s world have to do with Mother Earth?

But indigenous people know how the Earth runs. Slowly we others are realising that we can’t own the Earth, or the water, the air, the forests and plains, or the fish in the sea. The Earth doesn’t belong to us. If anything, the reverse is true; we belong to it, a position the developed world spurns at its peril.

Will Lima produce anything other than another fudge? I doubt it. Corporate interests still dictate our future and we are deaf to the indigenous voices. And as Jared Diamond showed in Collapse, civilisations have died out because of trashing their environments. We are now trashing the whole Earth.

Man’s drive to ‘develop’, his inventions that require yet more resources, his desire to own everything in sight, to put his interests before those of any other life forms – all this has led to an Earth stripped of its flora and fauna, and its mineral riches without which we cannot sustain our current way of life. Rivers run dry while the seas rise.

We will not kill life on the Earth; life is here and will evolve in strange and wonderful ways. But we are destroying everything that we have come to know and love. And while the Earth weeps and begs for our attention the world of men is silent in its selfishness.

First published on Brian May's Save-me

Brian May is an English musician, singer, songwriter and astrophysicist who achieved international fame as the lead guitarist of the rock band Queen.

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