Archive for July, 2025

“Nature has a lot to say, and it has long been time for us, her children, to stop playing deaf.” —Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist

Since 1989, UN World Population Day on July 11 has been an occasion to contemplate how humans can work together to forge a more just society. Earth’s 8.2 billion people must come together as never before to create an equitable planetary peace—a treaty, if you will—with all of Nature’s inhabitants. The world’s approximately 476 million Indigenous people are critical partners in that rising consciousness. They manage or hold tenure rights to approximately a quarter of the world’s surface area, accounting for a significant portion of the world’s biodiversity, nearly half of the protected areas, and over half of the remaining intact forests. 

Despite their vital role in conservation, Indigenous people experience disproportionately high levels of poverty. It is also not uncommon for Indigenous groups to bear the brunt of toxins and elevated air pollution. As is the case for many marginalized people, toxic industries can be found close by. For decades the Aamjiwnaang First Nation community in Ontario’s Sarina “chemical valley” has been subjected to emissions of the carcinogen benzene from the INEOS Styrolution petrochemical plant, despite the Ontario government’s acknowledgement of the dangers present. Sulphur dioxide is also a problem in Sarnia, because it irritates the human respiratory system. Environmental racism is a curse that visits groups of people who are vulnerable to the vagaries of justice. tinyurl.com/sarnia-pollution

Rights of Nature first came into focus with Christopher Stone’s Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects, published in 1972. He wrote: “Each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new ‘entity,’ the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’—those who are holding rights at the time.” You can read this groundbreaking essay at tinyurl.com/trees-have-rights

Robert Macfarlane’s recent book Is a River Alive? was born from the 50-year debate described in Stone’s essay, but it finds affinity with deeply rooted legal, scientific, poetic and both Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural stances—the bedrock of inspiration that encouraged him to write. Macfarlane’s undeniable passion and conviction bring Nature’s obvious centrality and necessary inclusivity into all primordial human relationships.

Is a River Alive? is unquestionably a book we should all savour. One of the areas Macfarlane visits is Ecuador, which, along with Colombia, has the world’s greatest biodiversity. In one section of the book he describes the process whereby Ecuador’s constitution incorporated a Rights of Nature manifesto, through which Indigenous people have been successful in pushing back the oil and mining companies’ rapacious appetite for destroying the country’s most biodiverse areas. including cloud forests such as the area known as Los Cedros. Two of the judges who enabled the transformation of the Ecuadorian constitution into a pro-Nature legal document accompanied Macfarlane on his journey to the headwaters of the Los Cedros river system.

Elsewhere in the book, Macfarlane’s exploration of Québec’s endangered Magpie River envelops us in an astonishing conversation that includes a group of fellow conservationists and Indigenous people. In 2021, the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the regional municipal council of Minganie passed resolutions granting the Magpie River (Mutehekau Shipu) the landmark right of legal personhood—a title that bestowed nine rights on the river: the right to live, to exist and to flow, the right to the respect for its natural cycles, the right to evolve naturally, to be protected and preserved, the right to maintain its natural biodiversity, the right to perform its essential functions within its ecosystem, the right to maintain its integrity, the right to be free from pollution, the right to regenerate and be restored, and the right to sue. 

The excellent no-fee, 44-minute documentary “I am the Magpie River” on CBC’s Gem service vividly makes the plea to defend the Rights of Nature declaration. The deeply set determination to keep the Magpie River unharnessed is evident throughout the dialogue. It also succeeds in portraying the river’s power and why Hydro Québec would love to tame it for electricity. gem.cbc.ca/the-nature-of-things

Bioregionalism inherently pulls down national and internal borders to create dialogue with all life. Permaculture, agroecology, Territories of Life, biocivilization, Zapatista, ecosocialism, ecofeminism and degrowth transition are a few of the ways to accomplish transformative alternatives that strengthen bioregionalism. A Rights of Nature credo is easy to establish when people believe in sharing peace with Nature.

A South Asian example of bioregionalism was recently presented by Ashish Kothari of the India-based Vikalp Sangam South Asia Bioregionalism Working Group, at a meeting of Elders for Peace (www.elders4peace.org). Its broad tenets are “porous boundaries, enabling free movement of wildlife, nomadic pastoralists/fishers, and traders; boundary areas governed as ‘peace sanctuaries’ by Indigenous peoples/local communities; civilizational identities replacing hyper-nationalist ones; village/town-assembly-based direct democracy coordinating over bioregional scale through federated institutions; small-scale traders and nomadic communities as messengers, story-tellers and news-givers across landscapes; and dismantling of dams/diversions on rivers, enabling free flow.” tinyurl.com/south-asia-bioregionalism

Sometimes bioregionalism enables peace and security between two warring groups that can be achieved because they find a sacred alliance with certain animals. Such is the case with the Pokot and Il-Chamus tribes in Kenya’s Rift Valley, whose members have brought conflicts regarding land, water and cattle to spiralling levels of violence. By 2005 everyone realized that an immediate solution was needed. The rare Baringo giraffe, which had been revered by both groups for centuries but had disappeared from the region in the 1960s as a result of conflict, expanding human settlements and hunting, was to be the catalyst. Working with conservation agencies, the tribes agreed to put aside their differences, and the long-gone giraffes were brought back to the region and given sanctuary. Rebby Sebei, who manages the Ruko Community Wildlife Conservancy in Baringo County, tells us why everyone wishes to work together. “Giraffe are associated with someone who plans, who sees far, because of their height.” Like seeing into the future. “Elders equated that to the vision of people coming together and living in peace.” therevelator.org/giraffes-for-peace/

An invigorating literary website, Otherwise Collective, celebrates deep connections that humans can have with plants, which reinforce a breaking down of barriers: “We hope to transport people across the seemingly unbridgeable divide from the sentience of plants to humans.” otherwisecollective.com

I conclude with some words from Robert Macfarlane: “We will never think like a river, but perhaps we can think with them… I take the Rights of Nature movement at its best to be a kind of legal ‘grammar of animacy:’ that is to say, an attempt to make structures of power align with perceptions of a world which is far more alive than power usually allows.”

“The ocean is the cornerstone of Earth’s support system. It shapes climate and weather. It holds the key to our future.” —Sylvia Earle, marine biologist and oceanographer 

“We need to stop toxic chemical, plastic, and partially combusted carbon pollution now. Along with ocean acidification, nothing else really matters.” —GOES Foundation 

To celebrate World Ocean Day on June 8, here are 13 wonderful photos that will entice you to care about protecting our ocean: https://tinyurl.com/13-photos

These images are an inspiration for people to do more for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), but in reality most of these areas are only protected on paper. The goal set out at the biodiversity COP15 in Montreal in 2022 and eventually agreed by 188 nations is to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030, but little progress has been made and indeed some of the larger areas deemed under protection are still subject to commercial fishing and proposed mining. https://tinyurl.com/marine-unprotected

The reduced protections in the US, which has abandoned MPAs under the Trump administration, have made the likelihood of achieving the goal even slimmer. https://therevelator.org/trump-marine-protection

Eighty percent of the planet’s biodiversity is found in the ocean. Scientists have so far identified 250,000 marine species but estimate that this covers only two-thirds of the life that exists there. More than half the oxygen production for Earth originates in the ocean. Yet humanity continues to orchestrate the ocean’s demise, even though 3 billion people depend on the ocean for their survival and livelihood. 

The ocean is a huge carbon sink, but the constant rise in greenhouse gas emissions is acidifying the water and making it difficult to absorb and sequester all the carbon. 

The ocean also soaks up about 90% of the excess heat generated by climate breakdown. The rise in temperature is already pushing the great coral reefs to their limit of tolerance and are threatening fish with extinction. Many fish are moving further north to escape this and lower oxygen levels. Predators don’t necessarily follow the migrating fish, and the fine balance that defines biodiversity is interrupted. And what happens to all the marine species who are unable to move to escape their drastically changing environment?

Every year 11 million tonnes of plastic find their way into the ocean and have now reached even the deepest trenches, polluting the seas from the Arctic to the Antarctic and every species of marine wildlife, and thus entering the food chain on which billions of humans depend. These plastics include lost and abandoned fishing lines and nets, which entangle creatures from seabirds to giant whales. https://tinyurl.com/ocean-planetary

The rapid melting of sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic is of critical concern as sea level rises threaten so many coastal communities. Small island states are now in jeopardy of disappearing entirely. 

Furthermore, a warming ocean fuels stronger hurricanes that bring more heavy rainfall and higher storm surge when they make landfall.

The Copernicus Ocean State Report lays out the multi-level crises that now plague the global ocean. https://tinyurl.com/ocean-report

One of the greatest threats to the ocean is the prospect of deep-sea mining, something many countries, aware of the risks, have chosen not to pursue. A summit conference to discuss a moratorium on this vital issue will take place in July this year. 

Flying in the face of this cautious approach, Donald Trump has issued an order to expedite permits to mine the ocean bed in international waters in order to exploit the minerals there.

This decision, says Jeff Watters of Ocean Conservancy, “runs counter to the way we as a global community have been cooperatively working on the high seas for decades now. Unilateral action to pursue deep-sea mining opens up a whole Pandora’s box of questions in terms of conflict on the high seas and conflict between nations… Do we want to experiment with the destruction of these environments before we even know what’s there?” https://tinyurl.com/deep-sea-mine

The International Seabed Authority was set up in 1994 by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. One hundred and sixty-nine nations are parties to the Law of the Sea treaty, but the US has not ratified it, just as it has failed to ratify climate or biodiversity treaties. 

A rise in temperature is one of the factors causing the colour of the ocean to change from blue to green. The water is becoming darker, driving animals who depend on light to move closer to the surface to compete for food and making them more vulnerable to predation. https://tinyurl.com/ocean-darker

Pollution from countless different human-made chemicals, including those leaching from plastics, is poisoning the water and killing the plankton that sit at the bottom of the food chain. The GOES Foundation states ominously, “If we had not poisoned the oceans, we could have prevented climate change. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of marine plankton in the maintenance and now precarious balance of life on Earth. We can all see the loss of phytoplankton, the decrease in oxygen production, and the well-documented CO2 increase… Oils and surfactants produced by marine plankton form [a] surface micro layer, which regulates water evaporation.” 

Earth’s ocean is at a crossroads. 

An alarming and tragic situation, but there are still glimmers of hope. Canada has a new area of protection 150km west of Vancouver Island. At over 133km2 it is Canada’s largest MPA, rich in hydrothermal vents and undersea formations known as seamounts and providing a unique habitat for many species. The Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council is happy that the MPA has been officially created within its territories: “With so many threats to our oceans, such as climate change and pollution, we must be vigilant in what we allow to happen in our waters. Joint management is key to reconciliation and living up to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Using our ecological knowledge is essential to the future of our oceans.”

A huge UN ocean conference is set to take place in Nice, France from June 9 to 13, as part of Ocean Week, which brings the world together so that we can celebrate and educate ourselves about the critical importance of protecting the ocean. https://tinyurl.com/know-your-ocean

The purpose of the conference is to support the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 14: “Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.” It will “build on existing instruments to form successful partnerships towards the swift conclusion and effective implementation of ongoing processes that contribute to the conservation and sustainable use of the ocean.” https://tinyurl.com/conference-ocean

World Ocean Day on June 8 marks year two in the multi-year action theme Catalyzing Action for Our Ocean & Climate. This is part of a movement for a more sustainable society and a healthy blue planet. Twelve separate months of actions have taken place or being planned for 2025. January: Ocean and Climate Literacy; February: Environmental Justice; March: Global Plastics Treaty; April: Earth Day Collaboration and Plastics; May: High Seas Treaty Ratification; June: World Ocean Day; July: Deep Sea Mining Moratorium; August: High Seas Treaty Ratification and 30×30; September and October: Antarctica and the Southern Ocean; November: 30×30 Implementation; December: Climate-Related Emotions & Wellbeing. https://tinyurl.com/twelve-months

Canada has many ocean celebrations in early June. Want to know what’s happening? https://tinyurl.com/ocean-quebec