Atlee-Evolving

From: Tom Atlee [mailto:cii@igc.org] 
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 8:54 AM
To: undisclosed list
Subject: Evolving into a Bigger Us with Nature

Dear friends,

One of the main trends in evolution is towards more inclusive whole  
systems -- the evolution of entities which "include and transcend"  
more primary entities.

One popular map of this hierarchy of inclusion goes as follows:
   *  Atoms include -- and are "more than" -- subatomic particles.
   *  Molecules include -- and are "more than" -- atoms.
   *  Cells include -- and are "more than" -- molecules.
   *  Complex animals and plants include -- and are "more than" --  
cells.
   *  Societies include -- and are "more than" -- us individuals who  
make them up.

In the last several hundred years, human societies and systems have  
developed and spread to global proportions.  As we have collectively  
reached and encountered the limits of Earth and the demands of  
relationship in order to function, it is becoming increasingly  
obvious that there is no "Other" and no "Away".  We are all  
interdependent kin, alive together here in this one planetary home.

We Are All. In This. Together.

Martin Luther King, Jr., declared forty years ago:

     We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,
     tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects
     one directly, affects all indirectly."

And people around the world now celebrate Interdependence Day <http:// 
www.co-intelligence.org/interdependenceday.html> instead of  
Independence Day.

Evolutionary pressure is building to include more varieties of  
people, species, and living systems within our definition of "us".

I recently ran across two very intriguing news items I share with you  
below:  First, Ecuador's Constitutional Assembly is proposing that  
natural communities and ecosystems have rights, thus initiating the  
first national legal system to include rights for both human and  
natural communities.  Second, the Spanish Parliament voted last month  
to grant limited legal rights to our closest biological relatives,  
the great apes -- chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans, thus  
becoming the first nation to give legal rights to other species.   
Both of these pioneering initiatives go beyond laws governing animal  
abuse and species extinction, two earlier steps on the path.

We also find new sciences like permaculture and biomimicry embodying  
an emerging respect for and partnership with the wisdom of nature.   
Some interesting videos -- which you'll find at the end of this  
posting -- also indicate an increasingly positive relationship with  
nature.

This process of envisioning an increasingly inclusive and functional  
"us" is and will be slow for society overall.  While as individuals  
we can realize the one-ness of all creation in an instant of insight,  
a society has to incorporate such a realization into the fabric and  
logic of its functioning as a complex system.  That takes some  
reflection, creativity, trial and error, conflict...

It is not an easy task.  We've seen it with the anti-slavery, civil  
rights, and human rights movements even within our own species.  But  
it is becoming increasingly obvious that rejecting our kinship with  
other organisms and natural systems is killing us.  So our  
relationship with nature is now a matter of grave and growing concern.

I find it useful to view this building up of such pressure in,  
around, and among us as a natural evolutionary process, a marker of  
impending transformation, part of a story that has been going on for  
13.7 billion years -- a story, signficantly, that we are very much  
active players in.  Evolution wasn't something that happened way back  
when, that has nothing to do with us.  Evolutionary Transformations R  
Us.

Similarly, I find it instructive to contemplate how human culture  
emerged into self-consciousness out of embeddedness in nature.  Early  
human cultures honored and ritualized the human relationship, not so  
much with nature as an abstraction, but with the living beings,  
organisms, and systems of their local place and experience -- and  
they had (and have) a very inclusive sense of what is "alive".  As  
human society grew more complex, breaking into interwoven functional  
roles and expanding into ever-complexifying civilization, our  
experience of nature has become more distant, abstract,  
materialistic, utilitarian, and our honoring of the source of Life  
has shifted into mystical, theistic, or Western scientific modes of  
engagement -- with all the resulting blessings and disasters we now  
see all around us.  Evolution has thus brought us, step by step, face  
to face with the challenge of weaving vital human-nature connections  
newly for our more complex societies.  We are about to become a new  
form of life.  Together.  Do it or die.

Millions of efforts by Life to create more inclusive living systems  
don't work out, and go extinct.  The one we're involved in demands --  
and has available to it -- a much broader palette of individual and  
collective human consciousness than Life has ever had before --  
different varieties and levels of individual and collective  
awareness, intelligence, wisdom, compassion, choice, etc.  That's the  
Big Picture of the work so many of us are involved in.

The impulse for inclusion is blowing in the wind.  What we do with it  
will make all the difference in the world.  Especially for the human  
species.

And time is of the essence.

Coheartedly,
Tom

===============

Ecuador Constitutional Assembly Votes to Approve Rights of Nature In  
New Constitution

July 7, 2008

http://tinyurl.com/6jpepp

Today, the <http://www.celdf.org/>Community Evironmental Legal  
Defense Fund (CELDF) announced that Ecuador became the first nation  
in the world to shift to rights-based environmental protection. There  
was a time when people were considered property (slaves) and this  
idea is no longer generally accepted in the developed world. Yet,  
Ecuador is the first country to begin to codify in its Constitution  
the concept that nature is not just property, but has an inherent  
right to exist.

On July 7, 2008, the Ecuador Constitutional Assembly - composed of  
one hundred and thirty (130) delegates elected countrywide to rewrite  
the country's Constitution - voted to approve articles for the new  
constitution recognizing rights for nature and ecosystems. "If  
adopted in the final constitution by the people, Ecuador would become  
the first country in the world to codify a new system of  
environmental protection based on rights," stated Thomas Linzey,  
Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
...
Over the past year, the Legal Defense Fund has been invited to assist  
Delegates to the Ecuador Constitutional Assembly to re-write that  
country's constitution. Delegates requested that the Legal Defense  
Fund draft proposed Rights of Nature language for the constitution  
based on ordinances developed and adopted by municipalities in the  
United States.

The Legal Defense Fund has now assisted communities in Pennsylvania,  
New Hampshire, and Virginia to draft and adopt new laws that change  
the status of natural communities and ecosystems from being regarded  
as property under the law to being recognized as rights-bearing  
entities.

Those local laws recognize that natural communities and ecosystems  
possess an inalienable and fundamental right to exist and flourish,  
and that residents of those communities possess the legal authority  
to enforce those rights on behalf of those ecosystems. In addition,  
these laws require the local governments to remedy violations of  
those ecosystem rights. In essence, these laws represent changes to  
the status of property law, eliminating the authority of a property  
owner to interfere with the functioning of ecosystems and natural  
communities that exist and depend upon that property for their  
existence and flourishing. The local laws allow certain types of  
development that do not interfere with the rights of ecosystems to  
exist and flourish.

In the past, I've been involved in <http://www.celdf.org/>CELDF's  
Democracy School programs in Seattle and written about this kind of  
<http://www.onenw.org/toolkit/onelist/is-rights-based-organizing-a- 
future-strategy-for-environmental-activism/>rights-based organizing  
for ONE/Northwest's newsletter. It makes good background reading on  
the Democracy School movement. You can also watch a lecture by  
<http://www.idealog.us/2006/08/thomas_linzey_l.html>CELDF's Thomas  
Linzey given in Seattle in 2005 on YouTube.

Ecuador's efforts stand in stark contrast to what happened in <http:// 
www.nader.org/opinions/oe6.19.96.html>South Africa's Constitution  
where transnational corporations were able to push through clauses  
giving corporation the same rights as people.

==============

WHEN HUMAN RIGHTS EXTEND TO NONHUMANS
By Donald G. McNeil Jr.
New York Times
July 13, 2008

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/weekinreview/13mcneil.html>

...The environment committee of the Spanish Parliament [voted] last  
month to grant
limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes --
chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

The committee would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape  
Project
<http://www.greatapeproject.org/>, which points to apes' human  
qualities,
including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use
languages, remember the past and plan the future. The project's  
directors,
Peter Singer, the Princeton ethicist, and Paola Cavalieri, an Italian
philosopher, regard apes as part of a "community of equals" with humans.

If the bill passes -- the news agency Reuters predicts it will -- it  
would
become illegal in Spain to kill apes except in self-defense. Torture,
including in medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment,  
including for
circuses or films, would be forbidden.

The 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, but better  
conditions would
be mandated.

What's intriguing about the committee's action is that it juxtaposes two
sliding scales that are normally not allowed to slide against each  
other:
how much kinship humans feel for which animals, and just which "human
rights" each human deserves.

We like to think of these as absolutes: that there are distinct lines
between humans and animals, and that certain "human" rights are  
unalienable.
But we're kidding ourselves.

In an interview, Mr. Singer described just such calculations behind the
Great Ape Project: he left out lesser apes like gibbons because  
scientific
evidence of human qualities is weaker, and he demanded only rights  
that he
felt all humans were usually offered, such as freedom from torture --  
rather
than, say, rights to education or medical care.

Depending on how it is counted, the DNA of chimpanzees is 95 percent  
to 98.7
percent the same as that of humans.

Nonetheless, the law treats all animals as lower orders. Human Rights  
Watch
has no position on apes in Spain and has never had an internal debate  
about
who is human, said Joseph Saunders, deputy program director.

"There's no blurry middle," he said, "and human rights are so woefully
protected that we're going to keep our focus there."

Meanwhile, even in democracies, the law accords diminished rights to  
many
humans: children, prisoners, the insane, the senile. Teenagers may  
not vote,
philosophers who slip into dementia may be lashed to their beds,  
courts can
order surgery or force-feeding.

Spain does not envision endowing apes with all rights: to drive, to bear
arms and so on. Rather, their status would be akin to that of children.

Ingrid Newkirk, a founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
<http://www.peta.org/>, considers Spain's vote "a great start at  
breaking
down the species barriers, under which humans are regarded as godlike  
and
the rest of the animal kingdom, whether chimpanzees or clams, are  
treated
like dirt."

Other commentators are aghast. Scientists, for example, would like to  
keep
using chimpanzees to study the AIDS virus, which is believed to have  
come
from apes.

Mr. Singer responded by noting that humans are a better study model,  
and yet
scientists don't deliberately infect them with AIDS.

"They'd need to justify not doing that," he said. "Why apes?"

Spain's Catholic bishops attacked the vote as undermining a divine  
will that
placed humans above animals. One said such thinking led to abortion,
euthanasia and ethnic cleansing.

But given that even some humans are denied human rights, what is the  
most
basic right? To not be killed for food, perhaps?

Ten years ago, I stood in a clearing in the Cameroonian jungle, asking a
hunter to hold up for my camera half the baby gorilla he had split and
butterflied for smoking.

My distress -- partly faked, since I was also feeling triumphant, having
come this far hoping to find exactly such a scene -- struck him as  
funny. "A
gorilla is still meat," said my guide, a former gorilla hunter  
himself. "It
has no soul."

So he agrees with Spain's bishops. But it was an interesting  
observation for
a West African to make. He looked much like the guy on the famous  
engraving
adopted as a coat of arms by British abolitionists: a slave in shackles,
kneeling to either beg or pray. Below it the motto: Am I Not a Man,  
and a
Brother?

Whether or not Africans had souls -- whether they were human in God's  
eyes,
capable of salvation -- underlay much of the colonial debate about  
slavery.
They were granted human rights on a sliding scale: as slaves, they were
property; in the United States Constitution a slave counted as only
three-fifths of a person.

As Ms. Newkirk pointed out, "All these supremacist notions take a  
long time
to erode."

She compared the rights of animals to those of women: it only seems  
like a
long time, she said, since they got the vote or were admitted to medical
schools. Or, she might have added, to the seminary. Though no Catholic
bishop would suggest that women lack souls, it will be quite a while  
before
a female bishop denounces Spain's Parliament....