Hi there. I understand that you probably have a handout that was circulated amongst you, which I'm going to walk you through.
To give you a little bit of background, I've been advocating for the recognition of the rights of nature as the foundation of all the other rights.
If we are to solve our issues to do with fresh water, we cannot look at it in isolation from all of the other systems. Fresh water can't be isolated from our ocean systems or from the rest of the water cycle. If we want to have clean water, we also need to look at agriculture and at the entire economic system because everything is interconnected. If we think of our human society as an iceberg, all of the crises that we see—the economic crises, the six mass extinctions, climate change, pandemics and ill health—are just above the water mark.
If we look beneath the surface of the water, we have the structures and the systems—the silo systems—that come from a mechanistic world view and from a separation of consciousness that separates the human being from nature, which has been encoded in law. In law, nature is objects, property and resources, separate from the human being. This leads to a degenerative cycle that produces all of these crises on autopilot. Most of our societal solutions are all about acting on crisis management and trying to see how we can avert climate change or the various crises that are happening. That's the lowest point of leverage we act at.
If we want to really resolve our problems, move toward a thriving future long term and really be leaders on the world stage, we have to look at bottom-of-the-iceberg solutions. We have to look at how we can rebuild that relationship with nature, which is our most fundamental relationship, and drive that change into law. This is what we advocate for with Nature's Rights.
If you think of the current sustainability model, you have people, economy and nature. You have three interlocking circles, like you'll see on the diagram that I circulated.
In this model, there are a couple of flaws. One is that people have rights, the economy has rights—corporate rights and property rights—and nature has no rights. There's also an assumption that these three circles can operate independently of each other, but this isn't reflective of reality. In reality, the only one that can operate independently of the others is nature, because the other systems are derived from nature. Without nature, there's no human society. Without nature and human societies, there is no economy.
We're advocating that what we move to in our governance system is a nested hierarchy of rights that follows the natural order. The rights are not adversarial; they're collaborative and synergistic.
The model on the right is what we proposed to the European Economic and Social Committee in looking at a European fundamental charter for the rights of nature that would encompass the other rights. We've built a framework where, if you take the three circles and map out the UN sustainable development goals on each layer—nature, people and economy—and add a fourth circle at the bottom, which is the planetary boundaries, you end up with a system where you can map out the rights corresponding to that, where you have economic rights embedded within human rights, which are all embedded within the rights of nature. This gets rid of inherent conflicts between the rights.
At the moment, sustainable development goals haven't been reached. A lot of the criticism around this is that there isn't a legal framework to achieve it. With this model, we're bringing in the nested hierarchy of rights, or the integrated model of rights, as a way of driving forward those sustainable development goals, all within the planetary boundaries.
We've heard about climate change in this meeting, but climate change is only one of the nine planetary boundaries. Seven of those planetary boundaries have already been exceeded—