Tag: Conservation & Environmental Justice

The Washington Post is right to shine a light on the connection between hunting and our environment, a connection that is breaking down as Americans lose interest in hunting. With the decline in hunting comes a decrease in conservation funding from hunting licenses, firearms permits, and more, with wildlife and environmental agencies suffering the consequences.

This trend screams for a paradigm change in the way humans think about — and make efforts to care for — the environment. We must establish a new paradigm for future generations of valuing nonhumans for more than their ability to kill them.

Prevailing Attitudes Toward the Environment

The old paradigm is centered on the idea that the “environment is just a human resource.” This thinking treats the environment as part of a world economy and considers it valuable only if people assign value to it, like any other commodity we buy and sell. This myopic, anthropocentric thinking helped create the climate crisis and the other ecological crises that now threaten our children and future generations.

Codifying the Human Right to Nature

What does the shift from this old way look like? It looks like recognizing our fundamental human right to nature. This right rises above and cabins the subjectivity of markets and human shortsightedness. It looks like institutionalizing that right in law.

That paradigm shift is now before the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a suit challenging the government’s total abdication of its most basic duties by failing to mitigate, and in many cases by exacerbating, the climate crisis. We have a right to nature — and seeing it is the paradigm shift toward having a truly symbiotic, nonviolent relationship with the ecology that keeps us alive.

Having Kids promotes our fundamental human right to nature and the sovereignty of democratic communities over economic pyramids driven by population growth, mass consumption and corporate greed.

TC Energy CEO Russ Girling is a key part of the system threatening our right to nature. He is behind the violence against the Wet’suwet’en peoples of Canada as they defend their land against Girling’s and TC Energy’s attempt to build the Coastal GasLink pipeline across their ancestral lands.

Given the impact of the project on our degrading climate, Girling and TC Energy are a manifest threat to our children’s future.

1. Girling and TC Energy are responsible for violating the human right to nature and the sovereignty that derives from it.
2. As human rights, the right to nature and sovereignty supersede national authority and any other rights the nation attempts to guarantee TC Energy and Girling.
3. Girling can offset the harm he is causing by pulling back from the Wet’suwet’en lands and repaying the money he and TC Energy have taken. This reparation could include funding Fair Start family planning policies that will build resilience in future generations as they face degraded ecosystems.

How Can We Stop TC Energy’s Threat to Nature?

Take Action: We can target the top of the pyramid. We are urging supporters to find Girling, to peacefully and lawfully engage him about fulfilling what our human rights require, and to publicize your bravery. As we obtain information on his whereabouts, we will update this post.
Please also contact the Hon. Mike Farnworth, the minister of public safety and solicitor general of British Columbia, regarding the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s incursions and to make the points above. Additionally, you can sign this petition or engage him personally if you are in the area.