The rights of nature laws recognize the rights of ecosystems and natural communities to exist, to flourish, to regenerate, and to evolve…nature laws move nature from being considered ‘property’ under the law to being recognized as ‘rights bearing’ under the law.
Existing environmental laws (Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, etc.) treat nature as property, such that the owner of that property effectively has the right to destroy the nature that exists on his property.
Similarly, slaves were treated as property under the law and a slave ‘owner’ had the right to destroy his ‘property.
Our existing structures of environmental law will not allow us to achieve anything close to true sustainability… in its place, we need to drive a fundamentally new legal structure forward.
On Saturday, a group of Occupy Wall Street protestors were arrested in the LaGuardia Place Citibank. Among them was freelance photographer and actor Marshall Garrett. Garrett, who has a bank account with Chase, had originally intended to go to that bank, close his account, and go to the big Times Square event in the evening.
Instead, when the Citibank crew needed more people, he and three friends went along for the ride, got arrested, and spent the next day and a half in custody.
Garrett: But what was unknown to us and to a lot of people that day, including those in Times Square, was that there were undercover cops already there, paid to be disruptive and to be loud. One undercover cop present [at Citi] was louder than the entire group.
VV: How did you know he was an undercover cop?
Garrett: He arrested one of the protestors outside, and slammed her into the wall, and pushed her back into the bank. We all saw him at the precinct with us. He was laughing with the fellow white shirt cops, telling them about what we’d been saying, basically. It was a bit startling how inside their information was – how they were being paid to go to these protests and put us in situations where we’d be arrested and not be able to leave.
