Rights "to" OR "of" Nature? & Responsibilities to the Spirit of...

essay

"'Haven't you heard it's a battle of words?'
The poster bearer cried"
- from "Us and Them" ~Pink Floyd

(photo: Mountain Pass, in southeastern California, remains the United States’ only mine for rare earth elements, the building blocks of magnets used in smartphones, wind turbines and electric vehicles. TMY350/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0) sciencenews.org)

People seem SO opinionated nowadays, with those opinions being based on information which is too-often inconclusive or flat-out erroneous. Therefore the propensity for arguments increases because, 'They attacked first!' … 'He did this!' …' She said that!' … or whatever the deliberately aimed attempt to push your emotional buttons propaganda is. It's hard to actually know what's what, yet people base their opinions, even their jobs, worldviews and friendships on such stuff that may or may not be accurate, thus making any ensuing arguments even stupider.

Sure, everyone's entitled to their opinions, but such bombastic vociferous behavior overrules intelligent discussions and genuine emotional responses. Seems like some people have such strong opinions so as to compensate for some other enthusiasm lacking in their lives. Sure, have an opinion, but do you have to wear it like a badge?

Asking a friend for an opinion is understandable, as is using “imho” (in my humble opinion) to convey one’s viewpoint/feelings in a gracious manner. It’s the demonstrative, histrionic, pomp of online and public opinions circumstances i'm referring to.

If we reframe the topic so as to ask about the natural world: What's your opinion of a maple tree? What's your opinion of a blue jay? ... then it becomes a ridiculous query. Essentially, you care for and/or respect a tree, or you don't; your opinion means nothing — except perhaps for how it may affect your subsequent behavior and treatment of tree, bird, rock, and other highly intelligent beings, and how they all interact.

Opinions coupled with global affairs is another discussion danger zone. What stands out to me is how opinionated people are about what’s going on with other countries at the neglect of ‘their own,’ for example, the USEmpire and foreign corporations are aiming to destroy Oak Flat –sacred ancestral Apache lands of Turtle Island – for copper mining.

I peg this pattern of being more opinionated and involved in what’s happening ‘over there’ as an aspect of the colonizer mindset: a lack of facing what's already here, the 'home front.'

As Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux (Lakota)) wrote in his 1970 book We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf:

”When we are unable to absorb the events reported to us by the media, we begin to force interpretations of what the world really means on the basis of what we have been taught rather than what we have experienced.”

If opinions get the best of you, you're likely to overlook, as one example, the wheelin' dealin' side of the Don's emotional button pushing machine art of the schpiel. Recent articles related to China and Africa both involve minerals/metals, revealing one of his and USEmpire’s truer purposes: resources from other countries for stuffs for bread & circus consumers:

“US, China formalize deal on rare earth shipments in trade breakthrough”
&
"Africa peace deal brokered by Trump tied to US resource push: The president says the US is getting “a lot of mineral rights” from the agreement between Rwanda and the DR Congo:

“Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have signed a peace agreement to end a decades-long conflict, which US President Donald Trump says gives the US rights to local mineral wealth.”

i’m all for peace yet the wheelin’ dealin’ rings hollow because of the USEmpire’s track record. Ukraine is another hot spot for minerals wealth, as shown with: “US pressured Kiev over minerals deal ‘like in a mafia movie’”.

Those are examples reflecting the key difference between: Rights to Nature and Rights of Nature. Rights to Nature implies human rights to take from Nature; Nature in and of itself doesn’t need any “rights”—Nature continues being and doing, in short, Natural Law.

Rights of Nature is about some humans learning to respect Nature, thus giving Rights in a legal sense so to ensure that respect happens—so as to compensate for and repair the harms of disregarding centuries if not millennia of the Natural Law.

For those wanting to learn more specifics about metals/minerals, a very informative book is The Rare Metals War: the dark side of clean energy and digital technologies (2018 in French, 2020 Scribe), by Guillaume Pitron:

"Talk of the digital revolution, energy transition and ecological transformation abounds. There are those — journalists, politicians, researchers and futurists — who tell us there’s a new world, free at last from fossil fuels, pollution, shortages, and political and military tension. This formidably documented book, the fruit of six years of research, shows us why nothing could be further from the truth. In unyoking ourselves from fossil fuels, we are merely taking on a new dependency on rare metals. Lithium, cobalt, rare earth, tungsten, nickel... They have become indispensable to the development of the new green (windfarms, solar panels, etc.) and digital society (embedded in our phones, computers, tablets and other smart devices we use every day). Yet the environmental, economic and political costs of this dependency will be even higher than those of our current industrial society."

Even the book’s website blurb’s “will be” doesn’t due the topic justice:

“In Chapter One we saw behind the scenes of the world’s rare-earths capital Baotou [in Inner Mongolia]. We saw its toxic lakes and its cancer villages, whose inhabitants are dying a slow death. Let us now examine its glittering exterior.”

One potential recourse to this variety of world incongruity and madness is:

“Rights of nature or Earth rights is a legal and jurisprudential theory that describes inherent rights as associated with ecosystems and species, similar to the concept of fundamental human rights. The rights of nature concept challenges twentieth-century laws as generally grounded in a flawed frame of nature as "resource" to be owned, used, and degraded.”

While i personally feel that Rights of Nature is one of the more promising legal avenues for making long-lasting change within the domination system, for starters, there is too much at stake already — and that ought to encourage every human being to volunteer some form of Responsibility for caring for the Earth and natural world.

“…the Great Lakes and State Waters Bill of Rights, a new law which was introduced into the New York legislature by Assemblyman Patrick Burke (District 142) on March 19^th. The bill, AO5156A, if passed, would be the first ever state-level “rights of nature” law in the United States.”[1]

Other examples include:

• “Ecuador was the first country in the world to accord legal rights to nature. In the country’s constitution, under Chapter 7, Articles 71 to 74 recognize the rights of ‘Pachamama’ – or Mother Earth – to ‘maintain and generate its cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes’.” The right was established after a high court case in the country ruled that mining in a protected region of the Ecuadorian rainforest violated the rights of nature.”

• “Respecting the majority view that nature is Mother Earth, Bolivia passed The Framework Law on Mother Earth and Integral Development to Live Well on October 15, 2012.”

• New Zealand “Under the Te Urewera Act, signed in 2012, the original status of the Urewera Forest as a national park was removed and replaced with legal personhood. The Act even used Māori language to reiterate that the forest has its own mana (authority) and its own mauri (life force). Two years later, in 2014, another settlement agreement between the Whanganui iwi and the New Zealand government gave legal personhood rights to the Whanganui river. The law recognised the “spirit” of the river, that it is above human sovereignty and therefore owned by no one.” (bold added)

• “The Central American country of Panama has joined forces with other nations to enact ecocentric laws to protect nature. On February 24, 2022, the country published a new law whereby it recognised the right of nature to “exist, persist and regenerate”. Panamanian Law No. 287 (the Act) goes further and recognises the obligations of the country to incorporate this law into all forms of rules, regulations, and policies.”

• “In India, a high court in Chennai, the capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, took the stance that nature is a person that needs protection.”

• “One of the first countries that established nature rights and adopted them into their legal system is the United States, in one of its founding states, Pennsylvania. … In 2006, local municipalities in [Pennsylvania] established the rights of nature by adopting them into their own local jurisdictions. In fact, the borough of Tamaqua in eastern Schuylkill County was the first community to enact rights for nature. Since then, more than three dozen communities have adopted such laws. In November 2010, the City of Pittsburgh became the first major municipality in the United States to recognize the Rights of Nature.”

The real enemies are those who assume with arrogant aplomb that the minerals, rare earth metals, oil, whatever is theirs to take and in any form they see fit, including the brutality of wars, the un-empathy of slave-labor mining, and the Oxfam report that “World’s richest 1% could end poverty 22 times. … The richest 1% of the people on Earth have gained over $33.9 trillion in real terms since 2015.”

Considering those more than sore spots, plus the USE government cutting funding to various programs and peoples, the opening lines of Dylan’s “Nettie Moore” sum up, imho, the zeitgeist of the common human being and current situations:

“Lost John sittin' on a railroad track
Something's out of wack
Blues this morning falling down like hail
Gonna leave a greasy trail”

[1] from “‘A Bright Spot Amidst the Chaos’ – From New York to Minnesota, the Rights of Nature are Growing - As the Federal government dismantles environmental protections, state efforts to recognize the rights of nature rights of nature have their day at the United Nations” April, 2025
&
for more specifics about Great Lakes and State Waters Bill of Rights, listen to Max WIlbert’s podcast “Truth and Reckoning Episode 1: The Rights of Water in New York State” from 34:00 to 1:05:00

Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) writes, publishes, gardens, travels a holistic mystic Kaballah-rooted pathway staying in touch with Turtle Island. To find out more about his writings, publishings, podcasts, presentations… Allbook Books