Does the Environment Need Constitutional Amandment by David W. Orr




“The effects of climate change, loss of species, destruction of ecosystems, and tropical deforestation are global, threaten to erode the ecological foundations of civilizations . . . Chemicals that disrupt the endocrine system do their work in parts per billion, wreaking havoc on the development and immune systems of children . . . nature is an intricate web of causes and effects often widely separated in space and time, and that small changes can have very large implications . . . we are trustees poised between our forebears and our posterity . . .”

“The question now is, can we adapt that document (the nation-state constitution) and our public life to pressing ecological realities? . . . Once we became much exercised about ‘taxation without representation’, but the present reality is more akin to ‘extermination without representation’ . . . As things stand, the benefits of risk are, in effect, privatized, while the consequences are externalized — to the detriment of the planet and its future inhabitants — which, by any decent reckoning, is unfair . . . The legal acknowledgement of our rights to a healthy environment, now and for those yet to live, would clarify necessary changes in policy having to do with taxes, prices, public expenditures, the proper control of corporations, and the uses of technology.”

Read the full article at Orion Magazine

 

Keywords : commons, nature, earth, law, constitution, management, governance, tax, externalities, corporation, capitalism
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