By Fe Bongolan, San Francisco
As Fukushima radiation — in the same category as Chernobyl, though still amounting to a tenth of that disaster’s output — travels over our west coast into our rainwater and grass, I watch as two political stories are being told. The stories are of the battle for the hearts and minds of human beings over the natural resources of the world, and an elegy for what we have been and should be calling civilized in this day and age.
While the White House and a Republican Congress were engaged in tense budget negotiations to stave off total government shutdown over the industrial regulatory and monitoring functions of the EPA and federal funding of Planned Parenthood, the nation of Bolivia has set the template for a new United Nations treaty giving Mother Earth the same rights as humans. The aim of the treaty is to have the UN “recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to ‘dominate and exploit’ — to the point that the ‘well-being and existence of many beings’ is now threatened.” The new treaty is based on Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, signed into law in January of 2011 by President Evo Morales — the first indigenous native head of state in the world. The aims of Washington and Sucre, Bolivia may seem disparate, but to me the perspectives from both could not be more intensely connected. We are in a moral struggle on the inside and out, to keep the human race from further wounding our planet and killing ourselves in the process.
It’s a form of insanity, this state of denial that leads us to believe that because of budget considerations, the Earth can continue to take the shit we shove into her, stripping her of life and living resources, hoping she’ll continue to be quiet. That goes for our own resources as well as the natural resources of other countries. That goes for the ‘she’ next to you as well as the one upon which you live. The subjugation of women — like the funding attack on Planned Parenthood — is based on a direct reflection of those values, or lack of them, that refuse to respect the power of the planet itself. How we treat women, including the female planet upon which we live, is how we regard our future. Exploitation happens to both people and places. Right now, it doesn’t look like we have great expectations for times to come.