Ecuador scored a victory yesterday for Mother Nature (or Pachamama as she is called by the indigenous people) by becoming the first country in the world to establish a Bill of Rights for the environment. Initial results say that 65 percent of Ecuadorians voted to approve a new constitution that includes a bill to grant inalienable rights to nature, blending Western modes of legal thought with native Ecuadorian respect for the natural world. The Bill of Rights, drafted by the Pennsylvania-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), states that “nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”

 

Ecuador is home to 13.3 million people, nearly every ecosystem in South America, and just enough oil — 1.2 billion barrels of crude — to cause trouble for its citizens. Ecological and human treasures such as the Amazon River, the Galapagos Islands, and at least 2 “uncontacted” Amazonian tribes have come under threat since discovery of the country’s oil. The country is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with Chevron over the petroleum giant’s dumping of tons of oil in unlined pits over two decades, contaminating the groundwater system in defiance of international law. Chevron denies the allegations, but the people of Ecuador are determined to avoid such disasters in the future by changing the legal status of Ecuador’s forests, water, air and islands from property to a right-bearing entity, similar to the status granted to the South American republic’s human citizens.