Rights of Nature :: Rites of Spring

This morning I discovered an encouraging resource at Wikipedia on the Rights of Nature. I was poking around following up on yesterday’s posting. There’s been more activity, for longer, than I realized. I’m going to do more reading to catch up.

Meanwhile, while discussing the Wiki contents with the Better Half, she raised a question that bears watching and thinking about. The early emergence of insect pests this year reinforces her point. When we refer to rights of nature, where and how do we draw the bounds of the system(s) we’re referring to? Do we intend to grant the right of existence to mosquitoes and ticks, recognizing that they become food stock for other creatures? What about viruses such as COVID-19 and its variants? I’ve not read enough to have a clue how one would include or exclude rights for such beings.

does the moon have rights?

Photo by J. Harrington

To further complicate ponderings on this theme, I note that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, states, in part, as the first right “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Did this phrasing intentionally preclude those not yet born from human rights? How does that reconcile with the recent judicial decisions on the unborn? Can it be reconciled?

I’m vacillating between thinking we have a Gordian knot and a large can of worms here. I’m not even sure we have sufficiently clear terms and meanings to be sure where and about what we could agree to disagree. I’ll continue to plod about this thicket and report back from time to time. In the interim, I’ve no idea how we stay out of trouble. It used to be one had only to avoid discussing religion and politics.

Human Knowledge

By Robert Wrigley

About the only thing I thought I knew

was that nothing I’d ever know would do

any good. Sunrise, say, or that the part

of the horse’s hoof that most resembles

a human palm is called the frog;

certain chords on the guitar of no mercantile use;

the abstruse circuitry of an envelope

quatrain; even the meaning of horripilation.

 

Sometimes on a flatland mound the ancients had made,

I took heart in the pointlessness of stars

and lay there until my teeth chattered.

I earned my last Boy Scout merit badge

building a birdhouse out of license plates

manufactured by felons in the big house.

No more paramilitary organizations for me,

I said, ten years before I was drafted.

 

I had skills. Sure-footedness and slick

fielding. Eventually I would learn to unhook

a bra one-handed, practicing on my friend,

his sister's worn over his T-shirt (I took

my turns too). One Easter Sunday I hid

through the church service among the pipes

of the organ and still did not have faith,

although my ears rang until Monday.

 

I began to know that little worth knowing

was knowable and faith was delusion.

I began to believe I believed in believing

nothing I was supposed to believe in,

except the stars, which, like me,

were not significant, except for their light,

meaning I loved them for their pointlessness.

I believed I owned them somehow.

 

A C major 7th chord was beautiful and almost rare.

The horse I loved foundered and had to be

put down. The middle rhyme in an envelope

quatrain was not imprisoned if it was right.

In cold air a nipple horripilates

and rises, the sun comes up and up and up,

a star that bakes the eggs

in a Boy Scout license plate birdhouse.

 

God was in music and music was God.

A drill sergeant seized me by my dog tag

chain and threatened to beat me

to a pile of bloody guts for the peace sign

I’d chiseled in the first of my two tags,

the one he said they’d leave in my mouth

before they zipped the body bag closed.

Yet one more thing I’d come to know.

 

He also said that Uncle Sam owned my ass,

no more true than my ownership

of the stars. I can play a C major 7th chord

in five or six places on the neck of a guitar.

A stabled horse’s frog degrades; a wild horse’s

becomes a callus, smooth as leather.

Stars are invisible in rainy weather,

something any fool knows, of course.

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That’s Life? ... What’s Life?

Yesterday the high was over 50℉. Today there are snowflakes in the air. We’ve reached a point at which the weather makes as much sense as an Alabama Supreme Court decision or the reactions of a US Senator from that state. Perhaps it’s time we insist on a critical thinking skills test for those who seek appointed or elected public office.

In the interest of further identifying the contents of the can of worms the Alabama IVF decision has opened, consider these items:

• One aspect that has received limited coverage is the question of the legal definition of being alive. If one doesn’t meet a legal definition of being alive, how can wrongful death occur? As a resource, I suggest you take a look at The Systems View of Life, A Unifying Vision. Follow this link for an excerpt.


• When, and under what circumstances, does legal personhood occur? Corporations are legal persons but don’t seem to face a death penalty for the killings due to climate change or a multitude of pollutants or some reckless acts. Is there such a thing as the wrongful death of a corporate entity due to a hostile takeover? Should there be?


• Is there confusion over distinctions between “persons” and “people?” The Declaration of Independence uses the term people. An online search could not find the word “person” therein. Lincoln referred to "government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The Constitution begins “We the people....” and promptly references “Person” in Article 1, Section 2.

I don’t think we want to call for a constitutional convention and chance throwing out babies and bathwater, but a significant convening of lawyers, linguists, politicians, systems experts, and others who could help sort through the implications of the incremental battles that are currently being fought across our country might be beneficial, unless politicians and jurists and the ilk enjoy suffering and dying from self-inflicted wounds all while creating chaos for the rest of US.

Personal

By Tony Hoagland

Don’t take it personal, they said;

but I did, I took it all quite personal—

the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;

the price of grapefruit and stamps,

the wet hair of women in the rain—

And I cursed what hurt me

and I praised what gave me joy,

the most simple-minded of possible responses.

The government reminded me of my father,

with its deafness and its laws,

and the weather reminded me of my mom,

with her tropical squalls.

Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness

Think first, they said of Talk

Get over it, they said

at the School of Broken Hearts

but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t

believe in the clean break;

I believe in the compound fracture

served with a sauce of dirty regret,

I believe in saying it all

and taking it all back

and saying it again for good measure

while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries

like wheeling birds

and the trees look seasick in the wind.

Oh life! Can you blame me

for making a scene?

You were that yellow caboose, the moon

disappearing over a ridge of cloud.

I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;

barking and barking:

trying to convince everything else

to take it personal too.

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for this Lent, I’m giving up giving up

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, for those who observe. I’m not a religious person although I was raised in a major faith. Making sacrifices during Lent was part of the tradition and rituals. In my younger days, I used to give up keeping my New Year’s resolutions during Lent until I got wise enough to make a New Year’s resolution to not make New Year’s resolutions. I’ve kept that one.

It has occurred to me that the radical right is trying to wear US down, just as Putin is trying to wear down Ukraine and their supporters. Add in the third year of a pandemic, continuing failures to properly respond to climate breakdown and loss of biodiversity, increasing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer oligarchs, and a long and growing list of other systemic failures (toxic train derailments and ubiquitous forever chemicals included) and it’s not hard to see how lots of intelligent, rational moderate and liberal folks can lean toward depression. If we surrender, they win. We don’t want that.

AOC is on a congressional trip to Japan. A recent email notes:

Japan is a country that not only has universal health care, not only has a bullet train public infrastructure system that is robust, not only has child care, not only cares about the environment, not only cares about cultural preservation – but is also successful. It is the third largest economy in the world. 

It’s not to say that everything is perfect here. It’s not to say that it is without its challenges. It’s not even to say that the U.S. should be just like Japan. 

But it’s saying that all of these things that we’re constantly told are impossible, are possible. They’re possible. A better world is possible. 

President Biden, in Poland after a visit to Kyiv, is reported in the Guardian, to have "accused [Putin] of ‘playing to rifts in the United States’ by raising specter of nuclear war between Moscow and west” ....

A member of Congress is proposing a divorce between conservative red and liberal/moderate blue states. That seems inconsistent with her oath to defend the Constitution.

the charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable,
a perpetual series of occasions for hope

Photo by J. Harrington

Worn out yet? Don’t be. Reread AOC’s note. “A better world is possible.” If you’re looking for some examples of how, try

• Slow Food
• Slow Water
• From What Is to What If
• Trout Unlimited
• Aldo Leopold Foundation
• Letters from an American

There are other options. Look around. First of all though, take care of yourself. You’re all we’ve got.

For the Consideration of Poets

By Haki R. Madhubuti

where is the poetry of resistance,

                     the poetry of honorable defiance

unafraid of lies from career politicians and business men,

not respectful of journalist who write

official speak void of educated thought

without double search or sub surface questions

that war talk demands?

where is the poetry of doubt and suspicion

not in the service of the state, bishops and priests,

not in the service of beautiful people and late night promises,

not in the service of influence, incompetence and academic

         clown talk?

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A Modest Proposal for transforming Facebook

With apologies to Jonathan Swift and the genre of satire, today we offer a proposal that could exceed Zuck’s efforts to rule the metaverse. Transform Facebook, or create a competitor, that is similar to the original SimCity game but that allows multi-players on the internet to collaborate on creating a shared and shareable vision of the kind of world in which they, and, conceivably, we, might want to live.

What's envisioned would require a significant upgrade over SimCity BuildIt by incorporating some AI version of the various algorithms and models used to test various carbon sequestration techniques, to assess the intended and unintended consequences of various urban and rural mixes, such as eliminating dairy and meat sectors from agriculture, composting food waste and then what happens to the soils and is there enough or too much compost to provide year-round food for the 10 billion expected.

But, and it’s a huge but (no pun intended), such an approach offers options to test Republican versus Democratic social and economic approaches; ways and means to test bridging or closing the urban rural splits; vegan, vegetarian and plant-based diets; and a variety of policy-based options that are currently being debated with few, if any, actual assessments of how well any policy may or may not work in a complex, emergent, dynamic world. (Build  Back Better anyone?)

blue sky flight test

Photo by J. Harrington

At the moment, we have a number of places trying doughnut economics; the United Nations has proposed its 17 Sustainable Development Goals; Paul Hawken et. al. have brought us Drawdown and Regeneration; all of which, and other approaches, require societies and cultures and nations to kind of buy a pig in a poke. If folks had access to the kind of SimWorld that’s policy-driven and systems-based, we could avoid a lot of misinformation, disinformation and consequent debate by offering folks an opportunity to plug a proposed policy into the simulation and see what happens. When multitudes are doing it at the same time, we will, I believe, at a minimum, clearly eliminate economists’ hiding behind the skirts of “rational person.” Between that and eliminating the nonsense now served on Facebook, we’ll have made major progress at creating a newer and better world. Zuck could become the snake that swallowed its own tail.

One Vote

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

            ^{After reading a letter from his mother, Harry T. Burn cast the deciding vote to ratify the 19th amendment of the U.S. Constitution}

My parents are from countries
where mangoes grow wild and bold
and eagles cry the sky in arcs and dips.
America loved this bird too and made

it clutch olives and arrows. Some think
if an eaglet falls, the mother will swoop
down to catch it. It won’t. The eagle must fly
on its own accord by first testing the air-slide

over each pinfeather. Even in a letter of wind,
a mother holds so much power. After the pipping
of the egg, after the branching—an eagle is on
its own. Must make the choice on its own

no matter what its been taught. Some forget
that pound for pound, eagle feathers are stronger
than an airplane wing. And even one letter, one
vote can make the difference for every bright thing.

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