Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Stop the Destruction of the Planet ~ Polly Higgins

‘Eradicating Ecocide highlights the need for enforceable, legally binding mechanisms in national and international law to hold account perpetrators of long term severe damage to the environment. At this critical juncture in history it is vital that we set global standards of accountability for corporations, in order to put an end to the culture of impunity and double standards that pervade the international legal system. Polly Higgins illustrates how this can be achieved in her invaluable new book.’ Bianca Jagger, Founder and Chair of Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation

In Eradicating Ecocide, international environment lawyer and activist Polly Higgins sets out to demonstrate in no uncertain terms how our planet is fast being destroyed by the activities of corporations and governments, facilitated by ‘compromise’ laws that offer insufficient deterrence. She offers a solution that is radical but, as she explains with great competence and experience, absolutely necessary.

The recent Mexican Gulf oil spill is a compelling reminder of the consequences of un-checked ecocide. Higgins advocates the introduction of a new international law against Ecocide. It would become the 5th Crime Against Peace and would hold to account heads of corporate bodies that are found guilty of perpetrating ecocide.

The opportunity to implement this law represents a crossroads in the fate of humanity; we can accept this one change and in doing so save our ecosystem for future generations, or we can continue to destroy it, risking future brutal war over disappearing natural resources. This is the first book to explain that we all have a commanding voice and the power to call upon all our governments to change the existing rules of the game. Higgins presents examples of laws in other countries which have succeeded in curtailing the power of governments, corporations and banks and made a sudden and effective change, demonstrating that her proposal is not impossible.

Eradicating Ecocide is a crash course on what laws work, what doesn’t and what else is needed to prevent the imminent disaster of global collapse. Eradicating Ecocide provides a comprehensive overview of what needs to be done in order to prevent ecocide. It is a book providing a template of a body of laws for all governments to implement, which applies equally to smaller communities and anyone who is involved in decision-making.

Click here to browse inside.

earthrise : Big Thinker: Polly Higgins

In most countries the environment has no legal rights. Corporate CEOs and heads of state are not bound by law personally to look after the earth and clean up any mess they make. But environmental lawyer Polly Higgins is trying to change that.

Ecocide, the 5th Crime Against Peace: Polly Higgins at TEDxExeter

Dare to be great: Polly Higgins at TEDxWhitechapel

Barrister and activist known as ‘lawyer for the Earth’, Polly Higgins, tells her recent transformative experience taking time out walking in New Forest where she was awakened to her greater purpose and next steps in service of the Earth. She challenges us to ask the empowering questions: “How can we move from a place of dependency to a place of interdependency? How can we create a world of peace? How can I dare to be great?”

Polly Higgins, barrister, international lawyer and award winning author of Eradicating Ecocide, proposed to the United Nations in April 2010 a law of Ecocide to be classed as the 5th Crime Against Peace. Ecocide is defined as the mass “damage, destruction to or loss of ecosystems of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished.”
Polly has been a vocal spokesperson on Earth Law for a number of years and is recognised as an expert in her field. Her first book, Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of our Planet is published by Shepheard-Walwyn, Winner of the Peoples Book Prize 2011 for non-fiction and book number 2, Earth is our Business, changing the rules of the game has been described as ‘groundbreaking’. No other author has addressed the heart of the problem and proposed how to change it into a solution by using law. Polly has now mounted a global campaign to have Ecocide recognised as the 5th Crime Against Peace.

The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change by Al Gore

From the former vice president and #1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything—a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come.

Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world:

• Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past.

• The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases.
• The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets.

• A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species.

• Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands.

• There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide.

From his earliest days in public life, Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent truths—no matter how “inconvenient” they may seem to be. As absorbing as it is visionary, The Future is a map of the world to come, from a man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too right

Former vice president Al Gore is the chairman and co-founder of both Generation Investment Management and Current TV, is a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and is on the board of directors of Apple Inc. He spends the majority of his time as chairman of the the Climate Reality Project. First elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, Gore served eight years in the House, eight years in the U.S. Senate, and eight years as vice president of the United States, from 1993 to 2001. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 and is the #1 bestselling author of An Inconvenient Truth and The Assault on Reason.

Click here to browse inside

Published on Jan 24, 2013
The Future by Al Gore – Former Vice President, Winner of the Nobel Prize (UK version)

.

The Secret Teachings of Plants : The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature By Stephen Harrod Buhner

Reveals the use of direct perception in understanding Nature, medicinal plants, and the healing of human disease

• Explores the techniques used by indigenous and Western peoples to learn directly from the plants themselves, including those of Henry David Thoreau, Goethe, and Masanobu Fukuoka, author of The One Straw Revolution

• Contains leading-edge information on the heart as an organ of perception

All ancient and indigenous peoples insisted their knowledge of plant medicines came from the plants themselves and not through trial-and-error experimentation. Less well known is that many Western peoples made this same assertion. There are, in fact, two modes of cognition available to all human beings–the brain-based linear and the heart-based holistic. The heart-centered mode of perception can be exceptionally accurate and detailed in its information gathering capacities if, as indigenous and ancient peoples asserted, the heart’s ability as an organ of perception is developed.

Author Stephen Harrod Buhner explores this second mode of perception in great detail through the work of numerous remarkable people, from Luther Burbank, who cultivated the majority of food plants we now take for granted, to the great German poet and scientist Goethe and his studies of the metamorphosis of plants. Buhner explores the commonalities among these individuals in their approach to learning from the plant world and outlines the specific steps involved. Readers will gain the tools necessary to gather information directly from the heart of Nature, to directly learn the medicinal uses of plants, to engage in diagnosis of disease, and to understand the soul-making process that such deep connection with the world engenders.

Stephen Harrod Buhner
Stephen Harrod Buhner is an Earth poet and the award-winning author of ten books on nature, indigenous cultures, the environment, and herbal medicine. He comes from a long line of healers including Leroy Burney, Surgeon General of the United States under Eisenhower and Kennedy, and Elizabeth Lusterheide, a midwife and herbalist who worked in rural Indiana in the early nineteenth century. The greatest influence on his work, however, has been his great-grandfather C.G. Harrod who primarily used botanical medicines, also in rural Indiana, when he began his work as a physician in 1911.

Stephen’s work has appeared or been profiled in publications throughout North America and Europe including Common Boundary, Apotheosis, Shaman’s Drum, The New York Times, CNN, and Good Morning America.

Click here to browse inside.

Daniel Vitalis Interviews Stephen Buhner ~ Part 1/4

Stephen Buhner is an award winning author, poet and a master herbalist

Daniel Vitalis Interviews Stephen Buhner ~ Part 2/4

More than just a profound Herbalist, Stephen is something more like a Bardic Naturalist. His speech is so eloquent that one cannot help but to be inspired (not to mention have their synapses re-networked)!

Daniel Vitalis Interviews Stephen Buhner ~ Part 3/4

Stephen is Reverently Irreverent in his approach to Re-Wilding and shares powerful insights about how we have been changed by domestication. Even more powerful are his strategies to reclaiming ourselves!
Daniel Vitalis Interviews Stephen Buhner ~ Part 4/4

His books have been some of the most influential of any I have read. In Fact, they have fundamentally changed the way that I experience Herbal Medicine! More than that, they set me on a path of using my heart as an organ of perception and cognition! ~Daniel Vitalis

Tell the World: A Young Environmentalist Speaks Out ~ Severn Cullis-Suzuki

Review
Severn Cullis-Suzuki’s Tell the World: A Young Environmentalist Speaks Out is another publishing oddity. Thirteen-year-old Cullis-Suzuki is, of course, the famed David Suzuki’s daughter. The book includes the text of her speechView Here at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro held in June, 1992, as well as sections that explain the formation of Cullis-Suzuki’s environmentalist group and give pragmatic suggestions for action to other teenage activists. Cullis-Suzuki’s speech is perfectly decent rhetoric for a cause most of us would support. It is, however, nothing new. While the suggestions for activism are sensible and well presented, the young author seems blissfully unaware of how her privileged position as the child of a celebrity has influenced her effectiveness as an environmental activist. This is understandable and forgivable in a youngster. The decision to publish such ephemera is not.
Rhea Tregebov (Books in Canada) — Books in Canada

Severn Cullis-Suzuki – A Call to Action for Canadians for Earth Summit 2012

Hey everyone. Severn is our inspiration and a hard worker for environmental justice Here she speaks as as We Canada Champion http://www.earthsummit.ca @wecanada

At only 12 years of age, Severn Cullis-Suzuki spoke to world leaders at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, telling them that they needed to take action and save the planet. Now, nearly 20 years later, she asks all Canadians to demand action from our leaders at the 2012 UN Earth Summit.

Severn Cullis-Suzuki is a world renowned environmental activist, a UN Commissioner for the Earth Charter, and a Champion of the We Canada Initiative.

1. Severn Cullis-Suzuki returns to Rio 20 years after stopping the world 2.The Girl Who Silenced the World for 5 Minutes

Environmental activist Severn Cullis-Suzuki returned to Rio on 16 June 2012, some two decades after stopping the world with her impassioned plea to governments to do more to preserve the world and its ecosystems for future generations.

Severn is in Rio as part of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and delivered her first address in the Brazilian city since 1992 during the day-long “Green Cross Returns to Rio” event on 16 June 2012.

The Green Cross event recognized the issues and activities that drive the NGO founded by President Mikhail Gorbachev out of the 1992 Earth Summit.

This is an incredible video of a Canadian girl who spoke to the United Nations and left them completely silent and speechless for six minutes. Her name is Severn Cullis-Suzuki, and her speech was given at a U.N. assembly in Brazil when she was twelve years old. She had raised all the money to travel to the delegation, five thousand miles from her home, herself.

Biography

Severn Cullis-Suzuki was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada. Her mother is writer Tara Elizabeth Cullis. Her father, geneticist and environmental activist David Suzuki,View his Video and Book Review here is a third-generation Japanese Canadian.While attending Lord Tennyson Elementary School in French Immersion, at age 9, she founded the Environmental Children’s Organization (ECO), a group of children dedicated to learning and teaching other youngsters about environmental issues.In 1992, at age 12, Cullis-Suzuki raised money with members of ECO, to attend the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Along with group members Michelle Quigg, Vanessa Suttil, and Morgan Geisler, Cullis-Suzuki presented environmental issues from a youth perspective at the summit, where she was applauded for a speech to the delegates. The video has since become a viral hit, popularly known as “The Girl Who Silenced the World for 6 Minutes”. In 1993, she was honoured in the United Nations Environment Programme’s Global 500 Roll of Honour.[7] In 1993, Doubleday published her book Tell the World , a 32-page book of environmental steps for families.
Cullis-Suzuki graduated from Yale University in 2002 with a B.Sc. in ecology and evolutionary biology.[3] After Yale, Cullis-Suzuki spent two years travelling. Cullis-Suzuki co-hosted Suzuki’s Nature Quest, a children’s television series that aired on the Discovery Channel in 2002.
In early 2002, she helped launch an Internet-based think tank called The Skyfish Project. As a member of Kofi Annan’s Special Advisory Panel, she and members of the Skyfish Project brought their first project, a pledge called the “Recognition of Responsibility”, to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in August 2002 The Skyfish Project disbanded in 2004 as Cullis-Suzuki turned her focus back to school and enrolled in a graduate course in the University of Victoria to study ethnobotany under Nancy Turner.

The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature, Updated and Expanded by David Suzuki

This special 10th anniversary edition re-examines our place in the natural world in light of the sweeping environmental changes and the recent advances in scientific knowledge.

Since its first publication, Sacred Balance has sold over 100,000 copies. In the meantime, global warming has become a major issue as glaciers and polar ice caps have begun to melt at an alarming rate, populations of polar bears have dwindled, the intensity of hurricanes and tsunamis has drastically increased, coral bleaching is occurring globally, and the earth has experienced its hottest years in over four centuries.

At the same time, scientists have made significant discoveries about the current state of the Great Lakes and other ecosystems of the world; the science behind the mother/baby interaction and the relationship between deprivation of affection in childhood and serious illness in midlife; the workings of the brain, including its ability to create a narrative, anticipate the future, and order the past; and the biological underpinnings of religion, among other findings. In this new and extensively revised and amplified edition of his best-selling book, David Suzuki reflects on these changes and examines what they mean for our place in the world.

The basic message of this seminal, best-selling work remains the same: We are creatures of the earth, and as such, we are utterly dependent on its gifts of air, water, soil, and the energy of the sun. These elements are not just external factors; we take them into our bodies, where they are incorporated into our very essence. What replenishes the air, water, and soil and captures sunlight to vitalize the biosphere is the diverse web of all beings. The recently completed human genome project has revealed that all species are our biological kin, related to us through our evolutionary history. And it appears that our need for their company is programmed into our genome.

As social animals, we have an absolute need for love; without it, we suffer dire psychological and physical consequences. The strength of that love is reflected in healthy, vibrant families and communities supported by full employment, security, and justice and free of threats of genocide, terror, or war. Finally, we have spiritual needs, which are ultimately rooted in nature, the source of our inspiration and belonging. These are the real requirements of all humanity and should form the basis of any society aspiring to a truly sustainable future.

These truths remain. But the cataclysmic events of the last decade require that we rethink our behaviour and find a new way to live in balance with our surroundings. This book offers just such a new direction for us all.

David Suzuki donates his royalties from sales of The Sacred Balance to the David Suzuki Foundation.

David Suzuki is an acclaimed geneticist and environmentalist, the host of The Nature of Things, and the founder and chair of the David Suzuki Foundation. He is the author of more than forty books, including Good News for a Change, From Naked Ape to Superspecies (both co-authored with Holly Dressel), The Sacred Balance (co-authored with Amanda McConnell), and David Suzuki: The Autobiography. He is the recipient of the Unesco Kalinga Prize for Science, the United Nations Environmental Medal, the UNEP’s Global 500 award, and has been named a Companion of the Order of Canada. In addition, he holds eighteen honorary degrees and he has been adopted into three First Nations clans. He was selected as the 35th most important green campaigner of all time by the British newspaper, The Guardian. Suzuki lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Amanda McConnell has written more than one hundred documentary films, many of them for The Nature of Things. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature, and she writes and gardens in Toronto, Ontario.

Adrienne Mason is the author of numerous books for adults and children, including The Nature of Spiders, The Green Classroom, Living Things, and Oceans. She is managing editor of the science magazine KNOW: The Science Magazine for Curious Kids and has been nominated four times for a Science in Society book award. She holds a B.Sc. degree in Biology from the University of Victoria, and she lives in Tofino, British Columbia, with her husband and two daughters.

Biography

David T. Suzuki, PhD, is an internationally renowned scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster who has spent over 40 years educating people about science and environmental issues in the classroom and over the airwaves.

Dr. Suzuki is acclaimed for his ability to explain the complexities of science in a compelling and easy-to-understand way. His face is familiar to millions around the world from the popular science TV show The Nature of Things, which he has hosted since 1979.
David Suzuki: School Years

A third-generation Japanese-Canadian, David Suzuki was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1936. During World War II, six-year-old David and his family were sent to an internment camp in the Slocan Valley in the B.C. Interior—a wartime measure prescribed by the federal government.

After the war, the Suzuki family moved east to Ontario: first to Islington, then to Leamington, and finally to London, where David attended high school. He continued his education by winning a scholarship to Amherst College in Massachusetts, graduating with an Honours B.A. in Biology in 1958; which he followed with a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961.

A respected geneticist and a gifted lecturer, Dr. Suzuki was a professor in the University of British Columbia’s zoology department for 30 years (1963–93). For the eight years leading up to his retirement in 2001, he taught as a professor at the university’s Sustainable Development Research Institute, where he is now a professor emeritus.
David Suzuki: Television and Radio

After dabbling in the medium since 1962, David Suzuki’s television broadcasting career began formally in 1969 when he appeared on screens across Canada as the host of Suzuki on Science. The show played only two seasons but led to Dr. Suzuki hosting another Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) series called Science Magazine for five years, from 1974-79.

David Suzuki shifted to CBC radio in 1975 to host Quirks and Quarks, a weekly science show. He hosted for four years.

In 1979, David Suzuki left both Science Magazine and Quirks and Quarks to become host of CBC television’s The Nature of Things. Seen today in over 50 countries around the world, The Nature of Things has helped make David Suzuki a household name.

In addition to hosting The Nature of Things weekly, David Suzuki has produced numerous other television series and specials, including:

A Planet for the Taking (1985), which won an award from the United Nations,
The Sacred Balance (2002), which was later turned into a book,
A PBS series on DNA, The Secret of Life (1993), which was praised internationally,
A five-part series for the Discovery Channel, The Brain: The Universe Within (1994).

For CBC Radio, David Suzuki created two influential documentary series on the environment: It’s a Matter of Survival (1984) and From Naked Ape to Superspecies (1999).
David Suzuki: Author and Books

In addition being a broadcaster, David Suzuki has authored more than 40 books for adults and children. His most recent is the second volume of his life story, David Suzuki: The Autobiography, published by Greystone Books in hardcover (April 2006) and paperback (April 2007) editions.
David Suzuki: Awards and Accolades

Over the years, David Suzuki has received numerous Canadian and international awards for his work. Some notable awards include:

UNESCO prize for science
United Nations Environment Programme medal
Companion of the Order of Canada
19 honorary university doctorates from schools in Canada, the United States, and Australia.

In addition, David Suzuki has received many tributes from Canada’s First Nations people, along with five names (Big Mountain; Man Who Knows Much; My Own; Sacred Mountain; Mountain Man; Eagle Child) and “adoption” by both Haida and Heiltsuk families.

In 2004, CBC television viewers nominated him as one of ten “Greatest Canadians” of all time.
David Suzuki Foundation

David Suzuki is recognized as a world leader in sustainable ecology. He has devoted himself wholeheartedly to educating the public about the importance of the natural world and the need to protect it.

In 1990, David and his wife, Dr. Tara Cullis, co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation, a non-profit organization that works to find ways for people to live sustainably in balance with the natural world and which uses science and education to promote solutions that help conserve nature. David Suzuki currently serves as chair of the Foundation.

David Suzuki lives with his wife in Vancouver, British Columbia. In his little free time, David says he enjoys fishing, camping, and exploring the world of insects and tidal pools.
David Suzuki Interviewed at Occupy Montreal

Why? Simply Because and Jobbook scores an impromptu interview with known social activist David Suzuki on the first day of the Occupy Montreal movement. This protest was a satellite protest to Occupy Wall Street. Follow the movement at #occupywallstreet -

Thanks to Antoine de Brabant from Jobbook for the great help on the interview!

Sydney Peace Prize

Give Mother Earth A Chance

30 Nov 2010, 11:00

“If commerce starts to undermine life support, then commerce must stop, because life has to carry on.” This is the central premise Dr Vandana Shiva’s passionate address for the 2010 City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture, in which she lambasts global corporations for waging war against nature in the name of profits.

Shiva argues that when commonly used agricultural herbicides have names like “Round Up”, “Squadron”, “Avenge”, one can see there is war being waged against nature…and the humans are winning at the cost of their own future. To Vandana Shiva, fighting for peace for ‘Mother Earth’ is the broadest peace movement we can engage in.

She calls for a form of ‘Earth Democracy’, that re-imagines the biosphere as a citizen, that has universal rights that need protecting and defending.

Dr Vandana Shiva is speaking at the Sydney Opera House for the City of Sydney Peace Prize.

The Sydney Peace Prize was established by the Sydney Peace Foundation in 1998. Each year a prize is awarded to an organisation or individual who has made significant contributions to global peace. Previous winners include Patrick Dodson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mary Robinson, Arundhati Roy, Hans Blix and more.

Dr Vandana Shiva is a physicist, environmental activist, author and eco-feminist. As a physicist she trained at the University of Western Ontario and specialised in Quantum Theory. As an environmental activist she has worked for campaigns that focus on the issues of bio-piracy, genetic engineering, sustainable agriculture, intellectual property rights and biodiversity. She has written many books on environmental issues including “The Violence of Green Revolution”, “Bio-piracy: the Plunder of Nature and Knowledge”, “Water, Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit”, “Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace” and her most recent book “Soil Not Oil” released in 2008. In 1991, Shiva established “Navdanya” a food security movement based in over 16 states in India, it aims to empower farmers to protect their economic livelihoods and natural resources, especially native seeds. Shiva has been awarded several awards for her efforts including the Right Livelihood Award and the United Nations Environment Program [UNEP] Global 500 Award in 1993, and most recently the 2010 City of Sydney Peace Prize.

Vandana Shiva has been recognised for her work on the empowerment of women in developing countries, her advocacy of the human rights of small farming communities, and her scientific analysis of environmental sustainability.

Vandana is founder of the Navdanya movement and the Bija Vidyapeeth learning centre in India, recognized as a school of the future.

Sydney Peace Foundation director, Professor Stuart Rees, said Dr Shiva was an inspiring recipient of the award. “Many communities are threatened by the consequences of global warming, yet in Australia the movement to address this issue has gone to sleep,” he said. “Vandana’s presence in Sydney in November should wake them up.”

Other distinguished recipients of Australia’s only international prize for peace have included previous Nobel recipients Professor Muhammad Yunus, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Aboriginal leader Patrick Dodson.

Mary Kostakidis, chair of the Sydney Peace Foundation, said governments around the world sought Dr Shiva’s counsel on issues of sustainable development. “Vandana Shiva’s work highlights the fundamental connection between human rights and the protection of the environment,” Ms Kostakidis said. “She offers solutions to some of the most critical problems posed by the effects of globalisation and climate change on the poorest and most populous nations.”

VANDANA SHIVA: Traditional Knowledge, Biodiversity and Sustainable Living

An Interview with Dr Vandana Shiva, one of the world’s foremost environmentalist, anti-GM activist and an advocate of ecological farming and sustainable agriculture as a solution to climate change, food security, hunger and peace. The interview was taken on 16th March 2011, during “Grandmonther’s University” a three day course at Navdanya Biodiversity Farm at Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India which Dr. Vandana Shiva founded in 1987 to help save traditional seeds. The farm also undertakes research and training, along with the important role of distributing native seeds to farmers in the region.