Mother Earth Rights

Intervention in the panel: The Right to Water and Indigenous Peoples

 Ambassador Pablo Solon, Permanent Representative of the Plurinational State of Bolivia to the United Nations

 Issue 6 : Half-Day Discussion on the Right to Water and Indigenous Peoples

 New York, May 24, 2011

Thank you very much, Madam President.

The revolutionary process of change in Bolivia has its roots precisely in the struggle against the privatization of water in my country. Ten years ago, we had one of the biggest battles to defend this resource from privatization in the city of Cochabamba and to oppose and change a law that privatized the sources of potable water for indigenous peoples in farming communities that rely on irrigation. Thanks to our success in stopping the privatization of water and modifying that law, a great unity was born among the Bolivian people which later allowed us to seek even deeper changes, notably the recovery of our natural resources and the recovery of our government – our own government, not one dictated from the outside.

That is why we promoted a resolution at the United Nations last year to declare the human right to water and sanitation, a resolution that was adopted without a single vote in opposition. We have to wonder why it took 62 years to pass a resolution declaring the human right to water and sanitation when it is quite evident that without water, there is no life, and without life, there are no human rights. Nonetheless, 62 years went by between the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Resolution on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation. Read more…

On December 10th, the UN sponsored international climate negotiations known as COP 16 concluded in Cancun, Mexico. 194 countries were in attendance of which 193 signed a non-binding agreement approving market based solutions to forest preservation, loose commitments to send an undefined amount of aid to developing countries, and to lower greenhouse gases by 2020.

While many of the negotiators and even mainstream environmental movements are calling Cancun a success, grassroots movements, including many indigenous and campesino organizations, have denounced the final agreement, saying it will further commodify Mother Earth and not actually combat the world’s climate crisis. Read more…

(Cormac Cullinan) In the wake of failure in Cancun and the much deeper problem that humanity is no longer living within the ecological capacity of the planet, might it be time for nature to have its own legal advocates?

Psychology has become a fashionable tool in the climate world to try and understand the levels of climate denial exhibited most vocally by the rowdy cohort of climate naysayers. With the conclusion of climate talks in Cancun, a more relevant question seems to be whether our climate negotiators suffer from an even worse form of denial – one that accepts the climate science but knowingly signs agreements that do nothing to stop our rush towards runaway climate change. Read more…

(Vandana Shiva) When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bigger war is the war against the planet. This war has its roots in an economy that fails to respect ecological and ethical limits – limits to inequality, limits to injustice, limits to greed and economic concentration. Read more…