NATURE IS NOT MUTE

June 5th

Reality paints still-lifes.

Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim. Meanwhile the climate goes haywire and we do too.

Today is World Environment Day. A good day to celebrate the new constitution of Ecuador, which in the year 2008, for the first time in the history of the world, recognised nature as a subject with rights.

It seems strange, this notion that nature has rights as if it were a person. But in the United States it seems perfectly normal that big companies have human rights. They do, ever since a Supreme Court decision in 1886.

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

From Eduardo Galeano's new book 'Children of the days, A calendar of human history'