Ecuadorian voters are considering bestowing the basic rights widely granted to humans upon natural entities. This means rivers, air, tropical forests, islands, and so on, will have an inalienable right to not be abused or destroyed or treated purely as property.
The new law on the table is actually a new constitution–not the kind of thing we generally go in for up here in the states, but so far polls show the Ecuadorians are into it, 56% to 23%. While this might initially sound like the latest in Latin American radicalism, a lawyer from the US, Thomas Linzey, is behind the proposal. He says the upshot will be that it will be possible to sue for damages to an ecosystem if the ecosystem isn’t on your property.
Not only is this non-anthropocentric, which isn’t that new (PETA is non-anthropocentric), it’s non-animal-centric. Actually, non-life-centric.
Image: flickr/pingnews

September 29th, 2008 at 4:52 am
Great! Let the people of Ecuador experiment with such an idiotic idea and show it to be moronic and unmanageable and froth with unintended consequences before the stupidity heads Northward to the U.S!
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:00 pm
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) Some individuals or companies have abused the TrackBack feature to insert spam links on some blogs (see sping). One notable blogging
October 28th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
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Where did you get your sources from?
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:07 am
yo
exellent
November 3rd, 2008 at 10:27 pm
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I found your post comments while searching Google. Very relevant especially as this is not an issue which a lot of peaople are conversant with.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:25 am
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I didn’t agree with you first, but last paragraph makes sense for me
November 15th, 2008 at 2:30 am
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The term is used colloquially for any kind of Linkback. One notable blogging tool that does not support trackback yet is Blogger. Six