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

Steve Jobs emphasized in a presentation today that the new iPod Nano is the “cleanest” ever; it contains lower levels of arsenic and other toxic substances, and it’s composed of “easily recyclable” materials.

This is nice, and represents part of Apple’s response to Greenpeace’s longstanding complaints against its mediocre enviro record. (This is one of their anti-Apple posters). But it does raise a couple questions: first of all, isn’t the most impactful thing about iPods that they keep coming out with new models? So that you don’t hold on to your expensive piece of electronics for more than a year?

Second, containing “easily recyclable materials” isn’t the same as “recyclable.” I don’t know about the recycling chart in your city, but in mine, chrome things don’t appear to go into the blue bin. Somewhere at MIT, consciencious students may be disassembling iPods before they throw them out, dividing their components into tiny recyclable and non-recyclable piles. But I bet most of those easily recyclable materials aren’t getting recycled. Unless they’re being passed on to parents, homeless people, etc when a new model comes out.

Image: Greenpeace

Environmentalism needs good villains. Rather than rely on the public’s ability to blame its own high-consuming tendencies, it’s nice if we can let them point to somsebody who’s trying to kill us all. Sarah Palin is just the thing.

I mean, look at her. That is the smile of the demonically possessed. More substantively, she is typical of Alaskan Republicans in that she’s a staunch ally of big oil. She supports drilling in ANWR, and generally comes down in favor of letting energy companies run pipelines wherever they want. They in turn have contributed generously to her campaigns.

She has apparently already caused Hurricane Gustav, which, according to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who has orchestrated a relatively orderly evacuation, looks to be a worse storm than Katrina.

Image: flickr/Thomas Roche 

There’s not much question that Obama’s address tonight, on the 45th anniversary of I Have a Dream, will be the most important of the election. So the question for enviros is, will Obama be able to talk about the most important issue of the next decade or so, which is to say, climate change?

The danger of bringing it up is that Obama needs more than anything else not to look like an elitist. He’s not going to win as the next Al Gore. High gas prices have been putting a lot of middle-class voters in the pro-drilliing, anti-conservation column lately. A speech that failed to make environmentalism a central issue would be sad but understandable. The Machiavellian in me kind of hopes he runs away from global warming until he gets elected.

Image: flickr/zenobia_joy

Even Fox News, in its sweetly guarded, vulnerability-fearing way, is conceding that Denver has been a pretty green convention. Once you get past their unfeeling headline, they show they are all mush inside.

There are free bikes downtown, some new wind power facilities. Green key-cards at the hotels. But more important, really, was the fact that Hillary dedicated one of the only substantive portions of her speech (most of it was ‘we made 18 million cracks in that glass ceiling, which changed that ceiling into a mosaic of caring, and Harriet Tubman said you’ve got to keep banging your head through that mosaic etc etc’) to talk about green-collar jobs.

That speech did make a little worried  about party unity though. I mean, everybody is praising it as a great speech, but wasn’t it kind of, I am great, I laid waste in the primary, I proved something, and oh yeah, vote for Barack? Because while he may not be a woman, like me, the man is at least black, like Harriet Tubman?

Image: flickr/Jeffrey Beall

The LA Times has a piece about how the Dems are trying to wrest the Rocky Mountain West from the GOP largely by emphasizing green issues. Basically, the strategy is to be, like, the GOP makes messes, financial and environmental. We’ll clean them up, because we’re not burdened with their impractical neocon craziness.

It’s kind of cool to see the Democratic party is able to cast itself as the pragmatist, non-ideological one now. The No More Drama party.

Obama’s VP pick, Sen. Joe Biden, gave an interview to Grist this weekend where he flashed his green cred. He was one of the first congressmen to introduce a climate change bill, back in the ’80s. If he can sell his native Pennsylvania on the green-collar jobs concept, and play attack dog on McCain’s greenwashing, he’ll be earning his keep.

Image: flickr/World Economic Forum

The Wall Street Journal today has a story about Rob Anderson, a guy, who, to judge from his little WSJ illustration, appears to favor old-school spectacles. He lives on a government stipend in an apartment in an old Victorian in San Francisco. And he has brought the city’s bike-friendliness initiative to its knees.

Anderson took the city to court a couple years ago arguing that cars will always vastly outnumber bikes in the city, and that pledging space to bikes space necessarily reduces space for cars, causing traffic jams and thereby raising emissions. He won; the state forced the city to write up an environmental impact report, and the initiative is still stalled.

Meanwhile, cyclists protest, and Anderson blogs about how cyclists are like Islamist terrorists. Mike Judge take note.  

Image: flickr/MoBikeFed

The New York Times has a strangely touching story on this hippie guy whose job (until he got canned) was to speak for Atlanta’s trees.

Atlanta’s trees are so famous that when Sir Elton John cut an album that was kind of about Atlanta he called it Peachtree Road. Tom Wolfe described Atlanta’s trees as the city’s saving grace in that other famous carpetbagger’s tribute, A Man in Full. “People loved living under them,” he wrote.

No matter. Apparently the arborist in question, Tom Coffin, enforced local tree-preservation law too vigorously for the city’s taste; he complained about how none of the other arborists bothered imposing fines on developers who cut down trees and was out the next week.

It’s hard to imagine a worse PR move for a city whose most widely known non-peachtree features are Outkast and the headquarters of Coca-Cola. Especially because Coffin actually looks exactly like the Lorax. Fluffy beard and sad, paternal eyes and everything.

Image: flickr/cogdogblog 

So you no longer want to be a scourge of everything we hold dear / friend to Saudi Arabia.  You want to throw away your SUV. But how is it done? A San Franciscan named Ryan Mickle raised the question for real on a web site this month, and little by little became a web phenom.

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This is my first post on the Better Planet blog, where I’ll be summarizing and commenting on the latest enviro news. I’m not going to pretend that you can buy rugs/houses/toys that will save the world, nor will I encourage you to tear your hair out, kill yourself, build a bunker, etc. The portents of disaster will be balanced with reflections on what various governments, organizations, and individuals are doing to prevent the worst. I’ll keep updated on the biggest problems—and the most interesting proposals for how to fix them.