The World Development Movement has organised an email petition to Nick Clegg, who is the UK representative at Rio+20 in June. It asks him to make sure that the Rio+20 agenda focusses on environmental justice – not, as the rich G8 countries want, on creating financial markets for natural resources.

You can find out a bit about this idea of treating the environment as a source of “environmental services”  that can be monetarised and traded, in the environmental services section of the Energy Royd Land page.

You can find out more about the issues and sign the petition here.

Source: World Development Movement

From www.bollier.org

Commons-based law – instead of marketisation of “environmental services”

Instead of extending the market into environmental resources which are basically priceless because nothing else can exchange or substitute for them, a new system of Commons-based law  would provide practical, democratic ways of protecting value that the market can’t achieve, because the market is essentially about consuming and profiting from natural resources.

Commons-based law would start from the premise that the environment is a common good that exists on its own terms. It would require us to adopt a biocentric rather than anthropocentric (human-centred) view of the environment.

According to the founders of the Commons Law Project,  Commons-based law

“…asks questions such as: How can appropriate limits be set on the market exploitation of nature? What legal principles, institutions and procedures can help manage a shared resource fairly and sustainably over time, sensitive to the ecological rights of future as well as present generations?”

If you’re interested in the idea of Commons Law, you might also like to read about the proposal to create a law prohibiting Ecocide – the destruction of ecologies.