- Pure relationships are the right key, legislation can only be a crutch
Our green expanses of forests can caress every soul. Take into themself every mind overthinking of every peace seaker.They know how to listen and embrace. To keep secrets. To comfort, to cheer up.
Oh yes, I know their role in ecosystems is huge, I know they breathe in what we humans breathe out and breathe out what we humans breathe in. Oxygen. In a process called respiration, which takes place in our cells, energy is released from food with the help of oxygen. Without oxygen, the organism at the cellular level dies and die.
Simple sentences, technical description. School definitions, life truths in one short sentence.
Those of us who enjoy forests and nature on a daily basis can shrug our shoulders. We carry our own vivid forest experiences within us, some of us relive these feelings even when we are somewhere else and need a forest bath. What about those who have no contact with forests? Of course, they know about them, but from television, the Internet, photos. They don’t experience them in terms of green oases, they don’t know the shades and depth of their greenery, they don’t know the smell of rustling leaves and rustling needles under majestic trees. Maybe they go to a paid forest bath for a couple of hours – these days, such possibilities are offered via the Internet. But, I feel that this way a person still has no chance to establish an intimate relationship – not with trees, not even with forests.
Nowadays, people on social networks often post photos of elderly people among trees, and also those where the trees stand out due to their shapes. They take pictures as they plant trees as a group. Recently, this has become popular. Do you know why? Perhaps because of the CO2 tax bills – even companies are starting to realize that planted trees mean lower costs of these taxes. So these may be decisions and campaigns based on economic calculations. And other option is, that more people accept the Natural order and the role of trees in it.
Some city dignitaries – for example, some mayors – sometimes plant a memorial tree during a ceremony. Nice gesture. But – when they adopt a spatial plan, they mostly don’t care about the trees. They let or even order trees along riverbeds, trees in city squares, trees in park plantations to be cut down. For potential protesters, they find and usually prepare in advance excuses, explanations, legal options that allow this. Duplicity? Or just dull tracking of daily tasks in projects, tracking project goals, potential obstacles are technically removed. If there are trees, it is bad luck for them.
Where there is no relationship, there is no flow of heart energy. When it’s not there, people don’t care. They are indifferent, they do not feel the loss. Do you understand?
People who establish a relationship with Nature, with forests, with trees, will never heartlessly cut down living green oases, will not indifferently cut down trees, will not commit environmental crime. Others, for whom green life means nothing, may stop before the law, before punishment. And such will have to be controlled…
Nature itself offers its own solutions for technologically necessary cellulose: e.g. bamboo, industrial hemp, …, and other rapidly self-renewable sources of wood and plant fibers. Trees that are several decades old are not intended for felling for industrial processing into goods for people.
Weather extremes are again predicted for today – downpours, hail. But I know when I do my daily tasks, my day job, I sit on the terrace at home. The edge of the forest and the forest behind it are close, less than 10 meters between us. I watch the trees, bent by the wind and forced to test their limits, the depth and strength of their roots and their interconnectedness into a beautiful forest. They know that I admire them and that I root for them – even in storms.
Dear people, visit the forests, respectfully enter their green shelters. Accept them into yourself, as they accept you into themselves. This is how living, strong, resistant bonds are woven on the tapestry of life. This is what humans and nature need most today. Pure relationships are the right key, legislation can only be a crutch. That is my personal opinion and believe!
Tree Story | Environmental Awareness Video | Short Animated Cartoon Film | HDsheet
Dealing with pests can be very expensive – unless you call us for help – we offer a special, completely natural, homeodynamic product, which do not contain active substances. The active ingredients are natural vibrations of appropriate plant-mineral origin:
After felling or after natural disasters – icefalls, snowfalls, windbreaks, additional damage in forests is caused by bark beetles. This is secondary damage, which can be even greater than that caused by fallen trees. The same applies to ornamental trees.
For the latter, we offer effective, natural, homeodynamic help. For more information, write to coraagro@gmail.com. WEB site, Our general Offer
The Environmental Crime Crisis
2. SOME EXPOSED BAD PRACTICE (1)
Under link ABOVE is published some bad practice humans management of health forest, their current forest practices and their perceptions and awareness of illegal logging and illegal forest trade.. The post list, that rural communities across the Lower Mekong region depend on forests.
3. FORESTS, SOCIETY, AND ITS INSTITUTIONS INCLUDING THE RULE OF LAW
” Forest destruction has contributed historically to climate change and continues to do so. Land use and land use change combined amount to 23% of total greenhouse gas emissions globally. Between 2001 to 2020, there was a 10% decrease in tree cover globally. Conversion of forests for agro-industrial crops is a significant driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Between 2001-2015 soy, mainly for livestock feed, replaced 8.2 million hectares of forest globally. South America alone, primarily in the Amazon region, converted 7.9 million hectares of forest. Forest fires, many directly attributed to climate change impacts such as droughts, are destroying vital biodiversity and habitats while releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide. In Australia over 45 million acres in 2019-2020 were lost due to forest fires. The 2015 Paris Agreement 2050 global net zero target will not be met without tackling the causes of deforestation, and that includes the embedded values within the rule of law that continue to legalise destruction of forest ecosystems.
For centuries the rule of law, through legislation, regulations, concessions, contracts, penalties, and courts, has legitimised and upheld unsustainable land use management practices. Society, and its institutions including the rule of law, has viewed forests as an unlimited collection of commodities – timber, biodiversity, land, genetics and now carbon – to be extracted and traded. Both in colonial and post-colonial times, such ecological plundering has displaced, often violently, local communities, indigenous peoples, and biodiversity habitat resulting in reduced forest ecosystem resilience. As Fisher notes in her excellent blog for this series, climate change requires change, a necessary part of which is legal transformation. The legal reasoning that informs new laws and interprets existing laws, from trade to human rights, needs to be informed by a more climate conscious reasoning. But climate conscious legal change must not be restricted to the technicalities of greenhouse gas management and accounting. It must be expansive, inclusive and recognise the systemic legal challenges climate change poses to all areas of law. If it does not, climate conscious laws will undermine fundamental rights and perpetuate deep-rooted injustice – including against non-human species. Although it is early days, there is encouraging evidence that such expansive climate conscious reasoning is increasingly informing law and policy strategies on forests and land use around the world.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, 1992) initially demonstrated a narrow imagination when it came to forests. The Convention included forests on the basis that they could both increase greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change but could also sequester carbon, helping to mitigate climate change. The UNFCCC’s technical binary perspective helped to rationalise and legitimise the initial legal design of the REDD (reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation) forest carbon trading mechanism in 2007, part of the UNFCCC Bali Action Plan. REDD lawyers did not include in their legal imagination the non-carbon related benefits and priorities of forests. Forests are not just carbon, they are dynamic living ecosystems providing provisioning services especially to those most reliant on them – indigenous peoples, forest communities, and biodiversity as recognised in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (1992). Campaigning by indigenous peoples’ organisations, civil society and climate justice NGOs at UNFCCC negotiations fought to get human and indigenous peoples’ rights and ecosystem integrity referred to in subsequent key REDD related COP decisions, and the Paris Agreement. This was a win for those who recognised the need for forests related law to be reimagined in an expansive and inclusive way as part of the effort to mitigate climate change.
The opportunity to adopt similar expansive integrated approaches to forests and climate change law, regulation and policy came with the Paris Agreement. Forests represented a quarter of all planned emission reductions by 2030 in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) submitted under the Paris Agreement. To spur momentum amongst the Paris Agreement parties at COP 26 in November 2022, the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use – which aims to ‘halt and reverse’ deforestation by 2030 – was released. The Glasgow Declaration identifies forest biodiversity protection, agricultural commodity trade and sustainable development, finance (public and private) and indigenous peoples and local communities’ rights (in accordance with relevant national legislation and international instruments) as interconnected legal fields that ‘will require transformative further action’ if there is any chance of meeting the Paris Agreement target of 1.50C. The Declaration follows on the heels of the unsuccessful 2014 New York Declaration on Forests that first set a deadline to end deforestation globally by 2030. To achieve zero deforestation, signatories to the Glasgow Declaration would need to reduce annual forest loss by at least 3.1 million hectares a year. Many NGOs and indigenous peoples’ organisations are sceptical that voluntary political agreements like the Glasgow Declaration can seriously challenge the dominant legal imagination that perpetuates forest ecosystem destruction around the world, especially in tropical forest countries. But others believe the latest Declaration can further legitimise other ongoing efforts to transform the legal imagination towards forests. Proposals such as deforestation commodity trading laws in the EU and UK, banning burning wood from primary forests for large scale energy generation, and investing in nature-based climate solutions are all areas where substantive legal changes are being advocated for.
Beyond the efforts within economic, trade and investment law, creative use of a rights-based approach is increasingly being used to reimagine laws’ relationship to protect forest ecosystems and non-indigenous people in the climate crisis. Firstly, the 2018 the Escazú Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters (Article 9) included commitments for parties to recognise and protect human rights defenders. The Latin America and the Caribbean regional agreement parties include biodiversity in rich tropical forest countries where environmental defenders have for decades experienced the highest rates of intimidation, violence and death in the world. Secondly, a new wave of litigation is making clear the numerous linkages between protecting the forests, protecting the climate, and protecting fundamental human rights. For example, the Institute of Amazonian Studies (IEA) v. Brazil law suit filed in October 2020 seeks not only an order to compel the federal government to comply with national climate law, but also the recognition of a fundamental right to a stable climate, for present and future generations, under the Brazilian Constitution. Finally, going beyond a solely anthropocentric legal rights focus, some lawyers are exploring how the rights of nature, frequently already in many indigenous peoples’ legal cosmovision, can help to reimagine priorities within the rule of law to protect forests ecosystems to exist and flourish. In December 2021, seven justices of the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court ruled that mining activities pursued by a state mining company and its Canadian partner threatened a protected region of the Ecuadorian rainforest and would violate the rights of nature under Article 71 of the country’s 2008 Constitution.
Making forest ecosystem destruction an environmental crime, and prosecuting those responsible, is another legal route being pursued by expansive climate conscious lawyers to prevent further devastation. Colombia in its 2021 environmental crime law made the act of deforestation, as well as its financing, illegal. Human rights lawyers are nevertheless concerned that law enforcers could target small scale farmers and indigenous peoples rather than multinational agro-forestry enterprises and illegal cartels thereby perpetuating historic injustices against marginalised peoples. Meanwhile in an unprecedented move, an Austrian environmental group, AllRise, filed a suit in October 2021 against the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, at the International Criminal Court, asking it to investigate whether his environmental policies and those of the administration constituted ecological crimes against humanity: commonly termed ecocide.
The need to reimagine how the rule of law values forests is clearly necessary if the world’s biodiverse and carbon rich ecosystems are to survive the anthropogenic planetary ecological crisis. The current rates of deforestation and degradation, especially in tropical forest regions, largely driven by unsustainable consumption, continues to exacerbate climate change, biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. So called climate change solutions like burning biomass for energy as a substitute for fossil fuels will only exacerbate the problem. Positive initiatives to reform investment, extraction, and trade rules, constitutionalise climate, environmental and nature rights as well as making participating in deforestation an environmental crime demonstrate there is a groundswell challenging the orthodox vision of forest ecosystem within the rule of law. Without doubt if the Paris Agreement targets are to be met, or at least any overshoot minimised, changes across multiple interconnecting legal fields impacting forest ecosystems and land use change need to be adopted much more rapidly than is currently the case. What can be celebrated, and a reason for cautious optimism, is that there are encouraging real world examples of an expansive changing climate consciousness driving the reimagining of forest ecosystems within the rule of law. ” (2)
4. HOPEFUL CORRECTIVE ACTIONS
UN – REDD Program: Good collective practices that set an excellent example
Pure relationships are the right key, legislation can only be a crutch.
Sources:
(1): UN – REED Program
(2): Climate consciousness and the reimagining of forest ecosystems within the rule of law. By Feja Lesniewska, Research Fellow, Institute for Sustainable Resources and UCL Laws. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/. February 1st, 2022
NOTE :
In Majda Ortan’s texts, I only state my personal reflections and my personal views. Dear readers, please take this into account! Thank you!
–RECOMMENDED FURTHER READINGS FROM OUR LIBRARY
- HIGH RECOMMENDED: THERE IS NO CHANGE WITHOUT CHANGE
–YOU ARE KINDLY INVITED TO EXPLORE POSSIBILITIES FOR OUR MUTUAL BUSINESS COOPERATION – HERE! WELCOME TO CONTACT US AND TO ORDER! Kindly invited to folow me on LinkedIn and to join my LinkedIn community. Thank you, you are sincerely welcome.
–UNDER LINK: BUSSINESS CARD with SHORT INTRODUCTION AND OUR GENERAL OFFER! Kindly invited to order! You are sincerelly welcome!
Ph. Natural Agrohom.,, Ing. Majda Ortan, s.p., Šmiklavž 26, 2381 Podgorje pri Slovenj Gradcu, Slovenia/EU
E: coraagro@gmail.com, coraagro@ortan.si
Tel/ WhatsApp: 00386 70 820 279 – kindly, accepted are sms only, phone conversation must be prior agreed
