Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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208 farther horizons
our politics more democratic and effi cient, I propose that the
Constitution be amended to protect the rights of posterity to
life, liberty, and property. The people of Ecuador went still farther,
changing their constitution in September 2008 to acknowledge
the rights of nature and permit their people to sue on behalf
of ecosystems, trees, rivers, and mountains, 1 an idea that owes
a great deal to Aldo Leopold’s 1949 essay on “The Land Ethic”
and to Christopher Stone’s classic article in 1972 in the Southern
California Law Review, “Should Trees Have Standing?” (Stone,
1974). What fi rst appears as “a bit unthinkable” in Stone’s words,
however, is yet another step in our understanding of rights and
obligations due some other person, or in this case, an entity, the
web of life. 2 And not once in our history has the extension of
rights caused the republic to tremble. To the contrary, it has always
opened new vistas and greater possibilities, with one potentially
fatal exception.
That exception is the rights of personhood presumed granted
to corporations by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Santa Clara
County v. Southern Pacifi c Railroad decision of 1886. Whether the
Court actually made such a grant or not, it is long past time to
rein in the power of corporations, for reasons that are patently
obvious. “The only legitimate reason for a government to issue
a corporate charter,” in economist David Korten’s words, “is to
serve a well-defi ned public purpose under strict rules of public
accountability” (Korten, 2007). That some corporations have got
the new religion on energy effi ciency or greening their operations
or carbon-trading schemes pales beside the fact that none is
capable of “voluntarily sacrifi cing profi ts to a larger public good,”
in Korten’s words. And with very few exceptions they are incapable
of helping us to reduce consumption, promoting public
health, increasing equality, cleaning up the airwaves, or restoring a
genuine democracy. It is time for this archaic institution to go the
way of monarchy and for us to create better and more accountable
ways to provision ourselves.