Maude Barlow: Read Me My Environmental Rights

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:



Maude Barlow: Read Me My Environmental Rights
What if a healthy environment were a human right?

by Madeline Ostrander
posted Dec 03, 2010


In most legal systems, you have a right to freedom of speech or religion, but you don’t have a right to breathe clean air or drink safe water.

Maude Barlow—author, activist, and former senior advisor on water to the United Nations—believes that those rights should be recognized. This past summer, she helped engineer a landmark victory: The U.N. formally adopted a resolution recognizing the human right to water (though the United States abstained).

Now, Barlow is part of an international movement—of governments, scientists, and activists—working to bring a focus on environmental rights to the ongoing United Nations climate negotiations. This week, she is attending the United Nations climate meeting in Cancún, Mexico.

The negotiations are thus far getting scant press attention, but thousands of people from all over the world are turning out in Cancún to voice their political views and hold alternative meetings and demonstrations outside the U.N. conference. Early this week, the international grassroots organization La Via Campesina led Barlow and hundreds of other grassroots leaders on a tour across the Mexican countryside to witness how climate change is already affecting rural communities. The tours converged in Mexico City where a few thousand people held a march to the Zócalo, the city’s central plaza. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/maude-barlow-read-me-my-environmental-rights