Are Profits The Most Important Thing?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-top-firms-environmental-damage

The cost of pollution and other damage to the natural environment caused by the world's biggest companies would wipe out more than one-third of their profits if they were held financially accountable, a major unpublished study for the United Nations has found.  The report comes amid growing concern that no one is made to pay for most of the use, loss and damage of the environment, which is reaching crisis proportions in the form of pollution and the rapid loss of freshwater, fisheries and fertile soils.....Another major concern is the risk that companies simply run out of resources they need to operate, said Andrea Moffat, of the US-based investor lobby group Ceres, whose members include more than 80 funds with assets worth more than US$8tn. An example was the estimated loss of 20,000 jobs and $1bn last year for agricultural companies because of water shortages in California.

Are profits the most important thing in the world?  More important than healthy ecoysystems?  Just in case no one else has noticed, I'd like to point out that the economy is a subset of the environment, not the other way around.   We have no Planet B  - so let's work for a velvet climate revolution  - a world that is sustainable and more democratic than  the one we live in now. 

Oil and the Earth's Inalienable Rights: A Connection?

Pretty, isn't it? But one's perception alters when one realizes it is an oil slick on drinking water.

Per Amnesty International's  (2009) report on Ecuador:

The human rights situation of Indigenous peoples and environmentalists in Ecuador continues to be a serious concern for Amnesty International. For over four decades, Indigenous communities have witnessed multinational oil companies cut through the Ecuadorian Amazon and their ancestral lands in search of the country's vast petroleum resources. Testimonies by members of these communities, verified by independent health studies and reports (including "Amazon Crude" by Judith Kimerling) have described how oil companies have left dead rivers, road-scarred forests, polluted air, and daily discharges of millions of gallons of toxic waste in their wake that are affecting the daily lives of the communities in the area.

Ecuador's citizens approved a novel constitution in September 2008: it extends inalienable rights to nature.
The Utne Reader (May-June 2009) speculates that "Ecuador was almost certainly predisposed to becoming an early adopter of nature's rights on a constitutional scale" due to the large indigenous population. This view may be correct: indigenous peoples do have a different view of their place in nature than we do. However, I think that witnessing the environmental damage done to the environment and consequently to themselves by oil companies may have motivated Ecuadorians in a large degee as well.  

Ecuadorians understand that the economy is a subset of the environment - and that the equation does not work the other way around.  We all need to respect and cherish Pachamamma - for our own sakes.    While it is unlikely that we will approve a similar constitution in in the near future in Canada,  we can pressure politicians to protect the environment.  We are their employers, are we not?  For starters, please email the Right Honorable Stephen Harper and instruct  him to negotiate a fair, binding, and science based deal on greenhouse gas emissions at Copenhagen.