Cochabamba People's Agreement on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth

What's up to my ferocious field spaniels and cockamamie one hump camels! 

Welcome back to the BNP everyone and thank you for jumping in! If this is your first time listening, welcome to our tribe of philosopher-barbarians! You're among friends. Shout out to my patrons! Y'all are the air pockets in my bubble wrap and the cozy toes in my soft white sand. <3

This week I'm back to ridin' solo, and I was called to tackle a veggie topic of tremendous, even existential, importance to all life on earth: climate change and the rights of Mother Earth.  

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just came out with their 2021 report, and in a nutshell the findings were thus: the climate is indisputably, scientifically, in crisis, and our only choice as a species is to make radical changes to our way of being human in the world, not just individually through individual choices, but on a coordinated global societal level. That means a tectonic shifting of material and spiritual, economic and psychological perspective. That means seeing the human family as one family, and seeing our resplendent planet Earth as our one and only home.

What better way to begin this critical journey of ecological and societal transformation than to look back at a critically important and totally overlooked (in the West anyway) global conference that took place in April of 2010: The Cochabamba People's Agreement on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. 192 countries (!!!) participated in this conference, which was held in a small town in a central Bolivian valley, at the feet of the eastern Andes.

You haven't heard of this Conference because goings on in the Global South are systematically excluded from our eurocentric U.S. discourse, especially when they challenge capitalism.

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