Post 80.
In what civilization
What crooked nation
Are businesses persons
While climate change worsens?
Business has rights
While lands suffer blights
Caused by our greed
Our misplaced need
For speed and for cash
While oil spills and ash
Fall from the sky
As species die
Never to be heard
The song and the word
And we, in our sin
Forget where to begin
The soil beneath our feet
With which we daily entreat
But in its place, we ignore
Cries of the earth, the poor,
Trading water for coal
Dis-easing our soul
I wrote this poem inspired by a recent Yes! Magazine article by Mark Ruffalo and Melissa Troutman, discussing the recent documentary Invisible Hand. They claim that “living ecologically is illegal” and point out that, in our society, corporations, a fiction of business, are treated legally as people, while nature, which is actually conscious and living, is situated ONLY as property. They discuss people in Toledo, OH and Grant Township, PA trying to protect their land from corporate pollution, while the legal system protects the rights of corporate “persons” to pollute uninhibitedly. They write, “The Rights of Nature movement is changing the foundation of Western Law to recognize Nature as an entity deserving the recognition of rights—not for what she does for us, but by virtue of the fact that she exists.”
Considering a piece secondary concert bands might program to open space for students to discuss the challenges of a conscious Mother Earth, the possibility of her having rights in a legal system that already recognizes fictitious corporations as “persons,” consider the level 5 piece, “Symphonies of Gaia,” by Jayce John Ogren. The ancient Greek goddess Gaia has “become a universal symbol for ecological stewardship and wisdom.” Listen to the University of Minnesota Symphonic Band performance of this powerful piece.
I like to pose questions to students in schools. Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Freire called this problem-posing education, and it is a cornerstone of critical pedagogy. According to James Lovelock, Gaia is “the global ecosystem, understood to function in the manner of a vast self-regulating organism, in the context of which all living things collectively define and maintain the conditions conducive for life on earth.” Ancient goddess, or living thing, if corporations deserve the rights of personhood does Mother Earth?
Corporate personhood seems to, through processes like eminent domain, take away the rights of a lot of human persons to protect their land, calling into question the very concept of land ownership. If human persons do not really own "their" land, if it can be poisoned through collaborations between governments and international corporations, has the legal system, capitalism itself, or merely human empathy failed?
The use of eminent domain benefits rich corporations while negatively impacting the little "owned" by the poor, including people of color. Is eminent domain representative of colonization, where billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Bernard Arnault (who have major interests in land purchases and fossil fuels) use the legal system to steal from the colonized?
According to Forbes Magazine Indigenous People are at "war" against pipelines. It seems the UN documents and US law are both against indigenous groups fighting to protect the land. Put yourself in their shoes: centuries of wars and broken treaties and promises. What would you feel and do if your waterways and lands were poisoned, using eminent domain, by a national government and world governance, in collusion with globalist corporations, that you recognize as foreign to your society, which has resided on Turtle Island since prehistory?
DS
Link to image, Mother Earth by Jacob Lipkin, 1966: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=mother+earth&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go&ns0=1&ns6=1&ns12=1&ns14=1&ns100=1&ns106=1#/media/File:Mother_Earth_by_Jacob_Lipkin.jpg
In what civilization
What crooked nation
Are businesses persons
While climate change worsens?
Business has rights
While lands suffer blights
Caused by our greed
Our misplaced need
For speed and for cash
While oil spills and ash
Fall from the sky
As species die
Never to be heard
The song and the word
And we, in our sin
Forget where to begin
The soil beneath our feet
With which we daily entreat
But in its place, we ignore
Cries of the earth, the poor,
Trading water for coal
Dis-easing our soul
I wrote this poem inspired by a recent Yes! Magazine article by Mark Ruffalo and Melissa Troutman, discussing the recent documentary Invisible Hand. They claim that “living ecologically is illegal” and point out that, in our society, corporations, a fiction of business, are treated legally as people, while nature, which is actually conscious and living, is situated ONLY as property. They discuss people in Toledo, OH and Grant Township, PA trying to protect their land from corporate pollution, while the legal system protects the rights of corporate “persons” to pollute uninhibitedly. They write, “The Rights of Nature movement is changing the foundation of Western Law to recognize Nature as an entity deserving the recognition of rights—not for what she does for us, but by virtue of the fact that she exists.”
Considering a piece secondary concert bands might program to open space for students to discuss the challenges of a conscious Mother Earth, the possibility of her having rights in a legal system that already recognizes fictitious corporations as “persons,” consider the level 5 piece, “Symphonies of Gaia,” by Jayce John Ogren. The ancient Greek goddess Gaia has “become a universal symbol for ecological stewardship and wisdom.” Listen to the University of Minnesota Symphonic Band performance of this powerful piece.
I like to pose questions to students in schools. Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Freire called this problem-posing education, and it is a cornerstone of critical pedagogy. According to James Lovelock, Gaia is “the global ecosystem, understood to function in the manner of a vast self-regulating organism, in the context of which all living things collectively define and maintain the conditions conducive for life on earth.” Ancient goddess, or living thing, if corporations deserve the rights of personhood does Mother Earth?
Corporate personhood seems to, through processes like eminent domain, take away the rights of a lot of human persons to protect their land, calling into question the very concept of land ownership. If human persons do not really own "their" land, if it can be poisoned through collaborations between governments and international corporations, has the legal system, capitalism itself, or merely human empathy failed?
The use of eminent domain benefits rich corporations while negatively impacting the little "owned" by the poor, including people of color. Is eminent domain representative of colonization, where billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Bernard Arnault (who have major interests in land purchases and fossil fuels) use the legal system to steal from the colonized?
According to Forbes Magazine Indigenous People are at "war" against pipelines. It seems the UN documents and US law are both against indigenous groups fighting to protect the land. Put yourself in their shoes: centuries of wars and broken treaties and promises. What would you feel and do if your waterways and lands were poisoned, using eminent domain, by a national government and world governance, in collusion with globalist corporations, that you recognize as foreign to your society, which has resided on Turtle Island since prehistory?
DS
Link to image, Mother Earth by Jacob Lipkin, 1966: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=mother+earth&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go&ns0=1&ns6=1&ns12=1&ns14=1&ns100=1&ns106=1#/media/File:Mother_Earth_by_Jacob_Lipkin.jpg
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