Klaus Bosselmann - Revisiting the Earth Charter

WHAT IS THE EARTH CHARTER? The Earth Charter is an ethical framework for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society during this 21st century. It seeks to inspire in all people a new sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the well-being of the whole human family, the greater community of life, and future generations. It is a vision of hope and a call to action. The Earth Charter is an international declaration of fundamental values and principles considered useful by its supporters for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society in the 21st century. Created by a global consultation process, and endorsed by organizations representing millions of people, the Charter "seeks to inspire in all peoples a sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the well-being of the human family, the greater community of life, and future generations." It calls upon humanity to help create a global partnership at a critical juncture in history. The Earth Charter's ethical vision proposes that environmental protection, human rights, equitable human development, and peace are interdependent and indivisible. The Charter attempts to provide a new framework for thinking about and addressing these issues. How do we integrate world citizens into a grassroots movement to bring this into being? Can the people of the Earth promote this idea so as to not lose power to the overriding corporate global resource grab that is ubiquitous and increasing? With the TPPA the Transpacific Partnership Agreement and the TTIP Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership being foisted upon many countries in their respective regions, is the  Earth Charter robust enough to ensure that humanity will be able to have a just and fair future? We are now also deeply embedded in an era of the Security State of Global Proportions how is this going to affect the Charter?    As we near 2020, we are seeing that the Charter may need some revising and that we as a humanity have to go beyond ecological sustainability and repurpose how we respond to the rapidly increasing ecological, economic and societal challenges that are all presently converging. Regeneration of the environment has to be a priority of the highest order, as well as looking deeply at the particulates in the air, water and food chain. With geoengineering being played with, what are the repercussions in our fast altering world, where democracy is now being seen as becoming very poorly represented and even problematic? (the two party electoral system in the USA and the UK) Whilst big world media becomes more omnipresent, globally yet concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.   Environmental Modification Convention   There is a need to give more teeth to enforce the rule of law on countries that break these conventions, especially ENMOD.   The Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD), formally the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques is an international treaty prohibiting the military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects. It opened for signature on 18 May 1977 in Geneva and entered into force on 5 October 1978. The Convention bans weather warfare, which is the use of weather modification techniques for the purposes of inducing damage or destruction. The Convention on Biological Diversity of 2010 would also ban some forms of weather modification or geoengineering. Yes, we definitely need regulation to stop unbridled degradation of the earth's resources, because as most people know the corporate world's only aim is to make a profit for shareholders. With corporate 'responsibility' seen with increasing suspicion we need to have this discussion of how we justly care for the 7.5 billion human inhabitants and the future of our biosphere especially children of today and tomorrow.      This is a repeat of an interview broadcast in 2006 and no doubt this important subject needs to be addressed far more in the public arena - now - 10 years after broadcast. http://earthcharter.org