Gaia Foundation, ABN, and allies have just launched Short Circuit Report: The Lifecycle of our Electronic Gadgets and the True Cost to Earth
A new report launched by The Gaia Foundation, African Biodiversity Network (ABN), and allies, exposes the social and ecological atrocities and the toxic legacy of gadgets such as smartphones and laptops. From environmental destruction and contamination caused by extraction, exploitative working conditions during production, to the mountains of e-waste being shipped abroad, the report follows the birth, life and death of everyday gadgets and reveals their true cost to the planet and to future generations.
Short Circuit – The Lifecycle of our Electronic Gadgets and the True Cost to Earth is the follow-up to the 2012 report, Opening Pandora’s Box, which exposed the alarming scale and rate of growth of the extractive industries and the disastrous ecological impact that this is having across the world. Short Circuit turns our attention to a key driver of this growth – the surge in consumerism and an increasingly throw-away culture, fuelled by marketing and illusions of necessity, and supported by the built-in obsolescence of our electronic gadgets.
Among the thought provocative Stories of Creativity included in the report is Reconnecting with Earth Our Source of Life and Law by Carine Nadal which examines how we can re-connect with Earth, relearn her laws, and recognize Rights of Nature.
You can download the full report as a pdf here: SHORT CIRCUIT or read the Executive Summary.
Earth Charter International hosted international environmental law and global governance experts Cormac Cullinan and Peter Brown for a webinar on Environmental Law and Global Governance. Cullinan and Brown offered a critical analysis of the current global governance system for sustainability and the role of ethics and the Earth Charter in the needed paradigm shift.
On Wednesday, May 22nd at 3PM UTC/GMT, Earth Charter International and the EC Center for Education for Sustainable Development will be hosting a one and half hour webinar on international and environmental law and global governance with experts Peter Brown and Cormac Cullinan. These two leaders in their respective fields will put their work into context as well as relate the importance of the Earth Charter to their fields. Attendance is free for all and participation will be available through the chat function on our platform.
Cormac Cullinan is a senior environmental lawyer and adviser on institutional, policy and regulatory reform in the fields of environment and natural resource management. His work in pioneering a legal philosophy that restores an ecological perspective to governance systems (Earth jurisprudence) is internationally recognised and in 2008 led to his inclusion in “Planet Savers: 301 Extraordinary Environmentalists”. He was admitted as an attorney in March 1989 and has specialised in environmental law since 1992 when he completed a Masters degree in environmental law at the University of London. With talents that include strong creative communication, writing, drafting and leadership skills, Cormac is known for developing practical and innovative approaches. He is an expert on international and South African environmental law and policy and acts for a wide range of public sector, private sector and NGO clients. Cormac is also a director of EnAct International, an honorary research associate of the Universtity of Cape Town, and a member of the IUCN Environmental Law Commission. Wide-ranging experience in policy formulation has given Cormac particular expertise in drafting legislation and international treaties as well as in designing and strengthening governance systems (including laws, policies and institutions). He has worked on these issues in more than 20 countries, including 10 in sub-Saharan Africa. In the academic field he has lectured and written widely on governance issues related to human interactions with the environment and is the author of Wild Law as well as of several works commissioned and published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He led the drafting of the 2010 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.
Professor Brown’s teaching, research, and service are concerned with ethics, governance, and the protection of the environment. His appointments at McGill are in the School of Environment, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Natural Resource Sciences. Before coming to McGill he was Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland’s graduate School of Public Affairs. While at the University of Maryland he founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, as well as the School of Public Policy itself. Professor Brown established the School’s Environmental Policy Programs to operate not only at the University’s College Park campus, but also at Maryland’s Department of the Environment, and at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. He has held numerous administrative positions within the University of Maryland System. He has taught at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at the University of Washington, and at St. John’s College in Annapolis. In the early 1970s, he was Visiting Fellow at Battelle Seattle Research Center and Assistant Vice President for Research Operations at The Urban Institute. He is currently a Research Scholar at the Center for Humans and Nature. Professor Brown is the author of Restoring the Public Trust: A Fresh Vision for Progressive Government in America (Beacon Press, 1994), and Ethics, Economics, and International Relations: Transparent Sovereignty in the Commonwealth of Life (Edinburgh University Press, 2000); re-published in Canada by Black Rose Press (2001) as The Commonwealth of Life: A Treatise on Stewardship Economics. He is currently working on three new books. One is tentatively entitled Reverence for Life: A Philosophy for Civilization which is intended as a sequel to Albert Schweitzer’s Philosophy of Civilization published in the 1920s. He is also a co-author of a book on macro-economics entitled Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy. With Jeremy Schmidt he is co-editing and authoring sections of a volume tentatively entitled Water Ethics: The Moral Foundations of Natural Resource Policy.
Cleghorn is the owner of Paradise Gardens and Farm– a fifty acre organic farm that sits above the Marcellus Shale formation in Henderson Township, Jefferson County, Pennsylvania.
