Law of the land
Silver Donald Cameron documentary details fight for green rights
Don Deleski might have been dressed in a suit and sitting in a courtroom instead of wearing hip waders and scooping buckets of sludge from the Sydney tar ponds if Canada’s laws were different.
According to writer and environmentalist Silver Donald Cameron, the late Deleski’s symbolic shovel-and-barrel attempts to have the toxic chemical stew left by a century of steelmaking cleaned up wouldn’t have been necessary if our country — like most nations — had laws that granted environmental rights to its citizens.
“We do have environmental laws but what we don’t have is the citizen’s right to a healthy environment, and the right therefore to take actions in the courts on our own behalf,” said Cameron, who was at Cape Breton University on Tuesday to present his documentary “Green Rights: The Human Right to a Healthy World.”
“It’s different because if you’re a resident of Sydney 20 years ago, for example, you yourself can go to court and bring a suit to insist that the provincial government and Sysco stop the pollution of the tar ponds. At the moment you don’t have such a right; you can plead with other people to do it, you may be able to find a statute that would allow you to bring an action of some kind, from some direction, but you wouldn’t have, as an individual citizen, the right to say ‘No, you’re damaging my environment and you must stop.’ You would have that right if we had environmental rights in this country.”
Through a series of interviews, “Green Rights,” which was produced and directed by Chris Beckett and written and hosted by Cameron, explores how more than two dozen individuals in farflung corners of the world have established, or flexed existing, environmental rights to battle big business and government in the courts.
You meet Daniel Sallaberry, an Argentinian environmental lawyer who led slum dwellers in Buenos Aires as they sued 44 companies and three levels of government into launching a multibillion-dollar cleanup of the heavily polluted Riachuelo River. Then there’s Pablo Fajardo, the Indigenous lawyer who won a $9.5-billion environmental judgment against Texaco and its successor Chevron for crude oil dumps left in the Amazon rainforest near Lago Agrio, Ecuador, in the 1970s and 80s. And courtroom “storyteller” Antonio Oposa Jr., who, on behalf of future generations, ingeniously managed to successfully sue the Philippine government and logging companies into ending the destruction of old-growth forests.
While the tar ponds have long since been capped over and topped with Open Hearth Park following a $400-million cleanup that took decades of often-contentious public debate — and displays like Deleski’s — laws that ensure environmental rights are still very much needed across Canada and the U.S., said Cameron.
In British Columbia, environmentalists are struggling to save the wild Pacific salmon, whose stocks have been severely depleted as its Atlantic cousins escape West Coast fish farms. Closer to home, members of Pictou Landing First Nation and concerned citizens in Pictou County are waging a desperate battle to stop the local pulp mill from pumping toxic effluent into a nearby lagoon, and ultimately into the Northumberland Strait.
Still, it’s not all doom and gloom. While Canada and the U.S. remain two of the 13 UN member nations that don’t recognize a citizen’s legal right to the three essential elements of life — clean air, fresh water and healthy food — the slow march toward securing environmental rights could soon end, said Cameron, who wrote a book “Warrior Lawyers: From Manila to Manhattan, Attorneys for the Earth” as a companion piece to the film (visit his subscription website www.thegreeninterview. com for more information on both).
The David Suzuki Foundation’s
Blue Dot campaign is still marshalling the support of municipalities across the country as it presses for an amendment to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that would enshrine environmental rights into the constitution. As well, the Canadian Environmental Act is up for revision this year, and the standing committee on sustainability and climate change has already called for the incorporation of the right to a healthy environment in the act. There are also several court challenges, including one by New Brunswick’s Elsipogtog First Nation, which clashed violently with police during two weeks of protests against fracking in 2013. Their lawsuits contend that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms section that promises everyone the right to life, liberty and the security of the person implies people have the right to a healthy environment.
“You have the right to life; you surely have the right to breathe,” said Cameron.
“That would be another way we could get environmental rights — and that might ultimately be the
way that we do get them.”
Cameron said he wants people who watch the film, or read his book, to realize that one determined person can make a huge impact on the world.
“I think the message we want them to take away is the situation is not hopeless, and you can make a big difference,” he said.
Cameron was final guest presenter of the year in the Compassionate Community or Living As If We Give a Damn speaker series. Terry Gibbs, who teaches international politics at CBU, said the group is exploring ways to create more compassionate communities that live in harmony with the earth.
“We thought we’d bring in a number of different speakers who come from different angles,” she said. “There will be more speakers and we hope to be able to continue the conversation and just kind of exploring the idea of how all of us as individuals in the communities where we find ourselves can contribute to taking care of the planet, taking care of our communities, taking care of each other. And to encourage the idea that we all have capacity to make a difference. We’re all important, we all have something to contribute.”