pachamama, Mother Earth...

Bolivia hosts talks on rights of Mother Earth

The talks will have no direct bearing on the UN climate talks, but the idea is to give a voice to the world's poorest people - those most affected by climate change - and to make governments more aware of their plight.

"Our experience in the last process of negotiation over the last year and a half is that things are moving in a bad direction," Pablo Solon, Bolivia's ambassador to the UN, told the BBC.

"I would say this is the only scenario to make a balance between the pressure that at this moment the corporations are putting on the government versus the pressure that can emerge, can arise from civil society."

The Bolivian government wants the UN to set in motion moves to create an international environmental court.

Bolivia is one of the American nations where indigenous cultures have managed to survive, and their voices are now ringing with more force than ever before, despite the scorn and persecution they suffered for a long time.

The entire world, stunned as it is, is wandering about like a blind man in the middle of a crossfire, having to listen to those voices. They teach us that we, tiny beings called humans, are part of nature, relatives to all those who have legs, paws, wings, or roots. The European conquest condemned the indigenous, who lived in that communion with nature, for idolatry, and for believing in that communion they were flogged, their throats were slit, or they were burned alive.

From the times of the European Renaissance, nature has been turned into a commodity or an obstacle to human progress. And, to this day, this divorce between us and her has persisted, so much so that there still are people of good will who are moved by poor nature, so abused, so wounded, but are seeing her only from outside.

Indigenous cultures see her from inside. Seeing her, I see myself. What is done against her is done against me. In her I find myself, my legs are also the road on which they walk.

In his opening address at the 1st Conference of the Peoples on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC), Evo stated: "The principal cause of the destruction of planet Earth is capitalism and, as people who inhabit it, let us respect this Mother Earth; we have all the right, we have the ethics and the morals to say here that the central enemy of Mother Earth is capitalism.

"The capitalist system seeks to obtain the maximum possible profits by promoting unlimited growth on a finite planet. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world," he affirmed, condemning the poverty against which half of the world population is struggling.

He noted that "more than 2.8 billion people are living on less than two dollars per day. For capitalism, we human beings are no more than consumers and a labor force; people are valued for what they have and not for what they are." In that context he condemned the fact that the dominant global economic system is commercializing water, land and even culture.

"As long as the capitalist system remains unchanged, the measures that we adopt will be of a limited and precarious nature, which poses an existential dilemma: "to continue along the road of capitalism or death, or to take the road of harmony with nature and respect for life in order to save humanity," he finally emphasized.