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A Bill of Rights for Future
Generations
“The status quo has many guardians, but the future is an orphan.”
--- Timothy E. Wirth, United Nations Foundation and Better
World Fund
The
original Bill of Rights was passed by Congress in 1789 to ensure that essential
human rights and personal liberties were guaranteed to the American people. This Bill of Rights consisted of the first ten
amendments to the Constitution of the United States. As stated in its Preamble, these rights were added to prevent the
“misconstruction or abuse” of the powers of the federal government over its
citizens, and to extend “the ground of public confidence in the Government.”
Our
Founders gave Congress the power in the Constitution to provide for the
“general Welfare”. In the long run, the
general welfare and the common good are completely dependent on fair
institutions, sensible fiscal discipline, honest economic accounting, resource
conservation, and a healthy natural environment. These needs can only be satisfied in the long term by a rigorous
framework of respected rights for our descendents.
Competition
is intense in our society for greater advantages and for more perks and
benefits from the government. There are
many competing interests in our society, and some are very well represented,
like wealthy people and big corporations, while many others are poorly
represented. The most severely
under-represented interests in our political system are young people under the
age of 18, because they cannot vote, and every person to be born in the
future. To remedy the extreme
inequalities that result from this disenfranchisement, we must make an
overarching commitment to higher guiding principles in the form of a Bill of
Rights for Future Generations.
Today,
mindful that the well-being of all people in future generations is seriously
threatened by shortsighted activities and present expediencies, this new Bill
of Rights must be designed to ensure that future generations have reasonable
prospects for freedom, dignity, prosperity, financial stability and survival. This Bill of Rights must help ensure that irreparable
harm is not done to Earth’s ecosystems and the diversity of life on our home planet. To make clear our vital commitment to the greater
good in the long run, and to “pay forward” some good deeds to improve the prospects for our
children and their descendents, Congress and nations
worldwide should enact this new Bill of Rights. This action will restore greater confidence and trust in our governing
institutions.
PROPOSED
BILL OF RIGHTS FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS:
Article
1. Sustainable Resource Use.
Enact an Ecological Balance Initiative which includes powerful
incentives designed to encourage resource conservation, cleaner energy, renewable
resources, healthy forests, robust fisheries, protected fresh water supplies, urban
renewal, the preservation of biological diversity, and protections of open
spaces and parks and wilderness areas. This
Initiative should give priority to safeguarding the vitally important and very valuable
services provided by healthy ecosystems by strengthening protections of wetlands,
wildlife habitats, national forests, and marine sanctuaries and it should enhance
the symbiosis and resilience contained in healthy biological diversity.
Article
2. Pollution Control and Mitigation.
Require
corporations which cause pollution of rivers, lakes, oceans and the atmosphere to
pay for the prevention or mitigation of the harmful impacts of their pollution-causing
activities. We can not continue to
allow these costs to be externalized onto the public and future generations. Further, concrete steps should be taken to
ensure that corporations and governments adhere to precautionary principles which
require that cost effective measures are implemented to prevent the degradation
of the environmental commons.
Article
3. Prevention of Anthropogenic
Climate Disruption.
Levy
a cost on carbon dioxide emissions to deal with the adverse impacts of the
greenhouse effect and related changes in weather patterns. Use the funds generated by this plan for two
purposes: (1) to create a “rainy day
fund” that covers the costs of natural disasters that are associated with
climate disruption, including intensified hurricanes and more widespread floods
and droughts and wildfires and heat waves and cold snaps and ocean
acidification and rises in sea level;
and (2) to help finance an incipient and necessary ‘green
transition’ to a cleaner and more renewable energy future.
Article
4. Stabilization of the National
Debt.
Prevent the Federal Government from
using the expediency of deficit spending to mortgage the future. Do not allow people today to obligate future
generations with high interest costs on enormous sums of borrowed money. Accomplish this by mandating that, for every
given year in which the federal budget deficit is in excess of $250 billion,
the excess will be assessed to those entities with the most power and influence
in determining national policies, i.e. rich people and big corporations. This provision will powerfully influence the
primary drivers of our national policies to seek common cause with the
American people, rather than being stubbornly opposed to sensible solutions to
our daunting budgetary challenges. These
assessments should be made on a graduated scale, with higher percentages for
wealthier individuals and more profitable institutions. Assess the shortfall to individuals with
assets in excess of $5 million and to corporations with earnings in excess of
$5 million. Make these obligations due
six months after the end of the fiscal year in which such imbalances are
incurred.
See the
Earth Manifesto publication in Part Four:
Radically Simple Ways to Make America
Fairer, and to Fix Both Social Security and Health Care So We Can Move On to
Address Much Bigger Issues. This proposal contains
detailed and exceedingly fair ideas on how we can solve our tax, deficit, Social
Security and healthcare challenges.
Article 5. Peaceful
Coexistence.
Strengthen
international institutions to build peace between nations and to prevent violent
conflicts between countries over resources.
Finance this effort to minimize wars by levying a surcharge on all U.S. sales
of arms abroad. Target this surcharge
to raise a total $100 billion per year.
Be aggressive in ratifying nuclear arms control agreements with other
nuclear nations.
Article 6.
Sensible Family Planning and Women’s Reproductive Healthcare.
Significantly increase funding at home and
abroad for women’s healthcare clinics and family planning services and AIDS
prevention and free contraceptives for all women who want them. Support comprehensive sex education, and
make sure it is both medically accurate and successful in preventing unwanted
teen pregnancies.
Article 7.
Social and Environmental and Intergenerational Justice
Increase the fairness of economic opportunity
and economic security to all citizens.
Increase environment justice to assure that disadvantaged and oppressed
peoples do not bear an undue burden of exposure to toxic wastes and air
pollution. Provide fair treatment and
generous foreign aid to the developing countries in the world in order to
mitigate harms caused by irresponsible profiteering by multinational
corporations. Ratify this Bill of
Rights for Future Generations to protect the interests of those in the future
from both the need-driven and irresponsibly greed-driven and mindlessly materialistic
consumerism of humanity.
Dr. Tiffany B. Twain
March 31, 2011
www.EarthManifesto.com
c/o SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com
Note: See the numerous specific proposals in Part
Four of the Earth Manifesto on how we should be making our nation and world fairer
to future generations. Note particularly
One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively
Transform Our Societies, and the Progressive
Agenda for a More Sane Humanity.
“As people alive today, we must consider future generations: a clean environment is a human right like
any other. It is therefore part of our
responsibility toward others to ensure that the world we pass on is as healthy,
if not healthier, than we found it.”
--- The Dalai Lama
“We are living at the expense of future generations. In this respect, it is plain that
we are living in
untruth.”
--- Light of the World, Pope Benedict XVI
“Let
us cease thinking only of ourselves and reasoning only in the short term. Let us assure for the children to come the
same rights that have been declared for their parents.”
---
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
“Whatever happens
to the Earth, happens to the children of the Earth … All things are connected,
like the blood that unites one family. Mankind did not weave the web of
life; we are but one strand within it. Whatever we do to the web, we
do to ourselves.”
--- Chief
Seattle, warning the United States government in 1844 against the
misuse of land, water, air, and animal
life.
“Each generation,
sharing in the heritage of the Earth, has a duty as trustee for future
generations to prevent irreversible and irreparable harm to life on Earth and
to human freedom and dignity.”
--- Jacques-Yves Cousteau
“Behold my brothers, the
Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall
soon see the results of that love! Every
seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being,
and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same
right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. Yet, hear me, people, we have
now to deal with another race --- small and feeble when our fathers first met
them but now great and overbearing. Strangely
enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a
disease with them. These people have
made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak
to support the rich and those who rule.
They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their
neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that
overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path.”
--- Sitting Bull, the Lakota Sioux Chief, 1877
“Freedom is not license but responsibility -- the
gift we have received and the legacy we must bequeath. Although our sojourn in life is brief, we are
on a great journey. For those who came
before us, and for those who will follow, our moral, political and religious
duty is to make sure that this nation, which was conceived in liberty and
dedicated to the proposition that all are equal under the law, is in good hands
on our watch.”
--- The great journalist Bill Moyers
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Initial Distribution by Mail in December 2010:
The
Cousteau Society, Future Generations Petition
930 West 21st Street, Norfolk VA
23517
The
Center for American Progress
1333 H Street NW, 10th Floor, Wash. D.C. 20005
Earth Justice, Because the Earth needs a good lawyer, and I may too!
426 17th Street, 6th Floor; Oakland, CA
94612
Wealth for the Common Good
c/o IPS–New England, 30
Germania, Bldg. L, Boston MA 02130
President Barack Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
NW, Washington D.C. 20500
Senator
Bernie Sanders
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
Senator Barbara Boxer
Bill Moyers, c/o 151 Central
Park West, New York, NY 10023
Rachel Maddow c/o NBC News, 30
Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10112
Jon Stewart, c/o The Daily Show, 733 11th
Avenue, New York, NY 10019
Katharine Weymouth, Publisher of the Washington Post
c/o
1150 15th
St. NW, Washington D.C. 20071
Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., Publisher of
the New York Times
c/o
620 Eighth
Avenue., New York 10018
Frank Vega, Publisher of the San
Francisco Chronicle
c/o 901 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
Arianna Huffington
c/o The Huffington Post, P.O. Box 447, Herndon, VA 20172
Filmmaker Robert Redford, c/o 3101 E.
Idas Road, Provo, UT 84604
Filmmaker Tiffany
Shlain
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