Climate Actions: True or False? 

Earth Day 2023 was just three weeks ago. Like every year, the world has seen so many talks, discussions, protests, celebrations, exhibitions, campaigns and newspaper articles about ‘Climate Actions’. The message is crystal clear; greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by half by 2030 and to net zero by 2050. However, climate pledges are falling far short. 

Countries have been debating climate actions since the 1990s and have produced several important accords such as the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Paris Agreement in 2015. Every year we have the Conference of Parties (COP). Have we made any progress? Far from it: the world is facing increasing climate disasters. Somewhere something is amiss. 

Chief Seattle’s letter in 1854 brought answers to this quandary: somewhere something is badly amiss. However, historians’ controversies have overshadowed the essence of his letter. The letter was a hoax, or it was a fiction, or this famous environmental speech was written a hundred years later by a screen writer, for a film called ‘Home’; the list of theories goes on. All the same, Chief Seattle’s words reveal a most compelling truth: we must consider Earth as a key stakeholder in our lives or else we will continue to destroy it.

Here comes the rub: some stakeholder theorists argue that Earth cannot be a stakeholder because it is not a person. On the contrary, corporations are persons and have rights. The legal status of corporations has also been acknowledged and protected in the European Convention on Human Rights, which says that “Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions”.

Corporations have more rights than the environment; thus, Earth is a victim of corporations. Ground-breaking ‘Carbon Majors’ research shows that 100 active fossil fuel producers have been linked to 71% of industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.

E F Shumacher has expressed this beautifully in his book, ‘Small is Beautiful’ (1973): “Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.” David Whyte’s book ‘Ecocide’ (2020) presents a wide range of relevant case studies supporting this.

While the modern man fails, some communities around the world are champions of natural resource management. Among them, indigenous communities stand out. Their population is less than 5% in the world, yet they protect 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity in the forests, deserts, grasslands and marine environments, as the 2020 report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) highlights.

According to the sixth report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), empowering indigenous communities “not only strengthens climate leadership in many countries, but also changes broad social norms by raising knowledge of indigenous governance systems which have supported sustainable lifeways over thousands of years.”

Put simply, indigenous communities’ identities, cultures, livelihoods and their spiritual well-being are strongly linked to the land and natural resources in which they live, which means that Earth is a key stakeholder in their lives. Not only do they value the environment, but they also have a moral responsibility towards protecting Earth. 

Whether Chief Seattle’s letter is a hoax or not, the message is as clear as a bell: indigenous communities and community-based resource management strategies across the world, at hundreds of sites and for generations, have placed the natural world at the center of their way of life. 

It is high time we moved from a human to a planet centered stakeholder approach. Stakeholder theory must change to stop current stakeholder capitalism which is built on the destruction of the natural world. In doing so, the legal rights of nature are protected. It is high time we legally redefined our relationships with our most critical non-human stakeholder for the sake of humanity itself.