Articles 2010

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Pétition à nos représentants parlementaires

For the last three decades, environmental groups have diligently lobbied their governments to slow carbon and methane emissions. Activists have put pressure on industry too. They’ve been smart, full of energy and creative. Yet, despite several big international treaties — especially the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement — and some impressive accomplishments including holding up pipelines and getting institutional investors to divest from fossil fuels, the pollution and the warming have not stopped.

En tant qu'intellectuels et citoyens engagés, et juchés sur les épaules de géants -ces dizaines de milliers de citoyens et décideurs engagés depuis plus de 6 mois-, il est de notre devoir de contribuer à ce que les partis et candidats expriment leur programme politique et que les citoyens votent en âme et conscience.

A toutes les citoyennes et tous les citoyens de Belgique, Considérant que la communauté scientifique internationale nous alerte depuis 50 ans sur le fait que le mode de vie de nos sociétés industrialisées –et en particulier notre mode de vie en Belgique– dérègle notre climat, détruit nos écosystèmes, érode nos terres arables, surexploite nos ressources naturelles, extermine les espèces vivantes, pollue l’air, l’eau et les sols partout dans le monde.

In the early 2000s, the idea of giving legal rights to nature was on the fringes of environmental legal theory and public consciousness. Today, New Zealand’s Whanganui River is a person under domestic law, and India’s Ganges River was recently granted human rights. In Ecuador, the Constitution enshrines nature’s “right to integral respect”.

On September 14, 1869, 25,000 people marched through New York to celebrate the centennial of the birth of German scientist Alexander von Humboldt.

While the element phosphorus is not scarce in the earth’s upper crust, the amount that can be accessed for productive use in food production is orders of magnitude smaller due to a wide range of bottlenecks including physical, economic, technical, geopolitical, legal, ecological and environmental constraints. From a food security and sustainability perspective, the most important quantity is not the total amount of phosphate rock in the ground but the fraction that is available to be accessed by farmers and applied to agricultural fields for food production.