Vivienne Westwood is right: we need a law against ecocide | Guardian Sustainable Business | Guardian Professional
Designer Vivienne Westwood expressed anguish and alarm at the worsening state of the planet, at a press conference yesterday. "The acceleration of death and destruction is unimaginable," she said, "and it's happening quicker and quicker."
Speaking in support of the European Citizens' Initiative to End Ecocide, her words echo a growing sentiment that we have to do something. One thing we can do is to enshrine the sanctity of the biosphere in law.
That ecocide – the destruction of ecosystems – is even a concept bespeaks a momentous change in industrial civilisation's relationship to the planet. To kill something, like Earth, presupposes that it is even alive in the first place. Today we are beginning to see the planet and all its subsystems as beings deserving of life, and no longer mere resource piles and waste dumps. As the realisation grows that we are part of an interdependent, living planet, concepts such as "rights of nature" and "law of ecocide" will become common sense.
Unfortunately, we live in an economic and legal system that contradicts that realisation. With legal impunity and at great profit, corporations bulldoze and cut, frack and drill, stripmine and burn, wreaking ecocide at every turn. It is tempting to blame corporate greed for these horrors, but what do we expect in a legal and economic system that condones and rewards them? Besides, all of us (in industrial society at least) are complicit. That's why we need a law of ecocide: a concrete emblem of the growing consensus that this must stop.
Designer Vivienne Westwood in Brussels in 2011. She has spoken out in favour of a new law against ecocide. Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters
