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Is Power a Disease?
Does power corrupt or is it itself corruption?
The Rights of Nature has entered my conscious attention because I had to address it as a proposal in an official capacity as a trustee of the town of Nederland, Colorado. As noted below, this is my opinion only. This is a very sincere and well-meaning attempt to address the fundamental problem of environmental degradation and, in assessing the proposal, I came to reconsider the nature of power. In this frame of understanding, it is essential to bequeath to Nature itself the rights that we assign to humans. The hope is that by assigning rights to Nature, we will provide some added level of protection against exploitation.
When people are confronted with insurmountable problems, they begin to think diagonally. This is almost always beneficial; but, diagonal thinking may sometimes require an orthodox assessment in order to assure that it is consistent with its stated goal. Ordinary people confronting the myriad offenses against rivers, forests, animal life and the very atmosphere which we all share will seek to find some way to correct what is clearly wrong. We have protested, written our representatives and taken small steps on our own such as recycling, driving electric vehicles and embracing public transportation. Unfortunately none of these actions by mere average humans have served to provide the…
