David R. Boyd has advised the governments of Canada, Sweden, and Iceland on environmental and constitutional issues and is the co-chair of Vancouver's Greenest City Action Team along with Mayor Gregor Robertson. He is a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Commission on Environmental Law, the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment, the Forum for Leadership on Water and the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW). A former Trudeau Scholar at UBC, he has also taught at SFU and UVic.

Monica Rolinski interviewed David R. Boyd for BC BookWorld on August 22, a.k.a. Earth Over-Shoot Day, declared by the Global Footprint Network to announce the day each year when humanity has exhausted nature's budget for the year.

David R. Boyd of Pender Island is an environmental lawyer and former director of the Sierra Legal Defence Fund who has collaborated with David Suzuki and Thomas R. Berger.
His two most recent books are The Environmental Rights Revolution: A Global Study of Constitutions, Human Rights, and the Environment (UBC Press $34.95) and The Right to a Healthy Environment: Revitalizing Canada's Constitution (UBC Press $29.95).
The Environmental Rights Revolution is the result of five years spent researching 193 constitutions around the world, and court decisions of more than 100 nations, to examine the impact that constitutional provisions can make on environmental protection.

He says the follow-up book, The Right to a Healthy Environment, "was almost like a no-brainer."; It examines how and why similar constitutional changes must be made to enshrine environmental protection in Canada as a basic human right.

BC BOOKWORLD: I came across the term "rogue primates"; in a book you edited, The Northern Wild, and it's also the title of John A. Livingston's Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication (Key Porter, 2002).

DAVID BOYD: That's one of the best Canadian environmental philosophy books that has ever been written. His premise is that humans were the first domesticated species and that we have turned nature on its head. That premise is a powerful beacon and it has had an influence on me.

From a broad perspective, human ethics have fallen behind our human technological prowess. We're able to wreak incredible havoc on the earth in a way that past generations simply didn't have the capacity to do. We don't have the ethics or the institutions to rein ourselves in.
As an environmental lawyer my path has been searching for ways of altering this. In the beginning I was taking a very micro approach, filing lawsuits against specific projects, and I became frustrated with that, and the site specific nature of it, so I moved on to think about how we need to change.

BCBW: And you've concluded....

BOYD: We need to change our environmental laws to be stronger. But it's not just the laws, it's the entire system that we have to transform if we're going to stop behaving like rogue primates, and start protecting the earth.

BCBW: We think that humans are not animals and that somehow we live outside of the natural world.

BOYD: Yes, David Suzuki says we have evolved from naked apes to a super species, and he doesn't use super in a particularly complimentary way. There's a beautiful book, edited by a couple of guys from Harvard, called Sustaining Life (Oxford UP, 2008) which is all about the way that humans are dependent on the natural world. Dr. Eric Chivian and Dr. Aaron Bernstein, both of whom are medical doctors, reached the conclusion that our whole way of being in the twenty-first century is the result of a basic failure to recognize that we are an inseparable part of nature; that everything we do that damages or harms nature is actually a form of damage and harm to ourselves as well. It's completely unscientific to think that we could ever be separate from the natural world.

BCBW: But better resource management alone doesn't seem to be enough.

BOYD: Because there's a fundamental problem even with the language of resource management. When you look up resource in the dictionary it's something that's meant to be used. That really is not consistent with our understanding of our dependence on ecosystems from which we are currently over-extracting our resources. Calling something a resource justifies the treatment as something that's just there to serve us.

I talk about people living in the North American bubble. We are completely focused in Canada, and to a lesser degree the United States, on extracting natural resources; everything getting bigger and getting better. Trading in your iPhone 3 for your iPhone 4 and waiting for your iPhone 5. It's not like that everywhere in the world. There are countries and regions that are much closer to what I would describe as having a sustainable set of human values. These countries, and these regions, are actually making progress towards a sustainable future in ways that are hard for Canadians to even begin to digest.

BCBW: After ten or so years of tracking them, what stands out?

BOYD: Sweden is widely regarded as having the strongest environmental laws and policies in the world. For example, imposing taxes on all kinds of chemicals and forms of pollution. They are attempting to transform the very basis of the economic structure so that they create less pollution, use fewer resources. To their credit, they have made progress.

Costa Rica is one of the pioneers in this field. Putting the right to a healthy environment into their constitution back in the early 1990s. I have met many people there, environmental lawyers, academics, people running convenience stores, people sweeping the street, and almost to a person, they commented on how that change twenty years ago had really marked a profound shift in the way they saw their country. So now, Costa Ricans of all stripes really take a deep-rooted pride in the fact that their country has this global reputation as an environmental leader. I mean, they're not perfect, they haven't achieved the holy grail of sustainability, but boy, they've made incredible strides in that country.
In Argentina, one of the amazing stories that I came across was a neighbourhood in Buenos Aires where a public health nurse moved into this very poor area full of oil refineries and petrochemical plants. After a couple of years of living and working there, she started to experience serious health problems, including a tingling feeling in her fingertips and her toes. So she went to see her doctor and her doctor ran some tests, they came back saying that she had very high levels in her body of a chemical named toluene which is a by-product of oil refineries. She was irate so she went to see a lawyer. The lawyer said, well, Argentina's constitution does say that everyone has the right to a healthy environment. Then this woman, whose name is Beatriz Mendoza, gathered a bunch of her neighbours and with the help of some lawyers filed a lawsuit which went all the way to the Supreme Court of Argentina. In 2008, the Supreme Court made the most extraordinary legal judgment that I've ever read from any country ordering the municipal, provincial, and federal governments to do a whole list of very concrete things to decrease the pollution; restore the water shed; and protect human health from the environmental hazard.

BCBW: So there's hope.

BOYD: I had no idea, despite being an environmental lawyer for over fifteen years when I started this, that the idea of a healthy environment had been put into so many national constitutions around the world. My research found that we're now up to 95 countries that have put the right to a healthy environment into their constitutions. The right to a healthy environment is the most rapidly adopted human right there's ever been in a short space of time.

BCBW: How do we fare in Canada when it comes to enshrining environmental integrity into our constitution?

BOYD: Very little has been done. We think that Canada is this great country and the reality is that Canada is a beautiful country but our environmental laws, our environmental policy, and our environment are really ranked behind the majority of industrialized nations.
We have terrible situations in Canada like chemical valley in Sarnia, Ontario, where there are dozens of petrochemical plants and oil refineries. The environment there is contaminated almost beyond the imagination. You really have to experience it to understand how absolutely awful it must be to live there on a full-time basis.
If changing things in a chemical valley can happen in a poor neighbourhood in a city in Argentina, because of the power of this constitutional law ensuring the right to a healthy environment, I have every belief that a similar shift should and could take place in Canada.
That's why I wrote the second book. With the first book I learned amazing things about the transformative impact of the right to a healthy environment around the world. The second book takes those lessons and shows how they can apply to Canada and how we can learn from what other countries have done.

Revolution 978-0-7748-2161-2;
Healthy 978-0-7748-2413-2

by Monica Rolinski, a freelance writer
in Vancouver.

[BCBW 2012]