The Commons

Our rights to clean air, clean drinking water, a livable environment, and biodiversity are rights in common that belong in equal measure to every living creature. All living things have an absolute right to maintenance of the conditions that sustain life. We, as conscious living beings, also have a sacred duty to ensure their maintenance.

Is this so, or just an environmentalist slogan?

Life would not exist if the essential conditions required for it to originate had not developed and then been maintained long enough for life on earth to evolve to consciousness.

Development of the right conditions took nearly 10.5 Billion years. Life on earth evolved to consciousness over the next 3.5 Billion years.

It is possible to imagine many universes in which life could not exist. However it is not possible to conceive of a universe different from this one in which life like us could exist. The conditions required for us to exist are so finely balanced that any universe that supported life like us would be a duplicate of our own.

The essential conditions of our existence are thus part of the very fabric of our universe. They endow all life within it. That is why they are rights in common to all living things.

Until the last century, it was not possible to conceive of anthropomorphic causes that could so alter the essential conditions as to endanger life itself. Now, as we come to understand the risks associated with weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and over population and over-exploitation of the earth, such causes have not only become imaginable, they are unfolding before our very eyes.

If we destroy life on this planet, and if by chance there is no life elsewhere in the universe that is evolving to or has achieved consciousness, we will have destroyed consciousness itself. The universe will still exist, but without life it will be the empty existence of which no being is conscious.

Spontaneous intuition tells us that we have a sacred duty to prevent this.