Rabbi, lawyer seek to end ‘ecocide’

By Dan Bloom

CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — When Rabbi Jeffrey Newman in the UK — Emeritus Rabbi at the Finchley Reform Synagogue — shoots you an email from his office in England and it lands in your inbox with a special “ping” to it, you know it’s about something important and deserves prompt attention. Rabbi Newman devotes a large part of his days now to thinking about how to protect the Earth, and he uses the internet to reach out with public awareness messages.

We’ve been friends for a year or so, and email back and forth a few times every week. The good rabbi is on Twitter, too, and we meet there as well.

So his latest email said: “Dear Dan, a lawyer named Polly Higgins — do Google her — is a major British campaigner, with a simple idea: that ‘ecocide’ (http://eradicatingecocide.com) should (as was in fact originally intended by Rene Cassin, originator of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) become the fifth of the crimes against humanity. You might want to know more about her work and share it with your friends on the climate awareness community.”

I said I would look into and use whatever PR skills I have to get her message out to people worldwide via my own contacts at newspapers and blogs.

This campaign was news for me, too, as I had not heard of Higgin’s work before. That’s what email exchanges with a friendly rabbi in England are all about, I suppose, and I am glad Rabbi Newman wrote to me on this topic.

Think patricide, matricide, fratricide, suicide. We are all against these things but whoever thought of bringing up the idea of “ecocide” being something that needs to be outlawed as well?

Meet Polly Higgins. I got an email from her shortly after the rabbi’s email and she told me: “My work is centered on putting in place a powerful legal tool that greatly benefits the Earth. In fact there is a whole emergence of Earth law, and it’s a very active arena. The law I am working on makes it a crime to destroy vast tracts of territory (ecological ecocide) and creates a legal duty of care. In other-words, communities such as the 1st nations living in Canada whose lands, rivers and forests have been destroyed shall be able to insist that the Canadian State prosecute CEOs of companies that have caused the harm. At the moment, as I am sure you know, that is not possible.”

She signed her email: “Polly Higgins, Chief Executive Officer, The Earth Community Trust.”

Barrister Higgins is also the author of two books titled ‘Eradicating Ecocide and ‘Earth is our Business and chairwoman of the Eradicating Ecocide Global Initiative (link: www.eradicatingecocide.com).

Thanks to Rabbi Newman, I am now up to speed on this British lawyer’s work. I hope her ideas spread and she receives broad support from international organizations around the world. If we love our Earth as we say we do, let’s outlaw ecocide.

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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is a dedicated web surfer who develops stories from all over the globe.  He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com.   He’ll read your e-message even if it doesn’t go ping