Online Signature Lawfulness for Construction Industry in European Union

How to eSign a document: online signature lawfulness for Construction Industry in European Union

[Music] monte monteito began her career as a high-powered corporate lawyer working in the heart of the city of london britain's equivalent to wall street she was advising investment banks multinational corporations and governments on large-scale complex transactions she was very successful until she found herself questioning the human value of her work during a leave of absence she experienced a profound spiritual transformation and joined the entourage of amma one of india's foremost teachers healers and humanitarians using her legal training to serve her new spiritual consciousness she set up a successful environmental organization in the virgin islands which led her to challenge the whole relationship between human law and the laws of nature she founded the international center for holistic law in scotland and she's now engaged in a european citizens initiative designed to change the world by embedding the rights of mother earth in the legal system of the 28 nation european union in the eu we've had participatory democracy as a fairly new invention started in february 2011 with the european citizens initiative and what the european citizens initiative allows us to do in europe is that seven citizens from seven member states can propose a law to the european commission and provided we raise at least a million signatures across at least seven member states with a de minimis of about 0.01 of the population of at least seven countries um then the european commission have to consider passing that law wow and it but that's a big task that's seven countries and well i guess several million signatures if you've got to get to that percentage of the population that's right and what what makes it really helpful for citizens is that the european union allows us to collect signatures online and so we can run it as an online petition campaign use social media and all of the rest and there are 20 other countries right and you can also take action in those but separately or individually absolutely we intend to run the initiative for the rights of nature across all 27 countries and the way we're organizing we're going to have a central team and we're also going to have country teams that are going to be actively spreading the message um in all of the countries now what's the initiative to tell me what the what it is that you're trying to do with all this okay um basically what we're looking to do um it's well known that we are facing unprecedented environmental issues and in my experience as an environmental lawyer i can see that the current system of environmental law that we have which is pretty much based on a paradigm of nature as property restricts some citizens to having to bring cases through the planning and the administrative courts and so it's very difficult for communities to protect nature per se so the initiative that we're bringing is following the emerging paradigm that's appearing throughout the world in countries like ecuador and bolivia in municipalities throughout the united states of recognizing a natural law approach so recognizing nature's inherent rights um to thrive and to flourish so ours our european citizens initiative is um for recognizing and respecting the inherent rights of nature now what would that actually mean in practice let's say i'm a citizen of one of the countries in the european union and i see some environmental outrage going on which i'm sure it does you know what can i do about it right so assuming that our initiative was successful and the eu adopted a directive on the rights of nature what that would mean is that um the the eu once they've adopted the directive it would become applicable in all 27 member states so there will be a time period within which each member state will have to enact laws that that give effect to the principles in the directive so this would enable the ordinary citizen in a european country to invoke the rights of nature so it would take it outside of the property paradigm in conjunction with just giving nature rights of course we've got to look at mechanisms and at the moment the current mechanism of looking at environmental cases is through the planning and administrative courts and there is also movement to bring about an international court for the environment and so coupled with our initiative we would also like to build in um this mechanism so that citizens have a much more straightforward means of addressing these issues can you think of an example of something which you can't now address but would would at least get its day in court if this were in place right um yes um for example something something like fracking at the moment communities need to need to look at the planning laws and need to look at the actual permissions that are given um to do extensive environmental assessments and all of these things and it's very difficult um for communities to actually bring a case um usually you would need to show that um your rights are personally affected in some sort of a way if there were the rights of nature we'd be able to look at the rights of the ecosystems that would be destroyed by this as well as the rights of the human beings involved so this and if we had a court for the environment it would give a completely different avenue um for which to look at these issues okay so if i were a citizen and i were trying to take some action on let's say the pollution of the local river or something of that kind if i go now i have to show that that pollution affects me personally directly in order to have what's called standing right yes exactly usually this is the case and um this makes it extremely difficult um yeah so but in this situation once the once you have that kind of legislation in place then it becomes possible for me to go to court and say it doesn't directly affect me but it does affect nature and it does you know yes part of um the mechanism that we look to to build in is also to give community the rights to defend the rights of ecosystems and of nature and at the moment rights of communities not really recognized in our legal system per se yes there may be pockets where where this exists but it isn't really a given um and certainly not being able to speak up on behalf of ecosystems and biodiversity that is affected by human action and it's in the states they're they're taking that as the approach to to try and get this kind of change is to say the community itself seizes that jurisdiction basically says within our city within our town nature has rights and and and then you the hope is that this becomes a big enough movement that it eventually pushes upward but you're looking at in a sense almost the opposite direction right doing it across this large political structure yes um in the united states i it's my understanding that municipalities are able to create their own ordinances in in european countries well in particularly the uk which is where i'm from this is not really an avenue that's available to us if laws were made at the local level they could be overridden at levels further up um so even if communities got together and they declared that we want to have a charter that recognizes the rights of nature those rights would not really be upheld in court so another difficulty that we have with europe is that the laws of each country are different so if we had a ground-up movement in germany it doesn't mean that um it would inspire a similar movement in spain because um it would be a different legal framework it's not as if they could just take what's happened in germany and just apply it to spain so by going at the european level um it provides an incredibly efficient mechanism for bringing about change throughout the whole of the european union because by proposing a framework directive we can propose a framework that brings in a legal structure that actually enables sustainability and if that is adopted it will have to be legislated for in all of the individual countries so um yeah so the as far as i know in the united states they also don't have an efficient participatory democracy that would make a proposal immediately applicable across all states so this is something quite unique that we have in europe which is very exciting for us as citizens to take advantage of yeah now you also you have you mentioned there's a sort of a paradigm about the organization just to come back to that for a few moments and what did you call it systemic progression or something like that um right i'm the founder of an organization called the international center for holistic law and we're based in the fintorn foundation community in scotland our vision at the center for holistic law is a world in which human laws and legal practice were in alignment with the universal laws that govern all of life and so if human laws about which regulate human behavior in human relationships then it naturally flows from that that it needs to take into account all of the relationships that humans have and at the moment our legal systems really only take into account relationships between rights holders which are broadly speaking human beings and other entities that have been created by human beings like corporations ignoring the most fundamental relationship that human beings have which is our relationship with the natural world so the center for holistic law will try to encourage an alignment between the existing legal system and the and the the laws of nature that you really can't offend yes absolutely and uh we're also very much part of our work at the international center for holistic law is looking at ways of resolving disputes that go beyond blame that go beyond separation so looking at the wider issues that affect all of us legal disputes are usually stemmed in societal problems and they cannot be looked at in isolation and so we're pioneering also innovative methods of dispute resolution that um allow the voices of all the stakeholders to be heard and taken into consideration so this is a whole different legal process isn't it it's not the adversarial process it's a process of finding solutions with many participants that's right our current legal system is based on a paradigm of retribution and as you know when we look at relationships if i'm having a dispute with my friend and i'm seeking retribution it's not really going to advance things in a positive way so on in a similar on a similar vein we have certain practices that take us towards war and we have certain practices that take us towards peace certain practices that unite us and certain practices that separate us and so we're seeking to use law as a tool to unite us and to bring restoration reparation and healing rather than retribution let me take you back to the uh to the beginning of all this because one of the things i find fascinating about the about your story is that it begins in of all places the financial heart of london the city of london the very belly of the beast and how did how did you get from there to fintorn and holistic law right yes it it was an interesting journey and um yes i did um start out um you know in in the so-called belly of the beast or um you know as what some people may see as part of the problem i was a structured finance lawyer i worked in the city of london i used to represent investment banks governments large multinationals on very very big transactions um that involved several jurisdictions etc a lot of yeah complex work and um i found um that this was on the outside it was going very well but my in my inner world something was not quite sitting right and um one day i had a profound um spiritual awakening and literally overnight my worldview changed and so when i went back into the office nothing nothing there resonated with me every anymore everything was back to front it was inside out nothing really made sense i found that the work that i was doing was not really in alignment with what i really valued in this world and so i i came out of there and i started to pursue a deeper inquiry i started to pursue a path of healing and spiritual practice and i trained with some of the most profound spiritual teachers of our time what was this what was the spiritual experience that turned this over is this because this is a fascinating situation where one day you're more or less aligned with what you're doing and then suddenly it's gone completely out of harmony yes um well okay i was um i was raised um in a fairly spiritual environment i'd grown up practicing yoga and meditation and had been brought up in the spiritual traditions of my ancestors and there came a time when i wanted to turn away from that and really experience what the the mainstream of life was saying was a route to happiness and this led to me pursuing the career path that i did and i pursued it wholeheartedly and so when one day when my father wanted to go and visit mother mira who's an enlightened being who's residing in germany invited me and my husband to come with him um i was really not very interested um at that point i'd convince myself that there is nothing spiritual in this world it's just a scientific material world and um you know and that's pretty much what life is all about and she's probably a and it you know it's it's nothing of interest to me however the reason that my father was going was because my sister was actually very ill at the time and he wanted to take her for healing and my sister was refusing to go so my father pleaded with me and he said well if everybody comes at least i can say to your sister that it's a family holiday and um and you know you don't even need to come and see mother mirror you could just you could just hang out so i thought okay well i'm not interested in going to see mother mira but i'm interested in helping my sister so if it would be of help to her then i'll come along and of course once i got there um i i didn't i couldn't resist going to see mother mira so i went and when i walked into the hall mother mayor has two assistants and they they balance the energies in the room by adjusting the seating between people so you know they would sometimes move people as people to certain certain positions so i walked into the room and as soon as i walked into the room the assistant motioned to me and my husband and asked us to sit on a seat right in front of mother and my initial thought at the time was wow they're very hospitable to skeptical people and then when my father and my mother and my sister walked in they motioned for them to sit on the side and then i thought oh wait a minute there might be something more to this because she's ill so anyway mother mira came into the room and i went into a deep meditation um all of my you know my my childhood upbringing and my deep reverence with the spiritual came back to me as soon as i was in the presence of this incredible being and i received mother mira's blessing which she does in a very particular way she works with the central channel she says where certain karmic codes are are encoded and they they appear in the form of knots and she looks directly for about six seconds into the eyes of each person and when she does that she's unknotting um these knots within the central channel so um after the session that night i had um the most incredible sleep um and during that sleep i found that i was having these dreams where i was held by these these incredibly beautiful swirling colors which i later found a book of paintings by mother mira where she was describing other dimensions of reality and in these paintings she had these incredibly beautiful swirling colors a bit like i'd seen in my dream so anyway i came out of there and i came back to the office and um and it was like the show was over what am i doing here i thought and what how did your colleagues react because you you then basically your body was there but you had spiritually you left the building right absolutely i mean one of the first changes that i made was that i turned my desk around because i had a beautiful view of the sky and i wanted to be a little bit more connected to nature and what was going on in the world and in my job we used to work incredible hours working all through the night through to the next day was quite common leaving the office at 3 a.m was was yeah it was it was commonplace so we never really got to go outside so i turned my desk around to look at the sky and i started playing subliminal relaxing music in my room and people used to come into the office and all of a sudden they would just forget what it was that they'd come to talk about and and and they would say wow i feel really nice and then they'd start talking about you know something personal and after a short time my room became known as the love room so um yeah and uh yeah there was uh you know coming to how i managed to you know to come away from from that um period of work it um the pain of being in that environment got more and more intense for me and one day when i was there late at night working on um on a transaction i ended up having a heart-to-heart with my boss you know saying why are we doing this why are we doing this to ourselves what's the end result of what we do some corporation or some bank just ends up making a little bit more money and what are they doing with the money are they are they solving the problems of poverty in the world no they're not they're investing it in in things that sometimes can can be causing damage and i don't really know why i'm doing this and so my boss said well why don't you leave and i said well i can't leave because i'm in this situation where we're building a house and you know i i just don't know what to do and he said well something in him really hurt me and and he said well how about we structure it as a redundancy you know maybe you could get i could give you say a year and a half's pay and that would give you an opportunity to finish building your house and by then you discover what it is that you really want to do personally i think once you've gone out there and seen what it's like out there you'll know how good it is here and you'll be back here but you know how about it and i thought wow this is fabulous so i took it and um and i haven't turned back have you seen him since i'm just curious to know what he would think about it yeah it would be very interesting actually i would like to see him one of these things he sounds like something i got him fabulously with him he was he was a great guy and um yeah and so from there you know i it gave me the opportunity to really deepen um my spiritual practice and i started traveling with my spiritual teacher and um and really going intensely into um on the spiritual path and it was during that time that um at the back of my mind even though you know the the world of healing and the world of spirituality was absorbing me so completely and so um bringing me so much fulfillment i really wondered why it was that i'd been trained in the n to the nth degree in something that that was now actually irrelevant to me i could see that the way law was structured it was entrenching the victim perpetrator paradigm in our society and i really wondered how we could bring about peace through methods that are primarily based on war so i asked my spiritual teacher whether i ought to continue in some way looking at being able to use the law in order to serve humanity or whether to just abandon that idea completely and and focus on something else and what she said to me was very simple she said stay in law for now and when the opportunity comes to serve just take it so about a week later i found myself in the virgin islands and i was approached by somebody on the island saying that the government had recently given approval for a golf course and a five-star hotel in an area of international ecological importance in fact a protected area with a ramsar code internationally recognized as a protected area even though there had been debates for years and years and lots of environmental studies finally the government had just the chief minister just unilaterally given his consent so the chief conservation officer was tearing his hair out because he wanted to bring a case but no lawyers on the island would help him it was the kind of island it was a small island everybody knew each other and so there are a lot of complex interrelationships between the people nobody would dare go against the government and in this scenario you'd have to go against the chief minister personally and the chief minister was the guy who personally would have to sign all the work permits and all the business permits of the lawyers so um yeah so understandably um very few lawyers were interested in taking it up so i thought to myself okay when the opportunity comes to serve just take it and so i went to go and see him and and we had we had a discussion we had three weeks to file a case i had no knowledge of environmental law and i thought okay let's do it so the first port of call for me was to start working on the energy with the spiritual practices and the healing practices that i had learnt and as soon as i started to do that i found that miracles started to happen um within the time three weeks which is a very short time space um to amass all of the all of the evidence that would be necessary to bring a challenge everything just came and we were in a position to file the case at this point it wasn't even clear whether citizens would even have standing because no environmental cases had ever been brought in this in this particular jurisdiction um and so um we organized as an ngo there was one caribbean case um where the citizens had gotten standing and that was only because it was brought by an organization of end with an international reputation and you know the scientific knowledge and all that it was greenpeace that brought this case so um so we thought okay we'll form the virgin islands environmental council and we got hold of whatever scientific experts that we could and prominent people that we could find in the community to come on board with this ngo it was very difficult to get somebody prominent from the community to sign their name behind the case and it had to be somebody personally bringing the case but eventually a prominent man in the community stepped forward and and we filed so what happened as a result of this at that time i was still volunteering and touring and studying with my spiritual teacher and so as soon as we found the case i was off the island i was on tour in europe so i discovered a new way of doing law um we were in a new city every two to three days and i was working from morning till night in the organization of my spiritual teacher running these programs and um so i really didn't know where i was gonna find the time um or the space i had no idea whether i'd have into an internet connection how i'd be able to get hold of people when the hearings were gonna be and i thought this would be very interesting but what i found was that all i had to do was stand as a channel for grace and i found that the case was doing itself miraculously um whenever uh any anything needed to be responded to or um any any business needed to be transacted i'd find that i would have internet connection all of the people that i need to connect with would be online at that time we'd transact our business in incredibly efficient time and and then i'd be back with my spiritual teacher and this was a completely new experience to me because working in law firm i was used to that you know you would push and push and push and push and you know be like working on it working on it working on it even though in reality things only move in a very prescribed way so when there is i started to notice that there was um an orchestration and a timing that was beyond my control and all i had to do was to be incredibly present to what was actually unfolding and and to be a conduit for the energy to facilitate the process um so the outcome of all of this i mean launching the case was uh was very useful even though yes it was engaging in the adversarial process um it was useful because it stopped work from starting it stopped the diggers from going in and the first um fortunate thing that happened in the chain was that the developers funding got pulled as a result of the of the case um so that brought us time um however we didn't we thought it was going to be a quick process which is part of the reason that um i was uh prompted to take it on it was going to be a judicial review and um in the legislation it said you get a result in three months it took us three years because the developers joined the action and um and they kept stalling it so they kept applying for these you know extensions and you know it just get kept getting pushed back and back further back um by this time we had a legal team and the people on the island started to feel more empowered um initially it was the kind of place where um people felt very disempowered because the government ran the shots and they really didn't have a voice but somehow um launching this case really kind of caught the imagination of the people and so um we worked on many different levels because people were highly interrelated and they knew each other we started working with dialogues with building relationships with them rallying around the shared values so um so this is where we start working non-adversarial way um showing that actually you know by um preserving um what we have in terms of you know our biodiversity um and preserving nature we're actually building um a much richer future for our countries and for future generations and and the government started to change um their view on things so much so that um by the time our court case came to be heard in the government's national tourist brochure they were actually bragging that there's such an environmentally friendly nation but we even have you know a local group that are challenging the government in court on environmental grounds so anyway um we won at first instance um of course because we were restricted to the planning and administrative courts we had to find fault with the planning process so we went for every single angle that we could we could get what the judge found was that was that development couldn't happen so we won um purely on the basis that it was a protected area and it was prohibited by law for any development to happen there so um that was great um however the developers did appeal and um the appeal was carried out in lucia and on appeal we weren't so fortunate because the lucian judge decided to go with the developers who were putting forward an argument that there was a technical drafting error in the way the law had been created instead of calling it a fisheries protected area it they referred to it as a marine protected area and and so in actual fact the judge says well the area is not protected even though there have been all these environmental studies and there was actually no dispute in the planning process about the protected status of this area um the judge still ruled that actually is not protected and so the development can go ahead however and this is the beauty of um of this case the government had such a change of heart in the way they were perceiving the issue that they came forward and they said okay well we'll just change the law the planning permission had we'll change the law and we'll word it as the judge wants it and on top of that we'll declare the area national park so i mean anybody who's had any experience of trying to bring environmental cases in the public interest would know that this is an absolutely phenomenal result usually if the government had still retained the same posture and and we'd say we'd have one at court at the very best all we would have won is that um the decision would go back to the planners the developers would make one or two changes and to get around what the judge said and then usually the development goes ahead in some shape or form so this was an absolutely astounding result so after that i came to the conclusion that okay i've got my learnings in law i can see that this adversarial process you know it just it doesn't work and it's not for me and um and that's great if all changes happen fundamentally at the energy level and i'll just continue focusing on that you know the most striking thing to me about that story is is that because your vision is is is at a level above the adversarial nature like the normal lawyer would take this on and would never question that framework they'd just work within it in the adversarial way but you're coming at it in a sort of a problem-solving way in a much more open kind of way and then it sounds as though you i don't know how how much by design and how much by just evolution it was but but it sounds as though you basically had a whole um educational process that went on that finally affected the government and it's really a it's a fascinating story because in a sense what i'm hearing is so we bought a little time and that gave people a chance to think and then we got another little bit of time and that gave other people a chance to think and as they thought more about it the people in the government started to think about it and and it evolves in a very non-adversarial way even though it's an adversarial process it's a but it's it it uses the law as a kind of a learning process for the entire community absolutely absolutely yeah and this is this is the beauty of the taking a holistic approach yeah yeah the other thing that strikes me is it in this in that story is is uh it's the remarkable experience with mother in germany because you go into that i mean at one level if you had been you know very much in a spiritual path in the first place it would be less well you might never have been in the law firm i guess but but you go in there with no expectation of change you've got the you've got this sort of the foundational understanding of the situation but but you go in there basically to uh to convenience your father and you know and to do something for your sister and the idea that anything is going to change for maunta is not on the agenda at all and then you have this profound experience bingo like and you come out and you come out into a different world but the striking thing for me is if you were ready for that you didn't know it right absolutely in fact um the person who was leading the tour you know taking people to see mother mirror she sat us down she said you know people sometimes they go undergo profound change sometimes their lives fall apart if their relationship's not aligned sometimes their relationships fall apart if their work is not aligned they find their work falls apart and i thought there's absolutely no way on earth that anything is going to fall apart in my life and then it does yeah and then the whole thing fell apart [Laughter] i think that's absolutely fascinating fascinating so let me come back to to europe because i can you i can see this the sort of evolution of how you get to the point where you're thinking very differently and but you're also feeling very empowered right i mean because essentially you're you're starting a movement here to change the legal system of 27 countries well absolutely and again you know there's a little bit of a story of how i came into that it wasn't the you know one day i woke up and i thought you know what we've got this initiative and i'm going to do something about it it's um it was a little bit of an evolutionary process after the virgin islands case i thought right well that's it i don't need to do anything further with law i'm clear i'm just going to continue on my path of healing and i became a mom and our family me and my husband my daughter we went up to go and live in the fintorn community in scotland and and it was around that time when i had a minor physical issue and i went to a kinesiology session kinesiology is a way of testing the muscles um for um to see whether something is um is true or not true and um it's a way of bypassing the mind and going into the body intelligence and usually very usually they would test the muscles to see if you're allergic to certain foods and that sort of thing but they could test a whole variety of issues so i went through a kinesiology session about this this minor physical issue and what came out of the session was that i need to put together a project that brings law and healing together that shifts the whole paradigm of the legal profession from adversarial to um to a paradigm of healing restoration reparation and that that takes into account the rights of all beings and in order to to know more fully what i should do that i should i should do a series of meditations an extra two hours of meditation and i was also i was already doing about three hours of meditation a day anyway so an extra two hours of meditation sending healing to the legal profession every day for a month during which time i'd get more clarity and um i did that at first very disbelievingly and uh you know and and very much dismayed thinking oh i thought maybe i could avoid certain foods [Laughter] and that would be all i'd need to do um but um yeah so i was sort of a little bit skeptical when i went into these meditations that anything would come but um amazingly a lot of information a lot of clarity came through and uh so i would sit there each day with a notepad and jot down all the insights that came to me and that culminated in the creation of the international center for holistic law and for our inaugural event one of the things that we're trying to pioneer is the use of systemic constellations in the context of legal disputes systemic constellations are a method that a man called bert helinger germany developed in the context of families which completely revolutionized the way psychology operates and it's pretty much been incorporated into the mainstream in germany he got his insights when he was living in africa and he observed how the tribal people dealt with their disputes and issues and how a lot of issues that people were carrying in the present had their origins with previous generations and unresolved energy from previous generations that continued to perpetuate itself you mean like our parents were enemies they were enemies that that kind of thing yeah that kind of thing but it could be it could be not even as specific as that it could be something like um if um if if my if our parents were or our grandparents were enemies with a person because of a certain thing we could be carrying an aspect of that and so we may be enemies with somebody completely unrelated to who our parents were enemies with but the same dynamic is playing out that that played out in in a previous generation and um so he he devised this method of working with representatives and found that a phenomenon started to appear where representatives who had absolutely no idea or had never met people whose issue it was and had no idea about their family system when they were standing as a representative and asked just to be present to what was occurring in their body would be downloading information relating to that system that um ordinarily they would not know so somehow people were tapping into this collective consciousness and dynamics hidden dynamics would become immediately visible and he found that when things were acknowledged this had a healing effect upon the whole system so things that were excluded when they were included again this then brought balance and he created something which was called the orders of love which was um um an alignment um of order that brought about peace and harmony which basically is you know in harmony with the natural laws that um that govern all of life so at our inaugural event we use systemic constellations to look at we had a group come from falkirk who a community that were facing fracking in their community to look at the issues related to that and we also did a constellation about the field of holistic law and where a change agent would be most effective for the fracking case it was uh it was quite evident that the community group were quite burnt out and they really didn't know where to go next um they felt that they were feeling angry and they were they felt as if they were locked in this battle this battle that they were not going to win with the energy company and they wanted some practical pragmatic answers and at the end of the constellation the man who brought the issue who was one of the leaders of the campaign said that he could see immediately that um how he'd become embroiled in this battle with the energy company but the energy company which is part of a much wider systemic picture and and that really what we're up against is ourselves and he could also see how personally how the energy company were bound to the people that it was serving and how he was also by virtue of being a human being also interconnected with that and he found it difficult to reconcile that on a personal level he also found that during the constellation um the representative for energy had to leave the room three times to be sick so yeah and she wasn't feeling sick before or after the constellation so there was a lot of energy that got moved during that and at the end of that constellation it ended up with the position of the energy company becoming a lot more balanced and the position of the um the citizens group becoming reconnected with the original impulse that brought them to the work and then being strengthened and after this constellation the the person who brought the issue said that he felt as a result of it that his consciousness had expanded and he can now see the need to work on multiple levels multiple dimensions and that it's not just a one-dimensional battle against one company yeah but a much broader systemic issue and from that they ended up getting a numb they launched a signature they already had a signature campaign but they managed to get an unprecedented number of signatures which won them a public inquiry which is going to be coming up and they were also invited to a conference with the scottish national party which is looking at banning fracking in the whole of scotland so somehow the movement did you know get a new direction new life from another one of these ones where you've got a very specific situation and somehow if you if you i hate to say rise above it but in a sense step back or look at it in a more rounded way opportunities arise that you wouldn't have seen if you'd stayed in that battle absolutely and with um coming back to the european citizens initiative um with holistic law what we found was that um holistic law didn't really have a place until all beings appeared on the scene and it was when all beings are a consideration of all beings were included in the framework it was at that point that the mainstream adversarial system really didn't know how to deal with the situation but holistic law was there in its entirety to meet it and from that i just got the clear insight that the rights of nature is something that would really bring about the change the systemic change that we need to evolve our legal systems to really meet the challenges that we're all facing globally today and from that i learned about the eci and i thought well it's obvious we'll bring a european citizens initiative to get the rights of nature recognized in europe if i can tease out one little thing there that this strikes me as interesting so you say that when you mention all beings in a sense that's what the rights of nature does isn't it is it is that it it expands your sense of the community that has standing and has rights and whose interests need to be considered and legitimately need to be considered it expands that from humans and human structures to the entire earth community absolutely and so that changes the you're not just changing the rules you're changing the the definition of of who the court should be serving and what the uh what the community is but the dimensions of the community yes absolutely it um it brings it to um for me a more um real construction of law after all nature moves ing to its own laws and we are also part of nature i mean our bodies were made up of the five elements just like everything else and so nature's laws bind us our laws don't bind nature nature carries on irrespective of what human beings decide is the truth so given that nature's laws mind us one would see that if nature didn't exist and thrive we wouldn't exist and thrive as well so in that sense everything that we call a human right derives from the rights of nature if nature doesn't have a right to exist and thrive how can we have a right to exist and thrive because our very existence is dependent upon nature um and so all it's doing really is just aligning just expanding and evolving our laws to recognize that when we talk about community we exist within a much wider community and it's a community of all beings we share this planet with and that's the plants that's the mountains the rivers we are intrinsically interdependent and it's just natural but if law is really going to meet the promise of the world that we would like to create for our children and our grandchildren that that it needs to expand its ambit and recognize all of the relationships that we have monte ito the young british lawyer who's determined to see the rights of nature recognized by the legal system of the european union in connection with our green rights film project the green interview has lately been interviewing green lawyers from around the world cormac cullinan in south africa for example pablo fallardo in ecuador michelle maloney in australia daniel salaberry and argentina we'll be releasing these interviews throughout 2014. if they aren't yet posted when you see this they soon will be for the green interview and for the green rights documentary project i'm silver donald cameron [Music] you