Implications of the Biocultural Ethic for Earth Stewardship - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 117

lament that “short-term thinking in climate change consideration leads to South
American failure to adopt the vanguard position that would be expected from a conti-
nent that leads in low carbon assets.” 1 In North America, environmental lawyer
William J. Snape, III has called on to the government of the United States to ratify the
UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, Snape 2010 , see also Jamieson 2014 ).
The United States is one of the only three countries worldwide that has not done so:
What is missing in the US is any urgency to seek durable solutions to many of these
problems. How this has come to be is a modern lesson in the power of oligarchical segments
to take over political parties. In other words, old guard corporate users of the Earth's bio-
logical resources will not succumb lightly to new economic-ecologic paradigms that
weaken their power. (Snape 2012 , p. 3)

The evidence provided by ecological sciences as well as environmental law
allows us to conclude that in order to achieve the ESA Earth Stewardship Initiative's
central goal of “shaping of trajectories of change in coupled social-ecological sys-
tems at local-to-global scales to enhance ecosystem resilience and promote human
well-being” (Chapin et al. 2011b , p. 45), it is indispensable to change the current
plutocratic regime toward a democratic one . 2
The clear distinction between plutocracy and democracy, and a reinforcement
of the latter over the former form of governance, will enhance intercultural and
interregional dialogues and negotiations at a planetary scale, which today are
fostered by social networking, linked to communication and information tech-
nologies. This clarifi cation and change in governance regime are necessary steps
toward implementing Earth Stewardship and other international environmental
initiatives (e.g., CBD) that better acknowledge and respect the linguistic and
cultural diversity of communities, with their environmental and social interests,
embedded in their ecological worldviews and practices.

9.3 Stewardship Versus Plutonomy

Will Steffen and collaborators ( 2011 , p. 757) have lucidly argued that an effective
Earth stewardship “can be built around scientifi cally developed boundaries for criti-
cal Earth System processes that must be observed for the Earth System to remain

1 For example, in March 2008, the Brazilian House of Representatives passed a bill to change the
law that governs forests. This change in legislation that could undermine authorities' power to halt
deforestation was passed despite the established scientifi c facts that deforestation causes 15 % of
global greenhouse gas emissions, and 75 % of Brazil's (Tollefson 2011 ).
2 My conclusion concurs with Barry Commoner's concept of “ecodemocracy,” which demands
new social obligations to guide the course of both environmental improvement and economic
development through democratic governance and make decisions that today are normally made on
purely private economic grounds, such as profi t maximization, by corporate managers. Commoner
( 1990 ) emphasized that the environment (whether local or planetary) is a sovereign social respon-
sibility that takes precedence over the private interest in exploiting it.