We pieced together the most precise records of major climate events from thousands of years ago. Here’s what we found

by Ellen Corrick, John Hellstrom, and Russell Drysdale, The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/we-pieced-together-the-most-precise-records-of-major-climate-events-from-thousands-of-years-ago-heres-what-we-found-144575

Between 115,000 and 11,700 years ago, the Earth would have been almost unrecognisable. Massive ice-sheets covered northern Europe and northern Asia, and about half of North America, and global sea-levels were as much as 130 meters lower than today.

In this period, known as the “last glacial period”, the climate was much cooler and drier than today. It was punctuated by some of the largest and most rapid climate change events in Earth’s recent geological history.

For a long time, scientists have pondered how closely timed these abrupt climate change events were between Greenland and other regions of the world — far beyond the Arctic.

In our research, published today in Science, we’ve shown abrupt climate changes across the Northern Hemisphere and into the southern mid-latitudes occurred simultaneously, within decades of each other, throughout the last glacial period. We’ve also determined exactly when the abrupt changes occurred, much more precisely than before.

This can help us predict how abrupt climate changes might play out in the future.

A series of abrupt climate changes

Scientists can peer into Earth’s climate history through long ice cylinders, called “ice cores”, drilled from the Greenland ice sheet. Changes in the chemical composition of these ice cores reveal that the surrounding atmospheric temperature repeatedly warmed by 8-16℃, and each time within just a few decades.

An ice core. Ancient ice can reveal what the surrounding climate was once like. AAP Image/ACECRC

Each warming event was followed by a more gradual period of cooling. These abrupt warming and cooling events happened more than 25 times throughout the last glacial period, and are known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events. They reflect changes in circulation patterns of the Atlantic Ocean.

While we have records of climate changes from many regions, the relative timing of these changes between Greenland and across the northern hemisphere into the southern sub-tropics is not well understood.

This has been difficult to resolve because we need very precisely dated records to make exact comparisons in timing. Ice cores provide a wealth of information about Dansgaard-Oeschger events. But while they faithfully reproduce the patterns of past climate, they are difficult to date very precisely.

Crystal time capsules beneath our feet

For our study, we turned to more precisely datable climate records: those from cave stalagmites.

Stalagmites are cave mineral deposits, which build up layer-by-layer on the cave floor. Their growth is fed by water dripping from the cave ceiling, which carries with it a chemical signal of temperature and rainfall conditions above the cave at that time. This signal is trapped in the crystal structure of the growing stalagmite.

Stalagmites can be dated very precisely, by measuring the decay of minute amounts of uranium trapped in them. This key feature enables us to compare the timing of climate events from place to place.

Stalagmites hold chemical signals that reveal what the climate above the cave was like thousands of years ago. Shutterstock

However, long, high-quality stalagmite records are rare. Scientists from around the world have been working for more than 20 years to produce these records. Only now that enough records are available, we are able to make precise comparisons of the timing of Dansgaard-Oeschger events between different regions.

We collated and compared 63 published stalagmite records from caves in Asia, Europe and South America, and we determined the timings of abrupt climate changes in each.

What we found

Our results show that during each Dansgaard-Oeschger event, climate changes felt in Asia, South America and Europe occurred within decades of one another. Being able to determine this level of synchrony is remarkable, given we are looking at events that occurred many tens of thousands of years ago.

This means that as large temperature increases were occurring in Greenland, abrupt changes were also occurring in air temperature and rainfall in Europe, and in the monsoon systems in Asia and South America.

So why is this important? First of all, finding that climate change events occurred in lots of different parts of the world within decades provides clues as to how they started in the first place.

It tells us the changes were likely propagated from the North Atlantic region to these locations through the re-organisation of patterns in atmospheric circulation. And knowing this can help scientists narrow down the underlying triggers, which are still not conclusive.

And our findings mean the precise ages from the stalagmites can be used to better date ice cores, enhancing one of the most important records we have of the last glacial climate.

In the last glacial period, vast ice sheets covered much of the world. Shutterstock

Implications for the future

The abrupt climate changes we studied occurred under very different conditions compared to the climate of today.

While our ancestors lived through the last glacial period, humans are unlikely to experience Dansgaard-Oeschger events for many thousands of years, until the earth has again cooled to glacial temperatures.

However, piecing together the puzzle of how abrupt climate changes took place in the past will help us to understand how abrupt climate changes might occur in the future. For example, our findings will help validate climate models used to predict climate changes.

Showing that profound changes in climate can occur simultaneously across large regions of the Earth highlights just how unstable and interconnected our climate system can be.

‘All things will outlast us’: how the Indigenous concept of deep time helps us understand environmental destruction

by Ann McGrath, The Conversation:  https://theconversation.com/all-things-will-outlast-us-how-the-indigenous-concept-of-deep-time-helps-us-understand-environmental-destruction-132201

The bushfire royal commission is examining ways Indigenous land and fire management could improve Australia’s resilience to national disasters. On the face of it, this offers an opportunity to embrace Indigenous ways of knowing.

But one traditional practice unlikely to be examined is the Indigenous concept of “deep time”. This concept offers all Australians a blueprint for understanding the land we live on.

In the words of University of Technology, Sydney, Visiting Research Fellow and Yuwaalaraay/Gamilaraay woman  Frances Peters-Little:

All things will outlast us, the land will change, and survive … Yes, the land will be different. But new things will come of it.

For non-Indigenous Australians like myself, the past summer of bushfires seemed to mark the end times. Indigenous Australians also grieved the enormous losses wrought last fire season – but their long perspective on history offers hope.

The ‘deep time’ concept offers all Australians a blueprint for understanding the land. Dean Lewins/AAP

What is deep time?

Deep time asks us to rethink our narrow conceptions of time by looking back far into Earth’s history, and looking forward far into the future.

The Indigenous Australian sense of history spans the 65,000 or more years they have lived on this continent. This goes way beyond the Western concept of “ancient history”, set in the Northern Hemisphere and reaching little beyond 6,000 years.

Australia’s deep human history covers everything Aboriginal people achieved before 1770 – the year marking the arrival of British navigator Lieutenant James Cook on the Endeavour – and 1788 when convicts under the governance of Arthur Phillip arrived.

Different groups of Indigenous people witnessed these events. But they also witnessed the great climate dramas of the Pleistocene and the Holocene. They experienced the chilling cold and adapted to the drying up of key water sources such as Willandra Lakes in far west New South Wales.

Around Sydney, they witnessed river systems forming and changing course around Kamay or Botany Bay, and the lands of Port Phillip Bay rapidly filling with water. In Queensland, they witnessed their lands being submerged and islands such as Koba (Fitzroy Island) being created. Some are thought to have observed the Great Barrier Reef being formed and  volcanoes erupting.

The Indigenous Australian sense of history spans the 65,000 or more years they’ve lived on this continent. Shutterstock

Beyond a Western sense of time

The story of deep history cannot be gleaned from the kinds of written evidence left by Cook and Phillip in their 18th-century journals. Rather, information about the deep past is held in features of the landscape itself.

As the Anangu people of Uluru explain, the land contains proof of a spoken narrative, like a photograph. The land’s markings are the archives, the inscriptions revealing and proving deep history stories.

Nature can expose some of these stories. In southwestern Victoria last summer, for example, the bushfires uncovered more sections of the ancient stone fish traps at Budj Bim.

Similarly, in the late 1960s, erosive winds took away sand deposited over tens of thousands of years, revealing the grave site of Lady Mungo in southwestern NSW. Here, her remains were ritually burnt 40,000 years ago.

For Aboriginal people, these events constitute their ancestors revealing themselves; people of the past speaking directly to those in the present. It is almost as if the ancestors are living today – in what anthropologist WEH Stanner translated as an “everywhen”.

The Budj Bim cultural landscape was heritage listed after fires exposed its intricate aquaculture system, built by Indigenous Australians. PR handout image

A blueprint for change

News in May that mining company Rio Tinto destroyed two rock shelters containing evidence of habitation dating back 46,000 years triggered public outrage. Perhaps this signals a burgeoning realisation that to understand our land, Australians need a history that stretches well beyond 1788.

To achieve this, Indigenous custodians, parks officers, historians and archaeologists might work together to develop a “deep time” research policy. This might include a national survey to assess the cultural heritage of Australia’s deep past.

Across Australia, many such sites – containing ancient rock art, engravings and the like – are little known and sometimes neglected. Surveying them will give all Australians insights into ecological change.

Of course, some of this work is already underway. Last summer’s Blue Mountains fires burnt some of these relics. But  researchers and Indigenous people are working together to record and conserve remaining sites.

At Namadgi National Park near Canberra, rock art identifies animals of the region, such as dingoes, kangaroos and wallabies. Firefighters successfully saved the Yankee Hat rock art site, including ripping up its timber boardwalks to prevent it burning. Figures at the site were painted over hundreds, or possibly thousands of years.

Elsewhere, such as in the Kuringai National Park in NSW, rock engravings point to astronomical knowledge about the Milky Way. The appearance of an emu figure in the sky once signalled it was time to gather emu eggs.

Indigenous Australians use astronomy, such as this emu constellation, to identify ecological patterns. Dylan O'Donnell/Wikimedia

A deeper understanding

Embracing a deep, expansive understanding of non-linear time helps give context to disasters such as bushfires. On Australia Day this year as the fires raged around Canberra, Frances Peters-Little told me:

There’s a lot of talk of extinction. (But) Aboriginal people are focusing on rejuvenation. It is our responsibility to ensure the land is protected … As a culture that has lived here tens of thousands of years, we know this. We have been here too long to think it’s the end of things.

We must all think of ourselves not just in biographical time – inhabiting one lifespan – but rather, of the future generations to come and those long before us.

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This article was reviewed by University of Technology, Sydney, Visiting Research Fellow and Yuwaalaraay/Gamilaraay woman Frances Peters-Little.

Library of Things: A cornerstone of the real sharing economy (free ebook)

by Tom Llewellyn, Shareable:  https://www.shareable.net/library-of-things-a-cornerstone-of-the-real-sharing-economy-free-ebook/

Image: Eddie Hamilton

A cultural shift from owning everything we might ever conceivably want to simply have access to good quality items when we need them started to take shape following the recession in the late 2000s. As the economy recovered, there was a general concern that most people would return to pre-recession levels of consumption and the act of sharing would fall out of vogue. But, according to Gene Homicki, co-founder of myTurn*, a cloud-based inventory platform for Libraries of Things (LoT) even as the economy rebounded, Libraries of Things continued to gain popularity.

There are more than 400 publicly accessible libraries that provide tools, kitchen items, toys, audio/visual equipment, electronics, musical instruments, and more on myTurn alone. These comprise more than a quarter-million items available to rent and nearly a million loans annually.

For the past decade, Shareable has been on the vanguard of covering this trend. We’ve done deep dives into how libraries are boldly innovating to meet the needs of changing communities, partnered on the successful campaign to save seed sharing in the United States, advised municipal leaders  on the benefits of LoTs for their cities, and produced several resources to support organizers around the world to start LoTs in their communities.

“Library of Things: A Cornerstone of the Real Sharing Economy” is both a celebration of how far LoTs have come and a glimpse into where they’re going.

In this book we explore:

• How traditional libraries are reinventing themselves while expanding their offerings and reaffirming their role as a vital community service.
• What you should know before starting an LoT (and how to do it!)
• How pop-up and mobile LoTs like The Thingery and ShareShed are expanding their reach and meeting the needs of more people in their communities.
• What opportunities exist for new services due to several advances in technology.
• And much more.

We hope you’ll feel inspired to support your local Library of Things after reading this ebook and maybe even work with others to start one yourself!

To Download "Library of Things: A Cornerstone of the Real Sharing Economy", go to: 

https://www.shareable.net/library-of-things-a-cornerstone-of-the-real-sharing-economy-free-ebook/

The ebook features our editorial series covering the past, present and future of libraries of things.

We know how to fix student debt: The U.S. government spends more on higher education than many countries where students graduate with far less debt. Is there a better way?

by David Byrne, Reasons to be Cheerful:  https://reasonstobecheerful.world/we-know-how-to-fix-student-debt/

In 2019, researchers from Harvard Business School, Indiana University and Georgia State University took advantage of a fortuitous court ruling to find out what happens when you get rid of student debt. A judge had ruled that National Collegiate, a company that bought up student debt and treated it as an asset, actually didn’t have a valid claim to much of that debt. So the debt was cancelled. How much? 800,000 individual loans amounting to $12 billion. A lot of students and their parents were very happy.

The researchers realized this was a golden opportunity. By tracking other graduates who lived in the same zip codes with similar amounts of debt as the lucky 800,000, they could  compare the outcomes of the still-indebted control group with the suddenly debt-free students. Before this ruling, comparing students with debt to those without had always been complicated. Now it was easy.

What they found was that students whose debt was erased ended up with incomes that were 12.5 percent higher than their indebted peers in the years following graduation. Why? Not just because they had more immediate cash on hand — that difference was taken into account. The extra income often derived from changes in their behavior. The debt-free graduates could take more career risks. They were more mobile, able to move to where the higher paying jobs were. They could also pay off other debts — credit cards, car loans, mortgages — which improved their credit ratings and prevented defaults.

Removing college debt, the researchers found, improved these students’ financial outcomes in all sorts of unexpected ways. More of them got married and had kids, for example. Their improved circumstances benefit the entire economy.

Credit: Oliver Knill

The debt problem

Some 44.7 million American adults are saddled with student debt totaling $1.6 trillion. That’s more than all U.S. credit card debt combined. This didn’t happen overnight. In the 1980s, the government began to replace student grants (which are essentially gifts) with loans, shifting the financial costs of higher education to students and their parents. Meanwhile, state governments cut the budgets of state colleges. The cost of higher education in the U.S. has surged more than 500 percent since 1985. A $10,000 education 35 years ago would cost over $50,000 today. The costs are rising faster than inflation, which makes for a dicey investment.

Student debt has quadrupled in the last 15 years, leading many high school graduates to wonder if an investment in higher education is still worthwhile. For the most part, it is. With a college education, you stand to make 84 percent more money  than someone with just a high school diploma. In the U.S., this gap between earnings for college grads and high school grads keeps growing, mostly because wages for high school grads are declining, and wages for college grads, even if they haven’t skyrocketed, continue to rise. 

Still, as we saw, all that student debt can hold folks back well beyond college. It’s a drag on the entire economy. Eliminating it is a worthy goal, which is why there have been proposals to cancel student debt. But simply canceling it doesn’t deal with the root of the problem: the high cost of college in the U.S. Until we deal with that, the next crop of students will simply rack up huge debts all over again.

Can this be fixed? Yes, it can. If we look at other countries, many have solved the problem of crazy-expensive higher education, and by extension, the student debt problem. 

Credit: Oliver Knill

Free and cheap tuition is good, but that is only part of the solution

College tends to be very affordable in Europe. Top universities are tuition-free in Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Czech Republic, Greece and Scotland. Sweden now charges a nominal fee of E500 for undergraduates. Germany charges for graduate programs, but undergraduate education is free. Austria and France are almost free for EU citizens — they charge a few hundred Euros. 

It’s not just European universities. Mexico and Brazil have extremely cheap higher education options. Argentina is tuition-free, as is Kenya, Morocco, Egypt, Uruguay and Turkey.

Credit: Mises Institute

A typical American response to this might be, “Oh, those countries simply have high taxes, so that’s how they subsidize colleges.” But it’s not as simple as that. The U.S. is 73rd in the world in spending on higher education as a percentage of GDP —  below Sweden, New Zealand and Norway, but ABOVE Germany, France and Canada, all of which have college options that are far more affordable. So it’s not a simple matter of tax more, spend more, problem solved. 

In many cases it’s not just the tuition that is the burden, but the cost of housing and eating for four years. Some places have come up with creative approaches.

Credit: Oliver Knill

New Zealand

In New Zealand, the first year of college is free, but tuition can be as high as NZ 10,000 ($6,600 USD) a year after that. So, not exactly free at all. However, government student loans are interest-free, and students don’t have to begin paying them back until their post-graduation income rises higher than NZ 20,000 ($13,300 USD). The loans are also interest-free for as long as you stay in New Zealand. This system has allowed a lot more kids to go to college — three years after these loans were introduced in 1992, university enrollment went up 49 percent. 

New Zealand also offers a Student Allowance — basically, grants to cover the cost of living expenses. Whether or not you have to pay these back depends on your parents’ income, your age and whether you are married or have a child.

Norway

Similarly, in Norway tuition is completely free, but the cost of living is high. This is a problem in the U.S., too. Part of what makes American colleges so expensive are all the extras that come with it — the dorms, the food halls, the football stadiums, the fundraising departments. And because American students often don’t live at home, add-ons like housing, food and transportation can be as expensive as tuition. 

Norway solves this problem by making state loans available that can be used by students to cover living expenses. These loans are interest-free until graduation, and some students can convert up to 40 percent of them into grants that don’t have to be paid back.

Denmark

In Denmark, tuition is free, and the cost of living is not as high, but even so there are grants to cover expenses depending on parental income. I’m seeing a pattern here.

South Korea

In South Korea, tuition is about one-third as high as in the U.S., which is still much higher than a lot of other countries. But some 18 percent of these costs are covered by private companies and foundations. I’m not sure how one prevents undue influence from corporations on the syllabus, but one hopes that the companies realize that even without influence an increase in graduates benefits them all.

Germany

The German system is unique. Early in life, kids are placed into one of three tracks: college preparatory, vocational training, or something in between. This means a lower percentage of folks go to university than in similar countries — even though it’s tuition free! This early-stage sorting means that those who do go to college tend to get masters or doctorates, while those on the vocational track get training and go into the job market. One has to make this choice early on — in high school or even earlier — which, for some of us, seems a bit young to commit to one’s life path. It’s not impossible to jump over to the university track later, but not many do.

Like in other countries, to cover the costs there are government interest-free loans for which repayment depends on post-graduation income. This model — repayment based on later income — seems to be a common and successful means of greatly reducing the burden of student debt.

Higher education as a public good?

The countries mentioned above don’t completely subsidize every higher education cost, but they have eased the burden by lowering or eliminating tuition and making loan paybacks flexible. These policies have proven successful and have lessened the crippling effects of student debt. We can learn from their examples. 

We accept lots of things as public goods and happily pay for them: drinking water, fire and police departments, sewage and garbage disposal, roads and bridges. I pay for roads even though I don’t own a car because, well, that’s how my groceries get to the local store. And folks would go nuts if the fire department only served those who paid for the service, though that is actually the case in some communities.

In many countries, higher education is viewed this way, too — as a public good, a basic right (in the U.S., that concept is wholeheartedly embraced up through high school, so the idea of education as a right does exist — it just stops short of college). It would be unthinkable to defund grade schools and high schools (though austerity budget cuts amount to the same thing). The question is, do we accept the idea that, in the contemporary world, college might be essential as well? The bar has been raised. Education fosters resilience, which, as recent events have shown, is something the U.S. needs more than ever. 

How Rights of Nature victories in Colombia’s rainforests can inform shared knowledge systems globally

by Daniel Henryk Rasolt, Shareable:  https://www.shareable.net/how-rights-of-nature-victories-in-colombias-rainforests-can-inform-shared-knowledge-systems-globally/

Wounaan Indigenous community of Union Balsalito along the San Juan River in Colombia’s Choco. Photo by D.H. Rasolt

Rights of Nature is a movement that has been fortifying itself around the world as an antithesis to the dominant paradigm of limitless growth and extractivism. Firmly grounded in holistic Indigenous worldviews, this ecocentric paradigm could be a global game changer if a coordinated and adaptable effort — based on shared knowledge systems and accountability — is established.

Colombia, with its biological, cultural and hydrological richness, has become a trailblazer in legally formalizing Rights of Nature, beginning with the 2017 Judgement of the Atrato River, but to what end? Who will defend these rights against powerful legal and illegal natural resource exploiting interests in such a conflicted country, and how can these formal voices for nature be strengthened by tools of modern science and technology, as opposed to repressed by them? 

Colombia’s Choco: Illegal gold mining, conflict and a river with rights

The Choco Rainforest along Colombia’s Pacific Coast pulsates with life. Thousands of endemic species call this dense forest  home, while expansive rivers empty out into the ocean through extensive deltas and mangrove forests. Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities live side-by-side — or, more frequently, face-to-face — along the rivers of the Choco.

The isolated rivers and forests of the Choco have also been hotspots of conflict, illicit activity and state neglect, facilitated by their strategic access to the coast. Illegal gold mining in particular — along with drug, arms, timber and wildlife trafficking — has run the illegal economy and fueled conflict in the Choco for decades, making its Rivers of Blood the harsh, semi-literal inverse of the Indigenous interpretation of rivers as Mother Earth’s lifeblood. 

While artisanal mining for alluvial gold was — and remains — a relatively low-impact livelihood for the Choco’s many descendents of African slaves, semi-industrial mechanized mining has deforested, degraded and contaminated the rivers and riverine habitats of the Choco for the past 20-30 years. Both the open-pit mines and dredges along the rivers have used mercury in copious quantities, poisoning the drinking water and fish species. The ecological and health crisis is devastating Afro-Colombian and traditional Indigenous riverine communities. 

The Embera Dobidá — which literally means people of the river — live along the 416 mile, south-to-north flowing Atrato River and its tributaries, and have been actively protesting the exploitation of the Atrato and its surroundings for decades.

Embera Dobidá leader Belarmino Tunay told me in December 2019, “For us, the people of the river, the Atrato is everything. It is the origin, the provider of life and the extension of Karagabí [a holistic conception of a cosmic world and creator] … The Atrato speaks to us, and it is suffering. The damage being done affects our health and threatens to destroy our culture.” Studies have shown dangerously high levels of mercury in the water, in fish species and in the people living along the banks of the Atrato, including members of the Embera Dobidá.

Illegal gold mine in Colombia’s Choco Rainforest. Photo by D.H. Rasolt

South of the Atrato River Basin lives the Wounaan Indigenous ethnic group, principally concentrated along the San Juan River within the Choco. 

The San Juan has its source along the Andean slopes then flows west-southwest-west before draining 240 miles downstream into an impressive delta full of rich mangrove forests that depend on nutrient-rich sediments  accumulated throughout the San Juan’s journey. Many fish species spawn within these mangrove forests, and just off the coast are  breeding grounds for humpback whales, whose dances and songs inspire awe above and below the surface. It is a beautiful area at the confluence of different ecosystems, where Indigenous communities lived in harmony with this diverse ecological milieu for millennia.

The Wounaan — sometimes referred to as Embera Wounaan — are closely related to the Embera Dobidá (as well as other Embera such as the Chamí and Katío), in genealogy, linguistics and many traditions, though they subscribe to a number of distinct beliefs and practices specific to their biogeography. The Wounaan base their worldview around a “Supreme Father” known as Inwadam, who created all living beings in, along, and including the San Juan River, the less voluminous but ecologically unique Baudó River, and the limitless Pacific Ocean that they flow into. 

Respected Wounaan teacher and werregue artisan Yenny Cardenas spoke to me in her community of Union Balsalito on the northern bank of the lower San Juan River. “The river provides us with our livelihoods and our food, but more importantly it allows us to preserve what our ancestors have taught us about Inwadam and to practice our traditional crafts and medicine,” she said. “We live in constant fear though, knowing that someday soon we may be forced to leave our homes on the river permanently.” 

Tragically, the last few decades have brought strife and degradation to the idyllic river and riverine communities of the San Juan River Basin. And like the Atrato River, the San Juan River is believed to be contaminated with mercury from illegal gold mining upstream.

“Weaving Tradition” – Vannessa Circe – Oil on Canvas – 24” x 30”

Within this complex socio-economic and environmental context, Colombia’s Constitutional Court gained international notoriety in 2017 for granting legal biocultural rights of “personhood” the degraded Atrato River. Local “guardians”  —  including members of Embera Dobidá and Afro-Colombian communities — are now responsible for being the legal voice of the river, in order to ensure its conservation, restoration and dynamic evolution.

Beyond symbolic legal victories

How can we turn this potentially revolutionary ecocentric framework of Rights of Nature from eloquent legalese, symbolic victories and often misunderstood traditional Indigenous worldviews, into pragmatic action in high-risk areas dominated by extensions of the modern world, such as rivers and riverine communities impacted by illegal gold mining and conflict?

To begin with, ways must be found to ensure the health and security of those individuals and local communities who speak in defense of rivers, forests, coral reefs, individual animal species and other designated legal persons within the Rights of Nature paradigm. Eliminating the existential threats to the Embera Dobidá and Wounaan, for example, is essential to protecting and restoring the diverse ecosystems of the Choco. 

To bolster formalized legal Rights of Nature in general and enforce accountability, culturally appropriate tools for monitoring, communicating and incontrovertibly documenting violations of nature’s rights are also needed. For off-grid communities, integrated solutions for connectivity and access to energy sources are also important, to coordinate monitoring efforts between themselves, and to share and receive vital information in real-time with the outside world.

Adaptable complex frameworks, such as the Multiple Evidence Base (MEB) approach and Mixed-method bicultural research, can help guide the formation and evolution of resilient, shared-knowledge initiatives around the world. “Using water as a central point of multidisciplinary, intercultural and educational collaboration, we can develop new ways of understanding our surroundings and place within them,” says professor Rafael Hurtado, a physicist from Colombia’s National University. Professor Hurtado leads REMONA, a community-based water quality monitoring network built around principles of complex systems science, that has recently been introduced to several isolated Indigenous communities in Colombia.

A young Arhuaco man analyzes a sample of water from a sacred river within his territory in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Photo by V. Circe.

These kinds of multidisciplinary and intercultural shared knowledge approaches between integrated science and traditional knowledge can produce mutual understanding and evidence considered concrete within modern judicial structures; they may, in fact, form the foundational structure for upholding the rights of rivers and other dynamic ecosystems to “exist, thrive and evolve.”

Progress in Colombia since the Judgement of the Atrato River

The Judgement of the Atrato River set a strong precedent for Rights of Nature in Colombia, and along with some celebrated rulings granting personhood to sacred rivers in New Zealand  and India, for further Rights of Nature advancements around the world. 

Between 2018-2020 there have been a number of local court rulings in Colombia, mostly at the municipal level, that have given nominal legal rights to some of Colombia’s rivers: the Cauca River, La Plata River and Pance River, for example. Rivers connect diverse ecosystems, and damage in one or multiple sections of a river can have cumulative impacts downstream, so — in reality — coordinated international, national or at least regional efforts are needed to effectively enforce Rights of Nature for rivers. 

The big post-Atrato victory for the Rights of Nature movement in Colombia, and potentially for our highly stressed living planet, was a 2018 ruling by the Colombian Supreme Court  granting legal rights to the entire Colombian Amazon region. The proclamation builds off of the Judgement of the Atrato River, and is a rather beautifully crafted and comprehensive  document. How Rights of Nature for the Colombian Amazon will formally and effectively be implemented remains to be seen, as deforestation, land grabbing and illegal gold mining  have rapidly expanded throughout the entire Amazon region, including in several parts of the post-conflict Colombian Amazon. Illegal actors have also become further emboldened by the uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and  rising global gold prices. 

An integrated, multidisciplinary and intercultural evidence-based system is needed to support the newly designated legal voices of Colombia’s rich ecosystems. A successful framework for enforcing Rights of Nature for the Choco and the Colombian Amazon could lay the groundwork for coordinated, interconnected efforts for the entire Amazon, and other  bioculturally rich areas globally.