The Conscious Constitution

What is required is a new constitution with a new backbone — a vertebral column defined and described through a Great Preamble, where we consensually adopt a new paradigm of development, well-being, and social transformation: the sustainability of our development and transformation, with an empowered citizenship. A declarative constitution: the other way.

There are several dimensions that justify this type of conscious and declarative constitution: the massive destruction of nature; the emergence of citizenship; the importance of identity, culture and values, and the loss of the rural world; the need for an immediate exit from the capitalist neoliberal system; the importance of the local and the creation and strengthening of communities; the inseparability of the environmental, the human and the social — “social problems originate from the environment, and environmental problems have great social consequences”; the importance of humanity as a collective, beyond the sum of individuals, going from a sickly and egocentric “me” to a “we”; and the great relevance of spirituality, and the necessary balance between materiality and spirituality, at the micro level as well as the macro level.

Whatever the new constitution, it must: (i) commit to the construction of a sustainable and inter-generational society, in all its senses; (ii) meet the demands and challenges of the most vulnerable people; (iii) embrace all the needs and challenges faced by children, youth and future generations; (iv) establish a multi-national state that ratifies the autonomy of native peoples; (v) include all actors through a deliberative democracy, in constant reform and transformation.

If we individually have a being (soul), we must also recognize that we have a collective soul — that is the difference between country and nation. A nation has a soul. The constitution of a nation must have a soul. A constitution that also establishes the instruments that will strengthen the individual and collective, external and internal, material and spiritual empowerment of citizens. You cannot leave out a reflection on mechanisms for citizen participation.

What is proposed here is not a reformist model, born from a correction of the neoliberal model, or of a socialist model. It is a model with its own merits, including a feminist dimension — “feminism” and “eco-feminism” as a radical change in relation to existing paradigms. The unifying element is not the market, traditional economic efficiency, or dirty competitiveness. The unifying element is sustainability and citizen participation.

This is not an “Ecological Constitution” in the conventional sense, because that concept needs major paradigmatic changes — in particular, self-realizing that the land and animals are not “one thing.” The Earth is not a collection of material balances (physical natural resources), but a collection of different forms of life and intelligences. Exchanges with nature are exchanges of intelligence and consciousness. A constitution is not ideologically neutral, neither in its values nor in its instruments. A great value that must be included in a Conscious Constitution is to ensure the material and spiritual well-being of its citizens.

To understand relationships of interdependence requires higher levels of individual and collective consciousness. An important differentiation between proposals for a new constitution is the role played by citizens — direct and binding participation. A conscious constitution demands the death of anthropocentrism: the economy and society are born naturally from nature. Where the current constitution places economic growth ahead of equity, the fundamental element proposed here is equity, not growth — and conservation as a fundamental principle, key to managing the political, economic and social. A conscious constitution must make us go from a society organized under an economism, to a development based on rights — civil and political rights, economic, social and cultural rights, and the right to development. In this context, rights do not only belong to human beings: there must be rights of nature, animals and all sentient beings.

The Values

The most important vehicle of a conscious constitution are the values that define it, and these must be explicit within it. Without denying the importance of certain individual (non-individualistic) values such as freedom of expression, the essential values are collective (non-collectivist) values — governance of the common good, of the national and global commons. This distinguishes a conscious constitution from traditional political proposals that speak of the common good only as a residue of the private good, without changing the private sector itself. A conscious constitution and sustainable pact are not just a list of causes; the sum of causes does not give a constitution or a social pact. Several principles guide decisions, even those concerning the allocation of scarce resources: the principles of Conservation, Interdependence, All Forms of Life, Spatial, Inter-Temporal, Origin, Decentralization, Quality of Life, Collective and Community Property, and Social Construction.

Citizen Organizations

The role that citizen organizations should play is vital. The implementation of sustainability policies is impossible without the active participation of grassroots, community citizen organizations. A sustainable pact, and a conscious constitution, cannot be born, nurtured or operate in an ethical vacuum — conscious ethics.

1. The ownership of our natural resources and environmental services. All our natural resources and fundamental environmental services should be owned by the public, with the State as the guarantor of these rights. Water should belong to all of us, unlike a private or state right. This should also apply to having clean air and being responsible for it.
2. The rights of future generations. An inter-generational constitution. Future generations also have rights. Part of the jurisprudence of this proposal is presented in the document “Our Common Future” by Gro Brundtland. The responsibility of ensuring a future, at least the same as that of the present generation, rests in the hands of the State and all those who generate material wealth in our society.
3. The rights and sovereignty of our native peoples. It is unacceptable that a new constitution ignores our native peoples. It is of fundamental importance that they are at the center of this constitution. Specifically, the sovereignty of these peoples should be explicitly declared, and how the different forms of sovereignty are properly woven with all aspects of the nation.
4. The rights of nature and responsibility for their implementation. The new constitution must understand nature as a living being and not as a “thing.” The new constitution cannot end up being homocentric. Nature has rights, and respect for those rights will allow citizens to grow and develop in healthy and appropriate environments.
5. The conservation and sustainable management of our natural resources and the environment as fundamental values. Examples of the trends this requires: moving from emphasizing only quantity toward quality of development; from extractivism to management and conservation; from dirty competitiveness to eco-competitiveness; from pure competition to cooperation; from short-termism to structural consideration of the medium and long term; from management through the market or the State to integral management by citizens.
6. The importance of citizen empowerment and a participatory and deliberative democracy. Direct citizen participation. The future of a democracy lies in the direct and permanent participation of the citizenry. Sustainability and empowerment go hand in hand, and the new constitution must establish the human, institutional, cultural, ethnic, spiritual and empowerment mechanisms involved.
7. Eco-competitiveness. Responsibility for all negative impacts on the life cycle of products. The new constitution must establish the concept of eco-competitiveness — a competitiveness that internalizes all the costs of externalities within the life cycle of a project or policy, forcing producers to find the most suitable technologies to respect the environment.
8. The commitment to a healthy diet and new forms of agriculture. Organic farming, not GMOs. Some developed countries are moving decisively towards agriculture that contributes to a healthy diet, in some cases restricting international trade of non-organic products to meet internal objectives.
9. Land use planning free of ‘sacrifice zones.’ The notion of a “sacrifice zone” must be rejected, as sustainability cannot be achieved in one part of the territory at the expense of others. Citizen participation at the local and regional level is decisive for sustainable development.
10. The integral human ecology and all forms of life in our country. The ecology and the human being must be integrated as an indivisible unit; this integration is interdependent, and must respect all forms of life that inhabit nature. The constitution must adopt the motto of “the integral ecology of all forms of life,” not only of human life.
11. The decentralization of the country as a key element for the sustainable citizen economy. Our wealth, in all its possible expressions, depends on this process of decentralization — a sustainable, decentralized and citizen country as the triangle of national development.
12. A new fiscal and tax policy: taxes on bads and not on goods. The neoliberal market system does not have the mechanisms to automatically correct environmental and ecological destruction. Markets must be intervened by citizens or the State, using green taxes and other fiscal instruments to correct negative externalities.
13. The new concepts of well-being. Collective and spiritual values. New definitions of what constitutes well-being must be made explicit, in order to evaluate the extent to which interventions contribute to it — security, integration, inclusion, protection, happiness, and spiritual well-being.
14. Redistributive Justice and Ecological Justice: Foundations of Equity. The deterioration of ecology and environment generally does not originate with poor people, yet poor people generally live in the most degraded environments. This difference between the actors involved in the origin and those who suffer the incidence has created great redistributive injustices — the basis of “ecological justice.”
15. An economy without ethical vacuum: towards a new eco-morality and economy. The constitution must be clear that the economic system cannot be implemented in an ethical or moral vacuum, establishing principles of eco-morality together with a precautionary principle.