Dear GNHRE members,

Allow me to pass on to you exciting news of a new book from Cambridge University Press by two of our members, Burns Weston and David Bollier (see attached promotional flyer).  I would really like to encourage as many of you as possible to engage with this important new text - and more importantly, with the agenda it represents.  Indeed, The Journal of Human Rights and the Environment will be the formal international launch pad for scholarly engagement with a Draft Universal Covenant Affirming a Human Rights to Commons and Rights-based Governance of Earth's Natural Wealth, drafted by Burns and Bollier - to be launched in Edition 5.1 'Human Bodies in Material Space'.  The idea is to introduce this document for discussion, critical engagement and further development and for the GNHRE to play a key role in engagement with the implications of the proposed Draft Covenant and its development - as well as with any relevant actions and campaigns emerging from this new consciousness-raising initiative.  The GNHRE and the JHRE are fully committed to the creation of a vigorous discursive space for precisely such agendas.  

Here is the personal message from Burns - and please note the attached flyer for the book,

Warm regards, Anna

Message from Burns Weston:

Dear Anna:

I’m eager to share with you my good news.  As evidenced by the attached promotional flyer, my new book (with commons scholar David Bollier) has been just recently published/released from Cambridge University Press: Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons.  It also has been posted on Amazon.com, complete with seven early “reviews”: http://www.amazon.com/Green-Governance-Ecological-Survival-Commons/dp/1107034361/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358267294&sr=1-8&keywords=burns+weston―including an endorsement from James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City who, as you know, early sounded the alarm about global warming and climate change some 30 years ago.  Judging from these early “reviews,” we like to think that we may have produced a policy game-changer of sorts.  At least we hope so.

That's the good news.  The unhappy news is that, because the book is published as an academic treatise whose primary purchasers are college and university libraries, the price is distressingly steep.  However, we were able to persuade Cambridge to release a less costly Kindle edition via Amazon.com, now online, and they are now discounting the cost of the book itself by 20% (see http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/discountpromotion/?site_locale=en_US&code=WESTON13).  Also they will publish an even less expensive paperback edition next year.  Perhaps you can use your organizational affiliations to acquire a copy for yourself; but in any case we hope you will be able to spread the word about our book to relevant policy-makers, colleagues, libraries, bookstores, and friends.  In our humble opinion, we think it worthy of widespread responsible attention.

Allow me, please, to explain this blunt talk: David Bollier‘s and my book is not your ordinary academic book.  Scholarly though it be, it is also, even fundamentally, a call to (peaceful) arms to get serious―humanly, in contrast to technologically―about the environmental degradation that is all around us from local to global and including, of course, global warming and climate change which, as you well know, is the greatest threat facing humankind today excepting perhaps nuclear proliferation.   Embedded in our book’s Appendix, indeed, is a Universal Covenant Affirming A Human Right to Commons- and Rights-based Governance of Earth’s Natural Wealth and Resources that we prepared which calls upon “all citizens, organizations, and governments of the world to commit themselves to recovering the Earth and humanity’s shared inheritance and future creations”―and to do so with a keen sense of urgency about “taking decisive, collective action to transform existing systems and structures of ecological governance so as to reduce climate change, loss of biodiversity, and other severe threats to Earth’s life-giving and life-sustaining capacity.”  Our Covenant, based on and built from our book, will soon be going viral over the Internet, especially after it has been launched, internationally, as the basis for an extended engagement and campaign in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, specifically to excite scholarly engagement with the Covenant as the basis for future reflection, action and hopefully, transformation.  We hope, thus to make waves as well as news worldwide.  

Kind and hopeful greetings,

              Burns Weston (and David Bollier)