“If we continue like this, we are going straight to collapse”, Ricardo Lorenzetti's call to seek collective solutions to environmental issues

The environmental challenge has already reached great dimensions at a time when the citizens of the world began to feel on their skin and not in theory the effects of the deterioration of the environment. This represents a call to find solutions to present, past and future problems.

With this call, Ricardo Lorenzetti, Minister of the Supreme Court of Justice of Argentina, said that “we are at the very moment when all the inhabitants of this planet began to feel very directly the effects of an environmental crisis, this generates fear and this generates a lot of hopelessness, we have to to think about the transition from fear and frustration to hope, how we build a solution... that's how big the environmental challenge is.”

During the Master Conference “Challenges and Trends of the New Environmental and Climate Constitutionalism” at the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) in Mexico, Lorenzetti reiterated that the environmental challenge is great, especially at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated to the world how civilization is highly sensitive to a virus and how it is increasingly difficult to work in polluted environments.

“We need to have the strength to understand that our people demand a large number of substantive solutions that can only be solved with the cooperation of powers and medium-term and long-term solutions that involve costs, but it is something that the population asks for,” he added.

In this context, he stressed the importance of thinking about collective goods and rights, rather than individual ones, because when talking about environmental conflicts, future generations must also be protected.

A new field that opens up in the matter, the minister said, is that of obligations “because those who now make decisions against the environment were also future generations, and now there are generations that we must protect so that they have the same environmental capital that we had.” This, in turn, will help to resolve an intergenerational conflict and ensure a principle of non-regression, that is to say that there will be no regression in what has been achieved so far in the area of environmental law.

“Climate change exceeds national competences, air or river pollution involves several cities or districts. Political and judicial jurisdictions must be rethought because there is always a discussion about competences, we must redefine and adjust, this is another transformation. We are living in shock, we are experiencing a huge change in humanity,” warned the minister, who will be declared “Herald of Education and Environmental Justice” by the Tlaxcala State Congress on Saturday.

Ricardo Luis Lorenzetti was born in the city of Rafaela, in the province of Santa Fe, on September 19, 1955 and since 2004 he became minister of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation of Argentina.

Lawyer and PhD in Legal and Social Sciences from the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, he was president of the Court from January 2007 to December 2015. At the University of Buenos Aires he led the Specialization in Environmental Law, the specialty in Damage Law, and the Update Program in the Civil and Commercial Code.

Since 2020, he has been an advisor to the Inter-American Institute of Justice and Sustainability (IIJS), an organization based in Washington, United States.

As Minister, Jurist and Academic, he has received three appointments as Doctor Honoris Causa and national and international distinctions, including the “Academic Merit” distinction by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 2004 and the Prize of the National Academy of Law and Social Sciences of Buenos Aires; Venera “Ius Ambiens-Lumen Orbis”, awarded by the World League of Environmental Lawyers of Mexico.

Likewise, he is the author of more than 40 books on environmental and legal issues, including titles such as Theory of Environmental Law (a work that was published in Mexico), The Art of Doing Justice, Collective Justice, Fundamental Rules of Private Law and Consumer Defense, among others others.

In one of his most recent books, The New Enemy. The environmental collapse (South American, 2021), the lawyer describes the signs of the environmental, social and political crisis, which are reflected not only in the imbalances that nature shows but also in the emergence of new diseases, crises in the water supply, fires and effects on the same people, among others.

Therefore, in its text, it calls for overcoming the polarization usually triggered by “minor disputes”, since the climate crisis and its social and economic consequences will affect rich and poor alike because “there will be no distinction or place to hide if the planet explodes”.

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