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This is clear in India’s heartland, where the steel and aluminum corporations’ limitless appetite for profits is clashing head on with the rights of the tribals to their land and homes, their forests and rivers, their cultures and ways of life. The tribals are saying a loud and clear “no” to their forced uprooting, and unrest is growing. The only way to get to the minerals and coal that feed the “limitless growth” model in the face of democratic resistance is the use of militarized violence. Operation “Green Hunt” has been launched in the tribal areas of India with precisely this purpose, even though the proclaimed objective is to clear out the “Maoists.” Under operation Green Hunt, more than forty thousand armed paramilitary forces have been placed in the tribal areas. Operation Green Hunt shows clearly that the current economic paradigm can only unfold through increased militarization and the undermining of democratic and human rights. The economic fundamentalism of “limitless growth” is clearly collapsing. The technological fundamentalism that has externalized costs—both ecological and social—and blinded us to ecological destruction has also reached a dead end. Climate chaos, the externality of technologies based on the use of fossil fuels, is a wakeup call that we cannot continue on the same path. The high cost of industrial farming is running up against limits, both in terms of the ecological destruction of the natural capital of soil, water, biodiversity, and air and in terms of the creation of malnutrition, with a billion people denied food and another two billion denied health because of obesity, diabetes, and other food-related diseases.

We need a new paradigm for living on the earth, because the old one is clearly not working. Finding alternatives is now imperative for the survival of the human species—not only alternative tools but alternative worldviews. How do we look at ourselves in this world? What are humans for? Are we merely money-making and resource-guzzling machines? Or do we have a higher purpose, a higher end?

I believe we do.

I believe that we are members of the Earth family—of Vasudhaiva Kutumbkam. And as members of the Earth family, our first and highest duty is to take care of Mother Earth—Prithvi, Gaia, Pachamana. And the better we take care of her, the more food, water, health, and wealth we have. “Earth rights” refers first and foremost to the rights of Mother Earth and our corresponding duties and responsibilities to defend those rights. Earth rights are also the rights of humans as they flow from the rights of Mother Earth—the right to food and water, the right to health and a safe environment, the right to the commons, the rivers, the seeds, the biodiversity, the atmosphere.

I have given the name “Earth Democracy” to this new paradigm of living as an Earth community, respecting the rights of Mother Earth.

Earth Democracy enables us to envision and create living democracies. Living democracy enables democratic participation in all matters of life and death—the food we eat or do not have access to; the water we drink or are denied due to privatization or pollution; the air we breathe or are poisoned by. Living democracies are based on the intrinsic worth of all species, all peoples, all cultures; a just and equal sharing of this earth’s vital resources; and sharing the decisions about the use of the earth’s resources.

Earth Democracy protects the ecological processes that maintain life and the fundamental human rights that are the basis of the right to life, including the right to water, the right to food, the right to health, the right to education, and the right to jobs and livelihoods. Earth Democracy is based on the recognition of and respect for the life of all species and all people.

Ahimsa, or nonviolence, is the basis of many faiths that have emerged on Indian soil. Translated into economics, nonviolence implies that our systems of production, trade, and consumption should not use up the ecological space of other species