Os Direitos da Natureza na Constituição Equatoriana de 2008: o novo constitucionalismo latino-americano rumo ao paradigma ecológico

Abstract

Humanity faces a serious ecological crisis, triggered by an anthropocentric and mechanistic worldview, which dissociates man and nature and sees nature as an object to be mastered and explored. This worldview's shown to be incapable of meeting the new socio-environmental demands, which call for a paradigm shift towards a systemic and ecological worldview. This article analyzes the rights of nature as an instrument to break with the anthropocentric paradigm. For this, the deductive method and the qualitative research technique are used, through the analysis of the 2008 Ecuadorian Constitution, the first in the world to foresee nature as a subject of rights, which was consolidated in the context of the movement called New Latin American Constitutionalism. It is concluded that the positivization of the rights of nature is a measure that's imposed in order to stop the ecological crisis and maintain satisfactory conditions for life on the planet, with the ecological paradigm being our possible future.