Nature 9

But not satisfied with this kindness, man enters the bowels of his mother [earth], rummaging through her womb, injuring and damaging all internal parts. In the end, he tears the whole body to pieces and completely paralyses its powers.

Ulrich Grober (2010): Wem gehört die Erde.

Paul Schneevogel (1460 – ca. 1517, also known as Paulus Niavis) was a philologist and school teacher.

The story Iudicium Iovis - The Judgment of Jupiter, Held in the Valley of Beauty... constitutes an early and radical green manifesto. It is about a court hearing by the ancient gods against the miner for raping and desecrating mother earth. This quote is from the speech made by Mother Earth's advocate. Here, Schneevogel condemns the fact that people do not recognise that they are destroying their own livelihoods by destroying nature. The context in which he wrote was the exploitation of silver deposits in the German Ore Mountains in the 15th century, which produced great damage to the environment. The picture shows silver mine workers in the Freiburg Minster. The Inca in Peru left silver in the mountains, and there is a convention that the mountain itself prohibited them from exploiting it. At the beginning of the 16th century, however, Spanish colonisers began to establish silver mines and forced workers to work underground through the “mita” system (Latin Amerika Institute FU-Berlin, 2011). To this day, social movements around the world continue to fight against the exploitation of mineral resources, e.g. in Colombia against gold mining (Democracy Now, May 18, 2018).

*Lateinamerika-Institut FU Berlin (2011): Die Silberminen in Potosi (Peggy Goede). *Democracy Now (2018): Afro-Colombian Activist Francia Márquez, 2018 Goldman Prize Winner, on Stopping Illegal Gold Mining.

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