Dr. Peter Doran:

Thank you very much. I really do not want to keep the committee. I would like to bear witness very briefly to an indigenous leader who stood in the jungles of Ecuador last week and recorded a message to us and to the citizens' assembly considering biodiversity. He called on those of us considering constitutional futures to protect the cosmos and to fight for the rights of nature. He was speaking in a way that commanded our attention to the fact that we are responsible to the world when we produce a new constitution. There is an ethical command, if you like, to be responsible to the planet and to the new subjects of history, the species and the ecosystems that have been colonised and translated into dead matter and mere subjective transactions in the economy.

Part of the opportunity here is to look to new constitutional revolutions in Latin America - for example, to Bolivia, Ecuador and Chile where new constitutional imaginations are there to be modelled - and for us to learn from them, given that we face two waves. We are an in-between people, as James Joyce said. We face Europe, the European project, but we also face and are in constant need to respond to the commands and the ethical requests of indigenous peoples who have also suffered at the hands of colonisation along with their natural systems.