EUROPEAN ENVIRONMENTAL
      TRIBUNAL

      
an active exercise of
      planetary citizenship

 
how
      it happened

      
In the early 1990s I became a
      founding member of the European Environmental Tribunal, in Brussels.

      
I think I was the only one who
      was not a judge at that moment.

      
The first aim of that institution
      was to be something coordinating the United Nations' acts. Dr.
      Dörte Fouquet, the founder and first President, a prominent
      lawyer, soon asked me to collaborated more actively with the
      institution.

      
I told her that the only way
      to do it would be to fight against judgements. She laughed and
      asked me why. I told her I was against bureaucracy and that I
      considered the human being as the essence of what we vulgarly
      call environment. I also added that we already had too
      many bureaucratic institutions to judge in this world, and what
      it was much more important, in my point of view, was consciousness,
      knowledge, illumination. She embraced me and said: Bravo!

      
Four years later, the EET was
      full of papers and I was invited to become a member of the board.
      I accepted with one condition: my function should be that one
      to criticize everything, unveiling contradictions and nonsense
      attitudes. I was accepted.

      
My world was, as what it still
      is, much more oriented to the ideas of people like John Cage,
      Richard Buckminster Fuller or Paolo Soleri.

      
In 1997 I was nominated president
      of the institution with powers to change everything. The first
      thing I did was to eliminate the figure of "president"
      and to establish a round table. Also, the EET started to be oriented
      to the environment as an anthropological issue, involving all
      disciplines of knowledge; the word "European" was assumed
      as something much beyond the European region, as a conceptual
      condition of different languages, cultures and ethos living
      together and in peace; and the concept of tribunal started to
      be not a place of judgments, but yes as a free forum of ideas.

      
Then, we moved to London and
      some time later we became a totally informal organization. The
      most important for the EET is to be totally free from any kind
      of political, ideological, racial, gender, cultural or social
      barriers.

      
Its objective is free knowledge,
      illumination.

      
With the years, because the EET
      is absolutely free, never attached to any group of interests,
      it stopped receiving any kind of financial support, and we decided
      to put it to sleep. It is sleeping now, but ready to wake up
      at any moment.

      
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta,
      2010