Purpose and Context

​With heavy heart I recall the passing of a beloved friend, who made a major contribution to the evolution of a better way of governing ourselves.  I had the luck and privilege to work with George Frantz during the nineties when an effort was taking place at both state and federal levels to improve how we do environmental regulation: to provide assistance, and not just enforcement (and to use that assistance to prevent harm, not just clean up messes after they have happened). 

This evolution of governance is unfortunately not that well grasped by the public, because some administrations used voluntary programs to replace enforcement, but that doesn’t work.  (Also, purveyors of toxics have worked to squelch efforts to reduce their sales).  But there is no question that assistance, and working in partnership with the regulated community, can be extremely effective if you first introduce it as a complement to enforcement.  In time things improve and you can reduce enforcement, but not right away.   

Back when this new movement was just starting, (late '80's, early '90's), the big question was, how do you create friendship between warring camps?  At that time environmental agencies were regarding all businesses as potential polluters and companies were regarding the agencies as a threat to their survival.  How do you bridge that giant gap?

Without people who can, you don’t get out of the starting gate and all your fine ideas live only in your files. You need people who can earn and keep the trust of other people.  George Frantz was a master practitioner of that art and from my lucky seat in this movement, I was a witness to some of the career of this key player, this principal demonstrator of the value of the all-important thing I call relational governance. 

I don’t want George (known as Tock to his family) to be an unsung hero of this forgotten and very rich period in environmental policy.  

Recommended Reading, Law for Sustainability

During this season of constant assault I took some refuge in Zaakir Tameez’s Charles Sumner, Conscience of a Nation,[i] which reminded me that although nature produces people who create and perpetuate toxicity it also produces those who face it head on and do not surrender to it, and thereby open a society to the evolution of a better future, by not suppressing that inner voice that whispers about what’s right and wrong.

In the face of extreme ugliness in his country Sumner continued to see its beauty.  The Constitution his abolitionist friends denounced as a pact with the Devil he saw as a promise of a better world, and his work to make that happen enabled Lincoln and Congress to bring us the “rebirth of freedom” of the constitutional amendments remaking the nation from a caste to a democratic society, after the Civil War.  (On the remaking of the U.S. as a caste society, see current news about this Administration’s actions, plans, attitude).
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Bob Dylan had a big effect of sparking conscience when he first hit the scene - the whole uproar about his turning to electric rock seemed to be the resentment of those who wanted him to be their leader, but he was not Sumner, he was and is something else we can only call Bob Dylan, and the good side of that is that we have to figure things out for ourselves (giving us the chance to realize our potentials as individual thinkers instead of being unthinking followers).  The intellectual ferment over injustice, which has caused such panic on the right, is something that each individual must figure out for themselves, but we all look to other people around us – which can cause confusion in relationships. An ethical standard on the way to universalization exists in many forms of manifestation, including the reflection of it in the backlash against it that we are experiencing now. 

My students today see a future blighted in many ways, yet out of more than sixty this past Fall semester to a person none seemed frozen, too overwhelmed to pick up the puzzles of how we fix the world. Each one demonstrated a kind of positive energy in response to the world’s hollowing out. Our theme has been that environmental, public health, public interest work is more important than ever.  These students are by no means a representative sample. Only a certain type of person takes a class entitled “Developing Sustainable Environmental Responsibility (DSER)”, or “Law for Sustainability”.  But they are a powerful indication that there are reasons to hope for the continuing powerful resonance of conscience, for facing problems with practical optimism seems to give them more energy. I hope more teachers will explicitly call for moral fulfillment and not just skills training.  They will find what comes forth comforting and helpful.

The positive force of morally impassioned young people feeds my life-long faith in democracy, even as it is challenged now.  It may be that because the pursuit of power over others plays itself out in such ugliness that the human potential for creating a better world ends up winning, because it is constantly fed by hope, and when it prevails, it brings beauty, peace, prosperity, rather than continuous struggle and damage.

Purpose and Context

​Tomorrow I meet the students in my class Developing Sustainable Environmental Responsibility (a responsibility you can sustain and which is enough to get us to sustainability).  I try to imagine how they see the world. When they were young and first understood the concepts of the United States and the Presidency, it was Obama who they saw exemplifying what this meant.  The United States was a force for reason - even if faulty, even if the things it did sometimes made little sense, it seemed like we were trying to help.  We had environmental laws.  We ;had international allies.  We honored agreements, and we honored diversity, believed in equity, and wanted everyone to feel and be included.  These young people, I tell myself, must feel as if we are all falling down a high mountain.

I feel that way but I also remember when this nation began that climb up that mountain in earnest, and how it was fueled by disgust and anger and a fierce loyalty to the truth and what’s right.  I remember when the country got up on its hind legs and barked and kept barking until even Richard Nixon had to move.  We can do it, and we can do it again.

It helps to read in the New York Times (print, Op-Ed) today that pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson has found that “few Americans live at the extremes…only 13 percent of Americans hold views that could be categorized as “strong liberal” and only 11 percent as “strong conservative”.  Years of looking at polling data has convinced her that “People in the American center are likely to be heterodox in their viewpoints.”  They take some ideas from the right and some from the left, and in her view it is “paired with a belief that as broken as things are now, there is hope things can get better in the future.” It helps me to think of people as more complicated because that makes it harder for evil leaders to divide us. It makes me think that arguments are important, as this indicates that most people are in the center, and most people are choosing what to think rather than choosing which herd to be corralled with.

That encourages me to have hopes for engaging when there is any opportunity, and attempting to use reason. I will try to frame it that way for my students, so that they can then spend their own time, as I have spent so many hours in mine, imagining things worth saying to people who really ought to hear them.

It seems that people need reminding of American history, because the ideas of the conservatives about restoring what they think we’ve lost are so often rejection of what we’ve gained.  The American Constitution gives the people of this country – all of us – a legislature to make laws that the majority wants, a court to make sure the majority doesn’t override basic rights of minorities or go against the purposes that made this government of us, and an executive to carry all that out faithfully.  Only if you are not getting good information about what is happening can you ignore that this has been reversed by the current Administration: they want everyone to follow the Executive.  History reminds us that this is what no one wanted in the early days of our republic – the Jeffersonians accused the Federalists of wanting a return to monarchy, and then the Federalists accused Jefferson of overreaching.  As Page Smith tells the story in The Constitution,

“In Jefferson’s view we were entering, with the American and French Revolutions, a new era in which human reason would triumph over ignorance and superstition, an era in which, as one of Jefferson’s favorite authors, John-Jacques Rousseau, had put it, ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God.’ Liberal political theorists, on the other hand, had yearned for centuries for ‘a government of laws, not of men.’  That was because they saw all men, however situated, as equally inclined to ‘self-aggrandizement’ – greed and exploitation.  It was only through fair and equitable laws, properly administered, that the exploitation of one class or group or interest by another could be avoided.  For men who held to such a conviction, the notion of a Supreme Court, a relatively impartial and independent power, charged with thwarting the popular will when that will was arbitrary and destructive of the legitimate rights of others, was one of the great political achievements in history. 

There was much to be said for both views.”[1]

The Federalist John Marshall at the head of the court through successive anti-Federalist administrations created a kind of balance, but Smith points out that it was not only the famous Marbury v. Madison decision in which Marshall gave Jefferson the result he wanted (reducing the possibility that Jefferson would ignore the court's order and weaken it, and at the same time affirming through reason, the power of the court).  There were other decisions that showed how the court was an essential tool for bridging the gaps between worldviews, and became accepted for this essential purpose.

[1] A Documentary and Narrative History, 1980, pp. 336 – 337.  

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On June 5th Judge Deborah L. Boardman of the Federal District Court in Maryland ordered that the shutting down of AmeriCorps be reversed, with staff hired back, and programs restored. She wrote:

If, at the end of this litigation, the government…cannot recover the funds that Congress appropriated for national service, the funds will have been spent on improving the lives of everyday Americans: veterans, people with substance use disorder, people with disabilities, children with learning differences, Indigenous communities, people impacted by natural disasters and people trying to survive below the poverty line.  Any harm the defendants might face if the agency actions are enjoined pales in comparison to the concrete harms that the states and the communities served by AmeriCorps programs have suffered and will continue to suffer.[1] 

To people who think a government focused only on commercial and technical development brings the most benefits for the people, a program like AmeriCorps can seem like a waste of taxpayer dollars, even a fraud perpetrated upon the people by bureaucrats. In reality, AmeriCorps directly benefits people and policies that put money-making first generate waste and fraud.  Focusing on people is far more in tune with the concept of legitimate government, whatever form government takes, whether democratic or monarchical.

Judge Boardman also ordered that the United States must comply with the requirement of providing notice and comment before making any significant changes in service delivery, including significant changes like the mass closure of AmeriCorps programs that occurred on April 25, 2025 and the April 15, 2025 removal of NCCC members from service. The word “comply” is in capital letters.

Not that many people know about or appreciate the meaning of the notice and comment requirement before changes in rule-making take place. It means our opinions are to be respected.  We are to be asked what we think. The government is supposed to listen to us. Such requirements can work for us only if we know about them, and when judges uphold these things, we should stand up and applaud loudly, in order to wake up others to their value.[2]

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[1] State of Maryland et al. v Corporation for National And Community Service (AmeriCorps), US District Court for the District of Maryland, Civ. No. DLB-25-1363, Order June 5, 2025.

[2] Notice and comment requirements, such as in the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act (APA), recognize our right to know what our government is going to do before it does it, and the right to say something about that first.  The APA formalizes your right to sue the government if it doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. For these things to work as they should more Americans have to know about them.