​Even if no one cares, I feel bad that I have posted only one blog at this site in 2021.  I suppose I have been like so many who took the election of Joe Biden as a reason to take a break from what feels like the front lines of a very tiring war.  Constantly attending to environmental issues, and the battle for the rule of law, for reason and mutual respect, can be like carrying a heavy weight.  Environmental citizens need rest sometimes from carrying that weight.  But picking it up again can make you feel strong, purposeful, engaged.  And despite the continuing darkness of the news, there are signs of light – there is a real prospect now of money flowing to much-needed efforts, such as the removal of lead from our homes and surroundings.
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In my class Research for Environmental Agencies and Organizations I offer students a list of projects, and each semester I include something about lead poisoning prevention.  One student signed on to help me promote a bill that is now before the Massachusetts legislature[1], submitted by Senator Patricia Jehlen, similar to a bill she submitted many years ago.  The intent of the bill is to overcome the barriers to suing those who recklessly placed lead in commerce, knowing it will harm people, and doing nothing to prevent that harm.  If companies make a product that they ought to know would likely harm people, the law should provide for both compensation to victims and punishment for those who unreasonably cause harm, so that others will be deterred from doing the same thing.  But when you can’t prove that the harm you experienced was caused by a particular company that company gets away with their malfeasance.  The bill that Jehlen put forth many years ago would have imposed “market share liability”, allowing the apportionment of liability according to the market share a company had of that product, treating all the members of industry who behaved the same way as culpable.  The current bill allows the court more flexibility to determine how to allocate responsibility, but it’s the same idea: no one should get away with such anti-social behavior simply because the specific product maker can’t be identified. 

​Among all the distressing news of our impact on the planet is evidence of rising awareness, which brings the hope of behavior change.  As a lifelong environmentalist I am used to hearing that “people don’t change”, and while my own profession showed me repeatedly that they can - for the better, too – the dominant trends have too often seemed to reflect arrested development of the body politic.  And while so many steps have been taken towards the world we deserve and the rest of life deserves from us, it has so often seemed pathetically not nearly enough.  Nevertheless, at the same time that one grapples with that feeling, one can and should also recognize good news.
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To mention just a few highlights: Scott Cassel’s decades-long work with the Product Stewardship Institute, after quiet victories in state after state, got national attention with Maine’s plastic recycling mandate;[i] Norway, the leading European producer of fossil fuels, just had what is being called a “climate election”;[ii] Representative Barbara Lee, the sole opponent of the Authorization for Use of Military Force[iii] which gave G.W. Bush the power to wage war in Afghanistan and then Iraq, is now joined by “almost every Democrat” and 49 Republicans in her decades-long effort to repeal this open permission to wage war,[iv] and the aid provided during the pandemic has substantially reduced the poverty rate.  For those who realize that protecting the planet requires not just smart regulation but also reorienting government towards peace and prosperity, these are good signs.

On Thanksgiving in the United States many no doubt expressed gratitude for having won the freedom to breathe. With the defeat of a president working only for the interests of a few, rather than the many, we have won a reprieve from autocracy.  We can now return to the effort to face the great responsibilities before us.  We must restore environmental programs and ramp them up to head off the coming climate catastrophe; stop accelerating extinctions; save natural areas; stop poisoning the world, and develop food, shelter and waste systems for billions, while instituting justice and greater economic equity.  All of this depends on policies that embrace universal needs, and overcoming the lie that the world rightly belongs to any exclusive club.  This deception has captured so many.[1]  The vote has given us a chance to be free of such dangerous delusions. There is much work to be done before we are truly liberated. 

Environmental citizens are those who face the truth of what is happening to the world.  Re-establishing the primacy of fact takes work and courage.  In addition to having the courage to see pollution, diminishing wildlife, and heating oceans, we have to take a good look at what people believe and why they don’t see or seem to care about what’s happening.  We need the conversations that will free us from an onslaught of lies.  We have been tricked into battling each other when our fate depends on the ability to combine all perspectives in order to solve the great puzzle of how to exist together. Great questions are presented: how can we continue advancing excellence if meritocracy itself is divisive?[2] Are those who succeed to blame for the plight of those left behind?[3] These are pressing questions but immediate focus should be undoing the noxious cliché that equates liberalism with elitism.  The historical fact is that Democrats are the ones who have tended to support government action to care for people, while Republicans have become the party of those who have most benefitted from exploitative and damaging behavior. The money from these harmful sources has funded Republican campaigns and relentless propaganda to blame the wrong elites.  The resentment of the exploited has been misdirected. Many intellectuals so despised by the right are indeed guilty of neglect, but anti-intellectualism has so confused public discourse that the real violence being done – the right’s support of economic and political oligarchy - is unrecognized by their followers, many of whom focus their ire on immigrants, minorities, and pregnant women.  The healing of a sickened planet begins with treating the disease of this political confusion. 

Law for Sustainability, Purpose and Context

When Justice Roberts was quizzed by Senators on his judicial philosophy during his confirmation hearings he said that judges ought to be like umpires.  They don’t make law, they just call balls and strikes.  But what about the role of the judge in providing justice?  Let’s say the rules of the game have been corrupted – the strike box is smaller for one team than for the other.  The judge must be a backstop, and apply the concepts of fair treatment embodied in the Constitution and our hearts.  That would meet the original intent of the founders in creating a government of the people, and that would be making law.  Of course judges are to restrain themselves, the judiciary is only one branch of government and the function of making and executing statutory law is reserved to two others.  But judicial restraint must not include failure to defend the fundamentals.  Judges must protect the basic purposes of government – to balance such things as freedom and equality on the scales of justice.  In order to do that, they must occupy the center, and not the extremes, of our politics.