Law, Purpose and Context, Policy & Events

Sometimes in the course of human events it becomes necessary for the ordinary citizen to speak up about the government that is supposed to be for the citizen, when it is not.  The founding of this country began with a list of the bad things the government was doing to the people, instead of for them.  The America of today seems to break down into two categories: those who believe the misinformation spread by the rightwing media and identify as against some kind of mythical bad liberal government that has supposedly constructed a big wasteful bureaucracy that serves just to perpetuate itself; and those who remain committed to getting good information and not choosing, but accepting, facts, and who know that our government is a set of carefully constructed tools for civilization.
Some time ago I had the recurring image, like a daytime nightmare, of America – all of us – as a woman being raped.  I shared that with my wife after I couldn’t stand to quietly experience it any longer and she wrote a letter to the NY Times expanding on that idea. They didn’t print it.  Too strong, I guess.  It was and is disturbing because it is so awful and so apt.  Since then, a letter was printed about that theme, not so shockingly put perhaps, and with good advice on standing up to abusers - discussed below.
I feel compelled to share another very disturbing image.  It is that of the chain saw, used to illustrate the cutting of waste and fraud at federal agencies, but actually doing immediate and deadly harm to people.  I can’t help but imagine the chain saw cutting into real people and – forgive me for saying this – with blood and bits of bone spewing everywhere.  Because federal agencies are made up of and are about people.
People want a quick answer to how we can respond to the assault on our democracy, to the removal of the restraints and checks.  We all need to figure out how to respond.  The images above are examples of the use of symbols to communicate an emotional response.  They are also reminders that we are in shock, and must work ourselves out of it. We need to organize, start and join initiatives, stand for principle, speak up.  One thing is to avoid fighting each other over tactics. We need many responses, and they can be knitted together.  We must have a goal not of crushing enemies but of restoring democracy, and seeking recruits to that.
One more disturbing image exemplifies what is happening to us today.  One of the places the Administration is attacking is Columbia University, where there are many useful things, such as the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund https://www.csldf.org/ and the Climate Deregulation Tracker of the University’s Sabine Center.  The https://climate.law.columbia.edu/climate-deregulation-tracker let us see all during Trump One just what they were doing, and how the courts turned so much of it back – saved us from the very worst.  The Climate Reregulation Tracker (https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/climate-reregulation-tracker) told us what Biden restored.  Now, too, to our horror but necessary edification, the Center has the Climate BackTracker (https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/climate-backtracker)[i].
Already the BackTracker has 62 items, including the announcement March 12 of the “Biggest Deregulatory Action in History” https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-launches-biggest-deregulatory-action-us-history in which the new Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said:

“While accomplishing EPA’s core mission of protecting the environment…We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion…” (emphasis added).

[i] See also Harvard Law’s regulatory trackers and links to others, as well as a database of information formerly on federal sites: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/tracking-the-trackers/ and
 environmental justice and community health: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/ejtools.

Activity, Law, Purpose

I sat down to write about the anxiety everyone I know is feeling as our democratic institutions are being assaulted, for being a lifelong environmentalist I am being asked what to do.  It’s a long story (there’s some discussion below) but there’s something everyone can do right now that is very easy and a very good thing to do.

You can comment until February 19 on the EPA’s proposed Environmental Justice framework for implementing Cumulative Impact assessments.[1]

Once we take Congress in the mid-terms, our representatives should be asked to restore this effort immediately.  It says who we are as a people – we believe in fairness.  Let no one say that because the current Administration will ignore this that there is no point in doing it, because it is more important than ever to stand for it.

By commenting you do two things: join others in affirming our joint will that our government be just, and draw attention to this tool, which is a significant achievement in the evolution of social responsibility.  It took a long time to develop and we should be pleased with how the EPA has kept faith with this idea and worked on it to this point.  As the EPA is being dismantled every means we have for embodying the truer reflection of our will – to have a quality environmental protection program and not one that buries some people under enormous burden - will help. This is one important thing that many raised voices can say, and it will be recorded for all history, right at this time of the attempted ending of environmental progress.

[1] https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/EPA-HQ-OLEM-2024-0360-0001
Be sure to put at the top: Interim Framework for Advancing Consideration of Cumulative Impacts
Docket ID Number: EPA-HQ-OLEM-2024-0360
 

​Biden’s farewell address warned Americans of a coming oligarchy.

A pro-fossil fuel, anti-regulatory administration takes office January 20. 

How can environmental citizens be effective in resisting the dismantling?  If people are reminded of the basic principles of democracy and the value of the structures of government that have been developed for us, will they return to caring about real democracy?  James Madison said men are not angels and worked to come up with something that would balance interests.  Could we get enough people to care again about what he was trying to do? 
​
H.W. Brands in the recent Founding Partisans describes Madison’s choice of principles, with “the great object…to combat the evil” (of parties).  (Paraphrasing), we could:
1. Establish “a political equality among all”
2. Withhold “unnecessary opportunities from a few to increase the inequality of property by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches.”
3. Reduce “extreme wealth” (without violating the rights of property, by the “silent operation of laws”) and Raise “extreme indigence towards a state of comfort”.
4.  Abstain “from measures which operate differently on different interests, and particularly such as favor one interest at the expense of another.
5.  Make “one party a check on the other, so far as the existence of parties cannot be prevented nor their views accommodated”.  (Quotations are from Brands, not the original).

President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Bill, 1964, as Martin Luther King Jr. looks on.  (Image provided at PickPik).  America turned then and now too many want it to turn back, on this and many other achievements.

​If Trump wins, the presidency will no longer be the “Bully Pulpit” envisioned by Theodore Roosevelt, but the pulpit for a bully.  Like the American Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden the Trump campaign echoed, disdain for others that powers the feeling of superiority is on shameful display. Everyone knows it masks insecurity.  The concept of equality in the evolution of human history, which can reduce the friction and drag of competitive existence, has apparently not yet been effectively embedded. 

In democracy and ecological thinking, life is a network and not a pyramid.  When mutual respect is discarded as the Republican party has done, casting opponents as evil, disparaging whole countries and categories of people, it ironically reveals a lack of self-respect.  If you see that, the desire to admire the powerful dissipates.  But you have to see past the bluster with bullies, and it seems that the old primitive impulses, the impatience that convinces people they should empower an individual over the rest of us together, the fears that make people want to see only people like them, may be more powerful than the considerations of mature adults who are not frightened by clownish aggression.

If you are the owner of a major newspaper like the Washington Post, or the leader of a major financial power like JP Morgan, and you are withholding criticism because you want to be able to work with the administration if Trump is elected,[i] you do not see that your gambling has already caused huge and irreparable losses.  This is the shortsightedness that happens when you believe that the business of America is business, not people: the evolution of humanity, essential to saving democracy and the environment, is badly hobbled.  To take a line from Barack Obama: Don’t boo these businessmen – vote – vote against the candidates they are helping so they can continue to work their deals in a dictatorship – and if you have shares in their companies vote them out – and vote with your dollars.  But most importantly, do so much more than just vote.  Voting alone cannot carry the weight of all that needs to be done.  Some people are voting against Harris because she doesn’t meet their expectations, and they want to use their vote to express their dissatisfaction.  That is too much to expect of the vote right now, because any vote not for Harris will help the man who will undo American democracy.  Speak out and volunteer and care about having an America that rejects the cold money dominance[ii] and invests in us and our future instead.

The fate of the concept of working together constructively is at stake.  This was a great step forward in human social organization, the only thing that can deliver us from the downward spiral of competition not subsumed under cooperation, to a world that can survive and have the chance to learn how to thrive.  What can an environmental citizen do, here, at the potential ending of the effort to govern ourselves with respectful democratic deliberation, if we still have faith in it?

​If you have faith in democracy, then you know that even if its processes are slow, they are the only way to determine how society should act so that it is most mindful of everyone.  If you don’t see this and don’t vote for democracy, then you are allowing the conflicts to continue in which some people are trying to gain without sufficient consideration of others.  You side with allowing the selfish interests to dominate.  This creates destructive tendencies, towards our planet and its life forms, and towards other people, when in the pursuit of human potential one damages others and takes no or too little notice.

Law for Sustainability, Purpose and Context

When, before, did we feel that some people were not just voting for a different approach to living together in a democratic republic, but for the ending of that system of cooperative self-government?  When, before, did we hear fellow Americans speaking of Civil War?  Before the Civil War.

For those who work or even just wish for environmental salvation, ensuring we don’t elect a man who would end the independence of the agencies created to enhance justice, environmental and public health, fair working conditions, basic rights, etc., is a task requiring putting everything else aside.

But how do we act?  Deep confusion reigns: we are fighting a new kind of battle – on the field of meaning.  It seems that some sentences are heard in very different ways by different people. For example, any sentence containing the words “immigrants” or “Democrat” can trigger anger, fear or anxiety on the part of those not sure these things aren’t immediate and serious threats.  Then there is everyone else who lives in the real world and wishes to grapple sensibly with the problems that face us all directly, here and now.  These require working together, a clear view of the world, faith that most other people are generally good even if some are a serious problem, and respect for individuals that forbids prejudging them by association.

This presents a new level of difficulty for environmental citizens to master, and there is not much time. But we can still work to increase the chances that the world will evolve responsibility, rather than continue to become brittle and fragile, as Our Thing – the self-governing mechanism bequeathed to us by a magnificently unfolding societal maturation, an enlightenment growing towards justice – is taken over.

When FEMA can’t have a meeting about to help victims of Hurricane Helene without people thinking it’s about stealing their land for lithium we see how good the devilish propagandists have gotten, how quickly they can poison the well.  The music played at Trump’s rallies hypnotically backs up his trance-like musings.  The listeners look dazed.  How do we break the spell? 

A learned friend recently lent me a translation[i] of The Sandman, by E.T.A Hoffman, published in 1817.  In it, advice is provided concerning how not to yield to a “dark and hostile power which traitorously fixes a thread in our hearts” to draw us “by means of it along a dangerous road to ruin”.

“So long as we have sufficient firmness, fortified by cheerfulness, to always acknowledge foreign influences for what they really are, whilst we quietly pursue the path pointed out to us by both inclination and calling, then this mysterious power perishes in its futile struggles to attain the form which is to be the reflected image of ourselves.”