As Tom Hanks said when playing astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13, describing how he found his way back to his aircraft carrier after his instruments failed, how in the dark he saw the glow in the ship’s wake of bioluminescent plankton, which he could not have seen if his lights were still on: you don’t always know how you’re going to find your way.
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The news about wildfires and smoke can make you feel that we are in the dark, lost.  I thought it would be helpful to write about the other causes of wildfires, besides heat, besides the careless camper scolded by Smokey the Bear.  There’s deforestation, bad land management, and utility line sparking.[i]  Hawaiian Electric, the Times reports this morning, is being sued for contributing to the fire that destroyed Lahaina by not acting to protect its lines in high winds.  As we grieve and gape at the vision of wildfires all across the world it helps to know that there are things to do.  Stopping greenhouse gas emissions, tempering resource extraction, and restoring forests, are all good things to do for many reasons, but getting consensus on movement is taking time.  Meanwhile there are more immediate steps available, and the best are those consistent with a good long-range vision, such as building spark prevention into general reform of electrical utilities to bring about a faster transition to the cleaner systems required by the public interest under which they are intended to be regulated.

While we do the work of strategizing how to solve this grim problem cheering news has arrived from the front, Judge Kathy Seely’s words in the case of Held v. Montana:

Plaintiffs have a fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, which includes climate as part of the environmental life-support system.[ii]

It is the second great victory of Our Children’s Trust.[iii]

Environmental citizens have a lot to think about.  Being an environmentalist means allowing what’s happening in the environment around you to become part of your internal world.  As Katha Pollitt and others have said, all politics is personal.  Each of us makes a personal decision about what we can focus on.  The issues we don’t choose to think about often remain unresolved. 

Amongst all the problems we have, the nuclear threat continues to loom unnecessarily large, destabilizing our sense of who we are and what we can be.  It festers at the periphery of consciousness, poisoning our hopes for the future and making humanity’s aspirations seem ridiculous.  Normally, we don’t have the time to focus on it.  But the movie Oppenheimer provides an opportunity, as attention is drawn, to move our thinking to a more constructive place. 
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In 1962, Herman Kahn wrote Thinking About the Unthinkable, about his work as a pioneer in the field of nuclear military strategy.  The concept of unthinkability was meant to refer to the horror of nuclear war.  But it can also represent the idea that nuclear policy has been a matter reserved for certain experts, not the general public.  It implies we ordinary members of the human race, though all affected personally by this matter, cannot be trusted to think about it correctly.  To replace it we ask military specialists and game theorists to take over.  This was not something the public ever chose, but something we find ourselves having inherited.  

I include stories from my career in my lectures on environmental law, and the other day I found myself describing the first project I did in my new job with the Commonwealth’s Office of Safe Waste Management back in the late 1980’s.  The students all have phone cameras but back then you took your negatives to these little photobooth stores and camera shops, or you had a smelly dark room in your basement.  The project was about not pouring photographic chemicals down the drain.  They contain silver – and hundreds of thousands of dollars was being poured into Boston Harbor every year.  At one event, a speaker gave away quarters to represent the money you get when you recover the waste instead. That makes the picture clearer.  It is one thing to tell your audience that silver is toxic to aquatic organisms and we need those organisms to break down wastes at the sewage treatment plant, and they shouldn’t be poisoning receiving waters either, but a coin to put in your pocket focuses attention, helping to foster clarity.   

I hope people have gotten a clear picture of what this court has been doing and just did with respect to our environmental laws.  I fear that May 25th’s Sackett v. EPA could be like a blank sheet of undeveloped photographic paper to some people.  What happened?  It was a unanimous opinion and EPA lost!  There are complexities here but as we apply what we know about what the law should be, a clear picture emerges from the mix.

The majority added words to the Clean Water Act that aren’t there.  

                       


This environmental citizen (definition: not a person who is environmentally exemplary, but a person who sees that learning about how to be more environmentally responsible is part of being a citizen of one’s country and the world) has been quiet on this spot, but active elsewhere.  Please go to www.bu.edu/rccp and click on Events in the Banner.  Then click on the conference Detoxifying Commerce.
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It will be on April 19 – a date when ordinary people, available “in a minute”, stood down the British Army.  We have just had Passover celebrations involving the opportunity of the Red Sea miraculously opening, to cross into freedom. We remember that it was not easy but thank god (definition: your own) it happened and let it happen for everyone now in slavery.  The feeling of freedom is in the air with the rebirth of spring.

A good time then, it would seem, to free ourselves from toxic threats.  The toxicity of our continued consumption of products made in a way that is efficient for producers in today’s system, rather than what makes sense biologically or ecologically, let alone in terms of justice, takes many forms.  It involves distortion of science, politics, and simple everyday cognition, as well as insults to every organ in the body and every form of life we know.  Toxicity is a term that has taken on many meanings, from unjustified attacks on independent scientists who threaten corporate interests, to cold indifference on the part of those representatives who protect moneyed rather than human interests, to twisted judicial reasoning that keeps outmoded laissez-faire policies in place and disrespects concepts of justice.  It is not just literal poisons, corrosives, hazardous substances, hepatotoxins, neurotoxins, carcinogens, mutagens, teratogens, endocrine disruptors, sensitizers, asthmagens, explosives, flammables, reactives, nanoparticles, solvents, delirients, asphyxiants, and so on.  It is that we tolerate their dispersion.  We need not.
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The eleven Federal Home Loan Banks - established by Congress in 1932 – “have total assets that exceed $1 trillion. They were conceived to support housing finance, but they no longer play that role.”  So wrote Cornelius Hurley of the Boston University School of Law[1] in “Imagining Taxpayer Response to FHFA Reform” in American Banker , October 7, 2022.  Why should environmental citizens care?  The home is our immediate environment, our housing has huge environmental impacts that can be greatly reduced, and the system is not equitable.

Hurley pointed out: 

“The Home Loan banks issue debt obligations in the hundreds of billions of dollars. They are the second largest issuer of debt after the U.S. Treasury Department. Their debt is subsidized by all taxpayers….
…because of the government guaranty, the Home Loan Banks offer below-market rates. Second, the Home Loan banks incur zero credit risk in lending to the banks because, even in the rare event of a bank failure, the Home Loan bank has a priority over the FDIC (and the taxpayer) in that bank’s receivership. The upshot is that it is cheaper for the banks to borrow from their Home Loan banks than from their own depositors.”

I wonder if there are people on the inside who might agree with him, because the FHFA has launched a national public conversation about how the system should be reformed.  Not being attuned to financial policy I have come to this late, but there is still one more week to comment. [2]   

The announcement of FHFA’s “Comprehensive Review” states it “supports affordable, equitable, and sustainable access to mortgage credit”, for home and community investment.  But if depositors and taxpayers are subsidizing this pool of credit for all other banking operations, what happens to the original purpose of addressing housing issues?  What happens to aspirations for a housing system that influences the evolution of healthy homes and sustainable community development?