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.

In 2009 climate activist Bill McKibben’s group 350.org had a day of action with rallies all around the world – sending the message that we need to keep the level of carbon dioxide lower than 350 ppm. It’s now approaching 420. 

As a lifelong environmentalist people sometimes tell me that they really care about the environment but don’t know what they can do.  This leads to discussions about flying less, buying less-polluting machines and products, recycling, eating less meat.  But nothing compares to the good every American citizen can do this Fall.  This is not a political blog.  There have been many Republicans we should respect for their environmental commitment.  But at this historic moment the environmental citizen must take sides and must vote to save the world.  If we vote wrong, we can expect more descent into the abyss.    

A National Academy of Sciences study just found that the number of people exposed to “extreme heat” in cities will sharply increase (by a factor of 12.7–29.5 by 2100) if we continue to fail to restrict greenhouse gases.[1]  We are seeing the West in wildfire emergencies every summer now.[2]  Hurricane Laura just caused from $8 – 12 billion in damage,[3] but the fire at the Biolab plant in Lake Charles, Louisiana should make us think about all those facilities refining oil and producing chemicals on the Gulf Coast.[4]  It’s one thing to have your house flooded, it’s another when the flood waters and the air are toxic.  Global warming is not just about Greenland melting. It’s about all hell breaking loose.

​I was recently asked if there is a real difference between the current presidential nominees, or if they really aren’t all the same in being beholden to corporate interests.  As an educator I strive very hard to avoid partisanship.  I do not consider my role as helping a political party.  I believe fervently that liberals need to understand honest conservative concerns about proposed changes, and that conservatives need to respect the hopes for greater justice that liberals express.  I have spent my life trying to mediate between extremes – and have been successful an astonishing number of times.  I believe in the vital center.  But at this particular point in history, it is necessary to see and say that the very survival of life itself depends on people opening their eyes and voting this current Administration out of office.  Trump is a wrecking ball and Biden offers a chance to save what’s left. I am a partisan in defense of the Earth and I call on all of Nature’s children to stand up for her, and themselves, as well.  We have the vote and we can use it to save the world. 

​Clear brook at high elevation, (inaccessible to livestock grazing).  Great Basin National Park, Nevada, 2019.

To read Christopher Ketcham’s This Land (2019) is to be disabused of any notion that what’s left of our wild land is safely managed for the people of the United States.  He makes clear that grasslands have been given over to sheep and cattle ranchers, the great sagebrush sea that covers much of the West now belongs to fossil-fuel extractors, and our old-growth forests are being mowed down.  This is a book full of the kind of anger that one might feel seeing one’s dearest loved ones threatened, and the subtitle tells us who Ketcham blames: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West. But it is not without attempts to understand.  In one arresting moment in a book packed with them, he blames himself as well for contributing to climate change, because of his air travel: it further harms the endangered high-mountain whitebark pine which produces fat-rich nuts for the grizzlies he can’t find. In another he describes the “terror management theory” of psychotherapist Irvin Yalom in an attempt to understand how people adopt killing as a way of reacting to a potentially hostile environment.

Intoxicated with the beauty of life itself, eager to find and experience its wonders, he draws you into the wild, and then you see how once-clear brooks – so precious in the arid West - are trampled into mud by cattle and filled with their feces.  With him you get up at dawn and watch wild bison being corralled by the Park Service, and hear
​
 the moans of bulls and cows, the calling of the calves for their mothers, the cracking of the wrangler’s whips, the cruel voices of men…

In mid-April the EPA refused to tighten standards for “fine soot”,[1] otherwise known as ultrafine air pollution, or PM2.5 (Particulate Matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter), even though its own scientists had found that this would prevent thousands of deaths per year.[2]  Also in mid-month came news from Harvard researchers that exposure to air pollution exacerbated the chances of dying from the COVID-19 virus.  The report states that the finding that “a small increase in long-term exposure to PM2.5 leads to a large increase in the COVID-19 death rate” is “consistent with previous findings that air pollution exposure increases severe outcomes during infectious disease outbreaks”. (Air pollution “is believed to have contributed to nearly 5 million premature deaths worldwide in 2017 alone”).[3] 

Later in the month, researchers in Italy posted a report of finding the novel coronavirus on particles of air pollution.  Although at present, “no assumptions can be made concerning the correlation between the presence of the virus on PM and COVID-19 outbreak progression,”[4] the finding is consistent with other evidence concerning viruses.  If we are to follow the sensible practice of preferring to be safe than sorry, we should take seriously the probability that particles of air pollution can carry COVID-19 viruses.  The ultrafine particles are so dangerous because they penetrate past ordinary obstacles and reach vulnerable interior parts of our bodies.  A new risk assessment of particulate matter should be performed, because the focus of the Harvard researchers was long-term, chronic exposure to air pollution.  But if air pollution is a vector of this new disease, it is an acute risk to public health. 

The public can comment until June 29 on EPA’s proposal to leave particulate air standards unchanged.[5]  A public hearing will take place on May 20 and 21.[6]