Bioluminescent plankton, Iran, Photo by: Safa Daneshvar, File:991119-Phytoplankton-IMG 6606.jpg - Wikimedia Commons.
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.
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]
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]
cThis organization led by Julia Olson is bringing to reality the atmospheric trust legal theory of Mary Cristina Wood,[iv] who applied to the climate crisis the public trust idea highlighted by Joseph Sax[v] half a century ago - that government has a responsibility to protect the public’s property. They own it nominally, we own it for real. That creates a duty on their part towards us. It is in my lifetime that I have seen the power of this word begin to take legal shape. It has taken that long time, from when people said what the law ought to be. But when they are right, at some point later judges have to agree.
The public trust idea (“doctrine”, as people call it, refers to how it has been applied, not necessarily how it ought to be applied) is not mentioned in the case, rather the court struck down limitations on the ability of state agencies to even consider climate change impacts. Technically this says nothing, a conservative would truthfully declare, about the public trust. But it does. It is related. Even if Seely is overturned by the state supreme court, still, it feels as if a self-evident truth has been declared.
That is partly because the ringing language about a state constitution rhymes with what federal district court Judge Ann Aiken said about our federal constitution in Juliana, the first win for the children. She said the plaintiffs, fearing for their future, had stated a due process claim of violation of their fundamental rights. To rule otherwise, she wrote, would mean
The Constitution affords no protection against a government’s knowing decision to poison the air its citizens breath or the water its citizens drink.[vi]
The evolution of law is in a way towards the past, for people have known this for a long time. Or, we can think of it as a kind of good regression, from a sophisticated legal perspective that reflects current unfair arrangements to a more basic level from which better ones can be developed, as in unwinding a twisted, knotted garden hose.
This second great victory of the children’s movement was a welcome message from the front, which can be thought of as a war between polluters and victims, resource extractors and living things; or an internal emotional war – the one between the tendencies that cause us to self-destruct and the urges to cherish and nurture; the war for our attention, the war for our loyalty. Perhaps best to call it a Great Struggle to capture that idea of internal and external fronts.
Sometimes when I am not working, but simply enjoying the day, I feel guilty that I am not at the front of the struggle myself. But when you are at the front you are beset or on alert, and to get the big picture requires retreat. It isn’t a desertion nor an abandonment if you keep in touch, do your best to supply those at the front, and recover something about what you are fighting for and how you can.
Every day, if you look for it, you can find and learn about what we could be doing to heal the world. Here are a few from just one day of reading the New York Times in between daily living tasks:
The Belem Declaration. After years of watching Bolsonaro open up the Amazon to destruction so that he could relieve some of the pressure on the wealthy of Brazil to share resources with the poor, we have with the return of Lula a pact with the presidents of Colombia and Bolivia and others to protect the Amazon. Already, the Times reports (print, 8/9) deforestation in Brazil has dropped 42% since Luis Da Silva came back to office. But at the end of the article it is mentioned that the $100 billion in climate change protection promised by the rich countries has not materialized.
Is this not then a great moment for Norte America to step up and help solidify what these presidents have created, and help make the Belem Declaration effective? Seems to me short change for us and it will make a huge difference for the climate and the survival of indigenous cultures. It is in the Developed World’s interest for the rest of the world to skip over – leapfrog, they call it – the dirty industries. Working together we can do that. Build it right the first time and you save on having to build it again. Reducing carbon and saving ecosystems anywhere in the world benefits us all. (See what students over several semesters came up with to help people in the Amazon stay on their land: https://www.bu.edu/rccp/files/2020/07/Can-Citizens-of-Industrialized-Nations-help-Indigenous-Peoples-Keep-Their-Land.pdf).
Torture-whistleblower buried at Arlington Cemetery. Also in the New York Times on August 9, (the day Nagasaki was bombed, a day to reflect on how that decision occurred), is the story of Ian Fishback, who worked hard to stop the use of torture he saw as a soldier in the Iraq War. Until Donald Trump came along, nothing had damaged American soft power more than the revelations of how we used torture, making us like other primitive powers of the past instead of the beacon of enlightenment many sincerely wish us to be. But Fishback’s loyalty to core American principles rather than the misleading suggestions of available power did not prevent him from feeling “shunned and sometimes threatened by some soldiers, commanders and peers, who treated him as a turncoat.” The core idea of America is the value of the individual, which means you get to and ought to think for yourself. That’s what the First Amendment is about, not “the right to lie”, as we are hearing today from defenders of the conspiracy to overturn our elections. Fishback’s fellow soldiers do not seem to have been taught basic American principles along with the lessons they got about following orders.
We were the ones who articulated the Nuremberg Principle that you don’t always follow orders. (See also Alexander Vindiman’s, Here, Right Matters, about how his patriotism motivated his whistleblowing of Trump’s extortion attempt on the Ukraine). Fishback’s father, who expressed his good fortune at having 42 years “with that wonderful man”, wanted him buried at Arlington despite the family’s anger at the military for not helping him when he went into a mental decline, “so that other dissidents and whistle-blowers, and those moved by Mr. Fishback’s ethics and courage, could find him in a prominent setting.” (C.J. Chivers, reporter). Just like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the ones who think for themselves and speak up for principle deserve honor they are not receiving from those who care more about sticking together on the team. All teams are supposed to honor the playing field. The team that cannot honor American principles over competition is destructive. Environmental problems are Mother Nature’s lesson that we all have to be on one team.
Distributed International Power. On the same day as the two stories above, the Times covered the rising influence of the United Arab Emirates, which goes with the diminishing sense of American involvement in the region. If we work ourselves out of the need for oil this could be a trend. Of note is how the Emiratis benefit, as the Swiss have, from a kind of neutrality that allows them to deal with Russia, China, and the US, and make money from everyone. They also represent the reinvestment by an Arab state in things other than oil, such as sports. While this evolution has seemed to defuse tensions with Iran to an extent, and disentanglement in the region could be good for the US, countries that cease depending on us for military or other protection do not feel compelled to do what we want. So we ask them to work with us to resist the Russian destruction of civilization and instead they choose the cheap oil they need or the investments of Russian kleptocrats.
Is it not time to face the answer to the question: can balance of power diplomacy work for long? It is temporary. Without a long-term vision, as FDR had for the United Nations, as he expressed in his Atlantic Charter, and as so many countries have embraced in principle, without support for the ideals that can serve as foundation for international peace and prosperity, balance of power politics decays as things change. Without guiding principles, each new President playing things his or her own way, we fall into imbalances. We need a realistic dream, founded on solid ideals, of our nation’s role in the world.
It can’t be left to leaders and those who are paid to do that, because the flow of money has distorted thinking. It flowed to poisonous, useless and backlash-creating armaments. It flowed in commitments to protect access to oil. Thinking in the context of the whole world we realize we need all local economies to function well, and it is in our interest not to play so competitively but to create a system in which many more benefit. As FDR said when he accepted the Democratic party’s nomination for the presidency in 1932, the party to win must not be reactionary, as the Republicans were (and are, today), to the threat of radical overturning of our system. To save our economy and way of life the party must be one “of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens.” When he pledged a new deal, he said,
Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and courage.
Ordinary citizens could bring a common sense, relational perspective to foreign policy, if they were involved. If we aren’t, we may be seen by future historians as complicit in the irresponsible policy of over-threatening destructive power, which should only be a deterrent. Political scientist Chalmers Johnson wrote in Nemesis, the last book in his “Blowback” Trilogy about what the more hostile (projection of power) strategy has brought us:
In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world. The concept "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes – as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 – the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.
He described Blowback as the reaction to America’s insistence on
projecting its military power to every corner of the earth and using American capital and markets to force global economic integration on its own terms.[vii]
This, of course, does not absolve the 9/11 attackers nor does it shift blame from them to us. But it points to a way forward. Nixon pointed out that economic competition was good because it is preferable to military competition. This is true but a step back from FDR’s cooperative vision of helping all world economies to prosper.
The foreign policy of the US has been frequently captured by competitive interests that serve only a few, instead of that expansive purpose. Its power-projection, considered “realpolitick”, is short-sighted and conducted very much under military secrecy. A depressing new development was Trump militarizing space further with his Space Force, when the Space Age began with an international treaty to keep the military out of space.[viii] This seems like a diversion when we learn that Elon Musk has power over a huge amount of the satellite system on which so many depend.[ix]
Years of conservative complaints about foreign aid and resentment of any sharing of sovereignty (in the end some is necessary for world civilization, and feasible with effective international agreements), have pushed FDR’s dream (and Einstein’s[x])– and our leadership in the United Nations we created - to the background. A sensible foreign policy that reflects what we would wish from a powerful neighbor would be tarred as weak by Republicans, but nothing about real “strength” (the ability to defend, enhanced by the ability to forge mutually-beneficial agreements) need be compromised by efforts to build world peace and prosperity.
A Local Demonstration of Influence. One must think and act globally and locally. The evolution of the needed response is being developed in my town. Though much slower than I and many others would wish, it is happening. The other night the sustainability coordinator ran through the new Sustainability Action Plan for the town at the public zoom meeting of the sustainability committee. It is very clear and helpful. The consultant knows how to do graphics and was faithful to what we all told them. It takes what we have worked on for ten years and puts it into a clear set of steps that involves town staff. That’s the big deal – it is no longer just about what the volunteer committee would do.
Key to success was our young coordinator, and here is irony – a story about how you never know how you are going to get there. The Sustainability committee wanted an experienced Sustainability Director, but the town hired a coordinator, at a lower pay scale, and saw that as a downgrading of the mission. Perhaps it was, but as a result we did not get someone who came in with all this intimidating experience and authority. Staff has not, as a result, put up its back in resistance. Our young graduate of an excellent university sustainability program listens carefully to all of us who have been doing sustainability around here for a while, and I can only assume she has listened to staff as well as she has listened to the citizen volunteers. After many years of recommending environmental perspectives in purchasing, building and landscape design, investment, education, water and land use, indoor air, and only sometimes getting staff to implement them, these items are now getting built into operations. The town is beginning to amass the capacity to think for itself on many aspects of sustainability, which helps when you use consultants, if you still have to.
Dream Implementation. Having the dream, the knowledge of what is needed, is only the first step. I visited a friend I have not seen for decades, who lives in a very beautiful place. Right near by are giant wind turbines, which I praised, and he told me he hates them. He resents that they were put so close without his input, he does not like the sound they make. They were imposed.
We don’t know how we’re getting back, getting home, getting to where we need to be. But even though the lights go off, new lights can appear. This is a moment to help the South American presidents protect the Amazon. More widespread understanding of the idea of the government’s responsibility to protect, that will help judges decide cases rightly. More education on basic principles – such as the development of individual conscience – can nurture more soldiers like Fishback and Vindiman faithful to the constitution and not the capturable chain of command. More engagement and listening can build sustainability into town operations. More thinking about basic human relationships can reform our foreign policy and reduce the waste and risk of excessive militarization.
These, like the bad news we read or ignore every day, are messages from the front. They can be raging red alerts, the subtle smell of smoke, or, like the faint light of bioluminescence in the ocean, the invisible but real rising of hopes in the children looking to courts to tell governments to do their job.
[i] A 2018 article in Electrical Contractor magazine notes that there are expensive and inexpensive ways to reduce this threat: https://www.ecmag.com/magazine/articles/article-detail/systems-link-between-power-lines-and-wildfires.
[ii] Point seven of the order in Held v. Montana. https://westernlaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/2023.08.14-Held-v.-Montana-victory-order.pdf.
[iii] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/14/us/montana-youth-climate-ruling.html.
[iv] Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age, 2014.
[v] https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/CLEE/Rose_1998_ELQ_Joseph_Sax_and_the_Idea_of_the_Public_Trust.pdf.
[vi] Juliana v. US, 217 F. Supp. 3rd, at 1250.
[vii] Amazon blurb for Blowback, second edition, (American Empire Project), 2004.
[viii] https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/introouterspacetreaty.html
[ix] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/28/business/starlink.html
[x] This blog, Thinking the Thinkable, August 3
The public trust idea (“doctrine”, as people call it, refers to how it has been applied, not necessarily how it ought to be applied) is not mentioned in the case, rather the court struck down limitations on the ability of state agencies to even consider climate change impacts. Technically this says nothing, a conservative would truthfully declare, about the public trust. But it does. It is related. Even if Seely is overturned by the state supreme court, still, it feels as if a self-evident truth has been declared.
That is partly because the ringing language about a state constitution rhymes with what federal district court Judge Ann Aiken said about our federal constitution in Juliana, the first win for the children. She said the plaintiffs, fearing for their future, had stated a due process claim of violation of their fundamental rights. To rule otherwise, she wrote, would mean
The Constitution affords no protection against a government’s knowing decision to poison the air its citizens breath or the water its citizens drink.[vi]
The evolution of law is in a way towards the past, for people have known this for a long time. Or, we can think of it as a kind of good regression, from a sophisticated legal perspective that reflects current unfair arrangements to a more basic level from which better ones can be developed, as in unwinding a twisted, knotted garden hose.
This second great victory of the children’s movement was a welcome message from the front, which can be thought of as a war between polluters and victims, resource extractors and living things; or an internal emotional war – the one between the tendencies that cause us to self-destruct and the urges to cherish and nurture; the war for our attention, the war for our loyalty. Perhaps best to call it a Great Struggle to capture that idea of internal and external fronts.
Sometimes when I am not working, but simply enjoying the day, I feel guilty that I am not at the front of the struggle myself. But when you are at the front you are beset or on alert, and to get the big picture requires retreat. It isn’t a desertion nor an abandonment if you keep in touch, do your best to supply those at the front, and recover something about what you are fighting for and how you can.
Every day, if you look for it, you can find and learn about what we could be doing to heal the world. Here are a few from just one day of reading the New York Times in between daily living tasks:
The Belem Declaration. After years of watching Bolsonaro open up the Amazon to destruction so that he could relieve some of the pressure on the wealthy of Brazil to share resources with the poor, we have with the return of Lula a pact with the presidents of Colombia and Bolivia and others to protect the Amazon. Already, the Times reports (print, 8/9) deforestation in Brazil has dropped 42% since Luis Da Silva came back to office. But at the end of the article it is mentioned that the $100 billion in climate change protection promised by the rich countries has not materialized.
Is this not then a great moment for Norte America to step up and help solidify what these presidents have created, and help make the Belem Declaration effective? Seems to me short change for us and it will make a huge difference for the climate and the survival of indigenous cultures. It is in the Developed World’s interest for the rest of the world to skip over – leapfrog, they call it – the dirty industries. Working together we can do that. Build it right the first time and you save on having to build it again. Reducing carbon and saving ecosystems anywhere in the world benefits us all. (See what students over several semesters came up with to help people in the Amazon stay on their land: https://www.bu.edu/rccp/files/2020/07/Can-Citizens-of-Industrialized-Nations-help-Indigenous-Peoples-Keep-Their-Land.pdf).
Torture-whistleblower buried at Arlington Cemetery. Also in the New York Times on August 9, (the day Nagasaki was bombed, a day to reflect on how that decision occurred), is the story of Ian Fishback, who worked hard to stop the use of torture he saw as a soldier in the Iraq War. Until Donald Trump came along, nothing had damaged American soft power more than the revelations of how we used torture, making us like other primitive powers of the past instead of the beacon of enlightenment many sincerely wish us to be. But Fishback’s loyalty to core American principles rather than the misleading suggestions of available power did not prevent him from feeling “shunned and sometimes threatened by some soldiers, commanders and peers, who treated him as a turncoat.” The core idea of America is the value of the individual, which means you get to and ought to think for yourself. That’s what the First Amendment is about, not “the right to lie”, as we are hearing today from defenders of the conspiracy to overturn our elections. Fishback’s fellow soldiers do not seem to have been taught basic American principles along with the lessons they got about following orders.
We were the ones who articulated the Nuremberg Principle that you don’t always follow orders. (See also Alexander Vindiman’s, Here, Right Matters, about how his patriotism motivated his whistleblowing of Trump’s extortion attempt on the Ukraine). Fishback’s father, who expressed his good fortune at having 42 years “with that wonderful man”, wanted him buried at Arlington despite the family’s anger at the military for not helping him when he went into a mental decline, “so that other dissidents and whistle-blowers, and those moved by Mr. Fishback’s ethics and courage, could find him in a prominent setting.” (C.J. Chivers, reporter). Just like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the ones who think for themselves and speak up for principle deserve honor they are not receiving from those who care more about sticking together on the team. All teams are supposed to honor the playing field. The team that cannot honor American principles over competition is destructive. Environmental problems are Mother Nature’s lesson that we all have to be on one team.
Distributed International Power. On the same day as the two stories above, the Times covered the rising influence of the United Arab Emirates, which goes with the diminishing sense of American involvement in the region. If we work ourselves out of the need for oil this could be a trend. Of note is how the Emiratis benefit, as the Swiss have, from a kind of neutrality that allows them to deal with Russia, China, and the US, and make money from everyone. They also represent the reinvestment by an Arab state in things other than oil, such as sports. While this evolution has seemed to defuse tensions with Iran to an extent, and disentanglement in the region could be good for the US, countries that cease depending on us for military or other protection do not feel compelled to do what we want. So we ask them to work with us to resist the Russian destruction of civilization and instead they choose the cheap oil they need or the investments of Russian kleptocrats.
Is it not time to face the answer to the question: can balance of power diplomacy work for long? It is temporary. Without a long-term vision, as FDR had for the United Nations, as he expressed in his Atlantic Charter, and as so many countries have embraced in principle, without support for the ideals that can serve as foundation for international peace and prosperity, balance of power politics decays as things change. Without guiding principles, each new President playing things his or her own way, we fall into imbalances. We need a realistic dream, founded on solid ideals, of our nation’s role in the world.
It can’t be left to leaders and those who are paid to do that, because the flow of money has distorted thinking. It flowed to poisonous, useless and backlash-creating armaments. It flowed in commitments to protect access to oil. Thinking in the context of the whole world we realize we need all local economies to function well, and it is in our interest not to play so competitively but to create a system in which many more benefit. As FDR said when he accepted the Democratic party’s nomination for the presidency in 1932, the party to win must not be reactionary, as the Republicans were (and are, today), to the threat of radical overturning of our system. To save our economy and way of life the party must be one “of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens.” When he pledged a new deal, he said,
Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and courage.
Ordinary citizens could bring a common sense, relational perspective to foreign policy, if they were involved. If we aren’t, we may be seen by future historians as complicit in the irresponsible policy of over-threatening destructive power, which should only be a deterrent. Political scientist Chalmers Johnson wrote in Nemesis, the last book in his “Blowback” Trilogy about what the more hostile (projection of power) strategy has brought us:
In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world. The concept "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes – as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 – the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.
He described Blowback as the reaction to America’s insistence on
projecting its military power to every corner of the earth and using American capital and markets to force global economic integration on its own terms.[vii]
This, of course, does not absolve the 9/11 attackers nor does it shift blame from them to us. But it points to a way forward. Nixon pointed out that economic competition was good because it is preferable to military competition. This is true but a step back from FDR’s cooperative vision of helping all world economies to prosper.
The foreign policy of the US has been frequently captured by competitive interests that serve only a few, instead of that expansive purpose. Its power-projection, considered “realpolitick”, is short-sighted and conducted very much under military secrecy. A depressing new development was Trump militarizing space further with his Space Force, when the Space Age began with an international treaty to keep the military out of space.[viii] This seems like a diversion when we learn that Elon Musk has power over a huge amount of the satellite system on which so many depend.[ix]
Years of conservative complaints about foreign aid and resentment of any sharing of sovereignty (in the end some is necessary for world civilization, and feasible with effective international agreements), have pushed FDR’s dream (and Einstein’s[x])– and our leadership in the United Nations we created - to the background. A sensible foreign policy that reflects what we would wish from a powerful neighbor would be tarred as weak by Republicans, but nothing about real “strength” (the ability to defend, enhanced by the ability to forge mutually-beneficial agreements) need be compromised by efforts to build world peace and prosperity.
A Local Demonstration of Influence. One must think and act globally and locally. The evolution of the needed response is being developed in my town. Though much slower than I and many others would wish, it is happening. The other night the sustainability coordinator ran through the new Sustainability Action Plan for the town at the public zoom meeting of the sustainability committee. It is very clear and helpful. The consultant knows how to do graphics and was faithful to what we all told them. It takes what we have worked on for ten years and puts it into a clear set of steps that involves town staff. That’s the big deal – it is no longer just about what the volunteer committee would do.
Key to success was our young coordinator, and here is irony – a story about how you never know how you are going to get there. The Sustainability committee wanted an experienced Sustainability Director, but the town hired a coordinator, at a lower pay scale, and saw that as a downgrading of the mission. Perhaps it was, but as a result we did not get someone who came in with all this intimidating experience and authority. Staff has not, as a result, put up its back in resistance. Our young graduate of an excellent university sustainability program listens carefully to all of us who have been doing sustainability around here for a while, and I can only assume she has listened to staff as well as she has listened to the citizen volunteers. After many years of recommending environmental perspectives in purchasing, building and landscape design, investment, education, water and land use, indoor air, and only sometimes getting staff to implement them, these items are now getting built into operations. The town is beginning to amass the capacity to think for itself on many aspects of sustainability, which helps when you use consultants, if you still have to.
Dream Implementation. Having the dream, the knowledge of what is needed, is only the first step. I visited a friend I have not seen for decades, who lives in a very beautiful place. Right near by are giant wind turbines, which I praised, and he told me he hates them. He resents that they were put so close without his input, he does not like the sound they make. They were imposed.
We don’t know how we’re getting back, getting home, getting to where we need to be. But even though the lights go off, new lights can appear. This is a moment to help the South American presidents protect the Amazon. More widespread understanding of the idea of the government’s responsibility to protect, that will help judges decide cases rightly. More education on basic principles – such as the development of individual conscience – can nurture more soldiers like Fishback and Vindiman faithful to the constitution and not the capturable chain of command. More engagement and listening can build sustainability into town operations. More thinking about basic human relationships can reform our foreign policy and reduce the waste and risk of excessive militarization.
These, like the bad news we read or ignore every day, are messages from the front. They can be raging red alerts, the subtle smell of smoke, or, like the faint light of bioluminescence in the ocean, the invisible but real rising of hopes in the children looking to courts to tell governments to do their job.
[i] A 2018 article in Electrical Contractor magazine notes that there are expensive and inexpensive ways to reduce this threat: https://www.ecmag.com/magazine/articles/article-detail/systems-link-between-power-lines-and-wildfires.
[ii] Point seven of the order in Held v. Montana. https://westernlaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/2023.08.14-Held-v.-Montana-victory-order.pdf.
[iii] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/14/us/montana-youth-climate-ruling.html.
[iv] Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age, 2014.
[v] https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/CLEE/Rose_1998_ELQ_Joseph_Sax_and_the_Idea_of_the_Public_Trust.pdf.
[vi] Juliana v. US, 217 F. Supp. 3rd, at 1250.
[vii] Amazon blurb for Blowback, second edition, (American Empire Project), 2004.
[viii] https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/introouterspacetreaty.html
[ix] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/28/business/starlink.html
[x] This blog, Thinking the Thinkable, August 3
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