Sustainability Policy and Events, Purpose and Context
Gouverneur Morris, author of the Preamble of the American Constitution. Bust by Houdon, 1791. www.gouverneurmorrispapers.com
So many I know are depressed about the state of the world, which still depends on the force of American power and reason to be stabilized, however much you may feel disillusioned with that role for us. Yet here we are flirting with ending the American dream of democratic self-government. An editorial by Michelle Cottle in yesterday’s (print) Times refers to “Republicans scurrying to do the MAGA King’s bidding”. No king in America, said our founders. Not even a dictator for only a day, as the former president said. To even consider allowing us to be represented this way, after the urging and praise of those who stormed the Capitol, the attempt to barter Ukraine’s defense for dirt on Joe, the unending and now proven fraud, the fawning before the monster Putin, is not just abandonment of our principles but our dignity as well, and any claim to honor or credibility in the world.
Those who would vote for that may also like this Supreme Court, thinking it is “conservative”, defending traditional values, not seeing how it is not just taking away freedoms but also defenses. This court clearly wishes to reduce the powers of government agencies and is not satisfied with stopping EPA’s Clean Power Plan or letting states curtail women’s control over their own bodies. Their philosophy resembles that of the court of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, the era of laissez-faire, of Social Darwinism, of the growth of concentrated economic power and the robber baron idea that this was good for us all. The court then, and this one now, has held more sacred the freedoms of businesses than the right of the people to pass laws curtailing damage by businesses. Then, they struck the laws down. Now, they hobble the agencies the laws created. Government agencies protecting public interests are a bother to those focused on profits. But the limits set by agencies are necessary in a crowded and poisoned world, and the agencies are the gifts of our parents, which "conservative" philosophy now takes away. Attention must be paid and the Constitution, which is not properly interpreted by extremist jurisprudence, recovered in its plain and common sense, by us.
I have my students read it, asking them not to read what others say about it until they have read it themselves. I ask what stands out to them, and they always notice the Preamble, and they always point to “Preserve the Blessings of Liberty for Posterity” and many ask if that means protect the environment, and some assert that it has to, or that line has no real meaning.
Those who would vote for that may also like this Supreme Court, thinking it is “conservative”, defending traditional values, not seeing how it is not just taking away freedoms but also defenses. This court clearly wishes to reduce the powers of government agencies and is not satisfied with stopping EPA’s Clean Power Plan or letting states curtail women’s control over their own bodies. Their philosophy resembles that of the court of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, the era of laissez-faire, of Social Darwinism, of the growth of concentrated economic power and the robber baron idea that this was good for us all. The court then, and this one now, has held more sacred the freedoms of businesses than the right of the people to pass laws curtailing damage by businesses. Then, they struck the laws down. Now, they hobble the agencies the laws created. Government agencies protecting public interests are a bother to those focused on profits. But the limits set by agencies are necessary in a crowded and poisoned world, and the agencies are the gifts of our parents, which "conservative" philosophy now takes away. Attention must be paid and the Constitution, which is not properly interpreted by extremist jurisprudence, recovered in its plain and common sense, by us.
I have my students read it, asking them not to read what others say about it until they have read it themselves. I ask what stands out to them, and they always notice the Preamble, and they always point to “Preserve the Blessings of Liberty for Posterity” and many ask if that means protect the environment, and some assert that it has to, or that line has no real meaning.
Free Enterprise is the right to participate in a market and see if people will buy your product. It is not when fossil fuel and chemical interests use their money to warp our legislative and regulatory processes. This unethical participation in democracy that destroys our children’s future is wrongly posited as the freedom we are due from a government that Abraham Lincoln said was of, by and for the people.
Confusion extends to the job President Biden is doing. Some swallow or are infected by lies about him, others seem unable to compare his intelligibility with Trump’s incoherence, but too many others are well-meaning idealists who wish Biden would do more, not realizing how constrained he is by the opposition. It should not be a successful tactic, but it has been, to convince people that it is the Democrats’ fault government is not working very well lately, while clearly the destructive campaigns of the opposition are the outstanding reason. This is not to say that Democrats don’t make terrible mistakes. But they need a cooperative partner, and we Americans need loyal opposition, not the smearing of Democrats as like Communists, pioneered by Nixon, not the charming disdain of government by Reagan, not the scorched-earth politics of Gingrich, not the chaos agents we have today. Recognizing and rejecting the takeover of the Republican party by extremists is a project for patriotic citizens.
In The Public Philosophy (1955) Walter Lippman wrote about two approaches to change – one he called assimilative, in which the ruling elite slowly opens up and allows more people to share power. England’s nobility, he writes, had done that enough for enough people to feel that they shared in governance, through Parliament, and when the Americans rebelled, they were fighting for the restoration of rights they thought they already had – demanding to be given back the right to be part of the system of self-governance. In contrast, the French nobility thought of themselves as a separate, superior caste, and refused to give up power, and so had to be overthrown and replaced. This “Jacobin” approach of revolution, we all know, involved the guillotine and ends with Napolean and then a restoration of nobility and a permanent fear of revolution, which then generates a perceived need for coercion to suppress it. The American ideal of equality has been a force for assimilation, and that is a slow and painstaking process. Yes, it makes one angry that we can’t move more quickly to the state we see as necessary and right. But the path of revolution, history shows, is reckless and often abysmal.
A friend of mine recently opined that he wished he had the courage that the Weathermen of the sixties and early seventies showed, in “doing something”. The Weathermen looked for fights with police and engaged in bombing campaigns. I reminded him that I was a protest leader at the time, using reason, candles, flowers, and peaceful gatherings, and told him that in my opinion, the Weathermen ruined the protest movement. They handed Nixon the opportunity to disparage protest as destructive and all of us as irresponsible and unpatriotic, and we have never recovered from that, just as many have not recovered from their fear of a communist uprising. I wish people like my friend pined instead for Henry David Thoreau’s peaceful Civil Disobedience, which inspired Gandhi and M. L. King.
If you spend all your time thinking about such things, it’s easy to get burned out because your ability to influence progress quickly is very limited and often you don’t even have an idea where to begin, or where even to find hope. It was this tension, that I began to feel as a small boy learning about pesticides, pollution from cars and factories, extinctions, the bomb’s threat to make us extinct, that caused me to be an environmentalist, even when there was no clear way to act or make money being one. When I tried working in other professions I found I couldn’t continue and always had to come back to environmental work, because I am too anxious about our ability to curtail our impacts, and environmental work is therapy for that anxiety.
This, I think, is the main thing I see happening with the students in my project class, which enables them to do real work on real issues. They come in totally depressed and get excited about the work they are doing. It is an important counter to the news and the sense with which all young people today are burdened, and it does more than writing a paper that only a teacher reads. When they work with adults working on our common problems, they realize they are not alone, they meet some of the existing cadre of environmental citizenship. This helps build the emotional strength to face these very distressing realities.
This year three students dropped out early, which is a lot for this class. I wish I had done more to help them choose a project that worked for them. But the dozen still in Research for Environmental Agencies and Organizations are hard at work and to hear them talk about what they are learning already, and in fact achieving, gives me as well as them a boost in the dark context that 2024 provides. I think of the astronauts Tom Wolfe talks about in The Right Stuff, who wanted windows and things to do in the capsules, and not just to be “spam in a can”. As we ride the insane political times we need to find those measures of control, however small, that we can exert. Sometimes we find, as the ancient Chinese legend tells, that you can move mountains.[1]
Three students visited The Great Exchange, in Devens Massachusetts, to help the manager of this innovative resource recovery initiative put together her story, of diverting perfectly fine products from the waste stream and giving them to schools and such. She is fighting the tragic throughput systems our short-sighted economics generates. Just visiting helps her know her project is valuable to others, as well as inspiring the students, who will likely put something together of some use.
Three other students are helping Quiet Communities (QC), a nonprofit devoted to noise, promote the accelerated transition to unleaded aviation gas – a task QC found itself in when the communities of airport neighbors disturbed by noise learned that they were also endangered by lead. The students have already interviewed an airport manager, who frankly confessed he had never worried about the lead issue before, but who now realized how important it was and had clearly been educating himself rapidly, and Kurt Castagna, who now heads EAGLE (the Federal Aviation Administration’s public-private effort to transition away from leaded gas). Castagna explained the status of unleaded fuels (beginning to be available) and the details of what’s needed for the transition to using them: distributors have to know enough to assume responsibility for it, including that their filters will work with it, that it won’t corrode linings, and most importantly, whether it is compatible with other fuels. We were all interested in how fast we could make that transition, without creating new problems. It is clear that the interests of those flying, those on the ground, and those who fuel and work on engines are all respected when this effort is conducted earnestly. It is good for the students to see such a “hot” issue, rife with anger and mistrust, being addressed constructively.
A student and I have put together questions for experts in road salt, to see if anyone is looking at the eventual accumulation issue – studies show alarming buildups of sodium and chlorides and the literature is full of techniques, but they only seem to minimize damage. Is there anyone pickup up salt, recovering runoff, stopping it from spreading to wetlands? Who is adjusting the liability of building owners so they don’t overdo salting out of fear of litigation, but instead will go out and scoop it back up when it’s clearly not needed? Are there solutions out there that will not just slow but stop the salting of our land?
Other students are helping a town on Cape Cod forecast and reduce its future waste management costs, and develop an app to help citizens be more environmental. A student is helping an organization that helps indigenous and rural peoples, and one is seeking sound ways to evaluate country performance on greenhouse gas reduction, trying to sort out what policies bring about better performance. One issue is the process of reaching out and not getting responses. I have to help them learn to persist, and ways of asking that get people to respond, and this is frustrating until we break through. Rarely does polite persistence not work, but it is an anxious time when you don’t know that yet. Student work is posted at www.bu.edu/rccp.
There are thousands of great projects that students can do. I give mine about two dozen ideas and then they pick the ones they want to do. The rest, undone, remain for us to care about. That includes the PFAS issue that seems to have penetrated people’s consciousness. It is to be hoped that people don’t assume something is “PFAS-free” just because it has been tested and found negative. It depends on the test. One approach looks for six PFAS compounds. The other looks for the presence of fluorine. Given that there are thousands of PFAS compounds the latter is the only sensible approach. But the big point is that these substances and others like them that do not break down, or are otherwise damaging to biological entities, must be banned. We have not yet learned that we must use the Toxic Substances Control Act. It is the height of inefficiency and irresponsibility to allow companies to make and distribute chemicals that we know will do nothing but damage because they are inimical to biological processes. Now billions must be spent to address the problem, that could have been prevented by proper use of that act, originally intended to get us to address the pollution problem at the source, the decision to make and use chemicals that should not be placed in our environment.
Concerning bans, however, imposing them suddenly can be terribly disruptive, and premature, when alternatives are not well known, proven, available, or suitable for everyone. It is easy for advocates to jump to the simple solution of a ban, but it may generate so much counterproductive resistance that the goal is blocked. This particularly happens when a sudden limit is imposed in a way that feels draconian, and makes the environmental effort seem not like a protection but an intrusion.
It is one thing to fight those who oppose regulation, it is another to be bedeviled by people on your own side impatient with details or unsympathetic to the legitimate concerns of the regulated community. God and the devil both reside there. We need to be working on transforming every system we have – the systems for feeding us, housing us, informing, clothing, transporting, generating the energy for all that. While that principle is simple, and so is the idea that restoring respect in our politics will lead to more constructive and more effective common efforts, the actual work involves complexity, patience, wisdom. The bomb-throwers and angry slogans, the disrespect and writing off of the other side – these generate resistance to the change we need.
There is so much that needs to be done. If you can find other people to do them with, the experience can be transformed from depressing drudgery to exciting, passionate engagement. I remind myself of the wonderful people I have worked with and how we have been a team of would-be world-savers. Nobody calls themselves that but that’s what it’s about. It feels good if you haven’t tried it. Would-be means you don’t know what you’re doing but you will try to figure it out, with all others willing to work seriously together. It’s not the arrogant kind of world-saving we don’t need any more of.
Joe Biden’s speech last night argued for this constructive engagement. Instead of castigating the Republicans as enemies he asked them to work as they should, for all Americans. If this call is heeded Americans will find themselves working for the world as well. Unity of purpose in protecting the whole circle of life, not positions for gain, will benefit those suffering in the Mideast, in Africa, in Eastern Europe, etc., and will restore to the world what it has been missing since 2016: a sense of progress and hope, born of purposeful and ethical action.
[1] As told in Dragons and Dynasties, An Introduction to Chinese Mythology, by Yuan Ke, (1993), everyone laughs at the old man who wants to move the mountain, but he and his sons get started on the job, and the gods are so impressed that they do it for him. For me the analogy is when you have a good idea and it gets taken up and implemented, works, and spreads.
Confusion extends to the job President Biden is doing. Some swallow or are infected by lies about him, others seem unable to compare his intelligibility with Trump’s incoherence, but too many others are well-meaning idealists who wish Biden would do more, not realizing how constrained he is by the opposition. It should not be a successful tactic, but it has been, to convince people that it is the Democrats’ fault government is not working very well lately, while clearly the destructive campaigns of the opposition are the outstanding reason. This is not to say that Democrats don’t make terrible mistakes. But they need a cooperative partner, and we Americans need loyal opposition, not the smearing of Democrats as like Communists, pioneered by Nixon, not the charming disdain of government by Reagan, not the scorched-earth politics of Gingrich, not the chaos agents we have today. Recognizing and rejecting the takeover of the Republican party by extremists is a project for patriotic citizens.
In The Public Philosophy (1955) Walter Lippman wrote about two approaches to change – one he called assimilative, in which the ruling elite slowly opens up and allows more people to share power. England’s nobility, he writes, had done that enough for enough people to feel that they shared in governance, through Parliament, and when the Americans rebelled, they were fighting for the restoration of rights they thought they already had – demanding to be given back the right to be part of the system of self-governance. In contrast, the French nobility thought of themselves as a separate, superior caste, and refused to give up power, and so had to be overthrown and replaced. This “Jacobin” approach of revolution, we all know, involved the guillotine and ends with Napolean and then a restoration of nobility and a permanent fear of revolution, which then generates a perceived need for coercion to suppress it. The American ideal of equality has been a force for assimilation, and that is a slow and painstaking process. Yes, it makes one angry that we can’t move more quickly to the state we see as necessary and right. But the path of revolution, history shows, is reckless and often abysmal.
A friend of mine recently opined that he wished he had the courage that the Weathermen of the sixties and early seventies showed, in “doing something”. The Weathermen looked for fights with police and engaged in bombing campaigns. I reminded him that I was a protest leader at the time, using reason, candles, flowers, and peaceful gatherings, and told him that in my opinion, the Weathermen ruined the protest movement. They handed Nixon the opportunity to disparage protest as destructive and all of us as irresponsible and unpatriotic, and we have never recovered from that, just as many have not recovered from their fear of a communist uprising. I wish people like my friend pined instead for Henry David Thoreau’s peaceful Civil Disobedience, which inspired Gandhi and M. L. King.
If you spend all your time thinking about such things, it’s easy to get burned out because your ability to influence progress quickly is very limited and often you don’t even have an idea where to begin, or where even to find hope. It was this tension, that I began to feel as a small boy learning about pesticides, pollution from cars and factories, extinctions, the bomb’s threat to make us extinct, that caused me to be an environmentalist, even when there was no clear way to act or make money being one. When I tried working in other professions I found I couldn’t continue and always had to come back to environmental work, because I am too anxious about our ability to curtail our impacts, and environmental work is therapy for that anxiety.
This, I think, is the main thing I see happening with the students in my project class, which enables them to do real work on real issues. They come in totally depressed and get excited about the work they are doing. It is an important counter to the news and the sense with which all young people today are burdened, and it does more than writing a paper that only a teacher reads. When they work with adults working on our common problems, they realize they are not alone, they meet some of the existing cadre of environmental citizenship. This helps build the emotional strength to face these very distressing realities.
This year three students dropped out early, which is a lot for this class. I wish I had done more to help them choose a project that worked for them. But the dozen still in Research for Environmental Agencies and Organizations are hard at work and to hear them talk about what they are learning already, and in fact achieving, gives me as well as them a boost in the dark context that 2024 provides. I think of the astronauts Tom Wolfe talks about in The Right Stuff, who wanted windows and things to do in the capsules, and not just to be “spam in a can”. As we ride the insane political times we need to find those measures of control, however small, that we can exert. Sometimes we find, as the ancient Chinese legend tells, that you can move mountains.[1]
Three students visited The Great Exchange, in Devens Massachusetts, to help the manager of this innovative resource recovery initiative put together her story, of diverting perfectly fine products from the waste stream and giving them to schools and such. She is fighting the tragic throughput systems our short-sighted economics generates. Just visiting helps her know her project is valuable to others, as well as inspiring the students, who will likely put something together of some use.
Three other students are helping Quiet Communities (QC), a nonprofit devoted to noise, promote the accelerated transition to unleaded aviation gas – a task QC found itself in when the communities of airport neighbors disturbed by noise learned that they were also endangered by lead. The students have already interviewed an airport manager, who frankly confessed he had never worried about the lead issue before, but who now realized how important it was and had clearly been educating himself rapidly, and Kurt Castagna, who now heads EAGLE (the Federal Aviation Administration’s public-private effort to transition away from leaded gas). Castagna explained the status of unleaded fuels (beginning to be available) and the details of what’s needed for the transition to using them: distributors have to know enough to assume responsibility for it, including that their filters will work with it, that it won’t corrode linings, and most importantly, whether it is compatible with other fuels. We were all interested in how fast we could make that transition, without creating new problems. It is clear that the interests of those flying, those on the ground, and those who fuel and work on engines are all respected when this effort is conducted earnestly. It is good for the students to see such a “hot” issue, rife with anger and mistrust, being addressed constructively.
A student and I have put together questions for experts in road salt, to see if anyone is looking at the eventual accumulation issue – studies show alarming buildups of sodium and chlorides and the literature is full of techniques, but they only seem to minimize damage. Is there anyone pickup up salt, recovering runoff, stopping it from spreading to wetlands? Who is adjusting the liability of building owners so they don’t overdo salting out of fear of litigation, but instead will go out and scoop it back up when it’s clearly not needed? Are there solutions out there that will not just slow but stop the salting of our land?
Other students are helping a town on Cape Cod forecast and reduce its future waste management costs, and develop an app to help citizens be more environmental. A student is helping an organization that helps indigenous and rural peoples, and one is seeking sound ways to evaluate country performance on greenhouse gas reduction, trying to sort out what policies bring about better performance. One issue is the process of reaching out and not getting responses. I have to help them learn to persist, and ways of asking that get people to respond, and this is frustrating until we break through. Rarely does polite persistence not work, but it is an anxious time when you don’t know that yet. Student work is posted at www.bu.edu/rccp.
There are thousands of great projects that students can do. I give mine about two dozen ideas and then they pick the ones they want to do. The rest, undone, remain for us to care about. That includes the PFAS issue that seems to have penetrated people’s consciousness. It is to be hoped that people don’t assume something is “PFAS-free” just because it has been tested and found negative. It depends on the test. One approach looks for six PFAS compounds. The other looks for the presence of fluorine. Given that there are thousands of PFAS compounds the latter is the only sensible approach. But the big point is that these substances and others like them that do not break down, or are otherwise damaging to biological entities, must be banned. We have not yet learned that we must use the Toxic Substances Control Act. It is the height of inefficiency and irresponsibility to allow companies to make and distribute chemicals that we know will do nothing but damage because they are inimical to biological processes. Now billions must be spent to address the problem, that could have been prevented by proper use of that act, originally intended to get us to address the pollution problem at the source, the decision to make and use chemicals that should not be placed in our environment.
Concerning bans, however, imposing them suddenly can be terribly disruptive, and premature, when alternatives are not well known, proven, available, or suitable for everyone. It is easy for advocates to jump to the simple solution of a ban, but it may generate so much counterproductive resistance that the goal is blocked. This particularly happens when a sudden limit is imposed in a way that feels draconian, and makes the environmental effort seem not like a protection but an intrusion.
It is one thing to fight those who oppose regulation, it is another to be bedeviled by people on your own side impatient with details or unsympathetic to the legitimate concerns of the regulated community. God and the devil both reside there. We need to be working on transforming every system we have – the systems for feeding us, housing us, informing, clothing, transporting, generating the energy for all that. While that principle is simple, and so is the idea that restoring respect in our politics will lead to more constructive and more effective common efforts, the actual work involves complexity, patience, wisdom. The bomb-throwers and angry slogans, the disrespect and writing off of the other side – these generate resistance to the change we need.
There is so much that needs to be done. If you can find other people to do them with, the experience can be transformed from depressing drudgery to exciting, passionate engagement. I remind myself of the wonderful people I have worked with and how we have been a team of would-be world-savers. Nobody calls themselves that but that’s what it’s about. It feels good if you haven’t tried it. Would-be means you don’t know what you’re doing but you will try to figure it out, with all others willing to work seriously together. It’s not the arrogant kind of world-saving we don’t need any more of.
Joe Biden’s speech last night argued for this constructive engagement. Instead of castigating the Republicans as enemies he asked them to work as they should, for all Americans. If this call is heeded Americans will find themselves working for the world as well. Unity of purpose in protecting the whole circle of life, not positions for gain, will benefit those suffering in the Mideast, in Africa, in Eastern Europe, etc., and will restore to the world what it has been missing since 2016: a sense of progress and hope, born of purposeful and ethical action.
[1] As told in Dragons and Dynasties, An Introduction to Chinese Mythology, by Yuan Ke, (1993), everyone laughs at the old man who wants to move the mountain, but he and his sons get started on the job, and the gods are so impressed that they do it for him. For me the analogy is when you have a good idea and it gets taken up and implemented, works, and spreads.
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