Do we have a right to a stable climate?

Today on the Sam Matey-Coste Substack account – The Weekly Anthropocene – carried news and a record of how countries voted to uphold the right of people across the world to a stable environment determined by the International Court of Justice. Note below, the U.S. now joins Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Liberia, and others, to deny that right.

A U.S.A. nonprofit supporting youth is working in state and federal courts toward a declaration of the rights of children and youth to a healthy, sustainable climate. Our Children’s Trust is a nonprofit worth following. Listening to youth speak to their futures requires all of us to understand our inaction acts to decrease their life’s potential. No one would deny that to children, right?

The children and youth are given top notch legal education and representation at no cost. Explore the website by state to learn where youth are applying pressure to achieve a sustainable environment for their generation.

I highly recommend the book, The Ecology of Childhood, How Our Changing World Threatens Children published in 2020. Barbara Bennett Woodhouse devoted her law career to the rights of children. (See Google Scholar for her published works.) Bennett demonstrates how the U.S. ranks low compared to other developed nations in the social safety net provided our children. We talk a good game about how we love our children in the U.S. but, when studied, that proves to be false. Now, we deny them a stable climate as well?

Readers, it is my firm belief that Americans are misrepresented by the current administration which denies climate change and has turned our country back to increasing fossil fuel production and use. The momentum toward clean energy that just got started in the Biden administration has slowed as a result.

In Sam Matey-Coste’s Substack account you can learn about advancement in clean energy and environmental victories in countries around the world. I highly recommend him to all of you who need a daily dose of climate hope.

In the U.S. there is progress in clean energy development such as in Texas and California, but it is much slower than it could be – especially in the automobile industry where sales of electric cars have plummeted. And now that Trump has illustrated how vulnerable the fossil fuel industry can be, the U.S. is losing out and our children’s futures are even more imperiled as the Earth warms. Emissions from fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate anomalies and storms like we’ve recently experienced — fires like we’ve never seen, droughts across whole regions of the continent.

But, it is not just our children whom we imperil. We imperial the world’s children. Emissions do not stay in place but circulate around the globe. We are all responsible and must get back to representatives in government who are responsible, serious adults. The window of opportunity for Americans to gain access to free or cheap clean energy is attenuating.

How can this be true? We have historically been a nation of innovators. But here, oligarchs in tech have taken away our agency and made us prisoners of their outsized influence over our politics and thus our government. Data centers to support AI development are being shoved down communities throats. Who profits? Oligarchs.

Step Up!

Step into this path we are on to take back our country and get back on a path to innovation, clean cheap energy for All, and working alongside our allies across the world to obtain for youth and coming generations a safe, stable environment, a world of innovators and well cared for people. War is obsolete, and our people must have a say through our representatives as to whether we go on defense of liberty. DEFENSE. The Speaker of the House refused to bring a vote to the floor of the House of Representatives to end the Iran War.

This administration must be held accountable. We must stand for truth and for our children’s future.

This time in U.S. history will either be recorded as our undoing and defeat, or our finest hour. Which will history record?

Our Father and His B-29 Crew WWII

Dad, on the far right standing, was 24 and his crew were 18 yrs old to 23. They flew 35 combat missions in the Pacific Theater, including Low Level Bombing over Tokyo, Japan. Below is the Three Feathers B-29 painted for combat.

My Parents

My sisters and I, our children and grandchildren are forever proud and grateful for the sacrifices of our parents’ generation. Both Mom and Dad came from modest income families, had suffered through their teen years in a depression that left them hungry and wondering what lay ahead of them. When Pearl Harbor woke a nation reluctant to enter the World War II conflagration, they all jumped into the entire country’s refitting and commitment to the war. We are ever grateful all they gave to make this world safe for us and for instilling in us the love of country, the willingness to step up as citizens to keep America safe and bubbling with hope and supportive of each new generation. Thanks to you, Mom and Dad. You are not forgotten. We take the baton and are carrying it along to keep our nation of equality and freedom safe from tyranny whether from without or within.

To all veterans, thank you! To those we remember, God bless you.

From the Poetry Foundation: William Butler Yeats

The Poetry Foundation

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

By William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Copyright Credit: W.B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. (London: Kagan Paul, Trench and Co., 1889.) Public domain.

Source: The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (Kagan Paul, Trench and Co., 1889)

Be Well My Friends

How We See Each Other

“The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality,” Wilkerson writes. “It is about power — which groups have it and which do not.” ~ Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson

America is beset with a wound of spirit. Slavery, or the subjugation of others based on skin color, origin – or any other arbitrary distinction -is an ongoing contradiction in our Constitutional lives yet to be resolved. Today, Black Americans are still struggling for equal representation. Now, with the striking down of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, are we back at the basic question: Do Black Americans have a right to equal representation in voting districts? We are at another make or break moment. Is the Supreme Court right that there is no longer a need for federal oversight of district maps in southern states which have historically worked to suppress the vote of African Americans?

Human beings can be vicious, murderous, and also kind and loving…and everything in between. We are a complex species with potential for good or bad. Our canon of law traces all the clever ways we try to obtain power.

For millennia, humans have sought distinctions that give them a false rationale, stemming their sense of guilt when taking what is not rightfully theirs. More advanced cultures are more tolerant, making judgements based on how people act in various situations.

Much of this wisdom of the ages was on the minds of our founders when we set out to establish a new kind of government based on equality. Yet, most of them owned slaves and denied poor whites privileges who did not own land. Over our history as a nation, Americans have subjugated and disparaged African Americans, Irish, German, Slavic, Italian and Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans. The Constitution and Bill of Rights, and ongoing adjudication in our courts, continues to refine how we live together and who gets a “slice of the pie.”

Listen to a scholarly discussion about the impact of the Civil Rights Act from the National Constitution Center.

Isabel Wilkerson explains in her landmark book, Caste (2020) that she set out to discover the origins of our discontent. In her lengthy study, interviewing thousands of people, the things that divide us the most are not so much color or gender but rather about who’s got power.

In a 2023 interview with Oprah Daily, she was asked about the banning of Caste from libraries across America. She responded, “In writing Caste, I had to do a tremendous amount of research into India and Germany during the Nazi era. The Nazis studied the United States’ Jim Crow laws in creating the Nuremberg laws. We are coming perilously close to the spirit of what they were doing in another century with the banning of books. It’s revisiting a past that we should never want to experience again.”

It seems to me that we are at a new juncture in determining whether a redistricting map achieves the goals of the party submitting it for review: to determine whether it serves to weaken the moral principles of a Republic to achieve a new form of government, i.e. an autocracy based on white male supremacy and Christian Nationalist ideology. Yes, it is a grab for power, but much more, right? It seeks to tamp down the voices of Black Americans who are seen as opposing white power and privilege which for centuries enslaved generations. Sound familiar? I think we are right back at Reconstruction.

What do you think? Please submit comments.

Resources:

National Constitution Center Civil Rights Town Halls on YouTube:

Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice: Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act

Scotus Blog

Brennan Center for Justice

How quickly we forget

When I was a teenager, I would ride my horse deep into the Northern California wilderness. I came of age living in big nature. Given California’s growth and development, that ride would now be impossible. Yet phylogenetically, big nature is deep in all of our psyches. So I began to wonder why we were so rapidly destroying it. Years later at my first job at the University of Houston, I was studying children and parents’ environmental views and values. I found the children knew what air pollution was; but when we asked them if Houston had a problem with air pollution, they said, “No, we don’t have pollution here.” At the time, Houston was the most polluted city in the United States. – Peter Kahn, Environmental Psychologist

Environmental Generational Amnesia (EGA) was identified by Peter Kahn when I was working as an environmental educator. It began to answer my puzzlement about why people could not see the degradation of nature over time.

Kahn explained this phenomenon occurs as each generation takes the environment in their time as the norm.

Now, in America, I am wondering if this phenomenon works with memory of a democracy. We take what is before us as what it has always been.

In Kahn’s recommendations to counter environmental generational amnesia he worked with urban planners, for example, to build in features that allow local residents to experience more robust nature in a built environment.

Could we do the same for each generation to remember and know the origins of our Republic by experiencing aspects of a democratic society through out our lives as The People. Our form of governance is dependent on robust citizen and representative action and participation.

We could start by considering how to identify fairness, developing respectful listening; teaching check and balance by designing situations where kids can participate in situations demonstrate how it works to protect representation, free speech, and other key characteristics of a democratic society.

I recall a teacher in high school who designed his homeroom to function in this manner. He did something else: he taught us the Latin and Greek derivation of many words in our language so that we could derive meaning from root words

Do you agree that a type of democratic generational amnesia may be a force that works to undermine democratic governance which is dependent on individuals possessing more than rudimentary knowledge (i.e. memorizing definitions).

What is a democracy?

The Rights of Nature

For too long, the dominant culture has cleaved humans from the web of life, insisting upon human separation from and superiority to the larger living world. That assumption has been translated into law, governance, and other realms of practice, justifying the treatment of nonhumans and nature as treasure troves for endless exploitation. However, the grip of this mode of thinking is beginning to ease, leaving space for new ideas and actions to sprout through. MOTH – More Than Human Life Program, https://mothrights.org/about/

Among thoughtful people across disciplines, the understanding that human beings are woven into the fabric of Nature – animal, plant, river, ocean – all is part of a whole that is interconnected beyond the human imagination. Recent research on trees, for example, demonstrate how certain trees “mother” others and pass on their knowledge to new generations. We’ve learned how fungi are a living glue and generative structure that is ubiquitous in nature and microbes in human beings are a living brain in the gut lining. The more we learn, the more we are humbled before the whole of life on earth.

Now, as great harm is evident through the combined activities of human beings which weakens and disappears species, robs whole forests or rivers of its life sustaining powers, we are called to reconsider whether the Earth is for human taking. What of the rights of all beings who make human life possible?

Emergence Magazine Podcast my readers will note is a well I return to frequently to gain new perspectives on the nature of our relationship to the whole of life. Western philosophy separates humans from nature, thereby providing rationale for extraction and overharvesting for economic gain and for power over others. Ironically for America, present at the time of exploration were millions of Americans with intricate knowledge of how to live on a piece of land without ruining it (Aldo Leopold) and a conceptual understanding of the web of life and its spiritual nature. To me this is one of our nation’s greatest sins. Yes, I consider it a sin because a thinking person through observation alone can observe how life is wildly interconnected and sacred.

Two links for readers to explore:

Emergence Magazine Podcast: Song of the Cedars. https://emergencemagazine.org/podcast/

Robert Macfarlane and the MOTH project https://mothlife.org/staff/robert-macfarlane/?fetch=single-staff and https://mothrights.org/about/

In Song of the Cedars listeners experience the oneness of life with an exceptional group of humans interwoven in the panoply of a healthy rain forest.

Consider whether the exploitation of a mineral from the earth should come with a cost paid back to that mountain based on the legal rights of nature. While listening to this podcast, I thought, “Wow. to think there are people who are engaged in integration in the web of life. I thought these are our most important people, guides and wisdom keepers.”

Let me know what you think about this movement. What is your experience with the rights of nature if any.

Robert Macfarlane Books

Photo from Kentucky Native Plant Society: Purple Coneflower

The Wisdom of a Forest

“When Mother Trees – the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience – die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape. It’s what all parents do.” – Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree.

Suzanne Simard, Forest Ecologist and author of Finding the Mother Tree and newly released When the Forest Breathes shares her latest research including the role of people in the health of the forest.

Please check out this recent podcast interview by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at Emergence Magazine with Suzanne Simard. The Scaffolding of Life: Cyclical Structures of a Forest

A mother tree: sugar maple, Bowling Green, KY

Democracy will not die in America

Get a cup of tea or coffee, glass of wine, and sit with all your attention to this great American Supreme Court Judge present an astute analysis of why the current Supreme Court’s use (misuse) of the Shadow Docket weakens the nation’s courts system overall.

Whenever we get to see democracy in action by a great American, take heart. Each of us, according to our ability, and from our own area of expertise, can provide the critical guardrails needed to protect the nation from tyranny.

Detail on stairs in the Capitol Rotunda
In the Capitol Building