Back in September Suzanne Fouty sent me an article from the Oregon Quarterly about the work of Mary Christina Woods and the concept of Natural Law and the Public Trust. I read through it and about the work of the Children’s Trust with fascination and saw clearly how important that argument might be for beavers down the road, but I couldn’t figure out how to begin sharing it with you. The bookmark stayed uselessly on my computer while I tried to think of where to start.
Bill Moyers, in the final show of his very consequential career, figured it out for me.
When we think of climate change, the idea seems so big and unfixably hopeless that most stop thinking very quickly. Mary Wood challenged that lethargy dramatically with her dynamic work, and it’s even more exciting to hear described in person. Find an hour in your day for this program and watch the entire thing. Really. It’s that good. But here are some money quotes from the transcript that will give you the basic platform.
Well, the heart of the approach is the public trust doctrine. And it says that government is a trustee of the resources that support our public welfare and survival. And so a trust means that one entity or person manages a certain wealth, an endowment, so to speak, for the benefit of others. And in the case of the public trust, the beneficiaries are the present and future generations of citizens. So it is a statement of, in essence, public property rights that have been known since Roman times.
In fact, this was articulated by the Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in a landmark public trust decision last year. And the decision basically overturned a statute that the Pennsylvania Legislature had passed to promote fracking. And the Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Chief Justice Castille, said this violates the public trust. And he began his opinion by saying that citizens hold inalienable environmental rights to assure the habitability of their communities.
And that these are ensconced in the social contract that citizens make with government. They cannot be alienated. They are inherent and reserved. So they are of a constitutional nature. And the point of the public trust is that the citizens hold these constitutional rights in an enduring natural endowment that is supposed to support all future generations of citizens in this country. It is so basic to democracy; in fact, the late Joseph Sax said the trust distinguishes a society of citizens from serfs.
Did you catch that? The people of this country are entitled to clean water and clean air and a liveable climate. Without these fundamental rights civic society as we know it becomes meaningless. This is the basic doctrine of the Public Trust, and what she has used so successfully in working with the Children’s Trust in Eugene OR. You don’t have to have a vivid imagination at all to immediately understand how this is important to beavers.
…environmental law held a lot of promise but that it’s not working, and that agencies have basically used it to allow almost unfettered destruction of our natural resources.
BILL MOYERS: What agencies are you talking about?
MARY CHRISTINA WOOD: Agencies that span the full realm of natural resources. So the US EPA, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Corps of Engineers, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service; you name it. There are dozens of agencies at the federal and state levels that control environmental resources. And they are supposed to represent the public interest and not corporations or moneyed interests in making those decisions. And we the public assume that the agencies are doing the right thing when they’re implementing environmental laws. Whereas in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Agencies have become politicized creatures that largely serve industry.
Climate is not just an environmental issue. This is a civilizational issue. This is the biggest case that courts will get in terms of the potential harm in front of them, the population affected by that harm, and in terms of the urgency. Climate is mind-blowing. It can’t be categorized any longer as an environmental issue.
Remind me again why climate change has anything to do with beavers?
And Eugene Oregon is about an hour away from the State of the Beaver Conference. Just sayin’.
