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Julio Torres, Intern

At the very end of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, after the forest has been destroyed and the pond has been drained, a boy is given a seed that will potentially bring renewal to the now tree-less land.

The story was published in 1971. A year latter, Christopher D. Stone, J. Thomas McCarthy Trustee Chair in Law at the University of Southern California, published Should Trees Have Standing?, a work that very much speaks for the trees.

His book became a cornerstone of the environmental debate, but since this is an ongoing struggle without quick remedies, this real life Lorax has updated his book, now with a 21st urgency and mindset.  Stone makes a case for the voiceless trees, oceans, wildlife and environment, arguing they should have legal rights.

The following excerpt discusses the case of an 80s oceanic catastrophe in Germany, and how in the long run, advocating for the environment paid off. In his chapter conclusion, he argues that an institution like the Global Commons Trust Fund is best fitted to get results for cases like these.

As Dr. Seuss wrote, “UNLESS someone like you cares an awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Words to keep in mind as you read the excerpt below.

A case in Germany invoked the guardianship concept in a case with global implications. In 1988, approximately 15,000 dead seals mysteriously washed up on the beaches of the North and Baltic Seas. Widespread alarms were sounded, amid considerable concern that the massive deaths were portent of an impending ecological disaster. The most flagrant insult to the North Sea’s chemistry was widely considered to be titanium and other heavy metals that were being produced by incineration and dumping on the high seas by permit of the Western German government.

Conceivably, any of the states bordering the sea might have tried to challenge Germany’s action. But recall that, so long as the harm was being done on, or affecting life only in, the high seas, the authority of any nation to sue was (and is) doubtful. For Poland, say, to trace through a legally compensable injury would have been nearly hopeless. From the point of view of national fishing interests, the reduction—even elimination—of the seals might even have been regarded as an economic benefit. (The harbor seals involved, unlike fur seals, are themselves commercially valueless but compete with fishermen for commercial fish stocks.) Moreover, all the sea-bordering nations were contributing to the pollution, and thus, had any of them objected their case might have been met by Germany with an “unclean hands” defense: “you can’t complain, because you’re as guilty as we are.”

Who, then, was to speak for the seals—and, in so doing, represent all the elements of the ecological web whose hazarded fortunes were intertwined? In comparable situations in the United States, courts have shown willingness to interpret the Administrative Procedure Act and other laws as giving a public interest group standing to challenge the government’s actions. German law, however, is much more stringent about allowing “citizen’s suits.”

The solution was for a group of German environmental lawyers (with the encouragement and advice of the author) to institute an action in which the North Sea seals were named the lawsuit’s principal plaintiffs, with the lawye

In honor of the new Ken Burns series starting on PBS next Sunday we asked Donald Worster, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History, University of Kansas and the author of A Passion For Nature: The Life of John Muir, to take a look at the series and let us know what he thought. His response is below. Tune in on Sunday and let us know what you think in the comments.

I have been watching the new Ken Burns series for PBS, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” and it is a gorgeous and inspiring achievement. The hero of the series, and of our long history of creating national parks, is John Muir, the subject of my recent biography. Muir had nothing to do with setting aside Yellowstone park in 1872, but he was the main force behind the preservation of Yosemite, and he was the founder of a movement that would go on to add the Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, Big Bend, Cape Cod, Haleakala, Glacier Bay, and many others. Altogether, Americans would set aside more than two hundred million acres in a vast, diverse system of terrestrial parks and marine preserves spanning the continent and the Pacific Ocean. Muir would have endorsed the claim that those parks are this nation’s best idea ever. But what is the idea behind the parks?

“Recreation” is a commonly expressed purpose of the parks, which usually means outdoor exercise in the form of hiking, camping, fishing, or boating. But one can find mere physical exercise in a gymnasium. Muir understood that recreation should be a “re-creating” of our inner selves through immersion in nature. In his 1901 book Our National Parks he wrote that the parks should offer “wildness” (another word for “nature”) and that “wildness is a necessity.” A nation of “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” seek in the parks an escape from “the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury.” They go there to reawaken something deep within their souls—a sense of being part of the natural world. Modern society has repressed that feeling of connectedness, of kinship with other forms of life, and has buried people under the burdens of too much work, too much economic insecurity, too much noise and machinery.

Muir thought the parks should be preserved for poor people as well as rich. Americans of all sorts shared the same need for getting back in touch with nature. The rich could buy a private summer retreat in the Adirondacks or a ranch high up in the Santa Barbara mountains, but the poor could not. They could, however, claim a right of access to the “people’s parks,” although it was not clear in 1901 how an impoverished sharecropper or a low-wage factory worker could afford traveling to a park. Muir seems to have assumed that eventually the railroad and the automobile would be cheap enough for almost everybody to use—and in fact that has come true. As well, he supported the creation of urban “natural” areas, like Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Central Park in New York City. It took art to design them, but they could bring the green world within reach of city dwellers.

Besides restoring Americans’ psychological and physical health, the great parks were supposed to serve a religious purpose. Muir was one of this country’s greatest spiritual prophets, and he envisioned the parks as a kind of church or temple. They should become sacred places, rigorously protected in their pristine beauty from too much profane intrusion. He would never draw a rigid line between what is sacred and what is profane; after all he wanted people to come to those new churches and they would need food, lodging, and transportation while there. It was an old dilemma that has plagued all religions. “Thus long ago,” he noted, “a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves.” He was under no illusion that the temple of Yosemite or Mount Rainier would be safe from the ancient struggle between what is appropriate and what is not.

For people who do not share Muir’s religious stance toward nature, the whole idea of setting aside and carefully preserving national parks may seem loony. Conservative Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims may find the idea of national parks a dangerous slide toward paganism or pantheism, a threat to their traditions. On the other hand, there are a lot of “nature atheists” who find Muir’s religion misguided, anti-human, or too restrictive. They don’t find nature at all inspiring or holy—it’s just a set of economic resources to be used for the benefit of humankind. Why shouldn’t we let snowmobiles into Yellowstone? Or why shouldn’t we give the parks back to their “rightful owners,” the Indian tribes that once hunted and gathered there and let them use the lands for economic development? That the parks should have a predominately religious purpose is not a universal point of view, and thus they are constantly embroiled in America’s cultural wars.

Yet I am impressed by the extent to which Muir’s way of thinking has spread through American society and the parks have become part of the nation’s religious life. The Ken Burns series promotes this success. It suggests again and again that we should come to these places in a spirit of awe and respect for something grander, more transcendent, more beautiful than we could ever create. Here are places to make us proud but also make us humble. They are the result of immense forces working over immense periods of time, and the outcome is goodness and beauty beyond our capacity to improve. This is a view that has gathered power in our culture. I am convinced that democratic societies are especially open to the religion of nature, for it takes faith out of the hands of priests and gives it back to the people. As long as Americans hunger for religion and as long as they pursue democracy, the national parks will likely be treasured as places where the people can go to worship as they see fit.

Because I like to start my day out with some good news.  Here is a neat article about a company in the UK who are making school exercise books out of a sugar cane byproduct rather than conventional wood-based pulp, and the best feature is that the books are no more expensive.

From the BBC

Ms Teal said using agricultural crops rather than wood gave the added advantage of reducing deforestation, and helped protect fragile ecosystems that would otherwise break down as a result of logging in forested areas.

"In this instance it costs no more to buy an eco-friendly green product than a conventional wood-based paper product," said Ms Teal.

"The Consortium is the first supplier to source this product and with sustainability becoming increasingly important in the classroom, we think that once schools have tried these exercise books, there will be no going back."

I hope the project has legs, if it works out well we may see publishers start producing textbooks from this material as well.

by Cassie, Publicity

Patricia Fara lectures in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and is the Senior Tutor of Clare College. In her latest book, Science: A Four Thousand Year History, she sweeps through the centuries, from ancient Babylon right up to the latest cutting-edge research in genetics and particle physics, illuminating the financial interests, imperial ambitions, and publishing enterprises that have made science the powerful global phenomenon that it is today. In this original article, she discusses global warming and the history of environmentalism.

As a topic for comic verse, global warming might not seem the ideal choice. However, Howard Nemerov, who used to be Poet Laureate of the United States, would not have agreed. In 1989, he wrote this eloquent reminder that scientific progress can have its drawbacks:

praise without end the go-ahead zeal
of whoever it was invented the wheel;
but never a word for the poor soul’s sake
that thought ahead, and invented the brake.

Twenty years later, as the icecaps melt and famine rates increase, it seems obvious that politicians and scientists should long ago have called a halt to industrial processes that made their own lives more comfortable, but pushed the world towards destruction. Unfortunately, winding back the clock has never been as straightforward as it sounds. In the middle of the eighteenth century, when Europeans first started wandering around Tahiti, the French explorer Louis de Bougainville enthused ‘I was transported into the Garden of Eden; we crossed a turf, covered by fine fruit trees, and intersected by little rivulets…everywhere we found hospitality, ease, innocent joy, and every appearance of happiness.’ Before long, this earthly paradise had been irreversibly corrupted by sexually transmitted diseases and imported technological gimmicks.

Current concerns about our planet’s survival have refueled romantic visions of a vanished golden age when natural harmony reigned, unthreatened by ozone holes or vanishing species. However, preserving environmental purity entails confronting some paradoxes. For one thing, much of nature is unnatural: scenes that seem eternal are man-made products. Britain, for example, was originally covered in dense woodland, and bore little resemblance to the open pastures featured in publicity brochures. Large fields were created only in the eighteenth century, when wealthy landowners decided to make their farms more profitable by obliterating the small strips of land allocated to individual families. Far from being conservationists, these agricultural reformers overrode protests about decimating traditional village life in order to create the meadows that now characterize picture-book Britain.

Safeguarding the environment might seem a universal ideal, but it is a political issue that has been adopted by very different factions. During World War Two, when British propaganda campaigns were urging loyal citizens to defend their supposedly traditional countryside, the nations’ enemies were summoning up nature to back the Nazi cause. Adolf Hitler was a nut-cutlet vegetarian whose regime reforested arable land, dispensed organic herbal medicines, and instigated research programmes into natural therapies. His right-hand aide Hermann Goering is now deplored for founding the Gestapo and the concentration camps, but he was also a pioneer environmentalist. After Poland’s original woodlands were devastated by the German Occupation, Goering restocked its newly created parks with the animals that had once been native, including a herd of superb bison – a potent Teutonic emblem – bred according to the latest techniques of post-Darwinian eugenicists. Despite the genocidal campaigns he launched against human beings, Goering insisted that this primeval forest was a sacred grove whose animal inhabitants should remain untouched.

Nature looks better when it is artificial. That is why the gardener Capability Brown fabricated tranquil English landscapes by digging lakes, planting trees and moving whole villages – including their inhabitants. The naturalist John Muir was enraptured by the serene Californian meadowlands he visited, but he chose to ignore the influence of native American farmers who had been fire-clearing the original forest for centuries. The artist James Audubon made a small fortune by selling exotic pictures of birds, carefully crafting them in his studio to symbolise American values of strength and freedom as they soared against painted backdrops of remote mountains. Yet Audubon was no conservationist, but a keen huntsman who obsessively tracked down the rarities he needed to complete his collection, not caring about the risks of extinguishing threatened species.

The appeal of wild nature is relatively recent. For millennia, wilderness was something to push back and overcome as people struggled to carve out a comfortable existence from their hostile surroundings. Survival depended on taming nature, so that barren mountains and dense forests were regarded as suitable for social outcasts, for sinners banished from God’s Garden of Eden. Such harsh domains started to become fashionable only a couple of hundred years ago, when the products of civilisation were starting to seem less attractive. Romantic travelers described how they reached states of near-religious ecstasy through contemplating the sublime beauty of precipitous gorges or gloomy cathedral-like groves. After venturing overseas to other continents, they recounted that they had voyaged back in time, encountering primitive societies where life was easier and purer.

This double yearning for the sublime and the primitive manifested itself particularly strongly in the United States. During the nineteenth century, romantic writers envisaged pioneers steadily pushing back the frontier between the wild and the civilized as they moved ever westwards. This triumphant vision was marred by nostalgic regrets that Americans were losing contact with their immigrant origins as progress obliterated the authentic experiences of the first rugged settlers. To resolve this sentimental dilemma, enterprising naturalists established national parks with a double purpose—to provide sanctuaries for refugees from successful capitalism, and to stand as monuments to America’s pioneering spirit.

Most famously, Muir—originally a farmer born in Scotland, nowadays celebrated as the founding father of environmentalism—set about converting Yosemite into a man-made wilderness zone. He intended his national park to appear primal, even though it had never before existed as he designed it. Apparently oblivious to the inherent ironies of their mission, Muir and his contemporaries worked with biblical zeal, aiming not to simulate the grim realities of frontier survival, but instead to resurrect the original Garden of Eden. But manufacturing uninhabited glades of harmony meant forcibly clearing out the indigenous residents, many of whom were slaughtered or subjected to misery in reservations. To guarantee safe access and stop nature from ruining the carefully selected views, conservationists constructed discreetly camouflaged tracks and embarked on continuous maintenance programmes.

Restoring an imagined natural past has always been an expensive business. It also entails interference and oppression—ejecting Native Americans from Yosemite, ripping out family strip-farms, relocating villages. Nowadays, privileged eco-tourists who live in cities campaign to preserve endangered species and keep vast tracts of untamed nature as retreats from urban pressures. Maintaining bio-diversity may seem a more worthwhile and more scientific ideal than Muir’s bid for an original terrestrial paradise. Nevertheless, just as in Yosemite, establishing uninhabited wilderness has entailed evicting the local inhabitants. In the interests of preservation, many victims of involuntary resettlement—Thai, Kenyans, Amazonian Indians—have become conservation refugees confined to shabby squatter camps.

The central paradox is that people are themselves part of nature. In 1964, American conservation law defined wilderness as a place ‘where man himself is a visitor who does not remain’—but if people are excluded from nature, then it is intrinsically artificial. In the Bible, God gave human beings a dual responsibility—to be the world’s custodians, but also to exploit it for their own benefit. To express this conflict in scientific terms, the drive to conserve is at odds with the competitive struggle for survival entailed in human evolution. During the second half of the nineteenth century, wealthy capitalists justified their cut-throat tactics through invoking the mantra coined by Darwin’s disciples—’survival of the fittest’. However, the very success of this ruthless formula prompted critics to focus on its flip-side of exploitation, and in Germany, a very different Darwinian champion appeared—Ernst Haeckel. While American environmentalists were attempting to resurrect uncorrupted paradise, Haeckel was initiating a less oppressive, more holistic approach to biology that strongly influenced later environmentalist movements.

The science of ecology was founded by Haeckel, who invented the word in 1866. Although it has now acquired a moral spin—ecological washing-powder is virtuous as well as expensive—ecology started out as the study of the relationships between living creatures and their surroundings. Like ‘economy‘, it comes from the Greek word for a family household, and Haeckel suggested that all the Earth’s organisms co-exist as a single integrated unit, competing against each other but also offering mutual aid. According to Haeckel’s version of Darwinian evolution, if people are to flourish, then they should respect the laws of this universal system instead of trying to dominate it. If more people had listened to him, perhaps global warming would not be the world’s greatest challenge confronting the human race today.

Deborah Gordon is a senior transportation policy analyst who has worked with the National Commission on Energy Policy, the Chinese government and many other organizations. Daniel Sperling is Professor of Engineering and Environmental Science and Founding Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis. Gordon and Sperling are the authors of Two Billion Cars: Driving Towards Sustainability which provides a concise history of America’s Love affair with cars and an overview of the global oil and auto industries. A few weeks ago we posted an original article by these authors.  Today we have pulled an excerpt from the book which looks specifically at Governor Schwarzenegger.

The unlikely hero who jolted California into climate change leadership is the former bodybuilder and action movie hero Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Before his election in fall 2003, California was experiencing something of a malaise.  Governor Schwarzenegger resurrected a bipartisan action-oriented government and, molded by circumstance, became and environmental leader.

In signing an agreement between California and the United Kingdom on July 31, 2006, Governor Schwarzenegger proclaimed, “California will not wait for our federal government to take strong action on global warming…International partnerships are needed in the fight against global warming and California has a responsibility and a profound role to play to protect not only our environment, but to be a world leader on this issue as well.”

He had come a long way in a short time.  Governor Schwarzenegger’s second inaugural address in January 2007 made it strikingly clear that he had evolved into an accomplished politician.  He was now focused, serious, and increasingly savvy.  In the cauldron of politics, he was forging himself into a centrist politician, strongly committed to getting things done, especially on the environment.  He emphasized above all else the need for action on global warming.  He was using global warming as his platform to unite voters from both parties behind him-in stark contrast to what President Bush was doing in Washington, D.C.

How did this Austrian bodybuilder evolve into an environmental leader?  He got his chance to govern through an extraordinary set of circumstances.  In 2003, voters became disenchanted with the remoteness and single-minded fund-raising of Democratic governor, Gray Davis, and voted him out of office in a rare recall election.  This election bypassed the normal process of primaries in which each political party selects a candidate.  That shortcut was essential to Schwarzenegger’s election.  Schwarzenegger was a moderate Republican in a state where the Republican Party has become very conservative.  According to most political experts, Schwarzenegger couldn’t have won a regular Republican primary.  But in a free-for-all election, he didn’t need his party’s endorsement.

In the end, the Democrats couldn’t put forth a compelling candidate, and Schwarzenegger slid into power with 48.6 percent of the vote.  he had never held a government office of any type, elected or appointed, and had little policy knowledge.  But he had huge name recognition as a result of his extraordinary success first as a bodybuilder, winning seven Mr. Olympia world championships, and then as a movie star, known for his Terminator action movies.  He also had management savvy in building very successful businesses capitalizing on his fame, though this was much overlooked at the time.  Governor Schwarzenegger resurrected a bipartisan action-orientated government and, molded by circumstance, became an environmental leader.

He entered office speaking of “blowing up boxes” of government, eliminating hundreds of boards and agencies, and bringing a new order.  His style was to browbeat the legislature.  The honeymoon began to fade during his first year when he provoked his legislature opponents by calling them “girlie men,” offended protesting nurses by telling them “special interests don’t like me in Sacramento because I kick their butt,” and antagonized teachers by asking voters to curtail teachers’ rights to job security.  Every one of the propositions he put forth to voters in a special election in fall 2005 went down in defeat.  His popularity plummeted.

He soon righted himself.  He apologized to voters for not respecting them.  He abandoned his more bombastic language.  He engaged himself in the business of governing and forged working relationships with the Democratic-controlled legislature.  His popularity was resurrected with apologies and an ability to learn from his mistakes, coupled with willful rejection of ideology and partisanship.  By late 2006, his ratings were once again soaring.  With a cooperative legislature, he concluded a series of legislative milestones, capped by the precedent-setting Global Warming Solutions Act.  In his 2007 inaugural address, Schwarzenegger justified this landmark law on moral grounds and “because California genuinely has the power to influence the res of the nation, even the world.”

Schwarzenegger was a product of circumstances.  He wobbled toward a model of leadership and innovation.  He’s not an intellectual leader.  He’s a problem solver with charisma and strong management and communication skills, who surrounds himself with strong, competent people, not least of which is his wife, Maria Shriver.  He’s been molded by the experience of being a Republican in a Democratic state and living with a politically astute Kennedy wife.  His bipartisanship was illustrated by his appointment of Terry Tamminene, an ardent environmentalist, as secretary of California’s Environmental Protection Agency and later as secretary of the cabinet, and Susan Kennedy, a Democrat and former abortion right advocate, as his chief of staff.

The governor’s desire to simultaneously achieve a healthy environment and economy in the state has resonated well.  With strong support from the venture capital community and leaders of many high-tech Silicon Valley companies, he has spurred the state’s businesses to think green thoughts.  His unwavering commitment to California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, low-carbon fuel standard, and greenhouse gas standards for vehicles has had the cumulative effect of convincing even the most recalcitrant company that there’s no turning back.  Indeed, Schwarzenegger sees climate change policy and green tech as his legacy.  The question is whether the various rules and laws and what skeptics refer to as the governor’s globe-trotting happy talk will translate into ral action and change.

Stuff Proliferates and Expands to Meet the Space Available.

Which is why I’ve been in trouble ever since I moved to a house half the size and no longer have a huge basement in which to store my own and my family’s stuff.

With winter approaching, I needed to reclaim the use of my garage. So I set a deadline for my family and myself and announced that we were going to have a tag sale, and whatever is left or not taken elsewhere would be given to Goodwill or some other worthy charity that takes Stuff.

Despite the “no earlybirds” admonition in the ad, the earlybirds were lined up and frothing at the mouth before I’d even put out the tables. The first day was pretty busy:



My daughter and her friend had been busy making beaded jewelry to sell for the JDRF Walk effort. (We’ve raised almost $7,000 so far and it’s still not to late to donate)



They raised $265 for the JDRF. Pretty awesome, I think. Son sold chocolate chip cookies and brownies that yours truly had to make the night before the tag sale. After the fourth batch I was wingeing about having to make another lot and the_webmeister offered to make the last batch of brownies. Isn’t he wonderful?

After two days of tag sale-ing, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

1) Never buy another thing
2) Never allow kids to buy another thing
3) If it can’t fit in the main body of the house, throw it out. (I’ve got some stuff in the attic and the garage, but I’m starting to get ruthless)
4) People at tag sales buy the stuff that you thought nobody in their right mind would want, and don’t buy the stuff you thought would be gone in a jiffy.
5) The $/hour earned from throwing a tag sale is even worse than the $/hour earned from writing a political column. And that takes some doing.
6) If there are any clothes left over, someone (no names mentioned) will inevitably use them to torture the dog:



7) If I ever say I want to throw a tag sale again, shoot me to put me out of misery.



On a more humorous note, I was sitting in my Writing Lair the other day and son came in shouting “Mummy! Mummy! I got bit by a dog and I have rabies!”

I turned around and saw:



Pretty funny, huh? He’d been playing with shaving cream at his occupational therapy appt and decided to pull one on his mother. Just another example of why I love writing for teens.