Environmental Awakening

Arriving back in San Francisco after a brief trip to the east coast, Coop buckled down to start year two of law school. I must admit, he seemed fairly dense to me. Contracts went right over his head, as did property law. In his defense, the California Supreme Court itself found something called “The Rule Against Perpetuities” incomprehensible, and even opined that an attorney who got it wrong could not be guilty of malpractice, because no one, including the seven justices on the court, fully understood it! But it could be on the bar, so struggle Coop did. 

Professor Luxembourg, who would soon hire Coop to clerk at his firm, explained the law in a simplistic way that finally made sense to Coop: “The law is just common sense made complicated so lawyers can make a living!” But in his class on environmental policy, Coop’s middling legal academic talents seemed to come alive. We learned a lot in that class. Luxembourg focused on not only the law as it currently existed, but on the intellectual underpinnings upon which the legal edifice was constructed. We read Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Barry Commoner’s, “The Closing Circle,” Aldo Leopold’s, “Sand County Almanac,” and many others. 

Native Americans had inhabited California for thousands of years, living lightly on the land and learning its secrets. The Spanish colonists arrived in the 17th century and constructed their missions along the Camino Real, dotting the coast from San Diego to San Francisco, each a day’s ride apart, but the numbers were so small that, while they decimated the native population through disease and forced conversion, environmental destruction mostly remained minimal. However, with the discovery of gold in 1849, the population exploded and the attacks on the land, the flora and fauna, as well as the near annihilation of the indigenous inhabitants, began in earnest.

However, in its blind destruction of the natural world, seeds were laid in opposition, and while it would take many years to coalesce, a new ethos would come into being that would change California and in the next century the country. In 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Concord sage, found the Sierra Nevada range to be so remarkable that it corroborated everything he had said about the spiritual effects of great scenery, and everything that he had heard about the Yosemite. “This valley,” he observed, “is the only place that comes up to the brag about it and exceeds it. “

Artists and naturalists settled in California and through their writings, paintings, and photography, proposed that California should mean the authentication and liberation of humans through nature, since nature in California was such an overwhelming fact. Hence indifference to and abuse of landscape and wildlife became for them a particularly distressing problem. These newcomers posed the question, “Was there something in the American character, that of itself resisted a redemptive relationship to nature, that destroyed beauty out of an uncouth rage or a maniacal urge to profit?”

Professor Luxembourg led the class through the developing philosophy and laws of environmental protection. He took us through four distinct yet overlapping eras, starting with “conservation,” espoused by President Teddy Roosevelt and many of the early 20th century progressives, that resources could be utilized by humans, so long as they did not deplete them beyond recovery. This was followed by the idea of “preservation,” that is, that some natural landscapes were of such special value that they should be left intact. This was highlighted by passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, setting aside millions of acres. 

Coop was particularly interested, having been raised adjacent to the post industrial wasteland of New Jersey in the next era of environmental law, which Professor Luxembourg described as the “remediation era.” 

He came to believe strongly that the very definition of ecology must be expanded. It was no longer just the non-human or natural world that comprised an ecological system, but greenhouse gasses, industrial pollution, and bio accumulative chemicals as well. He had finally found a coherent philosophy that would be his north star.

One of the numerous objective realities proving that new thinking was needed was the theory that you humans had managed to bring the Holocene era to an end. The Holocene, a geological epoch which began at the end of the Pleistocene around 12,000 years ago, was thought to continue to the present. It also encompasses within it the emergence of the human species worldwide, including all its written history and rather significant transition to urban living in the present.

Many scientists began to feel that human interference in the way the earth works was now so great that the Holocene is history. As a result, the term “Anthropocene” was specifically proposed and used informally for the latest part of this epoch, since atmospheric evidence of human impacts have been found on the earth and its ecosystems. These impacts may be considered of global significance for the future evolution of living species. This is ultimately an argument about the nature of the Anthropocene, the age of humans!

Professor Luxemburg concluded the class with a discussion of planetary boundaries. This was an attempt to identify a safe operating space for human development, a set of nine limits beyond which humans should not push their planet. These were areas where the law would need to adapt and develop new regulatory structures to ward off environmental catastrophe. He referred to this as the nascent “restoration” period, which continues to the present, joining and overlapping with the previous three.The nine areas of concern identified were climate change, ocean acidification, thinning of the ozone layer, nitrogen, and phosphate cycles (critical to plant growth), conversion of wilderness to farms and cities, extinctions, the buildup of chemical pollutants, and the level of particulate pollutants in the atmosphere. 

These planetary boundaries would provide a useful way of thinking about environmental change, because in many ways they create the scope for further change that has not yet happened. The actual location of the boundaries is, as their proponents acknowledge, somewhat arbitrary - partly as a result of the incomplete state of current knowledge.

While the numbers are somewhat arbitrary for things that do not have the springlike quality of shifting irreversibility if pulled or pushed too far, like the collapse of ice sheets or the melting of permafrost, a boundary system that seeks to stop you from getting too close to the threshold certainly seemed reasonable. The planetary boundaries idea attempted to constrain the Anthropocene within the norms of the Holocene. 

Over the next months and years events transpired to convince Coop that doing whatever was necessary to share and spread the knowledge he had acquired from Luxembourg to a wider audience was critical. He needed to reverse these trends, though at this point he had no clue what that might entail. First, he had to complete law school and figure out exactly how he might earn a living if he were to be part of this revolution he hoped would be coming.

Meanwhile, the complexity of this path was forever widening. In November, while he was utterly engrossed in the environmental law class, the country did undergo a revolution, but not the one Coop was hoping to sign up for. It overwhelmingly rejected the well-meaning but uninspiring former Georgia Governor Carter after one term in the White House, replacing him with B-list actor and right-wing media darling Ronald Reagan. 

The country, in addition to putting what seemed a dagger through the heart of racial progress, unceremoniously dumped Carter and his moderate policy agenda in favor of a new president who once suggested, with regard to preservation of ancient redwood groves, that if you had seen one tree you had seen them all. He even suggested that if environmentalists wished to see a redwood that he would put one on the back of a truck and drive it around!

Reagan viewed the natural world and the western environment as had too many before him, a place of transitory wealth. A land viewed only through the numbers in a bank account, where the ambitious could make a fortune. A place to “get in, get rich, get out,” as Wallace Stegner so eloquently put it. Always a treasure hunt, and never a settlement.

A little background as to what followed shortly after the 1980 presidential election will be helpful to understanding its consequences. Now you’ve got to understand that our friend Lucifer “Lucky” Mephistopheles was getting frustrated with various gods in the heavens at this time. He firmly believed that the hopeful rose-colored glasses through which Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, and a shrinking minority of his colleagues viewed humanity should be discarded once and for all. He argued that despite the brilliant philosopher George Santayana’s oft-repeated warning that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” humans made the same mistakes repeatedly, not learning from history. 

Wars did not end. World War I, “the war to end all wars,” killed 40 million people. In World War II, less than two decades later, another 70 to 85 million were slaughtered. Santayana died in 1952, yet his lament that “only the dead have seen the end of war,” was sadly prescient. If Shakespeare called it right in The Tempest, that “what's past is prologue,” Eugene O'Neill in Long Day's Journey Into Night hit the nail on the head when he said, “The past is the present. It's the future too.” 

In Lucky’s fetid, debased mind the human race had failed enough tests that they no longer deserved our support. “The sheer avariciousness of these pathetic creatures throughout the ages should disqualify them from controlling even a single planet,” the dark lord argued in his recitation of human perfidy. He did acknowledge that he had been the source of numerous plagues, natural catastrophes, and even a few wars over the years; however, there were so many more situations where humans committed atrocities all on their own without even his minimal interference. 

He provided charts and graphs and a list of the heinous and cruel, the mass murderers and perverts, who had risen to power over the millennium. If humans were evolving, how did one explain Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and disco, all of recent vintage, none of which he had sponsored - though he did eventually admit that disco was his. 

How to explain the fratricidal carnage of the India-Pakistan separation? Brahma and Vishnu had Allah and Muhammad over for drinks every Saturday, they had friendly philosophical discourses over the meaning of life. They watched in horror the massacres committed in their name. 

Viet Nam, Chile, Indonesia, Congo, and oh so many more all occurred after the founding of the United Nations. Coop had started college while Nixon bombed Cambodia. “Dick Nixon before he Dicks You,” a favorite saying of his dad at the dinner table. A poster shouting, “Don’t change dicks in the middle of a screw hung from his door during the ‘72 campaign. Yet it continued getting worse.

Lucky provided 8x10 glossies with circles and arrows, listing the creatures by continent that humans had exterminated by design or neglect. He produced sophisticated computer models showing planetary impacts of climate disruption. When Krishna, Buddha, and Muhammed coordinated a South Asian team response detailing the numerous good deeds done by these same creatures, running a regression analysis to show that the good outweighed the bad, Lucky dismissed the entire enterprise as nothing more than lies, damn lies, and statistics! 

The South Asia team responded with their own impressive hardback book detailing the brilliance and beauty humans were capable of. Beethoven, Mozart, The Alhambra, The Taj Mahal, The Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu - all created by humans. The Mayans had charted the heavens, the Arabs developed algebra, the British had produced Sir Isaac Newton, as well as Charles Darwin, who had somehow unraveled the complex mystery behind how we had created such incredible diversity. 

Lucky thought he had us there. He acknowledged Darwin’s brilliant intellect that could, through careful observation of a few species of finches and tortoises inhabiting a remote island chain in the western Pacific, discern the marvelous creation story of evolution. Even he was impressed by that one. But he had figured that this was his “aha moment” when he pointed out that humans had taken Darwin’s hard science and perverted it with the racist dogma of “Social Darwinism,” a pseudoscientific creed invented by grifters, eugenicists, and charlatans to justify predatory behavior in the name of Jesus and free enterprise. Jesus objected and reiterated that he was just as offended by this perversion of science as the rest of us were!

Lucky argued that we should all step aside and allow the planet to overheat, and then we could start over with the few remaining creatures - mostly cockroaches, rodents, hedge fund managers and New York real estate developers that would remain. He was making headway with the others, who were truthfully losing patience, and hoped to seal mankind’s fate with one last test that he believed would show the irredentist nature of humans and the greed that drove them. 

While acknowledging that humans had made some progress since the planetary slaughter of World War II and its aftermath, he claimed that it would not take much for human greed to overcome all the social progress made in narrowing inequality and limiting racism. What he proposed was an economic program that would nakedly benefit the rich over everyone else. He claimed that if he found someone to propose an absurd, mathematically impossible scheme that would reverse progress, rob from the poor, and give to the rich, and found the right naive genial spokesperson - a preternaturally optimistic madman with a nice smile, for instance - he could get the humans to turn back the clock. 

We all laughed when we saw his materials. Not even Lucky could convince the most powerful empire since the Romans that if you cut taxes on the rich and significantly expanded the money spent on bombs, tanks, and planes, that somehow budgets would balance, and manna would flow from the heavens. We underestimated his duplicity and resolve. After Lucky ran a few focus groups and rejected several promotionals, deciding that “Robin Hood in Reverse” might tip off his plans, he settled on the absurd slogan “Supply-Side Economics” as his sales pitch. The deal was pretty simple. If Lucky could sell this temporal witches’ brew of mathematically incongruent drivel to the American people, then we had to concede that Lucky was right, and that humans did not deserve our help. 

Lucky was confident as were we when he chose a doddering old actor as his champion. We thought he was nuts. Only time would tell! In horror, we watched as Lucky found just such an avatar in the United States of America - the shining beacon on the hill, liberal democracy, and humankind' s last best hope. I bring you Ronald Reagan, a late-night huckster perfect for selling life insurance on a third-rate cable channel. 

Reagan’s opponent in the Republican primary, George H.W. Bush, soon to put his manhood in a blind trust by accepting the Vice Presidency, referred to this brilliant economic theory as “Voodoo Economics.” But it took and Reagan won. And the gutting of the federal bureaucracy as well as environmental protections was off and running. 

In many ways, Reagan was the perfect president for a senescent and senile society seeking refuge in a mythical past. In his mind there was no racism in the region of downstate Illinois where he grew up - a region Martin Luther King had once described as more racist than even Mississippi. The eternally optimistic faux cowboy was living proof of Jefferson’s argument made to establish universal schooling - that if you expect a democracy in a nation of uneducated people, you expect what never was and never will be.

The election also turned over control of the US Senate to Republicans, removing from office numerous liberal stalwarts. While the House remained in Democratic hands, the clock was being turned sharply back. A revolution indeed. More like a reaction. Rather than an environmental ethic coming to Washington, industry hacks were appointed in critical decision-making positions. Coop had applied for legal jobs after graduation in numerous federal agencies, but now viewed that path as doubtful and perilous. 

But Coop at least had a direction. What he learned in that Environmental Law class, despite the Reagan years, would remain at the heart of his career as the decades rolled forward.