Giving Nature Constitutional Rights
Published by Yes! Magazine on March 2, 2010
Simply regulating pollution will never really stop it. Mari Margil of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund discusses why we need a fundamental change in the way we use law to protect nature.
The environmental movement, with its army of professional advocates, lawyers, grassroots campaigners, and dedicated funders, has been around for decades. Yet nearly every biological indicator shows a planet in crisis—and poised to unravel faster as climate change disrupts already-shaky ecosystem functions.
Mari Margil, associate director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) believes it’s time for different tactics. The nonprofit agency used to work within the body of existing environmental law—helping impacted residents file lawsuits or appeal corporate permits—to protect communities from environmental damage. But a series of blocked efforts, often made worse by the very agencies meant to protect the environment, convinced the group that more fundamental changes were necessary.
“Our system of environmental laws and regulations don’t actually protect the environment,” says CELDF’s Mari Margil. “At best, they merely slow the rate of its destruction … We weren’t helping anyone protect anything.”
The organization has since changed its goals, working with citizens from all over North and South America to literally rewrite local laws in ways that allow people to speak up for their communities, watersheds, forests, and air.
According to Margil, anemic environmental laws spring from the fact that nature has no constitutional rights. CELDF has taken a local approach to reversing this structural blind spot, drafting ordinances for townships from New England to Pennsylvania to Washington State that:
- Give communities legal authority to say “No” to unwanted corporate activities;
- Recognize the rights of nature;
- Strip corporations of their constitutional rights.
In one landmark victory, the town of Barnstead, New Hampshire, voted 135 to 1 to ban the privatization of their freshwater by encroaching corporate interests—the first community in the nation to do so. Other towns have followed, stripping corporations of the rights of personhood and recognizing the rights of communities to self-govern. In 2008, with legal advice from CELDF, Ecuador recognized the right of nature to exist and persist in its national constitution.
Mari Margil Addresses Bioneers Conference
This video was produced by Bioneers, a nonprofit organization that provides a forum and hub for social and scientific innovators.
Interested?
Communities Take on Corporate Power
People across the country are taking our founding documents at their word, declaring citizens’ right and duty to protect nature and community.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons License 
Fascinating Water Talk at Wolf Creek Alliance
Nick Wilcox of NID addressed a full house at the monthly meeting this evening of the Wolf Creek Community Alliance. Nick, a water scientist and former member of the California Water Resources Control Board, gave his rapt audience a high-level overview — full of interesting anecdotes and packed with information — of water issues in California.
He began by describing California’s ten hydrologic regions, which all drain into the Delta (originally a freshwater marsh). He described the extraordinary history of engineering projects that led to the fragile, levee-encircled Delta we have today (fifteen feet below sea-level in some places).
“The Department of Water Resources has understood for a long time that the worst case scenario for the Delta is a significant earthquake centered there, which could collapse all the levees at once.”
“In five minutes,” he said, “the city of Los Angeles could lose its entire water supply.” He couldn’t venture a guess for how long.
For this reason, and others, he suggests that the Peripheral Canal would probably be a good idea.
He opposes the $11+ billion Water Bond on the November ballot, and he repeated the phrase I first heard from him at A.P.P.L.E.’s recent water presentation: “In California, water runs uphill toward money.”
Nick loves his subject, and he could have gone on for hours. He is so engaging that his audience could probably have also listened to and questioned him for hours.
Take heart, those of you who have not yet heard Nick Wilcox: He is one of the featured presenters on March 6th at the Nevada City Methodist Church for the conference, “Water: Sacred and Profaned.”
Water: Sacred and Profaned
Our friend and United Methodist clergywoman, Sharon Delgado, sent us the following information about an important upcoming conference at the Nevada City United Methodist Church.
Here are the details, followed by the poster.
A one-day Conference on “Water: Sacred and Profaned” will be held at the Nevada City United Methodist Church on Saturday, March 6, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The Conference will focus on the growing scarcity of fresh water, water as a right, and the need to preserve water for humans and all living things. It will feature presentations, discussion, film, Native American drumming, song, and ritual.
The Conference is being organized by Earth Justice Ministries, a local faith-based nonprofit, and cosponsored by the Church and Society Committees of Nevada City and Grass Valley United Methodist Churches, Unitarian Universalist Church of the Mountains Social Action Committee, Peace and Social Justice Committee of the Grass Valley Friends Meeting, and Pax Christi of Nevada County. Conference organizers have put forward the following premise which speakers will address:
“Water is sacred, essential for all life. Used as a sacrament in various religions, it is an expression of divine love. But now, Earth’s waters are being profaned. Our premise is that water should be held in trust for the common good and not monopolized, privatized, or sold as a commodity. Access to water is a basic right of humans and all living things.”
Sharon Delgado, a United Methodist clergywoman, will speak from a perspective of water as sacred, and will present an overview of threats to water — how water is being “profaned.” She will point to people’s movements for protection of water around the world.
Keynote speaker Nancy Price is from Defending California for Life, a project of Alliance for Democracy. Ms. Price will speak about global and statewide issues related to water preservation in the context of her understanding of water as sacred. She will cover the upcoming vote on the California Water Bond, climate change and the rights of nature, and implications of the recent Supreme Court decision that strengthens corporate rights. Find out more here.
Speaker Roberto Garcia is the Board President of the local Tsi-Akim Maidu nonprofit organization. He will speak on the value of water from an Indigenous perspective, and on local issues that the Tsi-Akim Maidu are working on, including healing the waters from mercury pollution caused by past mining, their annual Calling Back the Salmon ritual, and attaining federal recognition for the tribe.
Afternoon speakers include local hydrologist Steve Baker, producer of KVMR’s series, “Living Water,” NID Board members Nick Wilcox and Nancy Webber, SYRCL Board President and CLAIM-GV Board member Heidi Hall, and David Edwards of the Nevada City Water District. They will address the themes of the conference and apply their understanding to local issues of water preservation.
Native American drumming will be provided by local group Three River Drum, with Mignon Geli on flute. Hilary Marckx, a United Church of Christ pastor and songwriter from Geyserville, will perform and lead singing. The day will include a “healing the waters” ritual and a film. Lunch will be provided.
Admission to the Conference is by voluntary donation from $0 to $25. For information go to www.earth-justice.org. Pre-registration is desired but not required. To register email water@earth-justice.org or call 274-1320.
Money and Career Opportunities in Climate Change Denial
In his review of the forthcoming book, “Merchants of Doubt,” by historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Jeffrey Sachs reports that “today’s campaigners against action on climate change are in many cases backed by the same lobbies, individuals, and organisations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer.”
Later, they fought the scientific evidence that sulphur oxides from coal-fired power plants were causing “acid rain.” Then, when it was discovered that certain chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, the same groups launched a nasty campaign to discredit that science, too.
Later still, the group defended the tobacco giants against charges that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. And then, starting mainly in the 1980s, this same group took on the battle against climate change.
What is amazing is that, although these attacks on science have been wrong for 30 years, they still sow doubts about established facts. The truth is that there is big money backing the climate-change deniers, whether it is companies that don’t want to pay the extra costs of regulation, or free-market ideologues opposed to any government controls.
Read Sachs’ full review here.
Nevada County Ranks Well in Health Survey
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation conducted a nationwide survey of ”health factors” by county, and you can see the rankings on this map, which gives a relative number for each county within each state.
For instance, surprisingly — considering its known air quality problems — Nevada County ranked relatively well at 14th among the 56 of California’s 58 counties that were ranked (where number 1, Marin, is best and Del Norte, number 56, is worst). Sierra and Alpine counties were not ranked.
The San Jose Mercury News reports it this way:
The least-healthy place to live in California is Del Norte County and other sparsely populated, rural areas in the northernmost reaches of the state.
The rankings enable residents to compare how their county stacks up against others within each state based on how long people live, how healthy they are, the quality of medical care, access to healthy food, air pollution, percentage of residents who smoke or are obese and numerous other categories.
Researchers analyzed 56 of the 58 California counties. San Mateo County was fifth in the rankings. Other Bay Area counties placing in the top half were Contra Costa (19th), Alameda (23rd) and Solano (28th).
Many of the lowest-ranked counties had premature death rates two to three times higher than other counties. The deaths often were caused by preventable conditions.
Some highlights for Nevada County include:
Adult Obesity: 21%
Binge Drinking: 14%
Teen Birth Rate: 20 (per 1000 aged 15-19)
Primary Care Provider Rate: 135 (per 100,000 population)
Uninsured Adults: 19% (under age 65)
Children in Poverty: 12% (under age 18)
Air Pollution Ozone Days: 42 (per year)
See a detailed profile for Nevada County here.
Will Supreme Court Radicals Gut the Commerce Clause?
Now that the radical majority on the Supreme Court — the activist conservative judges — have overturned a century of precedent and settled law with their decision in Citizens United v FEC, they may soon have an opportunity to overturn the longstanding use of the Commerce Clause as the basis for federal environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act.
Author Ray Ring, writing in the High Country News (“Supreme beings: After gutting campaign finance, the high court may go after the Commerce Clause“), explains it this way [with hyperlink references added by me]:
… there are signs that Chief Justice Roberts might rule that the Commerce Clause cannot be the basis for federal environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. While serving on an appeals court in 2003, Roberts wrote a dissenting opinion, saying that the Commerce Clause did not allow the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service to impose regulations on a California developer to protect habitat for an endangered toad. Roberts said the case was not about interstate commerce; it merely concerned “a hapless toad, that for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California.”
Libertarian and rightwing groups are arguing against the Commerce Clause in environmental cases in lower courts, hoping to push it to Roberts’ Supreme Court. The leading green law firm, Earthjustice, has warned that Roberts seems to have “an ideological agenda” for overturning environmental laws based on the Commerce Clause.
Read the full article here.
What’s Your Connection to Mountaintop Removal?
Published by Yes! Magazine on November 10, 2009
Power plants across the country use coal from destroyed mountains. Search your zip code to meet the communities and landscapes to which you’re connected.
Not In My Backyard?
Click here to find out if your power company uses coal from destroyed mountains.
Mountaintop removal—the literal toppling of mountains in order to mine the coal underneath—is a shocking assault on the ecosystems, communities, and landscapes of the southern Appalachian Mountains. For many Americans, though, its impact seems a world away: an atrocity, yes, but one confined to Appalachia.
But the coal that’s removed forms a direct connection between the millions of Americans whose homes it powers and the communities that suffer most directly from its extraction.
By searching your zip code, you can find out not only whether coal from mountain top removal sites is helping to power your home, but where it’s coming from. The zip code of the White House, for example, benefits from coal extracted from Glen Alum Mountain, West Virginia.
What’s your connection to mountaintop removal? Click here to find out.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Who’s Polluting the Climate Conversation?
Published by Yes! Magazine on December 1, 2009
Money, think tanks, and the scientists-for-hire behind the doubt and denial.
by James Hoggan
Scientists now warn that climate change is happening faster, and is a bigger threat, than they predicted just a few years ago. Yet the number of Americans who believe climate change is occurring at all is decreasing. That’s shocking—but not surprising.
It’s shocking because the stakes are so high and the science is so clear. A recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences carried an article reporting that sedimentary records from an Arctic lake show warmer temperatures in the last few decades than at any time in the past 200,000 years. At the same time, the Pew Research Center reported that the number of Americans who believe the Earth is warming has dropped from 71 percent to just 57 percent in the last 18 months.
How can that be unsurprising? Well, because the loudest voices in the U.S. climate conversation come not from scientists, but from dirty energy industries, with their paid experts and think tanks, who are promoting a view of science that serves their economic interests, regardless of what is actually true. This is not an idle assertion. It comes from four years of research on the climate website DeSmogBlog.com, which Richard Littlemore and I have compiled into the new book Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming.
Among our most disturbing discoveries were three instances in which corporate associations set out strategy and tactics for attacking the science of climate change—or science in general.
The coal barons went first. They recognized the strength of the science almost two decades ago. In 1991, the Western Fuels Association and the Edison Electric Institute crafted a plan to argue that global warming would be a good thing. They hired PR people, tested messages, and recruited compliant scientists to argue their case. They put out radio ads with messages like, “If the Earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis getting colder?” (Even though Minneapolis was, in fact, warming faster than the planetary average.) Then they paid scientists like the University of Virginia’s Patrick Michaels to write skeptical editorials for small town papers—publications unlikely to have the resources to check whether someone was being paid by industry.
Philip Morris joined the climate-change fight in 1993. They were already heavily invested in strewing confusion about science, having spent decades defending a product that is lethal when used as directed. But no one was taking them seriously anymore, so they established a fake grassroots organization—an “Astroturf group”—called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC). They recruited other businesses, like oil companies, that had a stake in undermining public faith in science. Together, they started hiring and promoting willing scientists like Dr. S. Fred Singer, who was equally happy to argue for the safety of secondhand smoke or to deny that climate change was real.
A third denial campaign was started on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute in 1997 by spin doctors with experience denying everything from the dangers of tobacco (Steve Milloy, at the time the executive director of TASSC) to the hazards of ozone depletion (Candace Crandall, Fred Singer’s then-wife). The API’s “Global Climate Science Communication Action Plan” detailed how to take advantage of small newspapers and TV stations to spread disinformation. They recruited more scientists-for-hire and gave them media training and editorial support, promoted them as interview subjects, and distributed their skeptical articles widely.
The strategies are still popular, and many of the original players are still in the game. Industry pays more every year to promote climate confusion. An Astroturf group, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), spent between $35 million and $40 million for a huge campaign during the last presidential election. Some of the propaganda was obvious. You couldn’t watch the presidential debates without seeing “clean coal” ads. Other activity was less transparent. For example, the Hawthorn Group PR firm recruited and paid young people to wear bright white “clean coal” T-shirts and baseball caps to electoral rallies. They offered bonuses to anyone who got their photo taken with a candidate and got it on the news.
For the debate over the Waxman- Markey climate change bill, ACCCE hired a Washington, D.C., Astroturf specialist called Bonner & Associates to generate fake grassroots opposition. Bonner employees got scripts directing them to hide who they were working for. (“Hi, I’m working with seniors/retirees to help stop their utility bills from doubling.”) They forged letters on purloined letterhead and sent them to Congress ahead of the vote. Congressman Markey’s office discovered the scripts and forgeries and continues to investigate.
In each of these cases, the funders actually admit their intent to confuse the public and undermine the credibility of legitimate scientists. They use Astroturf front groups because people know who not to trust: A recent poll showed that only 19 percent of people believe what corporations say about climate change.
The Greenpeace “Exxon Secrets” project, and similar groups, have documented other huge corporate investments in confusion and attacks on climate science. And the oil and gas industry keeps adding to the budget—in 2008, its expenditures on lobbying alone increased by 50 percent.
Neither the major media nor politicians are counterbalancing these campaigns. And that leaves a huge burden on you, the individual.
It also creates a great opportunity. People are crying out for leadership on this issue, and they would rather follow leaders they know. If you inform yourself and speak out, people will appreciate and emulate your example. If you call foul when you hear or see information being misused, your friends and colleagues will be grateful. And if you start demanding more from media, from business, and especially from government, others will applaud.
We can’t save the world from climate change with just a few lifestyle changes. We have to take back the public discourse. We could begin, for example, by demanding that think tanks like the Heartland Institute, which lobbies on behalf of tobacco companies and against climate-change legislation, have to declare the source of their funding. We could demand that companies like Bonner & Associates have to acknowledge their clients—that all Astroturfers should declare when they are operating on behalf of self-interested corporations.
Climate change can be beaten, quickly and affordably. It’s time we all insisted that it be done.
Another Environmental Film Festival
This small article caught my eye today: “Environmental Films Beyond Polar Bears.” It’s from the January 17th issue of The Chronicle Review, a publication of The Chronicle of Higher Education. The article describes the Tales From Planet Earth Film Festival at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which took place in November.
Excerpt from the article:
Some 50 films shown over three days featured the work of professional filmmakers, as well as that of students enrolled in a course in environmental filmmaking.
“We took students with no experience, who were doing work in environmental science, journalism, and humanities, and in two months taught them how to create effective stories in film,” says Gregg Mitman, the festival’s curator and interim director of the Nelson Institute.
Mitman, who is also a historian of science at Madison, became interested in environmental films while writing Reel Nature: America’s Romance With Wildlife on Film (Harvard University Press, 1999). The festival defines environmental issues broadly, to include where people live, work, and play, he says. “We’re not just talking about polar bears as an endangered species, but things right here in our neighborhood, such as food equity and access, and issues of public health.”
The Festival website has an assortment of trailers. Here’s a little two-minute trailer that tells a sweet, wild love-story about two red-tailed hawks:
Getting Them Home from Nelson Institute @ UW-Madison on Vimeo.
Financing Our Cleantech Future
by Joel Makower
My longtime friend and colleague Bill Green changed jobs recently. That’s not normally newsworthy — friends and colleagues do that all the time. But if you’re concerned about the future of clean technology — in particular, how we’re going to fund the massive scale-up of renewable energy, clean water, and other infrastructural changes needed to build a clean economy — Green’s career move warrants more than just passing interest.
Green is a seasoned environmental entrepreneur, with more than 20 years of management and investment experience. He has led five companies, including Ecolink, one of the first firms to produce alternatives to ozone layer-depleting chemicals, and the Strategic Chemical Management Group, an environmental management company. For seven years, he was in venture capital, a co-founder of VantagePoint Venture Partners’ CleanTech practice, among the largest cleantech VCs, with more than $1 billion dedicated to the sector. (In 2003, Green invited me to join VantagePoint’s Cleantech Advisory Council, where I still serve.)
Last week, Green announced that he was joining Macquarie Capital Funds as a senior managing director. If you’re like me, you probably didn’t know much about this company, part of The Macquarie Group, a massive Australia-based global investor and manager of infrastructure, real estate, and other businesses. The Funds division manages more than US$116 billion in assets around the world, much of it large infrastructure projects.
Why is this particular job change worth singling out? Green’s evolution from environmental entrepreneur to venture capitalist to a senior director of one of the world’s foremost investment banks mirrors the trajectory of the cleantech movement itself. What began in the 1980s and 1990s with a handful of scientists, engineers, and idealistic entrepreneurs, funded by a small circle of friends, came to life during the 2000s with the infusion of tens of billions in venture capital, private equity, and corporate and government investments. That gave rise to the thousands of growing companies that today are manufacturing everything from solar cells to electric cars — and all of the batteries, fuels, engines, controllers, software, and other components that make these things work.
Now, as a new decade begins, it’s time to take things to the next level: ramping up proven technologies at massive scale.
That’s where Green and Macquarie come in. They are at the leading edge of large investment banks that have the financial firepower to unleash mature technologies globally, financing the wind farms, solar fields, and energy storage facilities that will be needed to bring renewables to scale.
Bill Green describes this evolution in terms of a “corporate lifecycle.”
“At a highest level you’ve got an entrepreneur who comes up with an idea that is transformative in its promise and can attract venture capital,” Green explained recently. “The entrepreneur builds a team and develops a product and gets to a place where they are pre-commercial, so they have a product that works by whatever definition the category requires, and they’ve built one of them. They then face the challenge of building their first commercial deployment. Once there is an example of a fully commercial deployment, they can think about replicating at commercial scale — what in the semiconductor industry is called ‘copy exact’: Build a factory, build another one somewhere else, build a third somewhere else.”
That first commercial deployment is the most difficult to get funded. Once it’s proven itself — that it can perform reliably and generate a predictable cash flow — it is more or less a matter of “copy exact,” stamping them out from place to place. This is a role for project financing — as distinguished from company financing — and is the realm of investment bankers.
Deploying even one commercial-scale plant can require more capital than most people imagine. Consider BrightSource Energy, which builds and operates large-scale solar thermal plants, in which massive arrays of mirrors beam sunlight to a central tower, boiling water to create steam to run a generator. BrightSource (which happens to be funded by VantagePoint, along with Morgan Stanley, BP, Chevron, Google, and others) has contracts to build several of these plants, at $2 billion to $3 billion a pop. And then there are wind farms. Building one will set you back anywhere from $150 million to $1 billion or more. So, too, a biofuels refinery. Real money, as they say.
Big as those price tags are, cleantech projects are relatively small compared to other infrastructure projects — airports, bridges, toll roads, and the like — making them less appealing to large banks that prefer large projects. Moreover, a lot of investment bankers haven’t yet developed expertise in renewables. “Renewables is still a sector that is largely the province of a small group of people who have devoted many years to understanding the sector, who have grown up in the sector in various ways,” says Green. “And the sector has yet to fully mature to the point where every institution has developed the capabilities to invest in it. So, many bankers have taken a view that says, ‘If this is not my specialty, I would rather back the larger transaction.’ That leaves a tremendous opportunity for those of us who both understand and elect to focus on this subsector.”
Green and Macquarie view the cleantech sector as ripe for their style of banking. “There’s still a gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street when it comes to understanding the complete capital-formation value chain from venture capital through to equity and debt,” says Green. Put another way, the VCs and the bankers haven’t yet become a well-oiled machine in handing off venture-funded companies to those who can take their technologies and products to scale — the way, say, a new microprocessor chip can go from R&D to commercial development, with manufacturing plants deployed around the world in relatively short order.
As he sets now out to find and fund proven commercial technologies, Green says he will focus on wind farms, utility-scale solar, utility-scale solar thermal, and geothermal energy. Beyond that, he says, “I’m interested in finding the opportunities that are a bit less obvious but that come in the form of more traditional infrastructure.” Transmission, for example. “We believe that there may be opportunities for Macquarie in the emerging conversation around how renewable energy is moved from point of generation to point of use. This has been a real puzzle piece that’s starting to get more attention, but I think it’s still underserved from the standpoint of capital development.” Wastewater purification and landfill waste-to-energy technologies are two more interesting infrastructure opportunities, he says.
Of course, it’s not just the financial opportunity that interests Green as he starts this next phase of his career. “I am so excited to be able to point to steel in the ground and tell my son that our company participated in bringing that wind farm or that solar field into existence. I deeply enjoyed the years that I spent in conceptual conversation around bringing to life things that were only the dream of an entrepreneur at the time I first saw them. Now, I’m ready to see these things deployed at scale all over the place, and this is the absolute best platform that I could imagine to make that happen.”
It will be interesting to watch. As the financial heft of national governments hit their limits, we’ll need the big financial machines — which funded the Internet, cellular networks, highways, bridges, water systems, and mass transit systems — to make clean technology part of the global fabric. Macquarie isn’t the first investment bank to jump into cleantech, but it has made clear that it wants to be at the front of the pack.
As if to underscore his excitement for his new role, Green leaves me with a few parting words not typically associated with the dry world of large-scale finance: “It’s really cool,” he says. “Really cool.”
Joel Makower is Executive Editor of GreenBiz.com and chairman of Greener World Media, Inc.
This article originally ran on GreenBiz.com. Reprinted with permission.
