I didn't realize how explicit the Montana state constitution was on this [1], which was rewritten in 1972:
Part IX. ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES
Section 1. Protection and improvement. (1) The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.
(2) The legislature shall provide for the administration and enforcement of this duty.
(3) The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources.
I post this a lot but it's a relevant but super long read/listen - Piketty at the end of a 45 hour long audiobook (Capital and Ideology with additional web resources - charts and data) concludes we cannot change our course ala the climate/economics without changing the national constitutions of all countries to incorporate some language like this to protect future generations from the current one, current property owners have more say than voters (amending many national constitutions is pretty rare short of widespread civil unrest) because of this basic issue.
Yes, this is fairly obvious. The question is whether or not it will happen on a scale large enough to make a difference. These things are global in nature and you can't really solve global problems with local solutions, though you can create global problems with local activities. The level of coordination required is massive otherwise the hold-outs will be able to reap the advantages of not playing nice.
Probably not. See Latin America: most governments recently elected are against environment preservation efforts, and most people seems very happy with their suicidal plans.
For example, in Costa Rica the government is reactivating bottom trawling (which apart from destroying ecosystems also releases a lot of CO2), looking to extract natural gas, canceled the electric train plans, increased the maximum lifespan of busses even more (so, more polluting decades old units for population)...
Lots of humans die every year, and lots age into voting globally, in various forms of government. Electorate turnover is inevitable. It won’t happen overnight, constant force will be required. Success is not assured, but the effort is probably better than “smoke if you’ve got ‘em.” Collectively, we keep going until we can’t.
You don’t have to get to the goal, only to tipping points that lock in the desired outcome.
What's crazy to me is how common this line of thinking was from way back. Thomas Jefferson was borderline obsessed with basically this same concept. There's a really excellent letter from Jefferson to Madison from 1789 describing the importance of usufruct. [1]
My favorite chunk of this thing / the meat of the argument:
> I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.
> ...
> For if [a man], during his own life, eat[s] up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, & then the lands would belong to the dead, & not to the living, which would be the reverse of our principle.
> I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident
Reminds me of another famous quote from Jefferson. I wonder if describing things as "self-evident" was a personal favorite idiom of his or if it was just a common phrase back then. It seems like a fairly common phrase to me now, but it's hard to know if that's only because Jefferson popularized it.
From Walter Isaacson’s "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life":
On June 21, after he had finished a draft and incorporated some changes from Adams, Jefferson had a copy delivered to Franklin, with a cover note far more polite than editors generally receive today. "Will Doctor Franklin be so good as to peruse it," he wrote, "and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?"
Franklin made only a few small changes, but one of them was resounding. Using heavy backslashes, he crossed out the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" and changed it to read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident."
The concept of "self-evident" truths came less from Jefferson’s favored philosopher, Locke, than from the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. Hume had distinguished between "synthetic" truths that describe matters of fact (such as "London is bigger than Philadelphia" ) and "analytic" truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition. ("The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees" or "All bachelors are unmarried." ) When he chose the word "sacred," Jefferson had suggested intentionally or unintentionally that the principle in question the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights was an assertion of religion. By changing it to "self-evident," Franklin made it an assertion of rationality.”
Interesting! I think nowadays, the common way I've heard the latter type of truth described is "axiomatic", but that's probably because it's one of those words that math/CS professors seem to love, and people in tech (like me) might have picked it up from them.
This is the important question. The constitution is very vague on this, how would it be enforced? You might as well invoke the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and ask the courts to rule on this. I am not sure this ruling will withstand scrutiny. (my other comment in this story)
This isn't something impossible to do. It's something that builds over time with precedence with cases like this. Just because the law isn't 100% explicit about everything that is or isn't allowed doesn't mean it's a bad law or too vague. Being vague is a feature, because who knows how things will change tomorrow or next year or in a decade. The spirit of the law is explicit, everything else needs to be decided by voters and the justice system as the law is tested over time.
I swear, all I see is people throwing up their hands and saying "but it'd never work!" It's worked repeatedly, or nobody would've ever bothered with a constitution.
It'd be hard to pass a law that requires individual environmental improvement, but it seems pretty obvious that a law saying to ignore it is the opposite of the state constitution.
It is sad that this kind of language would never be approved in today’s political climate. The GOP passed some historic environmental bills in the past and today it is unthinkable that they would even consider it.
Because the clear intention of the law is not what the courts are enforcing today. This is common in modern times where by original intent has no bearing to current "modern" interpretation of old laws.
Sadly our founders predicted this would happen in away, Jefferson famously wanted all laws even the constitution to have a sunset of 19 years, requiring them to be debated and passed a new every generation.
Clearly not the abstract "harms" asserted in the case, where by one plaintiff has a medical aliment that was acerbated by COVID and because of that MT did not due enough for climate change.
Also the case was largely about individual "extreme weather" events that have no clear, direct link to MT pollution, and there is zero evidence to suggest that should MT suspend all their pollution today, right now, it would change anything for these young people.
The clear intention of the law was to preserve the land from direct, articulable harm such as chemical dumping, clear cut mining, deforestation, etc etc etc
The defendant declared Montana air unhealthy or very unhealthy every year since 2020 or before. And people with medical ailments are part of current and future generations.
Was the clear intention of the law to allow dumping DDT into a river contaminated outside Montana?
An author of the constitutional article was a witness. The judge cited the constitutional convention transcripts also. Did you read them?
> Clearly not the abstract "harms" asserted in the case
...
> The clear intention of the law was to preserve the land from direct, articulable harm such as chemical dumping, clear cut mining, deforestation, etc etc etc
I've read the Montana constitution and read up on the case. The points above are not clear to me. Is there something else your looking at that makes it clear to you?
> The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources.
I think this law/provision was passed at a time before there was a clear notion of CO2 from burning fossil fuels being connected to climate change, and they were thinking about more traditional pollutants/harms like logging and drilling oil.
(In my opinion) This historic law/provision is not specific enough (or it does not create a novel enough kind of cause of action) for the climate change type of problem, to be enforceable as it gets tested up the judicial chain. (see my other comment in this story)
If the law had been intended to apply to oil drilling and specific pollutants, it would have named them. Or at least named specific types of pollution. Instead it appears to have been deliberately written broadly to capture a wide variety of forms of environmental degradation, perhaps including some not discovered at the time of writing.
The connection between atmospheric CO2 and warming was actually identified as early as around the year 1900.
I wasn't around then to have a sense of the broad social awareness of things, but I've gotten the impression that the science was fairly obvious before the 1970s.
To me it reads of the kind of Rachel Carson types of environmental damages that were getting much more attention at that time. (Acid rain, pollutants, runoff, etc)
If they had anticipated CO2 (and yes, I agree it was known by some well before this time), they should have / would have made it much more specific to include that kind of slow, "who is responsible" kind of harm.
I believe the word you're looking for is "conservationism". The definition of conservatism has not changed. In fact, the wikipedia article for conservation calls out the ambiguity, right at the top:
He was referring to the political right in the states. Historically speaking, in 70s/80s, even Nixon, passed laws for conserving the nature, protectionism and etc. At some point there was a switch into “nah, screw the environment” to align with the voter base.
People seem to forget hunters and fishers are still the biggest funding source for conservationism and are almost overwhelmingly conservative voters.
But no, the people who live deep in urban jungles have the audacity to call them “environment haters”.
Conservation to enable ongoing future exploitation. That's a very different brand of conservation.
There's a reason those same groups refuse to support policies that would stave off climate change: it would require less exploitation of natural resources, and thus there's no money in it.
Ah apologies then, my knowledge of US politics is fairly surface based. I usually associate the oil and co. lobbyists with the conservative government, and they don’t have the best record in terms of natural conservation (I understand they do the same with the liberal side as well). I guess, that’s a bad habit.
I would consider myself pretty centrist, but I thought HN was a good place to get away from the thoughtless political vitriol that exists everywhere else. For a forum that's usually very well spoken, it's wild to see how quick people are to make claims about people and things they know nothing about. Political polarization really is going to destroy this country, damn.
Do you believe there is any justification for believing the EPA has gone far beyond the original intention for the agency created by Nixon?
Do you believe the EPA of today is the same EPA that was founded in those days?
or has the remit of the EPA like most federal agencies been expanded to the point of totalitarian control where by in many instances they are a detriment to their own stated goals, and certainly seen as no longer caring about balancing public liberty, property rights, or economic interests in their zealous often extremist pursuit of regulatory control over all aspects of anything remotely connected to their purview.
In short the EPA like most federal agencies routinely abuse their authority, invent new authority from thin air, and over all make the lives of every day people miserable who just want to build a home, a business or simply live their lives.
Relatively speaking, the EPA has pushed (in the wrong direction) the boundaries about 1,000,000x less than corporations have. We have PFAS everywhere (a recent HN article). Look at the list of superfund sites in the US. I think the EPA does far too little to protect us from cancer causing chemicals because politicians allow them to pollute. Fracking's 500 chemicals declared a proprietary:
Well that is a prime example of what about ism. I think one can hold the position that the EPA has been both abusive to every day American's when the abuse their authority to prevent home owners from building on their land because there is a beetle some where in the area (yes that is hyperbolic) while at the same time playing liability shield for large corporations that are harming these same home owners.
Yelling at the clouds saying "but what about the corporations" does nothing to refute my original statement
Part IX. ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES
Section 1. Protection and improvement. (1) The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.
(2) The legislature shall provide for the administration and enforcement of this duty.
(3) The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources.
[1] https://leg.mt.gov/bills/mca/title_0000/article_0090/part_00...