Speaker 1: Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
Speaker 1: known things go. A deer haunted forest, crowded with pines
Speaker 1: and hemlocks, the carpet of needles beneath your feet, grouse
Speaker 1: in the underbrush. Welcome to the woods. Outside of the
Speaker 1: Last Archive. I'm Jill Lapour. This episode, we're celebrating an anniversary,
Speaker 1: sort of the anniversary of a dream, an alternate history.
Speaker 1: We're imagining what the world might be like if fifty
Speaker 1: years ago, in nineteen seventy two, Americans had ratified an
Speaker 1: environmental rights Amendment, an amendment to the US Constitution granting
Speaker 1: not only protection but representation to the natural world. This
Speaker 1: did not happen, But this episode, I want to wonder
Speaker 1: about what the world would be like if it had happened.
Speaker 1: I want to think about the road not taken. I
Speaker 1: want to rekindle a spirit of imagination about what could
Speaker 1: still happen. To start, let's go back to where by
Speaker 1: my reckoning. The American environmental movement began in a seaside
Speaker 1: cabin on an island in Maine in nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 1: when Rachel Carson issued a warning about pesticides and petroleum
Speaker 1: companies so step through a screen door into Rachel Carson's
Speaker 1: cabin in Maine, on the edge of the sea. Now,
Speaker 1: to these people, apparently the vald of nature was something
Speaker 1: that was repealed or as soon as man came on
Speaker 1: the scene, Well, you might just as well assume that
Speaker 1: you could repeal the law of gravity. Rachel person had
Speaker 1: been writing for a long time by this point about
Speaker 1: the natural world, especially about the ocean. She loved mucking
Speaker 1: about in the shoreline, where she studied the tiniest creatures
Speaker 1: eddying in tide pools. She was fascinated by their interdependence.
Speaker 1: The balance of nature is built of a series of
Speaker 1: interrelationships between living things and between living things and their environment.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty three, a reporter from CBS News had
Speaker 1: driven up to her remote cabin It's on a little
Speaker 1: spit of an island, to ask her some questions. Carson
Speaker 1: had just published Silence Spring, a lyrical and terrifying account
Speaker 1: of what pesticides were doing to the natural world. Pesticides
Speaker 1: kill insects, sure, but they also kill birds that eat
Speaker 1: insects and the animals that eat the birds. You can't
Speaker 1: just kill one thing, Carson demonstrated, You put out a poison.
Speaker 1: It poisons everything because everything is connected to everything else.
Speaker 1: They come one day, she warned, an entirely silent spring.
Speaker 1: No crickets chirp, no frogs peep, no bird song. The
Speaker 1: pesticide industry waged a campaign to try to portray Carson
Speaker 1: as a silly old lady. It didn't work. We did
Speaker 1: a whole episode about Carson in season one. It's called
Speaker 1: for the Birds Anyway. In nineteen sixty two, Sound Spring
Speaker 1: became a bestseller, and Carson was hailed as a visionary.
Speaker 1: Her book fundamentally changed how people thought about the environment.
Speaker 1: President Kennedy read it, and Carson testified before the Senate.
Speaker 1: Carson died less than two years later, but she'd raised
Speaker 1: in the public mind a new and urgent concern about
Speaker 1: all kinds of environmental problems. Then nineteen sixty nine, NASA
Speaker 1: sent men to the Moon, and their photographs showed the Earth,
Speaker 1: the whole Earth, small and fragile, something to protect, a
Speaker 1: pale blue dot, as if made of glass, a blue marble.
Speaker 1: In September nineteen sixty nine, two months after men from
Speaker 1: the Earth landed on the Moon, Moonday, a Maverick, Wisconsin
Speaker 1: senator named gay Lord Nelson proposed a celebration, a national holiday.
Speaker 1: He called it Earth Day. The environment is all of
Speaker 1: America and its problems. It's the raps in the ghetto,
Speaker 1: It's a hungry child and a land of affluence. Nelson
Speaker 1: modeled Earth Day after anti war teachings. With all that urgency,
Speaker 1: life and death at stake, the future of humanity itself.
Speaker 1: I don't think there's any other issue, viewed in its
Speaker 1: broadest stands, which is his critical to mankind as the
Speaker 1: issue of the quality of the environment in which we live.
Speaker 1: Gaylord Nelson had grown up in Wisconsin. When he was fourteen,
Speaker 1: he'd started a campaign the plant trees in his hometown,
Speaker 1: clear Lake. As governor of Wisconsin, he'd made environmental protection
Speaker 1: his top priority. He taxed tobacco and used the money
Speaker 1: to buy land for public park. In the Senate, he
Speaker 1: dedicated himself to getting the environment on the national political agenda.
Speaker 1: In his first year, he co sponsored the Clean Water Act.
Speaker 1: He was also the first person to propose an environmental
Speaker 1: rights amendment. In a speech in the Senate on January nineteenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, Nelson proposed a constitutional amendment that read, every
Speaker 1: person has the inalienable right to a decent environment. People
Speaker 1: propose amendments all the time that never go anywhere, but
Speaker 1: still it planted a seed. I've been thinking a lot
Speaker 1: lately about amending the Constitution and why it's so hard
Speaker 1: to do, and when it got so hard to do.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen seventies, it looked like another amendment, the
Speaker 1: Equal Rights Amendment banning discrimination on the basis of sex,
Speaker 1: would surely be ratified. In the end, it wasn't. But
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy when gay Lord Nelson proposed an environmental
Speaker 1: rights amendment, it just didn't seem that crazy. In nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one, the twenty six the men it was ratified.
Speaker 1: It lowered the voting age to eighteen. In the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: In other words, you could still ratify amendments to the Constitution.
Speaker 1: On January twenty second, three days after Gaylord Nelson proposed
Speaker 1: his environment a rights amendment, Richard Nixon, the President, through
Speaker 1: his support behind this idea in his State of the
Speaker 1: Union address, The great question of the seventies is shall
Speaker 1: we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our
Speaker 1: peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the
Speaker 1: damage we have done to our heir, to our land,
Speaker 1: and to our wife. Nixon, in other words, seem to
Speaker 1: have embraced Rachel Carson's agenda restoring nature to its natural
Speaker 1: state as a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It
Speaker 1: has become a common cause of all the people of
Speaker 1: this country. The scale of the crisis was obvious to everyone.
Speaker 1: By nineteen seventy, States had become a very trashy looking place.
Speaker 1: It was embarrassing pollution, small glitter everywhere. The Cuyahoga River
Speaker 1: in Cleveland had caught fire only months before, and not
Speaker 1: for the first time. The water was so entirely polluted
Speaker 1: with oil slick debris that when sparks from a passing
Speaker 1: train flicked over the river, it went up in flames,
Speaker 1: flames as high as a five story building. Public outrage
Speaker 1: had been so intense that Nixon had signed into law
Speaker 1: the National Environmental Policy Act, which helped establish the Environmental
Speaker 1: Protection Agency. Through our years of past carelessness, we incurred
Speaker 1: a debt to nature. And now that debt is being called.
Speaker 1: The program I shall proposed to Congress will be the
Speaker 1: most comprehensive and costly program In this view. Again, America's history.
Speaker 1: I think about it this way, post War America, people
Speaker 1: are finally fed up with the ravages of the Industrial Revolution,
Speaker 1: the pollution, the filthy factories, the dead fish in the rivers,
Speaker 1: the dying oceans, the smog. To stop all that, you've
Speaker 1: got to pass some laws. One way to drum up
Speaker 1: support invent a national holiday. Call it Earth Day, Tell
Speaker 1: people about it, get them out on the streets, run ads,
Speaker 1: and stir up news coverage on television across the country.
Speaker 1: Do you feel as though all this is a reaction
Speaker 1: to publicity that's been blasted across the nation. It's going
Speaker 1: to be a real, real, big political move, probably bigger
Speaker 1: than any other political move we've ever seen this country.
Speaker 1: Birthday wasn't a federal holiday. We're like a rally day,
Speaker 1: but also more than rally day. Governors agreed to on
Speaker 1: Earth Day, so did a lot of musicians, poets, politicians.
Speaker 1: In Washington, the House and Senator journed for the day.
Speaker 1: Practically every Senator and congressman was off to make speeches
Speaker 1: on the year's most popular and least risky election issial
Speaker 1: April twenty, nineteen seventy, that first Earth Day took place
Speaker 1: all over the country, in cities and towns, at state capitals,
Speaker 1: a polluted highways. People picked up trash on river banks
Speaker 1: from the Kalamazoo to the Mississippi. Schools canceled classes, kindergarteners
Speaker 1: did crafts, college students marched in the streets, and middle
Speaker 1: schoolers went on field trips wearing baseball caps and muck boots,
Speaker 1: carrying binoculars as they trudged the woods to a lake
Speaker 1: whose shoreline was covered with trash. This is pollution, and
Speaker 1: it's poor hearby man, all right, So this isn't anything
Speaker 1: that Nature staff was that when you look at nature,
Speaker 1: you're going to find it a pretty peaceful thing. Twenty
Speaker 1: eight poisoned girls from Councils Loves AIOH. We're out early
Speaker 1: this Earthday morning. They are members of Missus Willard Hopper's
Speaker 1: sixth grade science class. Right full of answers. Another triumph
Speaker 1: of hope over experience. And pretty much everywhere that first
Speaker 1: Earth Day, people sang out. In Boston, protesters held a
Speaker 1: die in at Logan Airport to call attention to the
Speaker 1: pollution caused by airplanes. They pretended to die there. There
Speaker 1: were teachings and cleanups. Protesters wore surgical masks to call
Speaker 1: attention to air pollution. Parts of New York City banned
Speaker 1: cars for the day. Protesters in Chicago called for the
Speaker 1: elimination of the internal combustion engine, and in Washington, civil
Speaker 1: rights leader James Farmer tied the fledgling environmental movement to
Speaker 1: racial justice. The garbage, the trash, the carbon monoxide, the junk.
Speaker 1: Who suffers most from it if it is not the poor?
Speaker 1: And so the poor, especially the ghatois poor, the black
Speaker 1: and the brown and the red stand to benefit first
Speaker 1: from any successes in cleaning up the environment. In Albuquerque,
Speaker 1: in the Bareless Neighborhood, the leaders of a Chicano rally
Speaker 1: made the same argument. We're going to make people understand,
Speaker 1: but the kind of thing has come from our pollution,
Speaker 1: water pollution are the same kind of things that cause racism,
Speaker 1: to cause poverty, and cause hunger in this country. So
Speaker 1: we're all going to be marching to day. Okay. In Philadelphia,
Speaker 1: at the Salem Zion United Church of Christ, middle aged
Speaker 1: congregants and Sunday suits and bonnets joined their young pastor
Speaker 1: in a special Earth Day prayer. We have helped to
Speaker 1: fill up your air pollute your streams and clutter your
Speaker 1: earth with crash and gadgets. Now our high style heavy
Speaker 1: with sorrow for what we have done, but not before
Speaker 1: our sinuses and lungs warned us a great danger. Okay,
Speaker 1: nice idea, but I confess the prayer doesn't entirely work
Speaker 1: for me. Still, it's a measure of the intensity of
Speaker 1: all of this. And out of all those meetings and
Speaker 1: marches and clean ups and conversation after conversation came a
Speaker 1: demand for something more power to the earth. But what
Speaker 1: would that mean? Earth Day was the biggest protest in
Speaker 1: human history. Listening to the tape, you can feel this
Speaker 1: oceanic swell, this common knowledge that the earth is in trouble,
Speaker 1: the sense that people will make sacrifices to save it.
Speaker 1: It sounds as though things might actually change. But listening now,
Speaker 1: who know as well as I do that things didn't
Speaker 1: change nearly as much as they needed to. I don't
Speaker 1: want to tell that story again, though, I want instead
Speaker 1: to imagine what if that moment really had changed everything?
Speaker 1: How could it have the answer? After this break? The
Speaker 1: idea that everything could have turned out differently in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies is not crazy. Remember that in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: at the very same time that Wisconsin Senator gay Lord
Speaker 1: Nelson had come up with the idea for Earth Day,
Speaker 1: he come up with the idea of an amendment to
Speaker 1: the US Constitution guaranteeing people the right to a decent environment.
Speaker 1: While he was working on that, some states started trying
Speaker 1: to guarantee the same thing. The first to succeed in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one was Pennsylvania. The state ratified its own
Speaker 1: environmental rights amendment by popular referendum by a margin of
Speaker 1: four to one. So people who wanted to change the
Speaker 1: federal Constitution to save the planet, we're getting pretty excited.
Speaker 1: It all seemed so promising, so promising that environmental advoca
Speaker 1: groups pressed the case. They came up with another way,
Speaker 1: a fascinating way to think about how to grant power
Speaker 1: to the earth. That idea spread it up. In California,
Speaker 1: the Walt Disney Company was about to build a ski
Speaker 1: resort in Mineral King Valley. The Sierra Club sued to
Speaker 1: stop the plan, but the court said it lacked standing.
Speaker 1: The Sierra Club challenged the permit permitting this to go on,
Speaker 1: and case went up to the Ninth Circuit and the
Speaker 1: far Service said, look, you the Sierra Club don't have standing.
Speaker 1: Maybe this is a wrong to issue the permit, but
Speaker 1: you're not injured. You as a club are not injured.
Speaker 1: That's USC law professor Christopher Stone from an old interview
Speaker 1: at the time, he followed the case very closely. When
Speaker 1: I saw that case, I thought, this isn't a way
Speaker 1: sort of silly. This is an important decision, I said,
Speaker 1: whether to develop the Mineral King Valley in this way.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how it should come out, but at
Speaker 1: least it should be heard. And if the problem of
Speaker 1: its being heard is that this club was not suffered
Speaker 1: no injury, why not just saying, look, the injury is
Speaker 1: suffered by a Mineral King Valley. The injury is suffered
Speaker 1: by the valley. Stone decided to write a law review article.
Speaker 1: It's called should Trees Have Standing? Stone starts off talking
Speaker 1: about the Sierra Club versus Mineral King Valley case, but
Speaker 1: like most big legal arguments, Stones article made a very
Speaker 1: general claim, a legal innovation. He argued that trees and
Speaker 1: any other part of the natural world should have standing
Speaker 1: in courts of law as persons. After all, a corporation
Speaker 1: can be a person, so can a ship. So can
Speaker 1: your dog. If you leave your dog, your estate and
Speaker 1: your will, why not trees and valleys and rivers and streams.
Speaker 1: Stone didn't want humans to protect the environment. He wanted
Speaker 1: the environment itself to bear rights. He knew this might
Speaker 1: strike some people as a nutty idea, but he also
Speaker 1: felt the time had come for big, bold ideas because
Speaker 1: of how bad he thought things would be in fifty
Speaker 1: years time. There's a part of his article where he
Speaker 1: writes about that, and I find it uncanny, having been
Speaker 1: written in nineteen seventy two. He wrote, scientists have been
Speaker 1: warning of the crisis the Earth and all humans on
Speaker 1: its face. If we do not change our ways radically,
Speaker 1: the Earth's very atmosphere is threatened with frightening possibilities. Absorption
Speaker 1: of sunlight, upon which the entire life cycle depends may
Speaker 1: be diminished. The oceans may warm, increasing the greenhouse effect
Speaker 1: of the atmosphere, melting the polar ice cap and destroying
Speaker 1: our great coastal cities. Stone rushed a copy of his
Speaker 1: article to the Supreme Court, which was slated to decide
Speaker 1: the Sierra Club case, to decide, to begin with, whether
Speaker 1: the club had standing to try to block Walt Disney
Speaker 1: Company from chopping down a forest. Now sort of by
Speaker 1: one of those weird coincidences in the world. Write it
Speaker 1: about that time. Early in nineteen seventy two, Doctor Seus's
Speaker 1: book The Lorax was broadcast on television. You know, the
Speaker 1: cartoon about a creature who lives in the woods is
Speaker 1: trying to stop a lumber company from raising the forest.
Speaker 1: I speaking for the trees. Let him grow, Let him grow.
Speaker 1: But nobody listens too much, don't you know, No, they
Speaker 1: don't listen too much. Weeks after The Lorax was broadcast
Speaker 1: on TV, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in
Speaker 1: the case of Sierra Club versus Mineral King Valley, issuing
Speaker 1: a ruling in favor of the Walt Disney Company. Justice
Speaker 1: William O. Douglas wrote in a descent that if a
Speaker 1: ship can be a person under the law, so it
Speaker 1: should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beeches, ridges,
Speaker 1: groves of trees, swampland or even air. In a footnote,
Speaker 1: he cited stones article should trees have standing? But Justice
Speaker 1: Douglas said, but why not just essentially fall a stone's
Speaker 1: physician and let the mineral king be the plaintiff lest
Speaker 1: should be called mineral king against partner of interior. People
Speaker 1: like the idea that we should be speaking for nature,
Speaker 1: that nature should have its own voice. People did like
Speaker 1: that idea. So imagine what if Douglas's opinion had been
Speaker 1: not the dissenting opinion of the Supreme Court, but the
Speaker 1: majority opinion of the Supreme Court. What might have happened next?
Speaker 1: Imagine that with this incredibly huge legal victory, environmentalists had
Speaker 1: decided to really fight for an environmental rights amendment, not
Speaker 1: the one gay Lord Nelson had proposed in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Imagine they'd propose something much much bolder. I mean, imagine,
Speaker 1: really imagine. Imagine that this crazy, bold constitutional amendment had
Speaker 1: gotten ratified in nineteen seventy two. What if today, in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, we were marking the fiftieth anniversary of
Speaker 1: that environmental rights amendment. To imagine that, I've got to
Speaker 1: take you to a place I've never taken anyone before,
Speaker 1: to the last archives fiction annex. Imagine that in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one, Christopher Stone and his students at USC Law
Speaker 1: School had drafted a new constitutional amendment. Found a way
Speaker 1: for the law to listen to the trees. Article one,
Speaker 1: All legislative powers shall be vested in a Congress of
Speaker 1: the United States, which shall consist of a Senate, a
Speaker 1: House of Representatives, and a Chamber of Nature. The Chamber
Speaker 1: of Nature better known as the tree branch. Imagine this
Speaker 1: thing was ratified by a majority of states, and to
Speaker 1: help spread the news, Schoolhouse Rock made a song about
Speaker 1: it so the kids would know, Treehouse Rock. The Chamber
Speaker 1: of Nature shall be composed of members has chosen every
Speaker 1: fourth year by the people of several states. Representation in
Speaker 1: the Chamber shall be abortion among the several states according
Speaker 1: to the number of trees in the state relative to
Speaker 1: the number of trees in state prison at the time
Speaker 1: of the state entered the Union. Catch you right, But
Speaker 1: the idea that a portion ofment in Congress should be
Speaker 1: done by counting people that had been a new idea
Speaker 1: in seventeen eighty seven when the Constitution was written. There'd
Speaker 1: been other ideas at the time. They could have calculated
Speaker 1: representation by square miles or by taxable income. Why not trees?
Speaker 1: Imagine the people making this argument were very smart. They
Speaker 1: argued it very well. They brought out the best evidence.
Speaker 1: Rallies were held today in all the countries. National parks activists,
Speaker 1: citing recent reports by the US Forestry Department, explained the
Speaker 1: ability of trees to counter and even reverse them the
Speaker 1: line effects of pollution. This amendment would have meant that
Speaker 1: not only did nature have standing in courts the way
Speaker 1: the Sierra case would have ruled, but that nature, at
Speaker 1: least by proxy, had a voice in government that if
Speaker 1: a state was going to lose vegetation, it would lose votes.
Speaker 1: In Washington, the annual County of the Trees has begun.
Speaker 1: This new forest census is to take place every July.
Speaker 1: It follows this springs frenzy. At some eight million trees
Speaker 1: were planted in April alone. The public awaits the results
Speaker 1: of this first census with bated breath, as states by
Speaker 1: for representation in the new so called tree Branch. A
Speaker 1: chamber of Nature would have made protecting the environment not
Speaker 1: something subject to the competing interests of different people, but
Speaker 1: instead subject to the interests of nature itself. Interesting, right now,
Speaker 1: How in our imaginary world could such a thing come about?
Speaker 1: That's the easy part to imagine. First, Nixon, the environmental president,
Speaker 1: gets behind it. I can almost hear him offering his endorsement.
Speaker 1: By our decision, we will demonstrate the kind of people
Speaker 1: we are and the kind of country we will be kind.
Speaker 1: That's why I've charted the course I have laid out tonight. Admittedly,
Speaker 1: the debating Congress would have been crazy, the timber trade
Speaker 1: against it builders, developers, the construction industry, no way, but
Speaker 1: in favor a lot of ordinary people and business interests
Speaker 1: that wanted to stay on the right side of the
Speaker 1: rising environmental movement. The whole of DC would have been
Speaker 1: one giant environmental rally and counter rally for weeks, and
Speaker 1: then it could have all happened so quickly twenty seven
Speaker 1: the Environmental Rights Amendment might have passed Congress and gone
Speaker 1: to the states. And imagine this. Imagine that the last
Speaker 1: state needed ratified the amendment in nineteen seventy two. Imagine
Speaker 1: that the federal government had become answerable to nature a
Speaker 1: half century ago. This week, mining companies are lobbying the
Speaker 1: Chamber of Nature seeking exemption from bands on fracking. But
Speaker 1: the tree branch so far appears to be holding firm. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm locking up the annex again because this, all of this,
Speaker 1: none of it happened. What happened instead? After the break,
Speaker 1: there is no environmental rights Amendment to the US Constitution.
Speaker 1: We are not today in twenty twenty two, celebrating the
Speaker 1: fiftieth anniversary of its ratification. It was never ratified. It
Speaker 1: was never even written. A lot of other things, though,
Speaker 1: did happen in the early nineteen seventies, with Richard Nixon's
Speaker 1: full support the EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Clean
Speaker 1: Air Act. Still, the environmental movement never really trusted Nixon. Instead,
Speaker 1: it spurned him. As Dan Rather reported several weeks ago,
Speaker 1: the White House invited the Nice Stool organizers a birthday
Speaker 1: to drop by for a chat. They refused. On that
Speaker 1: first Earth Day in nineteen seventy, Nixon and his wife
Speaker 1: Pat planted a tree in the White House lawn and
Speaker 1: that's it. Pretty soon Nixon was embroiled in the Watergate scandal.
Speaker 1: The leaders of the environmental movement white middle class college
Speaker 1: students and young people, or pretty squarely anti Nixon for
Speaker 1: all kinds of reasons, and they didn't ever really seek
Speaker 1: his support, so it's hard to know how much he
Speaker 1: might have given. In the end, the establishment business leaders,
Speaker 1: the silent majority oppose the environmental movement. If you look
Speaker 1: at TV footage on Earth Day or listen to it,
Speaker 1: it looked and sounded pretty much like woodstock. And as
Speaker 1: for what civil rights activists thought about it all merely
Speaker 1: Evers put it this way. I was asked by someone,
Speaker 1: why is it that you think there are not too
Speaker 1: many black people participating in Earth Week? In Earth Day,
Speaker 1: they're interested about the health of themselves and their children
Speaker 1: when they are living in rat infested homes, about the
Speaker 1: garbage that's piled up. CBS News spoke to civil rights
Speaker 1: leader Herman Rice. He said, basically, we have bigger problems. See,
Speaker 1: we still have hungry children to feed, and we still
Speaker 1: will have houses to try to build. And I think
Speaker 1: we're taking the emphasis off the beat up buildings and
Speaker 1: the polluted streams that they're talking about. We've never seen
Speaker 1: anyway but trout. I don't know if they're dying. We've
Speaker 1: never seen that. I know, the rats of bike acue.
Speaker 1: Earth Day, for all of its successes and its huge scale,
Speaker 1: it's still had real limits. It's burned the establishment. It
Speaker 1: was too white. And then in nineteen seventy three, the
Speaker 1: gas crisis began, not just rising prices but in actual
Speaker 1: shortage due to US foreign policy in the Middle East
Speaker 1: and an embargo by OPEC, a consortium of oil producing
Speaker 1: nations in the Persian Gulf. Here's a clip from a
Speaker 1: special NBC News did about the crisis. There's almost unanimous
Speaker 1: agreement among the experts that the crisis is real, that
Speaker 1: it's been creeping up on us for about one hundred
Speaker 1: years now, and that it's getting worse each day as
Speaker 1: we continue to use up our precious supplies of oil, coal,
Speaker 1: and gas. And by the nineteen eighties, the fossil fuel
Speaker 1: industry was already organizing itself around an extraordinary project, undermining
Speaker 1: the science and promoting oil and oil companies as good
Speaker 1: for the environment. Climate change, pollution not real, they said,
Speaker 1: or at least not relevant. Exon BP and DuPont great
Speaker 1: for the environment. Recently, DuPont announced that its energy unit, Conico,
Speaker 1: would and hear the use of new doubleholed oil tankers
Speaker 1: in order to see if guard the environment. And the
Speaker 1: response has been foodfully blamingly positive, better things for better living.
Speaker 1: And as for what happened after that, you probably know
Speaker 1: what happened next. Rising temperatures, the increasing severity of storms,
Speaker 1: the forest fires. Why even bother thinking about whether it
Speaker 1: could have gone another way? No one proposed tree branch.
Speaker 1: That is my own cockamamie idea. But why is it
Speaker 1: a cochomamy idea? What if it could have worked? What
Speaker 1: would have happened if we'd had a third branch of
Speaker 1: the legislature in which representation was proportionate not to people
Speaker 1: but to trees. States would have had a huge incentive
Speaker 1: not to cut down forests, certainly not to cut them
Speaker 1: down without planting new ones. Urban forestry would have grown.
Speaker 1: Cities would have planted more trees. Suburbs would have provided
Speaker 1: incentives to homeowners to plant groves instead of lawns. More
Speaker 1: carbon would have been sequestered. Okay, and obviously that is oversimplifying.
Speaker 1: A lot of other messy stuff would have happened too.
Speaker 1: But I've been thinking this last archive season of Solutions
Speaker 1: about the US Constitution and its brittleness. Given the polarization
Speaker 1: of American politics since the nineteen seventies, it is now
Speaker 1: effectively impossible to amend the Constitution. But what if it weren't.
Speaker 1: Could what I have imagined really have happened in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. I decided to ask world renowned environmental activists
Speaker 1: Bill mckibbon, we talked about that first Earth Day in
Speaker 1: which one in ten Americans took part the watershed of
Speaker 1: the environmental movement, probably the biggest protest in the history
Speaker 1: of the country. And it wins most of the things
Speaker 1: that it's asking for right away. You know, the Clean
Speaker 1: Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act,
Speaker 1: and the air starts to get cleaner quickly, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden you can swim in lakes and streams
Speaker 1: that were catching on fire, you know, a few years before,
Speaker 1: and again it's Nixon's White House. Nixon is signing all
Speaker 1: these bills, and he says the seventies are going to
Speaker 1: be the environmental secade. And this was proofed by the
Speaker 1: way of the power of that movement because Nixon literally
Speaker 1: had not an environmental bonus. We know from listening to
Speaker 1: the tapes now that he thought they were all smelly hippies.
Speaker 1: But he had no choice. I mean, for four or
Speaker 1: five years, if you put the word environment in the
Speaker 1: title of a bill, it passed. And these were huge,
Speaker 1: you know, big things. They're still those, I mean, the
Speaker 1: only legislation had ever really passed about this stuff and
Speaker 1: the stuff that we still rely on when we try
Speaker 1: to fight nplians and stuff. All passed in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: three and was signed by Richard Nixon. And that was
Speaker 1: true until a few months after I talked to mckibbon,
Speaker 1: Biden signed the first major climate legislation. It did a lot,
Speaker 1: it did nowhere near enough. Mckibbon says, in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: Earth Day was in a way a victim of its
Speaker 1: own success. Had won the easy things, and then it
Speaker 1: wasn't able to win the hard ones. Environmentalism stopped being
Speaker 1: very early on a mass movement because it was so
Speaker 1: successful after Earthday nineteen seventy or within a couple of years.
Speaker 1: Everybody had left the streets because they were winning every
Speaker 1: bill they put forward in Congress, every court decision, whatever,
Speaker 1: and which was great. It was working until it wasn't,
Speaker 1: and the other side fought back very hard. So the
Speaker 1: environmental movement moves off the streets and into big institutions,
Speaker 1: and it's just not prepared either for the strength of
Speaker 1: the opposition or for the magnitude of the problem. And
Speaker 1: the problem is that the things that were addressing are
Speaker 1: the easy things. It turns out they're the problems when
Speaker 1: something goes a little wrong, like you don't have the
Speaker 1: right filter on your smoke stack or your car or whatever.
Speaker 1: And you can fix them by putting a catalytic converter
Speaker 1: in or a scrubber in your smoke stack. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it costs a little money, but it's not the end
Speaker 1: of the world. And once you do that, you've made
Speaker 1: extraordinary progress. In fact, the pollution that you can see
Speaker 1: with your eyes begins to disappear. So, having solved this
Speaker 1: one set of things, but without making fundamental shifts in
Speaker 1: how we ran the world, we were setting ourselves up
Speaker 1: for much, much deeper trouble. We didn't know about climate
Speaker 1: change yet, but we were beginning to sense that it
Speaker 1: was coming. More to the point, it was clear that
Speaker 1: relying on oil had all kinds of pitfalls. Kibbin had
Speaker 1: a different counterfactual from my whole tree branch thing, another
Speaker 1: near miss, maybe nearly as consequential as my counterfactual. His
Speaker 1: counterfactual was what if Jimmy Carter had succeeded in steering
Speaker 1: the country towards solar power and away from oil. If
Speaker 1: we had turned away from it in the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: done what Carter wanted to do and made this all
Speaker 1: out commitment to solar power. Well, we would have not solved,
Speaker 1: but addressed in a fundamental way what now has become
Speaker 1: the single existential challenge on planet Earth. So tell me
Speaker 1: a little bit about what Carter was and what happened
Speaker 1: to Carter's proposals. So his main message about how we're
Speaker 1: going to combat this problem is a conservation and there's
Speaker 1: you know there he puts on the sweater and gives
Speaker 1: the talk from the White House with the temperature thermostat
Speaker 1: turned down. And the other thing he's doing is saying,
Speaker 1: we have to figure out ways to power ourselves that
Speaker 1: aren't reliant on fossil fuel opeque the rest of the
Speaker 1: world today and directly harnessing the power of the sun.
Speaker 1: We are taking the energy that God gave us and
Speaker 1: using it to replace our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.
Speaker 1: And yet that didn't happen. Carter productive solar panels, made
Speaker 1: that plan, and then Reagan defeated him in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: and then Regan took down those solar panels and scrapped
Speaker 1: that plan. Carter put on a sweater, Reagan said, turn
Speaker 1: up the thermostat. This is America. So this is one
Speaker 1: of these rare like counterfactual history things where it's pretty
Speaker 1: easy to play out what would happen if you'd actually
Speaker 1: done it, you know, if we'd done that, if we'd
Speaker 1: made a serious governmental commitment to doing this, There's there
Speaker 1: was no physical or technological obstacle that would have kept
Speaker 1: us from developing cheap solar energy in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: and nineteen nineties instead of in the twenty tenths, which
Speaker 1: is when we finally did. You know, it would have
Speaker 1: been the greatest of gifts to the whole world to
Speaker 1: have done this thirty years earlier. Well, we would have
Speaker 1: been well on the way to knowing what to do
Speaker 1: and how to deal with it. But of course we
Speaker 1: didn't do that. And just as I really can't say
Speaker 1: what establishing a chamber of Nature would have meant, mckimn
Speaker 1: can't be sure how far solar might have gone if
Speaker 1: Carter had won re election in nineteen eighty and stayed
Speaker 1: the course on solar power. It's still good to dream, though,
Speaker 1: I told mckimn about our counterfactual the lorex, the tree
Speaker 1: branch the whole nine yards. I wanted to see what
Speaker 1: he thought about it. It's not a completely fanciful counter factual,
Speaker 1: the idea that things might have broken very differently in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, and it may have been the last
Speaker 1: chance for things to really break differently. Admittedly, the Chamber
Speaker 1: of Nature is wacky calculating political representation by counting trees,
Speaker 1: but as mckibbon pointed out, so is measuring the health
Speaker 1: of a country with its GDP. It's gross domestic product.
Speaker 1: I mean, governments count stuff. That's they're going to count something.
Speaker 1: And if they were counting number of trees or number
Speaker 1: of eagles or whatever it is, it would have led
Speaker 1: to a whole different set of outcomes. Probably, But the
Speaker 1: reason is because it would have shifted our sense of
Speaker 1: what was important. Would it have worked the tree branch
Speaker 1: political power based on trees? I expected out once using
Speaker 1: Forest Service reports to calculate which dates would have benefit
Speaker 1: it at the start, and how different states could have
Speaker 1: benefited from the incentive to plant more trees save more forests.
Speaker 1: What I came up with is that I think it
Speaker 1: might have thwarted polarization because it's not the usual Red State,
Speaker 1: Blue State divide. The season of the last Archive is
Speaker 1: about fixes. Fixing the constitution is not really one of them.
Speaker 1: What's the problem we're trying to fix here? It's not
Speaker 1: a scarcity of information, a lack of knowledge, the absence
Speaker 1: of proof. The evidence for climate change has been everywhere
Speaker 1: for decades now. Every year the evidence has grown stronger,
Speaker 1: and slowly, slowly, so did the environmental movement. There is
Speaker 1: no planet by to have a lovable future. So what
Speaker 1: are the climate change denihilists are? By now dead and dying?
Speaker 1: Which should have been common knowledge in nineteen seventy two
Speaker 1: is a half century later, undeniable, Dear representatives of the media.
Speaker 1: I've seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing
Speaker 1: like these. In twenty twenty two, a member of the IPCC,
Speaker 1: the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reported that
Speaker 1: any further delay in concerted global action will miss a
Speaker 1: brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.
Speaker 1: Antonio Guteresh, head of the IPCC, underscored the point today's
Speaker 1: IPCC report is a necklace of human suffering and the
Speaker 1: damning indictment of failed climate leadership. With fact upon fact,
Speaker 1: these reports reveals all people on the planet are getting
Speaker 1: clobered by climate change. These abdication of leadership is criminal.
Speaker 1: I wanted Season three to be upbeat, cheerful, good ideas solutions.
Speaker 1: This abdication of leadership is criminal. But I do still
Speaker 1: think if a window is now closing, there's much to
Speaker 1: be learned by looking back through the clouded light of
Speaker 1: other windows. I know people everywhere are anxious and angry.
Speaker 1: I am too. Now is the time to turn rage
Speaker 1: into action. Every fraction of their degree matters, every voice
Speaker 1: can make a difference, and every second counts. Twenty twenty
Speaker 1: two was a year for real, genuine celebration, the first
Speaker 1: meaningful climate legislation in the United States, and more than
Speaker 1: a generation. It's gone a long way, but it hasn't
Speaker 1: gone far enough. I don't want my grandchildren to look
Speaker 1: back at twenty twenty two the way I look back
Speaker 1: at nineteen seventy two and say, oh my god, they
Speaker 1: were so close. They did so much, They were so
Speaker 1: close to doing what needed to be done. If only
Speaker 1: they'd had a little bit more imagination. I don't want
Speaker 1: to have been close. Close is not enough. The last
Speaker 1: archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's
Speaker 1: produced by Sophie Crane, Ben Natt of Hafrey and Lucy Sullivan.
Speaker 1: Our editors are Julia Barton and Sophie Crane, and our
Speaker 1: executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jake Gorsky is our engineer.
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss
Speaker 1: and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our research assistant is
Speaker 1: Mia Hazra. Our full proof player is Robert Ricotta. Many
Speaker 1: of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and
Speaker 1: the Star Jennette Foundation. The Last Archive is a production
Speaker 1: of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing
Speaker 1: to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content like The Last Archivist,
Speaker 1: a limited series just for subscribers, and add free listening
Speaker 1: across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look
Speaker 1: for Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin
Speaker 1: dot Fm. If you like the show, please remember to rate,
Speaker 1: share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: I'm Jill Lapor