My granddaughter, born in the summer of the great Gulf gusher, faces a tumultuous world.  I do not know what the world will look like when she is my age.

Dianne Dumanoski’s latest book, The End of the Long Summer, begins with this paragraph:

The future in the modern imagination has always stretched [...]]]> By Nancy Myers

My granddaughter, born in the summer of the great Gulf gusher, faces a tumultuous world.  I do not know what the world will look like when she is my age.

Dianne Dumanoski’s latest book, The End of the Long Summer, begins with this paragraph:

The future in the modern imagination has always stretched out ahead like a broad highway drawing us onward with the promise of tomorrow. Now rather suddenly, as it becomes impossible to ignore dramatic physical changes taking place across the Earth, the future looms like an urgent question. Whatever the coming century brings, it will not unfold smoothly as some improved but largely familiar version of life as we now it. This is the only thing that seems certain.

Dumanoski’s elegant, relentless analysis shows how Western culture and what we know as civilization has been built on an anomaly of stable climate, abundant fossil fuel, and economic growth. None of these can last. We may slow the changes now underway but we can’t stop them, predict them, or control them. And they are upon us.

Half of the human transformation of the Earth, she points out, has taken place in the last 50 years. As a result, “we are already witnessing nature’s return to center stage as a critical player in human history. This development, more than any other, will shape the human future.”

Our culture has not prepared us for what will take place in the next hundred years. “For four centuries it did not seem to matter that the vast construct of modern civilization rested on an inaccurate view of nature or that our culture map was missing vital information. Now it matters most of all.”

Dumanoski is a renowned science journalist who coauthored Our Stolen Future, which unveiled the threat of endocrine-disrupting chemicals. She has chronicled developments from the discovery of the ozone hole to the Slow Food movement.  Her thoroughly scientific analysis in The End of the Long Summer makes clear that science and technology will not save us; what hope we have may lie in the (scientifically demonstrated) human capacity for flexibility and adaptability in the face of huge environmental changes and challenges.

She has few detailed prescriptions, just some broad ones: drastically reduce the human footprint, develop modularity, redundancy, and flexibility in our institutions and societies. But she ends with a call for “honest hope” and for arming our children and grandchildren for the dangerous passage of the next century with understanding, wisdom, and courage.

This we can do. We can keep our own hopes up, grounded in a cleareyed view of how much we humans have unleashed and how little control we have over what happens next. We can keep our courage up and work for the changes that we can bring about. We can lobby, legislate, march, and persuade. We can come up with new ideas and laws that incorporate wisdom. We can model the kind of spirit, individual and communal, that makes the human presence on this planet a harmonious part of the living whole.

With our grandchildren we can tend gardens, cook for crowds, tell stories. We can explore the libraries of human knowledge and expose our own ignorance. We can take the train, swim, bike, and sit still for hours among the trees. We can build self-reliance and the joy of cooperation. We can clean rivers and restore urban woodlands.

We can also huddle together in the storms, clean up after the floods, wrap up against the cold, collect precious water. We can do with less. We can mourn the losses. We can take in refugees. We can celebrate life.

“But a renaissance, a rebirth occurs not just because there is a rising of images and archetypal symbols. A renaissance happens because the soul is breached, the psyche unlocked, and a flood of new questions are released as to who we are and what we contain.”

Jean Houston

“Only [...]]]> By Carolyn Raffensperger

“But a renaissance, a rebirth occurs not just because there is a rising of images and archetypal symbols. A renaissance happens because the soul is breached, the psyche unlocked, and a flood of new questions are released as to who we are and what we contain.”

Jean Houston

“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Milton Friedman

***

Environmental law in the United States is predicated on a series of assumptions deeply embedded in free market doctrine.  The spawn of this radical free market ideology are things like “privatization is the best and highest use of all property”; “government by and for corporations”; “fossil fuels are essential and their consequent pollution is necessary.”  The BP oil disaster is a result of these assumptions. The regulators at the Mineral Management Service (MMS) presumed that privatization of the ocean’s oil was in the best interests of BP and therefore the country and so it moved to expedite drilling rather than protect the public. Recent news that the administration is considering opening the Gulf up for more drilling and ending the current moratorium makes clear how pervasive these assumptions really are.

But the massive failure of both government to protect public interests and BP to be responsible for its mess didn’t sit well with the public.  There was wall to wall outrage that BP acted as if it owned the ocean.  BP refused an EPA order to use less toxic dispersants. It kept scientists and the public away from the site itself and refused to make data public.  The public response has been vociferous, “BP does not own the ocean”.

The deep intuitive sense is that the ocean is a Commons—we all share it. Herons, whales, seaweed and humans. We have a right with all of these other beings and humans to care for it, to share in its bounty. The commons are the foundation of our economy. Without a healthy ocean, or local prairie or forest, without clean air and water, without the web of life, all of our dollars are worthless.

The idea of the commons is an ancient one but has been lost in the private property free for all of the United States. There’s a good historical reason for the ascendancy of private property in the U.S.–when we broke away from the British monarchy, owning land was the basis for citizenship, the right to participate in government. This is so deeply embedded in our cultural DNA that publicly owned land is often seen by the right-wing as a Communist plot.

But throughout our history we’ve also set aside public places such as town squares, national parks and shorelines or managed wildlife so anyone could get a hunting or fishing license.  Accordingly, the law of the commons in the U.S. looks more like a crazy quilt than an organized, clear framework. A year ago, I along with two co-authors set out to change that.  We wrote a paper that put forward a comprehensive law of the commons.

The law of the commons is ripe in the Friedman sense of policies that are kept alive and vibrant until they are needed.  Now that BP has demonstrated that the old idea of privatization of our shared resources is a big fail we can bring forward the robust alternative  and fully implement policies that protect the commons.

The corollary to the Commons is that government is the trustee (not the owner) of our shared wealth and must care for it on behalf of present and future generations.  Tweaking MMS or any other environmental agency won’t suffice.  All of these agencies must become active trustees and develop new policies and strategies that reflect their essential responsibility to protect and restore the commonwealth.

The standard of care government must use to fulfill its responsibility as the trustee is the precautionary principle: “When an activity raises threats of harm, precautionary measures must be taken even if some cause and effect relationships have not been fully established scientifically.” This means our agencies must act on the best available information to prevent harm. The BP oil hemorrhage has demonstrated that cleaning up messes is far more costly than preventing them in the first place. Calls for the precautionary principle by scientists and those who love the Ocean have never been stronger or clearer.

We will know whether agencies have met their standard of care by whether we turn over commons such as the Ocean, air, wildlife, freshwater and parks to future generations in better shape than we got them.

The Gulf disaster was a breach of our soul. Ideas like the commons, the public trust responsibilities of government, and the precautionary principle are alive and available. It’s time to make them politically inevitable.

On the morning of August 11th, 2010 residents in Ames Iowa were awakened by a robo-call from the city. “Prepare for unprecedented flooding. Move to high ground. “ Squaw Creek and the Skunk River rose to heights never before seen, even in the disastrous floods of 1993. Soon all [...]]]> By Carolyn Raffensperger

On the morning of August 11th, 2010 residents in Ames Iowa were awakened by a robo-call from the city. “Prepare for unprecedented flooding. Move to high ground. “ Squaw Creek and the Skunk River rose to heights never before seen, even in the disastrous floods of 1993. Soon all roads in and out of Ames and many inside were impassible except by boat.

At 2:30 we received another call. There were 8 breaks in the water main and residents of Ames were without water. We will not have safe drinking water for a week. I heard that there were fights at the grocery store over the few remaining cases of bottled water. All restaurants have closed as has Iowa State University.

Thoughts in the midst of a disaster

1. The measure of a community’s resilience will be taken in the aftermath of a storm or disaster.
2. We need to set in motion feedback loops that increase resilience rather than the feedback loops that decrease resilience.  Every action must reduce the odds of more frequent and worse disasters. For example, buying lots of bottled water actually increases the chance of more climate chaos creating positive feedback loops of disaster. In contrast, rain barrels are likely to minimize flooding and don’t require fossil fuels to transport the water and are locally available sources of clean water in the event of an emergency.
3. Climate chaos adaptation and mitigation strategies must also be prevention strategies. We have to find ways to adapt to rising temperatures and more intense storms without increasing greenhouse gases or the consequences of the storms such as flooding.
4. Generosity and acts of heroism are contagious. Hoarding and selfishness are equally contagious. The social fabric can unravel in the face of hoarding. It can be tightened into a safety net by preparation, communication, and sharing.
5. Self-sufficiency is insufficient. Community sufficiency is essential. Communities will minimize suffering if they have redundant survival systems  such as water, shelter, transportation, food, communication. It helps to have a Plan B.
6. Beauty matters. In the most difficult circumstances one perfect poem, one exquisitely expressive song, is a life-line in the wreckage.
7. During disasters, nights can be excruciating and filled with the angst that is unique to 3:00 am. In the middle of the night solastalgia is at its worst. The nights leading up to the Ames flood were nonstop torrential, violent rain and endless thunder and lightening, unlike a “normal” storm that comes through with all of its energy and leaves behind cooler fresher air. We will need to create cultural competencies for dealing with the literal dark of the dark times. Stories, songs, popcorn, lemonade or hot chocolate.
8. Local strategies that are tailored to our home geographies and ecosystems and that create local community integrity, resilience, and beauty will in the end determine whether there are fires in Russia or flooding in China, Pakistan and Ames Iowa…or not.
9. The Zen practice (Ok, the Iroquois practice) of asking how every action will affect the 7th generation will lead to the palace of wisdom and community resilience. Bottled water or rain barrels? Bike or car?
10. The Christian practice of asking who is my neighbor and then caring for them will lead to community sufficiency. And as Wavy Gravy said to those at the Woodstock concert, “look at the person on your right and left. That is your neighbor.”

“So we break the spell by loving ourselves and each other enough to tell the truth. Our own experience, as inhabitants of an endangered planet, gives us the authority and the authenticity to tell the truth about what we see and feel and know is happening to our world.” Joanna [...]]]> By Carolyn Raffensperger

“So we break the spell by loving ourselves and each other enough to tell the truth. Our own experience, as inhabitants of an endangered planet, gives us the authority and the authenticity to tell the truth about what we see and feel and know is happening to our world.” Joanna Macy

There’s a paradox about the role of personal experience in setting environmental policy. Consider the tension between these two scenarios.

Neighbors in small town Iowa vigorously protested the expansion of a factory hog farm because the noxious odors were destroying their quality of life. The State Health Department refused to take action saying that there was no proof of harm from the hydrogen sulfide that wafted like a mushroom cloud of stink from the “farm”.  (I wish blogs had scratch and sniff so you could judge for yourself.) The State delayed action and referred the problem to a University of Iowa team of scientists to do more research.

In the second scenario, my Iowa neighbors and I experienced a ferocious winter in 2009-1010. We had brutal cold and piles of snow.   Many of my neighbors argued that this proved that global warming was a hoax.

In both stories my Iowa friends were relying on their own senses to determine whether some kind of action should be taken to prevent harm. “Yes”, the neighbors of the pig farm said. “Take action. The stench is harming our health.” “No”, said the shivering Iowans. “The cold proves that there is no global warming.”

Standard science dogma would assert that neither group had enough data for, or against, taking precautionary action. The way science is used in most governmental agencies to set environmental policy is by using risk assessment to determine whether there is enough data to prove cause and effect relationships. Anecdotes and personal experience don’t count.

But there’s a real difference between the experience of the hog farm and the experience of weather. The difference is that the cause of harm from the hog farm is immediately available to our senses. Our eyes, ears, nose and mouth, are well-suited to assess immediate threats to our survival. If it tastes or smells bad, we are wired biologically to avoid it. But the patterns of climate are too big for individual humans to evaluate, especially in the short term. It could be within the range of normal variability or it might be an indicator of larger climate instability. It is very hard to tell.

The general rule is that personal experiences are trustworthy when we can ascertain the cause of the effect and it violates a biological aesthetic . Personal experiences are rarely trustworthy if the phenomenon is part of a much larger, complex system, and the causes can’t be  seen, felt, tasted, or smelled.

This doesn’t mean we discount our experiences of the weather and other complicated, long-term issues.  However, when myopic opinion is used to discount precautionary action that might prevent future harm, we should all be skeptical. Authentic and authoritative truth-telling admits to uncertainty, recognizes the limits of personal experience, but connects the dots and seeks the larger patterns.  The generosity of these truths enlarges the public good and serves future generations.

A quiet, ordinary canary, an older female named Vida had sent many of her brood into the mines. She had had enough. “What”, she thought,” can I do to stop sending our children into the mines to warn the miners of death? The mines themselves are death. This is [...]]]> By Carolyn Raffensperger

A quiet, ordinary canary, an older female named Vida had sent many of her brood into the mines. She had had enough. “What”, she thought,” can I do to stop sending our children into the mines to warn the miners of death? The mines themselves are death. This is what we must say.”

One night the miner who cleaned her cage and gave her food and water left the door ajar. Vida slipped past the billowing curtain and flew out the window into the dark. She went to each miner’s house and visited every canary whose job was to warn of death.
She unlatched the cage doors and convinced the canaries to meet on a tree branch under the light of the full moon.

“Isn’t it time we stopped dying for this folly? Isn’t it time they stopped dying in the name of jobs and money? How can we warn them about mining itself?”

The canaries agreed to revolt. Each canary flew to the pillow of their miner’s lover and whispered, “he will die”. Some went to the young lovers of the men who would become miners and whispered, “he will die”. A few went and whispered to the grandmothers whose lovers had died, and said, “your grandsons will die too.”

In the morning, after the lunches had been packed and the men were gone the women gathered around the mending, the cooking, the hearthing, and recounted their dreams. No one wanted to speak first. Finally one told her dream of a canary who had warned of her lover’s death. Each had the same dream.

The next night Vida reconvened the council. She asked if Eagle would join them. Eagle had come perilously close to extinction because of a pesticide that made her eggs too thin to support her weight while the babies hatched. What advice could she give?

That night each canary and each eagle flew to a lover’s pillow and whispered, “the children will die.” They whispered to the grandmothers, “the grandchildren will die.

Again in the morning, the miners left for the mines and the women gathered. Each had dreamed of the death of the children and the grandchildren.

The third night Vida gathered the birds and invited the Dark Clouds and the Ocean. She said, “you have warned the humans, just as we have. Speak of what we must do.” The Dark Clouds–the red ones that warned of stormy weather, the white ones that spoke of peace–said that the coal and the oil and the minerals would change the climate forever—or at least as far ahead as Clouds can see. The Ocean spoke of her partnership with the Dark Clouds and the Mountains and then said, “I am so polluted with plastic and oil, and so acidic that I cannot support life. I have become the garbage dump for all that is dug out of the Earth.”

That night each Canary, each Eagle, each Dark Cloud and the Ocean went to whisper at the pillow of the Lovers and the Grandmothers. “You will all die.”

The next morning the Lovers and the Grandmothers took the canaries and the lunch pails and went to the mouth of the mine. They opened the cages and freed the canaries. “No more”, they said. “This day we choose life not death”. They blocked the mine and refused to let anyone in it. They took up shovels and filled in the mouth so no one could get inside. They filled the tanks of the mountain removal equipment with sand so they could never run again. And they sang to the canaries who sang back.

And that is how mining ended. As the canaries said, “we’re all humans now”. As the humans said, “we’re all canaries now”.

In 1998 Jane Lubchenco, now head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency called for a new social contract for scientists. She said:

“As the magnitude of human impacts on the ecological systems of the planet becomes apparent, there is increased realization of the intimate connections between these systems and human health, the [...]]]> By Carolyn Raffensperger

In 1998 Jane Lubchenco, now head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency called for a new social contract for scientists. She said:

“As the magnitude of human impacts on the ecological systems of the planet becomes apparent, there is increased realization of the intimate connections between these systems and human health, the economy, social justice, and national security. The concept of what constitutes “the environment” is changing rapidly. Urgent and unprecedented environmental and social changes challenge scientists to define a new social contract. This contract represents a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding. The new and unmet needs of society include more comprehensive information, understanding, and technologies for society to move toward a more sustainable biosphere–one which is ecologically sound, economically feasible, and socially just.”

Twelve years later, in the face of the Gulf catastrophe, creating this new social contract is more critical than ever. It is time that we establish and fund a public interest research agenda.

Corporations and universities developed the technologies to drill in the Ocean a mile down but neglected to develop companion technologies to prevent disasters or respond to them appropriately. We didn’t learn anything from the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska’s Prince William Sound that occurred twenty one years ago. “BP’s Doug Suttles admitted that industry’s tools for cleaning up oil spills – such as booms and skimmers – aren’t ready for the 21st century.”

There’s a long list of policy failures at play in the BP disaster. We had regulations that privileged corporations and money rather than the Earth. The entire legal system is rigged against public health and the environment since it puts the burden of proof of harm on the public rather than placing the burden of demonstrating safety on industry. Agencies do cost-benefit analyses on individual activities and neglect the cumulative impacts of multiple activities. Corporations and governments alike ignore early warnings. These are all huge problems that need to be fixed.

Added to this list is another big problem that we need to address immediately in order to develop technologies and strategies that prevent and mitigate messes: our research agenda skews in the same corporate direction as our regulatory policies. The public money spent on research and development (R & D) is essentially designed to increase economic activity and benefit private interests. U.S. policy is to pay for research and transfer new technologies to corporations so they can put them on the market. You can guess how this works–we are far more likely to develop new widgets and technologies for resource exploitation that make companies rich than we are to develop approaches that protect the commons or the public good. We have not yet developed laws and policies that would put into place Lubchenco’s new social contract.

A year after Lubchenco published her germinal paper, I along with several coauthors wrote a paper defining public interest research. We said,

“Public interest research aims at developing knowledge and/or technology that increases the commonwealth. Such research requires complex problem-solving and will involve at least the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of people and natural resources. It will require that insights from these different ways of knowing be synthesized, and that an active citizenry be involved. (Peters, 1999)

Such research will be identified by its beneficiaries, the public availability of its results, and public involvement in the research. These key benchmarks identify public interest research:

• The primary, direct beneficiaries are society as a whole or specific populations or entities unable to carry out research on their own behalf.
• Information and technologies resulting from public interest research are made freely available (not proprietary or patented); and
• Such information and technologies are developed with collaboration or advice from an active citizenry.

“Public” means “not private.” Most research done in the private interest is done for the financial gain of a limited, circumscribed group. Research done in the public interest will seldom involve such direct financial gain to the developers and will benefit a community or the commons.”

The time has come. We must establish a public interest research agenda that

• - Develops effective technologies for preventing and stopping problems, cleaning up the messes and restoring ecosystems;
• - Develops alternatives to harmful technologies through biomimicry, green chemistry, green engineering, green energy, sustainable agriculture and ecological medicine;
• - Develops early warning mechanisms.

The BP disaster demands justice.  People are looking for asses to kick, ways to make BP–or the government—pay for their failures.  Some have argued that we are all to blame because we use fossil fuels. Others argue that the oil industry is solely liable because they were negligent, under-prepared and [...]]]> By Carolyn Raffensperger

The BP disaster demands justice.  People are looking for asses to kick, ways to make BP–or the government—pay for their failures.  Some have argued that we are all to blame because we use fossil fuels. Others argue that the oil industry is solely liable because they were negligent, under-prepared and greedy. These are all demands for a kind of justice that requires retribution. Punish the perps. I share the rage but I think this catastrophe calls for another larger kind of justice. Restorative Justice.

Restorative Justice is a theory of justice that “emphasizes repairing the harm caused or revealed by unjust behavior.”

The focus of restorative justice is to heal relationships, and make the victim whole. In the case of the oil hemorrhage in the Gulf the list of victims (or future plaintiffs, if you will) is long. The Ocean herself, all the sea creatures, the residents of the Gulf, and future generations, have suffered unspeakable damage from the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Restorative justice would assign blame as a way to allocate responsibility for the actions necessary to restore the environment, to restore all the relationships that are woven into the Ocean and coast. All of them.

Many key voices have called for the precautionary principle to be employed so that something like this never happens again.  Essentially the principle is an ethic of refraining from doing harm.  It is another expression of the Golden Rule that says, “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.”   This ethic is reflected in the concept of Restorative Justice.  How should we behave when the damage has already happened?  First we apply the precautionary principle to prevent any more harm and then we restore the environment so the cascade of damage can be stopped.

Our work following the 1998 Wingspread Conference on the precautionary principle emphasized the necessity of reversing the burden of proof. Moving it from the public–who must prove harm before something can be stopped–to the proponent of an activity–who must demonstrate safety before something can begin. Another way of expressing the idea of reversing the burden of proof is “the polluter pays.”

What are they paying for? In restorative justice they are funding the work necessary to restore the environment, to restore the health of the ocean, and to restore the lives of the people of the Gulf. Retribution is an inadequate remedy for an injustice of this magnitude. There isn’t enough money in the world to punish all who are culpable. Nor is there enough money in the world to restore the Ocean to health. But if we devote all resources necessary—not just money—to preventing any further harm and to restoring all the relationships that have been damaged we have a better chance of achieving real justice.

I’m an expectant grandmother. I feel the joy of this  in my heart region, just about six inches above where I feel the pain of the ongoing hemorrhage of oil into the Gulf. Heart joy vs. sick feeling in the pit of the stomach. Contradictory but related.

Warren Levy puts these together in an [...]]]> By Nancy Myers

I’m an expectant grandmother. I feel the joy of this  in my heart region, just about six inches above where I feel the pain of the ongoing hemorrhage of oil into the Gulf. Heart joy vs. sick feeling in the pit of the stomach. Contradictory but related.

Warren Levy puts these together in an essay for CSRWire, a publication on corporate social responsibility, titled “We Need a Grandchildren Standard.”

“Sustainability requires changing business and political decision-making to the ‘grandchildren’ standard from today’s pervasive ‘no tomorrow’ standard,” he writes. “BP and Goldman Sachs epitomize ‘no tomorrow’ thinking. When it counted most, key actors in BP and Goldman Sachs optimized for immediate return, putting local and global economies and their firms at risk.”

The “Grandchildren” standard asks, “What would we do if grandchildren were our principal stakeholders?”  Levy points out that most investors want sustained returns, labor wants secure jobs, and customers prefer continuous competition not only in price but also in quality. The Grandchildren standard, like the No Tomorrow standard, seeks to optimize a company’s performance—but over a longer timeframe. Time is the principal variable.

I’ve been calling this the long-term bottom line. I wrote about it a while ago in an essay on the economy of wisdom, “The Owl Economy”:

The owl economy would be green, fair, and diversified. It would emphasize the long-term bottom line—prosperity now that can be carried into the future. It would measure wealth by the wellbeing of communities as well as individuals. It would grow social and natural capital as well as material capital. It would be grounded in the biological reality of a generous but limited planet. It would protect, restore, and enrich the commons—air, water, soil, wildlife, and lands, and the shared wealth of human knowledge, cooperation, and infrastructure. Its goals would be to create jobs and beauty.

This vision seemed wildly idealistic when i sketched it out four years ago. But suddenly, with the oil gushing into the Gulf as my grandbaby heads down toward the birth canal, the Owl Economy and the Grandchildren Standard look wildly practical—and urgent.

But a renaissance, a rebirth occurs not just because there is a rising of images and archetypal symbols. A renaissance happens because the soul is breached, the psyche unlocked, and a flood of new questions are released as to who we are and what we contain. – Jean [...]]]> By Carolyn Raffensperger and Nancy Myers

But a renaissance, a rebirth occurs not just because there is a rising of images and archetypal symbols. A renaissance happens because the soul is breached, the psyche unlocked, and a flood of new questions are released as to who we are and what we contain. – Jean Houston

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. — Milton Friedman

Environmentalists have developed some amazing and useful alternatives to the policies that have gotten us into big trouble like the Gulf oil catastrophe. The old policies are those like privatization is the best and highest use of all property. Government by and for corporations. Fossil fuels are essential for the economy regardless of their pollution.

The new policies are the commons, public trust, and precaution.

In the weeks that followed the BP oil disaster, the public and the media are expressing outrage that BP acts as if it owns the ocean. BP refused an EPA order to use less toxic dispersants. It is keeping scientists and the public away from the site itself and refusing to make data public. The public has been vociferous: “BP does not own the ocean.”

The deep intuitive sense is that the ocean is a commons—we all share it. Herons, whales, seaweed and humans. We have a right with all of these other beings and humans to care for it, to share in its bounty. The commons are the foundation of our economy. Without a healthy ocean, or local prairie or forest, without clean air and water, without the web of life, all of our dollars are worthless.

The idea of the commons is an ancient one but has been lost in the private property free-for-all of the United States. There’s a good historical reason for the ascendancy of private property in the U.S. When we broke away from the British monarchy, owning land was the basis for citizenship, the right to participate in government. This is so deeply embedded in our cultural DNA that public ownership of land is often seen by the right wing as a Communist plot.

But throughout our history we’ve also set aside public places such as national parks and shorelines that are commons. The U.S. law of the commons has developed piecemeal and underground, for the most part. A year ago, several of us wrote a paper that put forward a comprehensive law of the commons. The law of the commons is one of those ideas lying around that Friedman says we need in time of crisis. The old idea that privatization leads to the highest and best use has failed.

The corollary to the commons is that government is the trustee (not the owner) of our shared wealth and must care for it on behalf of present and future generations.

The standard of care government must use to fulfill its responsibility as the trustee is the precautionary principle: “When an activity raises threats of harm, precautionary measures must be taken even if some cause and effect relationships have not been fully established scientifically.” This means our agencies must act on the best available information to prevent harm.

The BP oil hemorrhage has demonstrated that cleaning up messes is far more costly than preventing them in the first place. Calls for the precautionary principle by scientists like Jean-Michel Cousteau and others who love the ocean have never been stronger or clearer. We’ve done our homework and figured out how to implement the precautionary principle. It can be taken off the shelf and used now.

Canadian environmental leader Wayne Roberts calls the precautionary principle the “plug for the legal loophole that caused the gushing hole in the Gulf.” That loophole was the U.S. insistence, for the past 30 years, on the “risk management” and “cost benefit” approach to regulating iffy technologies of all kinds. He predicts Europe’s decade of experience with the precautionary principle is about to get a lot more respect. No more will Europeans be scorned as technological sissies.

Here is how the precautionary principle is working in Europe, is beginning to work in the US states and localities that have adopted it, and is ready to work on the national level.

1. It shifts the burden of proof and responsibility to the perpetrators of risk. Demonstrate the safety of your products and procedures before you impose them on the public. Demonstrate your ability to prevent, clean up, and pay for your own messes. If you can’t do that, you have no business doing business. The Safe Chemicals Act of 2010 now before Congress is an example of how that could work in one major area of the economy. We must apply that shift to energy and mining.

2. It makes us pay attention to the big picture. In today’s world we can’t afford to weigh the costs and benefits of each harm, each risky move, as if it were the only one. Rather, each environmental insult pushes fragile systems closer to the point of no return. The Gulf marshes have already been weakened by erosion, hurricanes, and development. They may not survive the oil spill. And we must look beyond the present disaster to the disasters waiting to happen as well as those quietly underway, like the Canadian oil sands devastation.

3. It makes us plan for the long term. President Obama approved a new round of off-coast drilling because we need that short-term oil fix for today’s bottom line. But short-term fixes can produce long-term disasters that destroy the livelihoods of people today as well as tomorrow. We can’t afford to wait to change the economic practices that produce false bottom lines and create enormous hidden costs and debt both today and in the future.

4. Precautionary policies are cost effective, even for industry, if they can prevent disasters too big to contain. Sanford Lewis proposes a number of strategies to integrate “the common sense of precaution” to corporate decision-making. By contrast Senator Lisa Murkowski’s attempt to protect the oil industry by limiting liability to $75 million shows how far backward politicians can bend to protect businesses from the consequences of their own actions. This kind of coddling doesn’t protect our economy; it weakens it.

Deepwater drilling is one of many high-risk enterprises we have turned loose on the world. We’ve seen what happens when they go wrong. Implementing the precautionary principle, on the other hand, is something like making the transition to renewable energy. It takes work and investment in the near term. But the risks are low and the potential rewards are high.

Last week (May 2-9, 2010), I was a member of the Defending Sacred Places Advocacy Delegation, a project of the Women’s Earth Alliance.  We met with Native American leaders in Nevada and Arizona seeking ways to use the law to protect sacred sites from mining and pollution.  Here is an update of my [...]]]> By Carolyn Raffensperger

Last week (May 2-9, 2010), I was a member of the Defending Sacred Places Advocacy Delegation, a project of the Women’s Earth Alliance.  We met with Native American leaders in Nevada and Arizona seeking ways to use the law to protect sacred sites from mining and pollution.  Here is an update of my blog, which was originally published on the WEA website.

***

What is sacred? What does the law recognize as sacred? These were the questions that haunted me on the third full day of the delegation’s trip to Nevada and Arizona to join with indigenous people to protect sacred sites from defilement and desecration.

Our first stop was at a uranium mine owned by Dennison Mines Corp.

The mine is one of the stand-by projects of Dennison.  Stand-by means the mine is on hold, with equipment in place awaiting the price of uranium to go up and the expansion of nuclear power. Dennison, according to its website, “enjoys a global portfolio of world-class exploration projects…” The problem is that the neighbors of the mine, in this case Navajo and Havasupai do not “enjoy” the exploration or the mining. The legacy of uranium mining in the Southwest is grievous. Cancer, contaminated land and water are the consequences of six decades of a nuclear weapons program and nuclear power. Indigenous people bear the brunt of the environmental problems associated with uranium mining.

This is personal for me. One of my dearest friends, an indigenous woman, grew up playing in the mine tailings near Tuba City AZ. While I was on this journey, she had surgery for her third cancer. She is in her 30s. The mining official we met with yesterday argued that the uranium miners’ high cancer rate was caused by their smoking rather than the radioactivity associated with the radon in the mines or the uranium itself.

The old argument that most cancers are a result of lifestyle “choices” is increasingly discredited by science.  Days after my friend’s surgery,  the President’s Cancer Panel, a distinguished group of scientists issued a new report on environmental causes of cancer. Radon is fingered as one of the culprit carcinogens.

Northern Arizona is full of places sacred to the Hopi, Navajo, Havasupai and other tribes that have called this place home for millennia. But it is also pock marked by uranium mines and old mine tailings. Over 10,000 new uranium mine claims were staked between 2005 and 2009.

U.S. law, particularly the antiquated General Mining Act of 1872 treats all mines and potential mines as part of the wild frontier, the cowboy west. There are few barriers to mines except some procedural hoops that might delay a mine from opening for a few months or years.

The tribes consider this land to be sacred. There are springs and mountains, canyons and buttes that hold the religion, the stories, and the histories of these people. It is the relationship of a community of humans to a place that makes that place sacred. Yet U.S. law only recognizes religion, which amounts to beliefs held by individuals. Indigenous spirituality is made up of the web of exquisitely-tended relationships that manifest and express beliefs.

We are only beginning to shape laws to reflect the sacred. The U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People includes this statement:

“Article 25: Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard.”

While not law in the United States, the Declaration sets the standard for how the law should treat the sacred places and relationships of indigenous people. The Declaration was not signed by the United States because it clashes with the U.S. private property regime. Private property trumps the sacred. Uranium mining trumps the rights of indigenous people to care for their springs and their holy sites.

The question of what is sacred sometimes only surfaces when we see what has been defiled–the rage we feel when we think a cancer might have been prevented, or an ocean might not have been polluted. How could we contaminate the very land from which we live? How can we contaminate the bodies of our children? How can we defile the places where we bury the dead? How can we destroy the places of great beauty and much history?

All of these are sacred. We know this in our hearts.