Nature's Trust Quotes

“old Indian proverb, “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children,”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Edmund Burke wrote, “Society is indeed a contract … a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“That government officials now do so regularly demonstrates how far modern bureaucracy has strayed from its purpose – and how far citizens have wandered from their vigil over democracy. As Brown observes, while the trust remains a vibrant part of the law and political tradition in the United States, it has “disappeared from the political arena.” Citizens of the United States and other Western democracies now face a dangerous transference of power from the people to corporations, and considerable political introspection will prove necessary to set democracy back on track. The progression of the body politic toward an undaunted democratic destiny finds a bright beacon in the public trust principle.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Climate thinkers in the United States dared to hope that the legal system would work as intended. Their anticipation seemed not entirely far-fetched. The EPA stood clearly charged by the highest court in the land to make a finding as to whether carbon dioxide pollution endangered public health and welfare. Legally, the White House could not make the determination. It must be a scientific, not political, finding under the clear terms of the statute and in accordance with the Massachusetts v. EPA ruling. The science certainly seemed to force an endangerment determination. That is, if the agency acted.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“The congressional investigation found that Cooney and others at CEQ made 181 edits to a strategic plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program with the effect of “exaggerating or emphasizing scientific uncertainties related to global warming.” They made 113 more edits that “deemphasized or diminished the importance of the human role in global warming.” As Dickenson reports, after the 2002 fiasco with EPA’s adverse report, “Cooney wielded a heavier pen when editing official reports on global warming. Not content obscuring science with uncertainty, he began to rewrite the science itself.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Averting climate disaster presents a matter of carbon math, not carbon politics.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“All humankind shares the Earth Endowment, but legal institutions have never devised a rational way to conserve natural bounty for the collective advancement and security of humanity. Global ecological problems arise within an international context that presumes complete national autonomy within borders. This nation-state model may operate well for many social and economic concerns, but it fails to adequately order ecological rights.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Unfortunately, most courts have not kept pace with advanced understanding of ecology.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“As Brown notes, Locke’s Second Treatise elaborates the circumstances justifying citizens to “legitimately rebel because the executive or legislator has violated the terms of the trust.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, a philosophical manifesto that forged many democratic ideals, declared a core principle that fiduciary obligation formed an inherent constraint on governmental power – and that the people shall serve in constant judgment of their government’s performance.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Though separated by more than two centuries, our answer should be that of the American colonists after the Revolution…. The institutions of government, the officers and agencies of government, exist for the people, to serve the interests of the people, and, as such, are accountable to the people….”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Weaving together two civic strands of power and obligation, the trust embodies: (1) the people’s delegation of authority to their government to control and manage resources; and (2) the people’s assertion, through a fiduciary obligation, of limits on that authority to ensure that it functions to benefit the public rather than special interests (who may have greater sway over the legislative process).”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Without a doubt, widespread agency disregard of NEPA traces to the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to find any substantive environmental mandate in the statute despite Congress’s forceful language. In Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Justice Rehnquist declared: “NEPA does set forth significant substantive goals for the Nation, but its mandate to the agencies is essentially procedural.” In other words, agencies may destroy the environment as long as they follow the correct procedures in doing so. Nearly all scholars agree that Rehnquist’s dismissive opinion demoted NEPA to a paperwork chore.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Activists compromise. Nature does not.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“The rider’s aim was no less than to shut down the operations of one specific federal official.” Another defunded the Fish Passage Center (FPC), the scientific agency that provides fish population data used in environmental lawsuits challenging the Columbia River hydropower system. Without funding for the FPC, the flow of data would dry up; without the data, the lawsuits would lose their key factual thrust against the hydropower industry. Idaho’s former senator Larry Craig crafted the rider. A longtime recipient of campaign contributions from the electric utility industry, Craig drew the title of “legislator of the year” by the National Hydropower Association in 2002.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Expansion of executive power erodes the most fundamental underpinnings of democracy,”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“For the most part, however, the public remains oblivious to the political manipulation and deception that now serves as standard practice in environmental”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“amounts to the privatization of truth.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“that such conflicts tempt the attorney to push one client’s interest under the rug to benefit the other client’s interest.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“In environmental litigation arising over fish habitat requirements in the Klamath Basin, for example, four different federal agencies take positions on water policies – some pushing for water to remain in the river, others advocating for drawing water out of the river for farmers. Serving as the government’s mouthpiece in court, the DOJ chooses which agency position to represent and, once the choice is made, effectively muzzles the others. Strict professional ethical standards generally prohibit attorneys from representing clients with conflicting interests, exactly for the reason”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“As Chapter 3 explained, the broad success of any pollution or natural resource program rests on its enforcement.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“These agencies sometimes act as henchmen for the White House, thwarting regulatory or enforcement initiatives that could upset corporate allies of the president or his party.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“A well-known example lies in the attempt of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (through its Office of Public Affairs) to silence Dr. Jim Hansen, the agency’s chief climate scientist. According to NASA’s inspector general, the office undertook “unilateral actions in editing or downgrading press releases or denying media access on a known controversial topic.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“20 percent of scientists in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) reported being directed to “inappropriately exclude or alter technical information” from scientific documents. In a survey of EPA scientists, 18 percent said they had experienced frequent or occasional edits during review of documents to “change the meaning of scientific findings.” One high-profile example investigated by the EPA’s Office of Inspector General involved the regulation of mercury emissions from coal-fired plants. In the process of preparing a proposed rule, EPA senior management instructed staffers to manipulate technical and scientific analysis in order to keep costs down for the electric utility industry.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Most serious of all, as Chapter 1 explains, Obama waffled on carbon dioxide regulation even as the window of opportunity to prevent climate catastrophe was fast closing.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“But environmental advocates have never confronted the problem in a transformative way. Why? Because they hold out hope that, once political winds shift, discretion will work in their favor. History mocks such reasoning time and time again.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Make no mistake – this practice sullies the Clean Water Act, enacted to protect such waterways from pollution. As Chapter 2 explained, Congress specifically established a national policy to eliminate all pollution into the nation’s navigable waters by 1985. The Senate Report stated that “[t]he use of any river, lake, stream or ocean as a waste treatment system is unacceptable.” Subject to EPA’s section 402 jurisdiction, the Coeur Alaska mine could not discharge into the lake.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“In large part, the environmental movement of the 1970s substituted executive-branch bureaucracy for judicial inquiry.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“When armed with statutory power to legalize pollution and resource destruction, this captured bureaucracy becomes a deadly force against Nature and the public itself.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“The most elaborate environmental law system of the world cannot protect natural assets as long as there exists an alliance between industries and regulatory agencies. The next chapters show how that alliance plays out. 2 Modern Environmental Law: The Great Legal Experiment In the middle of the night on August 30, 2004, a mining bulldozer, working in the dark, dislodged a huge rock.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age