New Moon in Libra – “Chanticleer Saluting the Sun”

Political Chi Gung…We see the desirable as already imaginatively manifest, and crow about it…continue what we referenced a smidge last week…Please to place  on the Altar of Spiralling into Play – the Desirable…Our Electing the Earth Platform…

October 15, 2012
6pm PDT, 9pm EDT

Yo Team, on the Carolingian Birthday Electing the Earth Tour…
Fresno to Vallejo to the Debates to SF to Radio to Talks to Bioneers….
The debate on October 16th (around which I will be publicly cahooting at Open Secret in San Rafael) takes place on William O. Douglas birthday, an ancestor whom we invite…My Dad and he were born the same year, both colleagues of FDR, and died the same year. Seems fitting to invite in the old New Dealers, and especially Dougas, who gave trees legal standing….Because it’s true in the conventional political theatre, amazing that the central issue of humans returning to collaborative harmony with nature – has not been honored…So we (very large we)…shall increasingly do so, with ancestral cahooting guidance , and spiral forth sane reverent common sense into the meosphere.)

During that time, he also established the records for the most opinions written, the most dissents written, the most speeches given, and the most books authored by any member of the Supreme Court. None of his successors has surpassed these records.

Douglas and the environment

Douglas was a self-professed outdoorsman, so much so that according to The Thru-Hiker’s Companion, a guide published by the Appalachian Trail Club, Douglas hiked the entire 2,000-mile trail from Georgia to Maine.^[15] His love for the environment carried through to his judicial reasoning.

“Trees have standing”

In his dissenting opinion in the landmark environmental law case, Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972), Justice Douglas argued that “inanimate objects” should have standing to sue in court:

The critical question of “standing” would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage. Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. This suit would therefore be more properly labeled as Mineral King v. Morton.^[16]

He continued:

Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole—a creature of ecclesiastical law—is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases…. So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes—fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.^[16]

In the early 1970s, Douglas and his wife Cathleen were invited by Neil Compton and the Ozark Society to visit and canoe down part of the free-flowing Buffalo River in Arkansas, putting in at the low water bridge at Boxley. This experience endeared him to the river and the young organization’s idea of protecting it. As such Douglas was instrumental in having it preserved as a free-flowing river, left in its natural state.^[17] This decision was much to the chagrin of the area’s Corps of Army Engineers. The act that soon followed designated the Buffalo River as America’s first National River.^[18]

Environmentalism

Douglas’s review contributed to the success of Silent Spring, an important turning point for the environmental movement.

Besides his famous dissent in Morton, he also served on the Board of Directors of the Sierra Club from 1960 to 1962 and wrote prolifically on his love of the outdoors. He is credited with saving the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and inspiring the effort to establish the area as a national park; going as far as to challenge the editorial board of The Washington Post to go with him for a walk on the canal after it had published opinions supporting Congress’s plan to pave the canal into a road.^[19] His efforts convinced the editorial board to change its stance and helped save the park.^[19]

In 1962, Douglas wrote a glowing review of Rachel Carson‘s book Silent Spring, which was included in the widely read Book-of-the-Month Club edition. He later would sway the Court in the direction of preserving the Red River Gorge in eastern Kentucky when a proposal to build a dam and flood the gorge reached the Court. Douglas visited the area himself on November 18, 1967. The Red River Gorge’s Douglas Trail is named in his honor.

In 1969 he wrote Points of Rebellion and authored a piece for Evergreen magazine. Two years later, Justice Douglas helped launch the nation’s first law review dedicated solely to environmental issues by publishing a paper in Lewis & Clark Law School’s new law review, Environmental Law.

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LISTEN TO RECORDING:
Trickster Call 10-15-2012