Guardians of the land
The Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1963 published “The Quiet Crisis,” alerting Americans to environmental degradation on multiple fronts. Twenty-five years later, Stewart Udall updated his seminal work, with addition of Part Two, “The Next Generation.” This second section described ecological progress during the intervening decades, albeit with some rollback under the Reagan administration. I consider this work a classic not so much for its eloquence and originality, as for its addressing a serious problem in a readable, well-organized, compelling way. And I’m impressed that this country once had an Interior Secretary who not only cared about preserving federal lands for future generations, but was talented enough to write a book about it.
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was another government official whose concern about environmental degradation led him in 1972 to write The Three Hundred Year War: a chronicle of ecological disaster. Even after Congress’s passage of the Clean Air (1967) and Clean Water (1966) acts, Douglas found much to worry about, in his chapters on air, water, radiation, pesticides, garbage, noise, estuaries, mining, wildlife, forest and wilderness, transportation, and land use. Add to these on-going problems, the hole in the ozone layer and global warming, and there’s no dearth of issues for environmentalists to work on. But how are they to effect change? Douglas’s chapter on “Political Action,” is sobering, but not without hope. He counseled a shift in priorities from war abroad to righting the wrongs of the “300 year war” at home, with the judiciary playing a key role in upholding laws and checking abuses of power. Surfing the web, I see that Douglas’s writings, including his Supreme Court opinions, have been criticized for being hasty, dashed-off, draft-like. “The Three Hundred Year War” is not beautiful prose; but it is a passionate and informed argument about the fate of our national (and increasingly global) commons.