Last Program of Moyers & Company
Nature’s Trust by Prof. Mary Christina Wood Tells Our Basic Rights to Protect the Natural Order
Last Article from Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company, January 1, 2015
The very agencies created to protect our environment have been hijacked by the polluting industries they were meant to regulate. It may just turn out that the judicial system, our children and their children will save us from ourselves.
The new legal framework for this crusade against global warming is called atmospheric trust litigation. It takes the fate of the Earth into the courts, arguing that the planet’s atmosphere – its air, water, land, plants and animals — are the responsibility of government, held in its trust to insure the survival of all generations to come. It’s the strategy being used by Bill’s recent guest, Kelsey Juliana, a co-plaintiff in a major lawsuit spearheaded by Our Children’s Trust, that could force the state of Oregon to take a more aggressive stance against the carbon emissions.
It’s the brainchild of Mary Christina Wood, a legal scholar who wrote the book, Nature’s Trust, tracing this public trust doctrine all the way back to ancient Rome.
Wood tells Bill: “If this nation relies on a stable climate system, and the very habitability of this nation and all of the liberties of young people and their survival interests are at stake, the courts need to force the agencies and the legislatures to simply do their job.”
See the program video here: http://vimeo.com/115286097
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Prof. Mary Wood releases ‘Nature’s Trust’ empowering citizens to protect ecological rights
Article from the Newsroom, Oregon Law, University of Oregon, October 23, 2013
Leading experts say book is ‘Silent Spring’ for the new millennium
Empowering citizens worldwide to protect their inalienable ecological rights. That is the goal of University of Oregon School of Law Professor Mary Wood‘s just-released book, “Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age.”
Wood writes that environmental law has failed us. Her work exposes the dysfunction of current environmental law and offers a transformative approach based on the public trust doctrine. The trust doctrine asserts public property rights to crucial resources. At its core, notes Wood, the doctrine compels government, as trustee, to protect natural inheritance such as air and water for all humanity.
Ultimately, Wood’s book teaches the reader how a trust principle can apply from the local to global level to protect the planet, offering a new framework for environmental law.
“Nature’s Trust” already has received numerous positive reviews and endorsements from some of the world’s leading environmental thinkers including James Gustave Speth, author of “America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy” and former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Speth says the impact of Wood’s book will be comparable to that of “Silent Spring.”
“What ‘Silent Spring’ did for our perception of the environment, ‘Nature’s Trust’ should do for our perception of environmental protection,” he noted.
Kathleen Dean Moore, author of “Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril,” said, “‘Nature’s Trust’ is the book we have been waiting for, a new paradigm that can correct the course of history.”
Wood is the Philip H. Knight Professor of Law and the faculty director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program at Oregon Law. She is an award-winning teacher who has taught for more than 20 years in the areas of environmental law, property law, federal Indian law and other subjects. Wood is the co-author of two casebooks, one on natural resources law and the other on the public trust doctrine. She is a frequent speaker on climate crisis and environmental issues.
As Wood elaborates in her book, captured agencies use their discretion to allow mounting environmental losses that harm communities — precisely the damage that the statutes were designed to prevent. “I wrote this book to empower average citizens to assert their ecological rights and hold government accountable, as trustee, of our public resources,” Wood explained.
See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net
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