Educate
We all know something is not right but we just can’t quite put our finger on the why. The education part of the WACRN’s mission means taking people deeper into an understanding of the origins and mechanisms of the systemic obstacles we face to changing the way humans relate to and live with the natural world. Legal, cultural, even spiritual–we need to work with these realities and speak honestly about them in order to affect transformative change. Through efforts, resource access, and relationships the WACRN is able to provide a multitude of educational materials and learning opportunities.
Historical
In order to see where we are we have to more critically examine how we got here. That requires a re-thinking of U.S. history most of us learned in school – things like:
- The revolutionary sentiment was largely a wealthy landowner’s issue. Patrick Henry was a middle class lawyer who the wealthy elite engaged to whip up public sentiment in the name of lofty ideals of political liberty and individual freedom
- The origins of Second Continental Congress–that resulted in the Constitution as we know it–stemmed from George Washington’s frustration that he couldn’t transport goods efficiently across state lines from his massive inland land-holdings to the Eastern seaboard.
- Those meetings only included wealthy, white landowners and were held behind closed doors, protected by armed guards to keep protesters at bay while the former ‘revolutionaries’ worked tirelessly to recreate the very system of government from Britain that they had decried less than fifteen years before
- In the first 44 years following ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868, the US Supreme Court decided 28 cases that concerned the extent to which African Americans’ 14th Amendment rights had been violated, and 312 cases involving the ‘right’ of corporations to invoke the protection of the 14th Amendment (following the Southern Pacific railroad case decided in 1886). (Winkler, Adam. ‘Corporations Are People’ Is Built on an Incredible 19th-Century Lie. The Atlantic. March 5, 2018.)
- Although our society now accepts as a given that corporations enjoy the benefits of civil rights, just as people do, the fact that they do has never been approved by a state or federal legislature–it is a completely judicially-created legal ‘fact.’
Legal
We live subject to a legal system that literally makes it illegal for citizens to pass meaningful laws to protect their local environment. Wait a second you might be saying. How is that possible with so many environmental laws in place at the federal, state, and local level? The truth behind those laws is they largely function on the premise that polluting and degrading the environment is fine so long as it doesn’t happen in too great of quantities or too quickly. Our system – call it American Democracy – has been erected on a number of pillars that operate largely unseen:
The doctrine of preemption
Local law is subordinate to state law, and state law is subordinate to federal law. In some states, local governments literally have no political authority except to the extent granted that authority by the state government. This is why we see perverse results like a state Environmental Protection Agency suing town council members for enacting more stringent environmental protection laws.
Corporate Civil Rights
Once a corporation is granted the ‘right’ by a state to cut down a forest for timber, any local law that might prohibit that is considered an illegal ‘taking’ of the corporation’s property under the 5th and 14th amendments to the US Constitution. And we all know that a corporation’s ‘right’ to spend outlandish sums on political campaigns is protected under the 1st amendment thanks to the Citizens United decision. Armed with civil rights and deeper pocketbooks than almost any individual, corporations have an arsenal of legal power to push their agenda through the courts.
Nature is an object
Only humans are legal ‘subjects,’ and only legal subjects that are harmed by another actor have legal ‘standing’ to bring a claim in court for relief. That means harm done to an ecosystem goes unaddressed unless a human can show they themselves have been impacted–and then the measure of damages only accounts for harm to the human, not to the ecosystem.
Regulatory law
Most federal and state laws require ‘implementing regulations’ in order to be put into practice. Those regulations are created not by legislators but by administrators who define the scope of the conduct that will be regulated by the law and therefore the only issues to be discussed at regulatory hearings. This is where consideration of a law designed to protect air quality gets narrowed down to how many parts per million of pollutants are permissible, or where a law intended to protect a riparian environment gets necked down to how many degrees can the water level rise through contamination for industrial cooling. This is why we say that all existing environmental laws don’t actually protect Nature, they only regulate the rate at which Nature can be despoiled.
Cultural
Non-indigenous humans have forgotten how to live together in communities and how to live in a mutually-sustaining relationship with the natural world. At once the most ephemeral aspect of our mission and the most fundamental, WACRN and organizations like it seek to facilitate a re-learning of what ‘right relationship’ looks like among humans and between humans and the natural world and in a way that addresses the reality of where we are rather than merely appropriating other cultures’ traditions.
Community – what does it mean to be a community and to act in community? Rooted in place and rich in a sense of belonging, WACRN provides programming and resources for individuals and groups to develop a rich social fabric through which they can bring about change where they live and work.
Language – Unsustainable ways of living are baked into our very language. Even the term “wild” implies a distinction between the human and the ‘more-than-human’ world that doesn’t exist in the language and cosmology of indigenous peoples. Part of WACRN’s work is transforming the way we speak in order to reorient towards a sustainable relationship with the animism of the non-human world.
