Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the known things go. A deer haunted forest, crowded with pines and hemlocks, the carpet of needles beneath your feet, grouse in the underbrush. Welcome to the woods. Outside of the Last Archive. I'm Jill Lapour. This episode, we're celebrating an anniversary, sort of the anniversary of a dream, an alternate history. We're imagining what the world might be like if fifty years ago, in nineteen seventy two, Americans had ratified an environmental rights Amendment, an amendment to the US Constitution granting not only protection but representation to the natural world. This did not happen, But this episode, I want to wonder about what the world would be like if it had happened. I want to think about the road not taken. I want to rekindle a spirit of imagination about what could still happen. To start, let's go back to where by my reckoning. The American environmental movement began in a seaside cabin on an island in Maine in nineteen sixty two, when Rachel Carson issued a warning about pesticides and petroleum companies so step through a screen door into Rachel Carson's cabin in Maine, on the edge of the sea. Now, to these people, apparently the vald of nature was something that was repealed or as soon as man came on the scene, Well, you might just as well assume that you could repeal the law of gravity. Rachel person had been writing for a long time by this point about the natural world, especially about the ocean. She loved mucking about in the shoreline, where she studied the tiniest creatures eddying in tide pools. She was fascinated by their interdependence. The balance of nature is built of a series of interrelationships between living things and between living things and their environment. In nineteen sixty three, a reporter from CBS News had driven up to her remote cabin It's on a little spit of an island, to ask her some questions. Carson had just published Silence Spring, a lyrical and terrifying account of what pesticides were doing to the natural world. Pesticides kill insects, sure, but they also kill birds that eat insects and the animals that eat the birds. You can't just kill one thing, Carson demonstrated, You put out a poison. It poisons everything because everything is connected to everything else. They come one day, she warned, an entirely silent spring. No crickets chirp, no frogs peep, no bird song. The pesticide industry waged a campaign to try to portray Carson as a silly old lady. It didn't work. We did a whole episode about Carson in season one. It's called for the Birds Anyway. In nineteen sixty two, Sound Spring became a bestseller, and Carson was hailed as a visionary. Her book fundamentally changed how people thought about the environment. President Kennedy read it, and Carson testified before the Senate. Carson died less than two years later, but she'd raised in the public mind a new and urgent concern about all kinds of environmental problems. Then nineteen sixty nine, NASA sent men to the Moon, and their photographs showed the Earth, the whole Earth, small and fragile, something to protect, a pale blue dot, as if made of glass, a blue marble. In September nineteen sixty nine, two months after men from the Earth landed on the Moon, Moonday, a Maverick, Wisconsin senator named gay Lord Nelson proposed a celebration, a national holiday. He called it Earth Day. The environment is all of America and its problems. It's the raps in the ghetto, It's a hungry child and a land of affluence. Nelson modeled Earth Day after anti war teachings. With all that urgency, life and death at stake, the future of humanity itself. I don't think there's any other issue, viewed in its broadest stands, which is his critical to mankind as the issue of the quality of the environment in which we live. Gaylord Nelson had grown up in Wisconsin. When he was fourteen, he'd started a campaign the plant trees in his hometown, clear Lake. As governor of Wisconsin, he'd made environmental protection his top priority. He taxed tobacco and used the money to buy land for public park. In the Senate, he dedicated himself to getting the environment on the national political agenda. In his first year, he co sponsored the Clean Water Act. He was also the first person to propose an environmental rights amendment. In a speech in the Senate on January nineteenth, nineteen seventy, Nelson proposed a constitutional amendment that read, every person has the inalienable right to a decent environment. People propose amendments all the time that never go anywhere, but still it planted a seed. I've been thinking a lot lately about amending the Constitution and why it's so hard to do, and when it got so hard to do. In the nineteen seventies, it looked like another amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment banning discrimination on the basis of sex, would surely be ratified. In the end, it wasn't. But in nineteen seventy when gay Lord Nelson proposed an environmental rights amendment, it just didn't seem that crazy. In nineteen seventy one, the twenty six the men it was ratified. It lowered the voting age to eighteen. In the nineteen seventies, In other words, you could still ratify amendments to the Constitution. On January twenty second, three days after Gaylord Nelson proposed his environment a rights amendment, Richard Nixon, the President, through his support behind this idea in his State of the Union address, The great question of the seventies is shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our heir, to our land, and to our wife. Nixon, in other words, seem to have embraced Rachel Carson's agenda restoring nature to its natural state as a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. The scale of the crisis was obvious to everyone. By nineteen seventy, States had become a very trashy looking place. It was embarrassing pollution, small glitter everywhere. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland had caught fire only months before, and not for the first time. The water was so entirely polluted with oil slick debris that when sparks from a passing train flicked over the river, it went up in flames, flames as high as a five story building. Public outrage had been so intense that Nixon had signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, which helped establish the Environmental Protection Agency. Through our years of past carelessness, we incurred a debt to nature. And now that debt is being called. The program I shall proposed to Congress will be the most comprehensive and costly program In this view. Again, America's history. I think about it this way, post War America, people are finally fed up with the ravages of the Industrial Revolution, the pollution, the filthy factories, the dead fish in the rivers, the dying oceans, the smog. To stop all that, you've got to pass some laws. One way to drum up support invent a national holiday. Call it Earth Day, Tell people about it, get them out on the streets, run ads, and stir up news coverage on television across the country. Do you feel as though all this is a reaction to publicity that's been blasted across the nation. It's going to be a real, real, big political move, probably bigger than any other political move we've ever seen this country. Birthday wasn't a federal holiday. We're like a rally day, but also more than rally day. Governors agreed to on Earth Day, so did a lot of musicians, poets, politicians. In Washington, the House and Senator journed for the day. Practically every Senator and congressman was off to make speeches on the year's most popular and least risky election issial April twenty, nineteen seventy, that first Earth Day took place all over the country, in cities and towns, at state capitals, a polluted highways. People picked up trash on river banks from the Kalamazoo to the Mississippi. Schools canceled classes, kindergarteners did crafts, college students marched in the streets, and middle schoolers went on field trips wearing baseball caps and muck boots, carrying binoculars as they trudged the woods to a lake whose shoreline was covered with trash. This is pollution, and it's poor hearby man, all right, So this isn't anything that Nature staff was that when you look at nature, you're going to find it a pretty peaceful thing. Twenty eight poisoned girls from Councils Loves AIOH. We're out early this Earthday morning. They are members of Missus Willard Hopper's sixth grade science class. Right full of answers. Another triumph of hope over experience. And pretty much everywhere that first Earth Day, people sang out. In Boston, protesters held a die in at Logan Airport to call attention to the pollution caused by airplanes. They pretended to die there. There were teachings and cleanups. Protesters wore surgical masks to call attention to air pollution. Parts of New York City banned cars for the day. Protesters in Chicago called for the elimination of the internal combustion engine, and in Washington, civil rights leader James Farmer tied the fledgling environmental movement to racial justice. The garbage, the trash, the carbon monoxide, the junk. Who suffers most from it if it is not the poor? And so the poor, especially the ghatois poor, the black and the brown and the red stand to benefit first from any successes in cleaning up the environment. In Albuquerque, in the Bareless Neighborhood, the leaders of a Chicano rally made the same argument. We're going to make people understand, but the kind of thing has come from our pollution, water pollution are the same kind of things that cause racism, to cause poverty, and cause hunger in this country. So we're all going to be marching to day. Okay. In Philadelphia, at the Salem Zion United Church of Christ, middle aged congregants and Sunday suits and bonnets joined their young pastor in a special Earth Day prayer. We have helped to fill up your air pollute your streams and clutter your earth with crash and gadgets. Now our high style heavy with sorrow for what we have done, but not before our sinuses and lungs warned us a great danger. Okay, nice idea, but I confess the prayer doesn't entirely work for me. Still, it's a measure of the intensity of all of this. And out of all those meetings and marches and clean ups and conversation after conversation came a demand for something more power to the earth. But what would that mean? Earth Day was the biggest protest in human history. Listening to the tape, you can feel this oceanic swell, this common knowledge that the earth is in trouble, the sense that people will make sacrifices to save it. It sounds as though things might actually change. But listening now, who know as well as I do that things didn't change nearly as much as they needed to. I don't want to tell that story again, though, I want instead to imagine what if that moment really had changed everything? How could it have the answer? After this break? The idea that everything could have turned out differently in the nineteen seventies is not crazy. Remember that in nineteen seventy at the very same time that Wisconsin Senator gay Lord Nelson had come up with the idea for Earth Day, he come up with the idea of an amendment to the US Constitution guaranteeing people the right to a decent environment. While he was working on that, some states started trying to guarantee the same thing. The first to succeed in nineteen seventy one was Pennsylvania. The state ratified its own environmental rights amendment by popular referendum by a margin of four to one. So people who wanted to change the federal Constitution to save the planet, we're getting pretty excited. It all seemed so promising, so promising that environmental advoca groups pressed the case. They came up with another way, a fascinating way to think about how to grant power to the earth. That idea spread it up. In California, the Walt Disney Company was about to build a ski resort in Mineral King Valley. The Sierra Club sued to stop the plan, but the court said it lacked standing. The Sierra Club challenged the permit permitting this to go on, and case went up to the Ninth Circuit and the far Service said, look, you the Sierra Club don't have standing. Maybe this is a wrong to issue the permit, but you're not injured. You as a club are not injured. That's USC law professor Christopher Stone from an old interview at the time, he followed the case very closely. When I saw that case, I thought, this isn't a way sort of silly. This is an important decision, I said, whether to develop the Mineral King Valley in this way. I'm not sure how it should come out, but at least it should be heard. And if the problem of its being heard is that this club was not suffered no injury, why not just saying, look, the injury is suffered by a Mineral King Valley. The injury is suffered by the valley. Stone decided to write a law review article. It's called should Trees Have Standing? Stone starts off talking about the Sierra Club versus Mineral King Valley case, but like most big legal arguments, Stones article made a very general claim, a legal innovation. He argued that trees and any other part of the natural world should have standing in courts of law as persons. After all, a corporation can be a person, so can a ship. So can your dog. If you leave your dog, your estate and your will, why not trees and valleys and rivers and streams. Stone didn't want humans to protect the environment. He wanted the environment itself to bear rights. He knew this might strike some people as a nutty idea, but he also felt the time had come for big, bold ideas because of how bad he thought things would be in fifty years time. There's a part of his article where he writes about that, and I find it uncanny, having been written in nineteen seventy two. He wrote, scientists have been warning of the crisis the Earth and all humans on its face. If we do not change our ways radically, the Earth's very atmosphere is threatened with frightening possibilities. Absorption of sunlight, upon which the entire life cycle depends may be diminished. The oceans may warm, increasing the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, melting the polar ice cap and destroying our great coastal cities. Stone rushed a copy of his article to the Supreme Court, which was slated to decide the Sierra Club case, to decide, to begin with, whether the club had standing to try to block Walt Disney Company from chopping down a forest. Now sort of by one of those weird coincidences in the world. Write it about that time. Early in nineteen seventy two, Doctor Seus's book The Lorax was broadcast on television. You know, the cartoon about a creature who lives in the woods is trying to stop a lumber company from raising the forest. I speaking for the trees. Let him grow, Let him grow. But nobody listens too much, don't you know, No, they don't listen too much. Weeks after The Lorax was broadcast on TV, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of Sierra Club versus Mineral King Valley, issuing a ruling in favor of the Walt Disney Company. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a descent that if a ship can be a person under the law, so it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beeches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland or even air. In a footnote, he cited stones article should trees have standing? But Justice Douglas said, but why not just essentially fall a stone's physician and let the mineral king be the plaintiff lest should be called mineral king against partner of interior. People like the idea that we should be speaking for nature, that nature should have its own voice. People did like that idea. So imagine what if Douglas's opinion had been not the dissenting opinion of the Supreme Court, but the majority opinion of the Supreme Court. What might have happened next? Imagine that with this incredibly huge legal victory, environmentalists had decided to really fight for an environmental rights amendment, not the one gay Lord Nelson had proposed in nineteen seventy. Imagine they'd propose something much much bolder. I mean, imagine, really imagine. Imagine that this crazy, bold constitutional amendment had gotten ratified in nineteen seventy two. What if today, in twenty twenty two, we were marking the fiftieth anniversary of that environmental rights amendment. To imagine that, I've got to take you to a place I've never taken anyone before, to the last archives fiction annex. Imagine that in nineteen seventy one, Christopher Stone and his students at USC Law School had drafted a new constitutional amendment. Found a way for the law to listen to the trees. Article one, All legislative powers shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate, a House of Representatives, and a Chamber of Nature. The Chamber of Nature better known as the tree branch. Imagine this thing was ratified by a majority of states, and to help spread the news, Schoolhouse Rock made a song about it so the kids would know, Treehouse Rock. The Chamber of Nature shall be composed of members has chosen every fourth year by the people of several states. Representation in the Chamber shall be abortion among the several states according to the number of trees in the state relative to the number of trees in state prison at the time of the state entered the Union. Catch you right, But the idea that a portion ofment in Congress should be done by counting people that had been a new idea in seventeen eighty seven when the Constitution was written. There'd been other ideas at the time. They could have calculated representation by square miles or by taxable income. Why not trees? Imagine the people making this argument were very smart. They argued it very well. They brought out the best evidence. Rallies were held today in all the countries. National parks activists, citing recent reports by the US Forestry Department, explained the ability of trees to counter and even reverse them the line effects of pollution. This amendment would have meant that not only did nature have standing in courts the way the Sierra case would have ruled, but that nature, at least by proxy, had a voice in government that if a state was going to lose vegetation, it would lose votes. In Washington, the annual County of the Trees has begun. This new forest census is to take place every July. It follows this springs frenzy. At some eight million trees were planted in April alone. The public awaits the results of this first census with bated breath, as states by for representation in the new so called tree Branch. A chamber of Nature would have made protecting the environment not something subject to the competing interests of different people, but instead subject to the interests of nature itself. Interesting, right now, How in our imaginary world could such a thing come about? That's the easy part to imagine. First, Nixon, the environmental president, gets behind it. I can almost hear him offering his endorsement. By our decision, we will demonstrate the kind of people we are and the kind of country we will be kind. That's why I've charted the course I have laid out tonight. Admittedly, the debating Congress would have been crazy, the timber trade against it builders, developers, the construction industry, no way, but in favor a lot of ordinary people and business interests that wanted to stay on the right side of the rising environmental movement. The whole of DC would have been one giant environmental rally and counter rally for weeks, and then it could have all happened so quickly twenty seven the Environmental Rights Amendment might have passed Congress and gone to the states. And imagine this. Imagine that the last state needed ratified the amendment in nineteen seventy two. Imagine that the federal government had become answerable to nature a half century ago. This week, mining companies are lobbying the Chamber of Nature seeking exemption from bands on fracking. But the tree branch so far appears to be holding firm. Okay, I'm locking up the annex again because this, all of this, none of it happened. What happened instead? After the break, there is no environmental rights Amendment to the US Constitution. We are not today in twenty twenty two, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its ratification. It was never ratified. It was never even written. A lot of other things, though, did happen in the early nineteen seventies, with Richard Nixon's full support the EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act. Still, the environmental movement never really trusted Nixon. Instead, it spurned him. As Dan Rather reported several weeks ago, the White House invited the Nice Stool organizers a birthday to drop by for a chat. They refused. On that first Earth Day in nineteen seventy, Nixon and his wife Pat planted a tree in the White House lawn and that's it. Pretty soon Nixon was embroiled in the Watergate scandal. The leaders of the environmental movement white middle class college students and young people, or pretty squarely anti Nixon for all kinds of reasons, and they didn't ever really seek his support, so it's hard to know how much he might have given. In the end, the establishment business leaders, the silent majority oppose the environmental movement. If you look at TV footage on Earth Day or listen to it, it looked and sounded pretty much like woodstock. And as for what civil rights activists thought about it all merely Evers put it this way. I was asked by someone, why is it that you think there are not too many black people participating in Earth Week? In Earth Day, they're interested about the health of themselves and their children when they are living in rat infested homes, about the garbage that's piled up. CBS News spoke to civil rights leader Herman Rice. He said, basically, we have bigger problems. See, we still have hungry children to feed, and we still will have houses to try to build. And I think we're taking the emphasis off the beat up buildings and the polluted streams that they're talking about. We've never seen anyway but trout. I don't know if they're dying. We've never seen that. I know, the rats of bike acue. Earth Day, for all of its successes and its huge scale, it's still had real limits. It's burned the establishment. It was too white. And then in nineteen seventy three, the gas crisis began, not just rising prices but in actual shortage due to US foreign policy in the Middle East and an embargo by OPEC, a consortium of oil producing nations in the Persian Gulf. Here's a clip from a special NBC News did about the crisis. There's almost unanimous agreement among the experts that the crisis is real, that it's been creeping up on us for about one hundred years now, and that it's getting worse each day as we continue to use up our precious supplies of oil, coal, and gas. And by the nineteen eighties, the fossil fuel industry was already organizing itself around an extraordinary project, undermining the science and promoting oil and oil companies as good for the environment. Climate change, pollution not real, they said, or at least not relevant. Exon BP and DuPont great for the environment. Recently, DuPont announced that its energy unit, Conico, would and hear the use of new doubleholed oil tankers in order to see if guard the environment. And the response has been foodfully blamingly positive, better things for better living. And as for what happened after that, you probably know what happened next. Rising temperatures, the increasing severity of storms, the forest fires. Why even bother thinking about whether it could have gone another way? No one proposed tree branch. That is my own cockamamie idea. But why is it a cochomamy idea? What if it could have worked? What would have happened if we'd had a third branch of the legislature in which representation was proportionate not to people but to trees. States would have had a huge incentive not to cut down forests, certainly not to cut them down without planting new ones. Urban forestry would have grown. Cities would have planted more trees. Suburbs would have provided incentives to homeowners to plant groves instead of lawns. More carbon would have been sequestered. Okay, and obviously that is oversimplifying. A lot of other messy stuff would have happened too. But I've been thinking this last archive season of Solutions about the US Constitution and its brittleness. Given the polarization of American politics since the nineteen seventies, it is now effectively impossible to amend the Constitution. But what if it weren't. Could what I have imagined really have happened in the nineteen seventies. I decided to ask world renowned environmental activists Bill mckibbon, we talked about that first Earth Day in which one in ten Americans took part the watershed of the environmental movement, probably the biggest protest in the history of the country. And it wins most of the things that it's asking for right away. You know, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the air starts to get cleaner quickly, and all of a sudden you can swim in lakes and streams that were catching on fire, you know, a few years before, and again it's Nixon's White House. Nixon is signing all these bills, and he says the seventies are going to be the environmental secade. And this was proofed by the way of the power of that movement because Nixon literally had not an environmental bonus. We know from listening to the tapes now that he thought they were all smelly hippies. But he had no choice. I mean, for four or five years, if you put the word environment in the title of a bill, it passed. And these were huge, you know, big things. They're still those, I mean, the only legislation had ever really passed about this stuff and the stuff that we still rely on when we try to fight nplians and stuff. All passed in nineteen seventy three and was signed by Richard Nixon. And that was true until a few months after I talked to mckibbon, Biden signed the first major climate legislation. It did a lot, it did nowhere near enough. Mckibbon says, in the nineteen seventies, Earth Day was in a way a victim of its own success. Had won the easy things, and then it wasn't able to win the hard ones. Environmentalism stopped being very early on a mass movement because it was so successful after Earthday nineteen seventy or within a couple of years. Everybody had left the streets because they were winning every bill they put forward in Congress, every court decision, whatever, and which was great. It was working until it wasn't, and the other side fought back very hard. So the environmental movement moves off the streets and into big institutions, and it's just not prepared either for the strength of the opposition or for the magnitude of the problem. And the problem is that the things that were addressing are the easy things. It turns out they're the problems when something goes a little wrong, like you don't have the right filter on your smoke stack or your car or whatever. And you can fix them by putting a catalytic converter in or a scrubber in your smoke stack. And yeah, it costs a little money, but it's not the end of the world. And once you do that, you've made extraordinary progress. In fact, the pollution that you can see with your eyes begins to disappear. So, having solved this one set of things, but without making fundamental shifts in how we ran the world, we were setting ourselves up for much, much deeper trouble. We didn't know about climate change yet, but we were beginning to sense that it was coming. More to the point, it was clear that relying on oil had all kinds of pitfalls. Kibbin had a different counterfactual from my whole tree branch thing, another near miss, maybe nearly as consequential as my counterfactual. His counterfactual was what if Jimmy Carter had succeeded in steering the country towards solar power and away from oil. If we had turned away from it in the nineteen seventies done what Carter wanted to do and made this all out commitment to solar power. Well, we would have not solved, but addressed in a fundamental way what now has become the single existential challenge on planet Earth. So tell me a little bit about what Carter was and what happened to Carter's proposals. So his main message about how we're going to combat this problem is a conservation and there's you know there he puts on the sweater and gives the talk from the White House with the temperature thermostat turned down. And the other thing he's doing is saying, we have to figure out ways to power ourselves that aren't reliant on fossil fuel opeque the rest of the world today and directly harnessing the power of the sun. We are taking the energy that God gave us and using it to replace our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. And yet that didn't happen. Carter productive solar panels, made that plan, and then Reagan defeated him in nineteen eighty and then Regan took down those solar panels and scrapped that plan. Carter put on a sweater, Reagan said, turn up the thermostat. This is America. So this is one of these rare like counterfactual history things where it's pretty easy to play out what would happen if you'd actually done it, you know, if we'd done that, if we'd made a serious governmental commitment to doing this, There's there was no physical or technological obstacle that would have kept us from developing cheap solar energy in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties instead of in the twenty tenths, which is when we finally did. You know, it would have been the greatest of gifts to the whole world to have done this thirty years earlier. Well, we would have been well on the way to knowing what to do and how to deal with it. But of course we didn't do that. And just as I really can't say what establishing a chamber of Nature would have meant, mckimn can't be sure how far solar might have gone if Carter had won re election in nineteen eighty and stayed the course on solar power. It's still good to dream, though, I told mckimn about our counterfactual the lorex, the tree branch the whole nine yards. I wanted to see what he thought about it. It's not a completely fanciful counter factual, the idea that things might have broken very differently in the nineteen seventies, and it may have been the last chance for things to really break differently. Admittedly, the Chamber of Nature is wacky calculating political representation by counting trees, but as mckibbon pointed out, so is measuring the health of a country with its GDP. It's gross domestic product. I mean, governments count stuff. That's they're going to count something. And if they were counting number of trees or number of eagles or whatever it is, it would have led to a whole different set of outcomes. Probably, But the reason is because it would have shifted our sense of what was important. Would it have worked the tree branch political power based on trees? I expected out once using Forest Service reports to calculate which dates would have benefit it at the start, and how different states could have benefited from the incentive to plant more trees save more forests. What I came up with is that I think it might have thwarted polarization because it's not the usual Red State, Blue State divide. The season of the last Archive is about fixes. Fixing the constitution is not really one of them. What's the problem we're trying to fix here? It's not a scarcity of information, a lack of knowledge, the absence of proof. The evidence for climate change has been everywhere for decades now. Every year the evidence has grown stronger, and slowly, slowly, so did the environmental movement. There is no planet by to have a lovable future. So what are the climate change denihilists are? By now dead and dying? Which should have been common knowledge in nineteen seventy two is a half century later, undeniable, Dear representatives of the media. I've seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like these. In twenty twenty two, a member of the IPCC, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reported that any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future. Antonio Guteresh, head of the IPCC, underscored the point today's IPCC report is a necklace of human suffering and the damning indictment of failed climate leadership. With fact upon fact, these reports reveals all people on the planet are getting clobered by climate change. These abdication of leadership is criminal. I wanted Season three to be upbeat, cheerful, good ideas solutions. This abdication of leadership is criminal. But I do still think if a window is now closing, there's much to be learned by looking back through the clouded light of other windows. I know people everywhere are anxious and angry. I am too. Now is the time to turn rage into action. Every fraction of their degree matters, every voice can make a difference, and every second counts. Twenty twenty two was a year for real, genuine celebration, the first meaningful climate legislation in the United States, and more than a generation. It's gone a long way, but it hasn't gone far enough. I don't want my grandchildren to look back at twenty twenty two the way I look back at nineteen seventy two and say, oh my god, they were so close. They did so much, They were so close to doing what needed to be done. If only they'd had a little bit more imagination. I don't want to have been close. Close is not enough. The last archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, Ben Natt of Hafrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editors are Julia Barton and Sophie Crane, and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our research assistant is Mia Hazra. Our full proof player is Robert Ricotta. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star Jennette Foundation. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content like The Last Archivist, a limited series just for subscribers, and add free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jill Lapor

Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the known things go. A deer haunted forest, crowded with pines and hemlocks, the carpet of needles beneath your feet, grouse in the underbrush. Welcome to the woods. Outside of the Last Archive. I'm Jill Lapour. This episode, we're celebrating an anniversary, sort of the anniversary of a dream, an alternate history. We're imagining what the world might be like if fifty years ago, in nineteen seventy two, Americans had ratified an environmental rights Amendment, an amendment to the US Constitution granting not only protection but representation to the natural world. This did not happen, But this episode, I want to wonder about what the world would be like if it had happened. I want to think about the road not taken. I want to rekindle a spirit of imagination about what could still happen. To start, let's go back to where by my reckoning. The American environmental movement began in a seaside cabin on an island in Maine in nineteen sixty two, when Rachel Carson issued a warning about pesticides and petroleum companies so step through a screen door into Rachel Carson's cabin in Maine, on the edge of the sea. Now, to these people, apparently the vald of nature was something that was repealed or as soon as man came on the scene, Well, you might just as well assume that you could repeal the law of gravity. Rachel person had been writing for a long time by this point about the natural world, especially about the ocean. She loved mucking about in the shoreline, where she studied the tiniest creatures eddying in tide pools. She was fascinated by their interdependence. The balance of nature is built of a series of interrelationships between living things and between living things and their environment. In nineteen sixty three, a reporter from CBS News had driven up to her remote cabin It's on a little spit of an island, to ask her some questions. Carson had just published Silence Spring, a lyrical and terrifying account of what pesticides were doing to the natural world. Pesticides kill insects, sure, but they also kill birds that eat insects and the animals that eat the birds. You can't just kill one thing, Carson demonstrated, You put out a poison. It poisons everything because everything is connected to everything else. They come one day, she warned, an entirely silent spring. No crickets chirp, no frogs peep, no bird song. The pesticide industry waged a campaign to try to portray Carson as a silly old lady. It didn't work. We did a whole episode about Carson in season one. It's called for the Birds Anyway. In nineteen sixty two, Sound Spring became a bestseller, and Carson was hailed as a visionary. Her book fundamentally changed how people thought about the environment. President Kennedy read it, and Carson testified before the Senate. Carson died less than two years later, but she'd raised in the public mind a new and urgent concern about all kinds of environmental problems. Then nineteen sixty nine, NASA sent men to the Moon, and their photographs showed the Earth, the whole Earth, small and fragile, something to protect, a pale blue dot, as if made of glass, a blue marble. In September nineteen sixty nine, two months after men from the Earth landed on the Moon, Moonday, a Maverick, Wisconsin senator named gay Lord Nelson proposed a celebration, a national holiday. He called it Earth Day. The environment is all of America and its problems. It's the raps in the ghetto, It's a hungry child and a land of affluence. Nelson modeled Earth Day after anti war teachings. With all that urgency, life and death at stake, the future of humanity itself. I don't think there's any other issue, viewed in its broadest stands, which is his critical to mankind as the issue of the quality of the environment in which we live. Gaylord Nelson had grown up in Wisconsin. When he was fourteen, he'd started a campaign the plant trees in his hometown, clear Lake. As governor of Wisconsin, he'd made environmental protection his top priority. He taxed tobacco and used the money to buy land for public park. In the Senate, he dedicated himself to getting the environment on the national political agenda. In his first year, he co sponsored the Clean Water Act. He was also the first person to propose an environmental rights amendment. In a speech in the Senate on January nineteenth, nineteen seventy, Nelson proposed a constitutional amendment that read, every person has the inalienable right to a decent environment. People propose amendments all the time that never go anywhere, but still it planted a seed. I've been thinking a lot lately about amending the Constitution and why it's so hard to do, and when it got so hard to do. In the nineteen seventies, it looked like another amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment banning discrimination on the basis of sex, would surely be ratified. In the end, it wasn't. But in nineteen seventy when gay Lord Nelson proposed an environmental rights amendment, it just didn't seem that crazy. In nineteen seventy one, the twenty six the men it was ratified. It lowered the voting age to eighteen. In the nineteen seventies, In other words, you could still ratify amendments to the Constitution. On January twenty second, three days after Gaylord Nelson proposed his environment a rights amendment, Richard Nixon, the President, through his support behind this idea in his State of the Union address, The great question of the seventies is shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our heir, to our land, and to our wife. Nixon, in other words, seem to have embraced Rachel Carson's agenda restoring nature to its natural state as a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. The scale of the crisis was obvious to everyone. By nineteen seventy, States had become a very trashy looking place. It was embarrassing pollution, small glitter everywhere. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland had caught fire only months before, and not for the first time. The water was so entirely polluted with oil slick debris that when sparks from a passing train flicked over the river, it went up in flames, flames as high as a five story building. Public outrage had been so intense that Nixon had signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, which helped establish the Environmental Protection Agency. Through our years of past carelessness, we incurred a debt to nature. And now that debt is being called. The program I shall proposed to Congress will be the most comprehensive and costly program In this view. Again, America's history. I think about it this way, post War America, people are finally fed up with the ravages of the Industrial Revolution, the pollution, the filthy factories, the dead fish in the rivers, the dying oceans, the smog. To stop all that, you've got to pass some laws. One way to drum up support invent a national holiday. Call it Earth Day, Tell people about it, get them out on the streets, run ads, and stir up news coverage on television across the country. Do you feel as though all this is a reaction to publicity that's been blasted across the nation. It's going to be a real, real, big political move, probably bigger than any other political move we've ever seen this country. Birthday wasn't a federal holiday. We're like a rally day, but also more than rally day. Governors agreed to on Earth Day, so did a lot of musicians, poets, politicians. In Washington, the House and Senator journed for the day. Practically every Senator and congressman was off to make speeches on the year's most popular and least risky election issial April twenty, nineteen seventy, that first Earth Day took place all over the country, in cities and towns, at state capitals, a polluted highways. People picked up trash on river banks from the Kalamazoo to the Mississippi. Schools canceled classes, kindergarteners did crafts, college students marched in the streets, and middle schoolers went on field trips wearing baseball caps and muck boots, carrying binoculars as they trudged the woods to a lake whose shoreline was covered with trash. This is pollution, and it's poor hearby man, all right, So this isn't anything that Nature staff was that when you look at nature, you're going to find it a pretty peaceful thing. Twenty eight poisoned girls from Councils Loves AIOH. We're out early this Earthday morning. They are members of Missus Willard Hopper's sixth grade science class. Right full of answers. Another triumph of hope over experience. And pretty much everywhere that first Earth Day, people sang out. In Boston, protesters held a die in at Logan Airport to call attention to the pollution caused by airplanes. They pretended to die there. There were teachings and cleanups. Protesters wore surgical masks to call attention to air pollution. Parts of New York City banned cars for the day. Protesters in Chicago called for the elimination of the internal combustion engine, and in Washington, civil rights leader James Farmer tied the fledgling environmental movement to racial justice. The garbage, the trash, the carbon monoxide, the junk. Who suffers most from it if it is not the poor? And so the poor, especially the ghatois poor, the black and the brown and the red stand to benefit first from any successes in cleaning up the environment. In Albuquerque, in the Bareless Neighborhood, the leaders of a Chicano rally made the same argument. We're going to make people understand, but the kind of thing has come from our pollution, water pollution are the same kind of things that cause racism, to cause poverty, and cause hunger in this country. So we're all going to be marching to day. Okay. In Philadelphia, at the Salem Zion United Church of Christ, middle aged congregants and Sunday suits and bonnets joined their young pastor in a special Earth Day prayer. We have helped to fill up your air pollute your streams and clutter your earth with crash and gadgets. Now our high style heavy with sorrow for what we have done, but not before our sinuses and lungs warned us a great danger. Okay, nice idea, but I confess the prayer doesn't entirely work for me. Still, it's a measure of the intensity of all of this. And out of all those meetings and marches and clean ups and conversation after conversation came a demand for something more power to the earth. But what would that mean? Earth Day was the biggest protest in human history. Listening to the tape, you can feel this oceanic swell, this common knowledge that the earth is in trouble, the sense that people will make sacrifices to save it. It sounds as though things might actually change. But listening now, who know as well as I do that things didn't change nearly as much as they needed to. I don't want to tell that story again, though, I want instead to imagine what if that moment really had changed everything? How could it have the answer? After this break? The idea that everything could have turned out differently in the nineteen seventies is not crazy. Remember that in nineteen seventy at the very same time that Wisconsin Senator gay Lord Nelson had come up with the idea for Earth Day, he come up with the idea of an amendment to the US Constitution guaranteeing people the right to a decent environment. While he was working on that, some states started trying to guarantee the same thing. The first to succeed in nineteen seventy one was Pennsylvania. The state ratified its own environmental rights amendment by popular referendum by a margin of four to one. So people who wanted to change the federal Constitution to save the planet, we're getting pretty excited. It all seemed so promising, so promising that environmental advoca groups pressed the case. They came up with another way, a fascinating way to think about how to grant power to the earth. That idea spread it up. In California, the Walt Disney Company was about to build a ski resort in Mineral King Valley. The Sierra Club sued to stop the plan, but the court said it lacked standing. The Sierra Club challenged the permit permitting this to go on, and case went up to the Ninth Circuit and the far Service said, look, you the Sierra Club don't have standing. Maybe this is a wrong to issue the permit, but you're not injured. You as a club are not injured. That's USC law professor Christopher Stone from an old interview at the time, he followed the case very closely. When I saw that case, I thought, this isn't a way sort of silly. This is an important decision, I said, whether to develop the Mineral King Valley in this way. I'm not sure how it should come out, but at least it should be heard. And if the problem of its being heard is that this club was not suffered no injury, why not just saying, look, the injury is suffered by a Mineral King Valley. The injury is suffered by the valley. Stone decided to write a law review article. It's called should Trees Have Standing? Stone starts off talking about the Sierra Club versus Mineral King Valley case, but like most big legal arguments, Stones article made a very general claim, a legal innovation. He argued that trees and any other part of the natural world should have standing in courts of law as persons. After all, a corporation can be a person, so can a ship. So can your dog. If you leave your dog, your estate and your will, why not trees and valleys and rivers and streams. Stone didn't want humans to protect the environment. He wanted the environment itself to bear rights. He knew this might strike some people as a nutty idea, but he also felt the time had come for big, bold ideas because of how bad he thought things would be in fifty years time. There's a part of his article where he writes about that, and I find it uncanny, having been written in nineteen seventy two. He wrote, scientists have been warning of the crisis the Earth and all humans on its face. If we do not change our ways radically, the Earth's very atmosphere is threatened with frightening possibilities. Absorption of sunlight, upon which the entire life cycle depends may be diminished. The oceans may warm, increasing the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, melting the polar ice cap and destroying our great coastal cities. Stone rushed a copy of his article to the Supreme Court, which was slated to decide the Sierra Club case, to decide, to begin with, whether the club had standing to try to block Walt Disney Company from chopping down a forest. Now sort of by one of those weird coincidences in the world. Write it about that time. Early in nineteen seventy two, Doctor Seus's book The Lorax was broadcast on television. You know, the cartoon about a creature who lives in the woods is trying to stop a lumber company from raising the forest. I speaking for the trees. Let him grow, Let him grow. But nobody listens too much, don't you know, No, they don't listen too much. Weeks after The Lorax was broadcast on TV, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of Sierra Club versus Mineral King Valley, issuing a ruling in favor of the Walt Disney Company. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a descent that if a ship can be a person under the law, so it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beeches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland or even air. In a footnote, he cited stones article should trees have standing? But Justice Douglas said, but why not just essentially fall a stone's physician and let the mineral king be the plaintiff lest should be called mineral king against partner of interior. People like the idea that we should be speaking for nature, that nature should have its own voice. People did like that idea. So imagine what if Douglas's opinion had been not the dissenting opinion of the Supreme Court, but the majority opinion of the Supreme Court. What might have happened next? Imagine that with this incredibly huge legal victory, environmentalists had decided to really fight for an environmental rights amendment, not the one gay Lord Nelson had proposed in nineteen seventy. Imagine they'd propose something much much bolder. I mean, imagine, really imagine. Imagine that this crazy, bold constitutional amendment had gotten ratified in nineteen seventy two. What if today, in twenty twenty two, we were marking the fiftieth anniversary of that environmental rights amendment. To imagine that, I've got to take you to a place I've never taken anyone before, to the last archives fiction annex. Imagine that in nineteen seventy one, Christopher Stone and his students at USC Law School had drafted a new constitutional amendment. Found a way for the law to listen to the trees. Article one, All legislative powers shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate, a House of Representatives, and a Chamber of Nature. The Chamber of Nature better known as the tree branch. Imagine this thing was ratified by a majority of states, and to help spread the news, Schoolhouse Rock made a song about it so the kids would know, Treehouse Rock. The Chamber of Nature shall be composed of members has chosen every fourth year by the people of several states. Representation in the Chamber shall be abortion among the several states according to the number of trees in the state relative to the number of trees in state prison at the time of the state entered the Union. Catch you right, But the idea that a portion ofment in Congress should be done by counting people that had been a new idea in seventeen eighty seven when the Constitution was written. There'd been other ideas at the time. They could have calculated representation by square miles or by taxable income. Why not trees? Imagine the people making this argument were very smart. They argued it very well. They brought out the best evidence. Rallies were held today in all the countries. National parks activists, citing recent reports by the US Forestry Department, explained the ability of trees to counter and even reverse them the line effects of pollution. This amendment would have meant that not only did nature have standing in courts the way the Sierra case would have ruled, but that nature, at least by proxy, had a voice in government that if a state was going to lose vegetation, it would lose votes. In Washington, the annual County of the Trees has begun. This new forest census is to take place every July. It follows this springs frenzy. At some eight million trees were planted in April alone. The public awaits the results of this first census with bated breath, as states by for representation in the new so called tree Branch. A chamber of Nature would have made protecting the environment not something subject to the competing interests of different people, but instead subject to the interests of nature itself. Interesting, right now, How in our imaginary world could such a thing come about? That's the easy part to imagine. First, Nixon, the environmental president, gets behind it. I can almost hear him offering his endorsement. By our decision, we will demonstrate the kind of people we are and the kind of country we will be kind. That's why I've charted the course I have laid out tonight. Admittedly, the debating Congress would have been crazy, the timber trade against it builders, developers, the construction industry, no way, but in favor a lot of ordinary people and business interests that wanted to stay on the right side of the rising environmental movement. The whole of DC would have been one giant environmental rally and counter rally for weeks, and then it could have all happened so quickly twenty seven the Environmental Rights Amendment might have passed Congress and gone to the states. And imagine this. Imagine that the last state needed ratified the amendment in nineteen seventy two. Imagine that the federal government had become answerable to nature a half century ago. This week, mining companies are lobbying the Chamber of Nature seeking exemption from bands on fracking. But the tree branch so far appears to be holding firm. Okay, I'm locking up the annex again because this, all of this, none of it happened. What happened instead? After the break, there is no environmental rights Amendment to the US Constitution. We are not today in twenty twenty two, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its ratification. It was never ratified. It was never even written. A lot of other things, though, did happen in the early nineteen seventies, with Richard Nixon's full support the EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act. Still, the environmental movement never really trusted Nixon. Instead, it spurned him. As Dan Rather reported several weeks ago, the White House invited the Nice Stool organizers a birthday to drop by for a chat. They refused. On that first Earth Day in nineteen seventy, Nixon and his wife Pat planted a tree in the White House lawn and that's it. Pretty soon Nixon was embroiled in the Watergate scandal. The leaders of the environmental movement white middle class college students and young people, or pretty squarely anti Nixon for all kinds of reasons, and they didn't ever really seek his support, so it's hard to know how much he might have given. In the end, the establishment business leaders, the silent majority oppose the environmental movement. If you look at TV footage on Earth Day or listen to it, it looked and sounded pretty much like woodstock. And as for what civil rights activists thought about it all merely Evers put it this way. I was asked by someone, why is it that you think there are not too many black people participating in Earth Week? In Earth Day, they're interested about the health of themselves and their children when they are living in rat infested homes, about the garbage that's piled up. CBS News spoke to civil rights leader Herman Rice. He said, basically, we have bigger problems. See, we still have hungry children to feed, and we still will have houses to try to build. And I think we're taking the emphasis off the beat up buildings and the polluted streams that they're talking about. We've never seen anyway but trout. I don't know if they're dying. We've never seen that. I know, the rats of bike acue. Earth Day, for all of its successes and its huge scale, it's still had real limits. It's burned the establishment. It was too white. And then in nineteen seventy three, the gas crisis began, not just rising prices but in actual shortage due to US foreign policy in the Middle East and an embargo by OPEC, a consortium of oil producing nations in the Persian Gulf. Here's a clip from a special NBC News did about the crisis. There's almost unanimous agreement among the experts that the crisis is real, that it's been creeping up on us for about one hundred years now, and that it's getting worse each day as we continue to use up our precious supplies of oil, coal, and gas. And by the nineteen eighties, the fossil fuel industry was already organizing itself around an extraordinary project, undermining the science and promoting oil and oil companies as good for the environment. Climate change, pollution not real, they said, or at least not relevant. Exon BP and DuPont great for the environment. Recently, DuPont announced that its energy unit, Conico, would and hear the use of new doubleholed oil tankers in order to see if guard the environment. And the response has been foodfully blamingly positive, better things for better living. And as for what happened after that, you probably know what happened next. Rising temperatures, the increasing severity of storms, the forest fires. Why even bother thinking about whether it could have gone another way? No one proposed tree branch. That is my own cockamamie idea. But why is it a cochomamy idea? What if it could have worked? What would have happened if we'd had a third branch of the legislature in which representation was proportionate not to people but to trees. States would have had a huge incentive not to cut down forests, certainly not to cut them down without planting new ones. Urban forestry would have grown. Cities would have planted more trees. Suburbs would have provided incentives to homeowners to plant groves instead of lawns. More carbon would have been sequestered. Okay, and obviously that is oversimplifying. A lot of other messy stuff would have happened too. But I've been thinking this last archive season of Solutions about the US Constitution and its brittleness. Given the polarization of American politics since the nineteen seventies, it is now effectively impossible to amend the Constitution. But what if it weren't. Could what I have imagined really have happened in the nineteen seventies. I decided to ask world renowned environmental activists Bill mckibbon, we talked about that first Earth Day in which one in ten Americans took part the watershed of the environmental movement, probably the biggest protest in the history of the country. And it wins most of the things that it's asking for right away. You know, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the air starts to get cleaner quickly, and all of a sudden you can swim in lakes and streams that were catching on fire, you know, a few years before, and again it's Nixon's White House. Nixon is signing all these bills, and he says the seventies are going to be the environmental secade. And this was proofed by the way of the power of that movement because Nixon literally had not an environmental bonus. We know from listening to the tapes now that he thought they were all smelly hippies. But he had no choice. I mean, for four or five years, if you put the word environment in the title of a bill, it passed. And these were huge, you know, big things. They're still those, I mean, the only legislation had ever really passed about this stuff and the stuff that we still rely on when we try to fight nplians and stuff. All passed in nineteen seventy three and was signed by Richard Nixon. And that was true until a few months after I talked to mckibbon, Biden signed the first major climate legislation. It did a lot, it did nowhere near enough. Mckibbon says, in the nineteen seventies, Earth Day was in a way a victim of its own success. Had won the easy things, and then it wasn't able to win the hard ones. Environmentalism stopped being very early on a mass movement because it was so successful after Earthday nineteen seventy or within a couple of years. Everybody had left the streets because they were winning every bill they put forward in Congress, every court decision, whatever, and which was great. It was working until it wasn't, and the other side fought back very hard. So the environmental movement moves off the streets and into big institutions, and it's just not prepared either for the strength of the opposition or for the magnitude of the problem. And the problem is that the things that were addressing are the easy things. It turns out they're the problems when something goes a little wrong, like you don't have the right filter on your smoke stack or your car or whatever. And you can fix them by putting a catalytic converter in or a scrubber in your smoke stack. And yeah, it costs a little money, but it's not the end of the world. And once you do that, you've made extraordinary progress. In fact, the pollution that you can see with your eyes begins to disappear. So, having solved this one set of things, but without making fundamental shifts in how we ran the world, we were setting ourselves up for much, much deeper trouble. We didn't know about climate change yet, but we were beginning to sense that it was coming. More to the point, it was clear that relying on oil had all kinds of pitfalls. Kibbin had a different counterfactual from my whole tree branch thing, another near miss, maybe nearly as consequential as my counterfactual. His counterfactual was what if Jimmy Carter had succeeded in steering the country towards solar power and away from oil. If we had turned away from it in the nineteen seventies done what Carter wanted to do and made this all out commitment to solar power. Well, we would have not solved, but addressed in a fundamental way what now has become the single existential challenge on planet Earth. So tell me a little bit about what Carter was and what happened to Carter's proposals. So his main message about how we're going to combat this problem is a conservation and there's you know there he puts on the sweater and gives the talk from the White House with the temperature thermostat turned down. And the other thing he's doing is saying, we have to figure out ways to power ourselves that aren't reliant on fossil fuel opeque the rest of the world today and directly harnessing the power of the sun. We are taking the energy that God gave us and using it to replace our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. And yet that didn't happen. Carter productive solar panels, made that plan, and then Reagan defeated him in nineteen eighty and then Regan took down those solar panels and scrapped that plan. Carter put on a sweater, Reagan said, turn up the thermostat. This is America. So this is one of these rare like counterfactual history things where it's pretty easy to play out what would happen if you'd actually done it, you know, if we'd done that, if we'd made a serious governmental commitment to doing this, There's there was no physical or technological obstacle that would have kept us from developing cheap solar energy in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties instead of in the twenty tenths, which is when we finally did. You know, it would have been the greatest of gifts to the whole world to have done this thirty years earlier. Well, we would have been well on the way to knowing what to do and how to deal with it. But of course we didn't do that. And just as I really can't say what establishing a chamber of Nature would have meant, mckimn can't be sure how far solar might have gone if Carter had won re election in nineteen eighty and stayed the course on solar power. It's still good to dream, though, I told mckimn about our counterfactual the lorex, the tree branch the whole nine yards. I wanted to see what he thought about it. It's not a completely fanciful counter factual, the idea that things might have broken very differently in the nineteen seventies, and it may have been the last chance for things to really break differently. Admittedly, the Chamber of Nature is wacky calculating political representation by counting trees, but as mckibbon pointed out, so is measuring the health of a country with its GDP. It's gross domestic product. I mean, governments count stuff. That's they're going to count something. And if they were counting number of trees or number of eagles or whatever it is, it would have led to a whole different set of outcomes. Probably, But the reason is because it would have shifted our sense of what was important. Would it have worked the tree branch political power based on trees? I expected out once using Forest Service reports to calculate which dates would have benefit it at the start, and how different states could have benefited from the incentive to plant more trees save more forests. What I came up with is that I think it might have thwarted polarization because it's not the usual Red State, Blue State divide. The season of the last Archive is about fixes. Fixing the constitution is not really one of them. What's the problem we're trying to fix here? It's not a scarcity of information, a lack of knowledge, the absence of proof. The evidence for climate change has been everywhere for decades now. Every year the evidence has grown stronger, and slowly, slowly, so did the environmental movement. There is no planet by to have a lovable future. So what are the climate change denihilists are? By now dead and dying? Which should have been common knowledge in nineteen seventy two is a half century later, undeniable, Dear representatives of the media. I've seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like these. In twenty twenty two, a member of the IPCC, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reported that any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future. Antonio Guteresh, head of the IPCC, underscored the point today's IPCC report is a necklace of human suffering and the damning indictment of failed climate leadership. With fact upon fact, these reports reveals all people on the planet are getting clobered by climate change. These abdication of leadership is criminal. I wanted Season three to be upbeat, cheerful, good ideas solutions. This abdication of leadership is criminal. But I do still think if a window is now closing, there's much to be learned by looking back through the clouded light of other windows. I know people everywhere are anxious and angry. I am too. Now is the time to turn rage into action. Every fraction of their degree matters, every voice can make a difference, and every second counts. Twenty twenty two was a year for real, genuine celebration, the first meaningful climate legislation in the United States, and more than a generation. It's gone a long way, but it hasn't gone far enough. I don't want my grandchildren to look back at twenty twenty two the way I look back at nineteen seventy two and say, oh my god, they were so close. They did so much, They were so close to doing what needed to be done. If only they'd had a little bit more imagination. I don't want to have been close. Close is not enough. The last archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, Ben Natt of Hafrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editors are Julia Barton and Sophie Crane, and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our research assistant is Mia Hazra. Our full proof player is Robert Ricotta. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star Jennette Foundation. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content like The Last Archivist, a limited series just for subscribers, and add free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jill Lapor