The following was sent out by Joseph Bonasio who is heading up the effort to get the Florida Right to Clean & Healthy Water Amendment in our Florida Constitution. It was directed to the ambassadors working on this issue, but please join the Zoom meeting.
We have published previously on Maya Van Rossum and her work. Her message can be applied to our sad situation in Florida.
We have also expressed multiple times that this amendment may be our last hope for saving our springs and rivers, as it is beyond obvious that the State of Florida does not plan to do it.
Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back © Jim Tatum
Dear RTCW Ambassadors,
“Industries are perfectly able to pollute the air and water not in spite of, but because of the Clean Air Act and the CleAan Water Act and their state counterparts—they simply need the right permits to do so. In the very act of purporting to restrict or regulate pollution, our laws legalize it. In fact, they create a presumption—even an expectation—that it is a right of business and government to pollute and degrade our environment.”
Maya Van Rossum writes that in The Green Amendment, so much of which focuses incisively on what ails our environmental regulatory system. The boldfacing is mine, however.
“Ideally of, course,” she continues, we need to “amend our national Constitution with an environmental rights provision…But let’s be realistic. Since the adoption of the US Bill of Rights two centuries ago, the American constitution has been amended a scant seventeen times. Many of these amendments reflected epochal transformations in American society and culture. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery…and the Nineteenth extended voting rights to women. While environmental protections merit a federal amendment, this will only become possible after a grassroots transformation has occurred across the nation and in the individual consciousness of our people. The place to start is at the state level.”
This, of course, is what you and I are working on. Again, the boldfacing is mine, because I am leading up to this point that I highlighted heavily in my copy of The Green Amendment:
“In addition to the legal benefits they provide, Green Amendments help reshape how people think about their rights to a clean and healthy environment—from something they hope for, to something they expect and feel empowered to fight for.”
For Florida Rights of Nature Network, through the “Right to Clean and Healthy Waters,” we pursue both legal and cultural change. We are changing societal expectation from the right to pollute to the right to be free from pollution in an ecologically healthy natural environment. The cultural change isn’t as dramatic as that necessitated by Rights of Nature laws, but considerable and desperately needed nevertheless.
I’ll admit I will not have read all of The Green Amendment, Second Edition, by this Tuesday, December 13th, 6pm. (Perhaps many of you haven’t either—we are all very busy—but have read enough to contribute to an engaging and valuable discussion about it. I hope you will join me then. Zoom link here and below.
Additionally, we will meet Thursday at 6pm for our usual general RTCW meeting. Zoom link here. Part of that meeting will be about the first application in court of New York’s new green amendment. You can read about it here, in this press release from Green Amendments for the Generations, founded by Maya Van Rossum.
Lastly, here is a guest column that owes much to The Green Amendment, and which provides ambassadors with important information.
Joe
Topic: The Green Amendment Book Discussion
Time: Dec 13, 2022 06:00 PM Eastern Time
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I live in Southwest Florida. I would
like to be informed on the progress of the Green Amendment, and provide support when I can. Thanks