The U.S. Constitution neither defines nor precludes presidential executive orders, but every president since George Washington has issued at least one. The sole exception was William Henry Harrison, who died in office after only 31 days. In more recent presidencies, this would be ample time to issue orders, some of which are ready for a new president's signature before the Mayflower moving van has left the White House grounds on inauguration day.
Political observers now expect a sheaf of executive orders to be ready with each new administration because -- to some degree -- executive orders are sometimes made to be broken. This will certainly be the case with regard to executive action related to the environment in general and climate change in particular when the Biden Administration takes office on January 20, 2021.
Sadly, public policy is sometimes a game. Image: Card Cow
A pair of recent segments from the public-radio program Living On Earth provide an overview of recent executive actions related to climate change and informed speculation about orders that may be issued just before and just after the moving vans arrive.
In March 2020, program host and environmental journalist extraordinaire Steve Curwood spoke with law professor Jody Freeman about the EPA's rush to rollback regulations before the election. The discussion draws on her experience as Counselor for Energy and Climate Change in the Obama administration, to quickly describe the most important environmental protections that are at stake.
This is good preparation for a segment that aired today, in which Curwood returns to the topic of executive orders with economist Joe Aldy, who served on President Obama's 2008-2009 transition team. They explore President-elect Biden's environmental priorities. Aldy's experience 12 years ago gives him keen insight into what the outgoing president is likely to do and what tools the incoming president has available -- including the degree to which control of the Senate will matter.
Lagniappe
Just as I was posting this, I found a more detailed description of President-elect Biden's climate-related transition plans by journalists and Adam Aton and Jean Chemnick. The intention to address climate in nearly every department of government suggests the need for interdisciplinary approaches to the deepening climate crisis.
Moving two families during a ceremony -- even a long ceremony -- is daunting, but it is done every 4 to 8 years in the People's House. I once read that Mayflower (which seriously botched the 1997 Hayes-Boh family move) was always hired, but a quick image search suggests that competent companies also get the job sometimes, as in the January 2001 move shown above.
My favorite librarian habitually checks the National Day calendar, looking for things that might be fun to celebrate, and this often inspires special meals in our household. It also leads to odd discoveries, such as the Mad Hatter Day.
Chapeleiro Maluco
The "holiday" began in Colorado in 1986, simply as an excuse for "crazy" or whimsical behaviors, especially involving the wearing of hats. When I posted this photo online, a friend in Brazil immediately commented with the Portuguese version of the term, and some virtual chuckles followed.
As detailed in a Mad Hatter Day article in the Panache section of Economic Times, the manic character is associated with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, though he never used that exact name for his character the Hatter. The article explains why today's date is used to celebrate the character.
It errs, however, in associating the "madness" of haberdashers with their use of lead; mercury was the real culprit, as mentioned in the video above. It is an easy mistake to have made: both are metals known to be neurotoxins, and in reality the toxicity of mercury is gravely serious. In fact, I am justifying the time I am spending on this blog post by the fact that I am sharing it with my Environmental Regulations class later this morning. We will make some comparisons between mercury and dichlordiphenyltrichloroethane, which we have been studying for the past few weeks.
Mercury and DDT are different in many ways, but both are subject to biomagnification in fatty tissue and were in use for decades before their toxicity was understood. Both exemplify the limitations of free markets when managing environmental risks.
Atlas Obscura is always a trove of geographic insight; the geographically curious can spend hours perusing the online or print version.
A recent contribution by journalist Lauren Vespoli offers even more to the geographically curious (including hints as to how and why we should all be geographically curious). In How to Dig Into the History of Your City, Town, or Neighborhood, she describes how she has used newly-found down time to explore her own surround -- and to engage friends to do the same. This is very creative online bonding! As she makes clear throughout the piece, the history comes in many forms and so do the processes of discovery.
Geographic discovery involves inquiry about
the ordinary in our midst.
She describes several tools that are familiar to me as a professional geographer -- such as Sanborn maps -- and other fascinating tools I had never heard of. I am most excited about using the Archipedia, which has well over 100 listings in each of two cities I teach as honors colloquia -- New Orleans and Detroit. Sadly, none of the fascinating buildings of Brockton (about which I teach an honors seminar) are this database, but I have other resources for exploring that city formerly known as North Bridgewater.
Among the tools Vespoli introduces is another I learned about from a fellow geographer just recently. Mapping Inequality is an impressive online collection of the maps used by the Federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation to guide mortgage rate-setting. In the guise of managing institutional financial risk, these maps also imposed or reinforced geographic patterns of racial discrimination through the practice of redlining. For many communities across the United States, researchers can discover whether their own neighborhoods fell inside or outside of those red lines.
I will also use this in my course Environmental Regulations, because this kind of research -- while enjoyable in its own right -- is potentially quite useful in some of the detailed work necessary to protect us from environmental contamination. Because pollutants from the past can be just as dangerous as chemicals currently in use, searching for possible relict sources of pollution is an excellent application of geographic skills.
I did my entire master's thesis on dams, so I feel emboldened to make more than the usual number of dam-related puns whenever the topic of dams comes up. And for the same reasons, I make sure that the topic comes up more than it does around normal people. That said, the title of this post is slightly mismatched to the topic, because the people responsible for the recent dam failure in Edenville, Michigan and for the associated toxic-waste disaster downstream seem to have exactly zero shame.
Shortly before a catastrophic failure. Image: NPR.
I am including a few items that relate to different geographic lessons about this failure. First is from a rather nerdy geomorphology perspective, but it illustrates sometihng everyone should know about dams.
Every dam has a spillway at some level below the top of the dam -- usually at least a few feet lower. This spillway defines what should be the maximum level of water behind the dam. It must be designed with a capacity to allow for ANY possible flow of water around the dam. If water is allowed to flow over the wall of the dam ("topping" the dam) failure is quite likely. This is especially true of earthen dams, but is also a danger with concrete or stone dams. Dave Petley's American Geophysical Union blog post on which I found this video includes more technical details, including some that are in the form of questions, as this system is much more complicated than it appears to non-specialists.
The failure of this dam brings immediately to mind the 1889 Johnstown Flood. In both cases, innocent downstream communities were devastated by a failure of both engineering and conscience. Wealthy owners had been warned that their structures were unlikely to survive expected rain events, but chose to risk not only their investments but also the properties -- and the very lives -- of downstream neighbors. Lee Mueller, the owner of the Edenville Dam, is doubly culpable because he has actively ignored federal and state safety regulatorsand he must know the history of Johnstown. He is a perfect illustration of the need for environmental regulations, and the need to empower those agencies charged with enforcing them. Sadly, at least 2,500 dams in the United States are considered dangerous, meaning that they are both in a position to cause deaths if they fail and in a state of repair that makes such failures more likely than they ought to be.
When I commented about the good luck that nobody was killed by the Edenville collapse (though thousands were evacuated and millions of dollars of damage was done), a friend and former professor of mine quickly corrected me: nobody died as an immediate result of the collapse, but the flood damage included the inundation of an inadequately prepared chemical plant downstream.
As I explain in my 2016 Houston, Too Close to New Orleans post, tanks storing hazardous chemicals are required to be surrounded by secondary containment, meaning a wall or berm that will contain the chemical in the event of flooding or failure of the tank. I know this because I have done the calculations for such containment in Puerto Rico. The inside dimensions must be adequate to contain the entire contents of the dam, plus a small freeboard capacity. Similarly, the outside dimensions (height above ground) must be high enough to withstand a 100-year flood. Tanks on Dow properties downstream from Edenville were not adequately contained, so my friend is correct that increased casualties are likely. But they will be the result of long-term, low-dose chemical exposure that will be impossible to document on an individual basis.
In the case of the Dow facility, it is not yet clear what the nature of the miscalculation was; it could very well be that the berms met legal requirements and failed anyway. This is because the regulations worst-case conditions on which regulations are based might assume only meteorological flooding, not that caused by independent failures upstream. Moreover, the 100-year flood level is no longer an adequate way to estimate flood risk. It describes a flood that would have a 1/100 probability of being exceeded in any given year in the past. As I explain in my 2018 post Not in the Cards, even in the hands of statisticians, hydrologists, and engineers who do understand precisely what the term does and does not mean (and these people are rare), existing records are not adequate to estimate flood probabilities, because climate change means that today's conditions are statistically not related to those of the past.
We are not fans of reality television -- even if it pertains to food -- but of course we watched this show with great attention (and through torrents of tears, to be honest). PLEASE watch it if you can, because ultimately it is a hopeful story. Because it is not a show about hydrology, though, it is understandable that a mistaken comment about the floods was included without correction. Someone in the program said that the town had been struck by two 1,000-year floods. They did not go on to say that the odds of this would be close to one in a million, but it is implied. The reality, unfortunately, is that the floods in Ellicott City were inevitable given. climate change and recklessly inadequate regulation of upstream land use. The three blog posts above describe the details.
Incidentally, Ellicott City is still vulnerable, but engineering remedies -- including those described in Ramsay's show -- have likely reduced the risk in general terms and have removed some of the most vulnerable victims completely.
Lagniappe
Strictly speaking, my master's thesis was not about dams: it was about soil erosion. But the unexpectedly rapid sedimentation of a reservoir behind a medium-scale dam was the motive for our study, and we examined several dozen small-scale reservoirs to study the problem. When we started the project, I could barely discern small reservoirs on aerial photos; after a full year of study, I felt as though I knew some of them personally.
I am not certain to what extent dam safety has been a factor in the decision, but I recently learned that a small dam about a mile from my house in Bridgewater is slated for removal. This will create some environmental benefits and some environmental hazards (principally from the draining of artificial wetlands and the possible liberation of long-dormant toxic sediments). I will be following that with nerdy interest!
A couple of days after the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a surprising ruling on a complicated case involving the Clean Water Act, a 1972 law signed by Nixon (originally under a different name) and often seen as one of the signal achievements of the original Earth Day.
Before reading about the ruling, it may be helpful to listen to NPR journalist Ryan Finnerty's reporting on the case as it was heard by SCOTUS in November 2019.
Connections between ground water and surface water vary,
but often are this simple.
Image: BYJU'S
The result is considered a victory by the environmental groups that filed the suit, because it reduces polluters' ability to claim that water flowing underground is immune from the Clean Water Act -- what plaintiffs and some justices consider a loophole.
I use the phrase "is considered a victory" because nobody is quite certain what the ultimate impact of this case will be. As often happens, the Court has returned the case to a lower court with some direction, but that court might have more than the usual latitude in deciphering the court's intent.
Underlying (pun intended, I guess) all of this complication is the fact that Federal jurisdiction over water has in many ways been limited to navigable waterways, a term that originated in the 1899 Rivers and Harbors Act, and whose definition has never engendered a lot of consensus.
For me, this ruling will have been a victory for the environment only if it helps to bring about an end to the dangerous practice of oil extraction through hydraulic fracturing (fracking). The current drop in oil prices will sideline fracking for the next year or two, but legal action will be needed to prevent it from continuing to destroy the quality of ground water in places with minimally accessible petroleum deposits. See my Imagine No Fracking (2012) Non-Oil Futures (2012), and More Than Modified (2014) posts for more on the dangers of pumping toxic solutions into damaged aquifers.
Nitrous oxide pollution in Wuhan, 2019 (top) and 2020 (bottom). Chinese New Year is responsible for the temporary decline shown on the top line. The quarantine associated with COVID-19 is responsible for the deeper and more persistent reduction this year. The coverage by the Independent correctly attributes the reduction of smog-forming NOx to the extensive quarantines in the region. It also mentions the concomitant reduction in greenhouse gases, but can leave readers with the incorrect impression that the maps depict the presence or absence of carbon dioxide. The situation in China is reminiscent of the clearing of the air in Mexico City in 1985. At the time, 14 million people lived in the high-altitude (thin-air) bowl of the Valley of Mexico, kicking up fine-particle dust from the bed of Lake Tenochtitlan and more importantly contributing the exhaust of millions of tailpipes. Two successive earthquakes essentially stopped traffic and the air cleared. Many residents saw Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl for the first time in their lives. These icons of the city had not been visible from the city for decades -- nor have they been visible since. Despite many efforts to clear the air of Mexico City, an active population now numbering 22 million has not taken a long enough rest to do so as effectively as the enforced vacation of an earthquake or epidemic would do. These phenomena are reminders that the air pollution we experience in and around many of the world's great cities is directly related to the choices we have made about work and transportation in those cities, and how we regulate emissions. Unfortunately, the clean air correlates not only with illness but also with economic dislocation, as illustrated by plummeting stock prices near the end of the same period (see below). That is to say, despite some successes at the margins, pollution remains tightly linked to economic progress. Geographic Information Systems experts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are providing constant updates to the distribution map. This is a graduated-circle map, in which a place is represented by a circle whose diameter is proportional to the square root of the phenomenon associated with that place. This is the March 1 map; click the link in the caption for updates.
My GEOG 431 course -- Environmental Regulations -- will be a bit complicated when I teach it in the fall 2020, but I'm determined to do my best. The gap between hard-won environmental laws and their responsible enforcement is growing.
Congress passes laws, presidents sign them, and then executive departments implement the laws through regulations. I teach a course that helps future environmental professionals (and citizens who simply want to know how their government works) navigate the complexities of those regulations. We explore what happens when people find the enforcement either too strict or too lax -- this is where courts get involved.
But the current approach to "implementing" established environmental law is to operate the enforcing agencies in such a way as to essentially shred the original laws. The changes are so widespread and rapid as to preclude meaningful appeal to the courts, and courts are being unraveled at the same time.
The result? Those who favor dumping more raw sewage into rivers are winning. And YES, some agencies -- and elected officials -- really prefer more sewage in the water if it makes their budgets easier to balance. And oddly, it always does, because sewage flows downhill.
A new tunnel to store raw sewage below Congress and the White House. Photo: Ting Shen for NY Times.
In my reading of the history of municipal sewage systems (yes, I have a glamorous job), it turns out that local officials will almost always favor sending more sewage to the next town. Even when the Federal government pays 90 percent of the cost of treatment, many officials will resist spending the remaining 10 percent. This is why Federal regulations are needed, why deregulation zealots should be kept away from our public water supplies.
Photo: Geoffrey Scott Baker, resident of nearby Oella who calls Ellicott City his muse
I remember this riddle from middle school days -- "If a plane crashes on the U.S.-Canada border, where would they bury the survivors?" The punchline, of course, is that you don't bury survivors.
The headline hints at some of the problems with the response of county officials. The plan is indeed ambitious, in the way that Al Capone was ambitious at banks: it contemplates obliterating the victims. The financial cost to be paid by the county would be high, but the businesses that have rebuilt in the "flood zone" would not survive in new locations. They thrive because of the "sense of place" to which they have contributed for years or decades.
The plan announcement seeks to downplay the impact of the demolition by pointing out that 5 percent of the historic district would be affected, and this map with much less than 1 percent in red reinforces (and exaggerates) that message. Everyone who cares about the place, however, knows that this is the most important road segment on the map, or indeed in the entire county.
Moreover, the removal of buildings in the path of the flood waters will not "prevent" flooding. As detailed in the Preservation Maryland Statement on Ellicott City Demolition Proposal, the county's plan merely moves victims out of the way but does not even include study of the radically altered upstream hydrology that has driven the floods.
Main Street Ellicott City -- A walkable downtown with arts, history, architecture, cuisine, and coffee
The story is a reminder that climate change is leaving less room for error in many of our decisions about the environment. In this case, decisions about land use that would normally have made flooding quantitatively worse are now making it qualitatively worse -- a threshold has been crossed into an entirely new type of flood risk.
Lagniappe
I have to admit that -- like many people from this part of Maryland -- I take the woes of Ellicott City personally. I have been a customer in most of the buildings slated for demolition, and my favorite librarian and I bought wedding gifts for each other in Discoveries.
Discoveries, around the anniversary of the 2016 flood. We tried to go again in May 2018, but downtown was thriving and we could not find a parking space. We were actually glad to see that. The next day, it was destroyed by a disaster resulting from climate change and poor land-use planning upstream.
I found this image while browsing for something to represent the idea of environmental regulations from the point of view of what the regs are meant to protect. It is from a short video in which the Canadian NGO West Coast Environmental Law makes a strong case for citizen participation in the details of environmental protection.
Since I was hired to teach environmental geography in 1997, I have taught Environmental Regulations about once every alternate year. It had an even wonkier title when I first arrived, but the simple title to which I changed it reflects the applied (as opposed to theoretical) approach I take in the course.
More than anything else I teach, this course provides students with skills and knowledge that have direct workforce application. It is the course that draws most directly on my non-academic work in geography -- a single year between graduate programs in which I worked for what was then the world's largest civil and environmental engineering firm: Dames & Moore.
Combined with environmental courses in geography and other disciplines, this course helps all students who take it better understand how humans interact with the environment through the nitty-gritty of policy implementation. Some find related employment -- perhaps after some graduate study -- in government agencies or consulting firms. Incidentally, I would love to have more students from our business school take this course, since many firms now integrate environmental compliance into mission-centered positions such as inventory control.
One of those alumni helped me to find a new text for the course, as the one I had been using was becoming both dated and quite expensive (out-of-date textbooks gain value in warehouses faster than most financial instruments). The massive volume by Tom Daniels includes some land-management concepts that I cover in a different course, but most of it is relevant to the scope of this course, which has been the regulations that flow from major federal environmental-protection laws regarding hazardous waste and pollution.
At the beginning of the book is a lengthy -- but by no means exhaustive -- list of acronyms related to environmental planning and protection. These include such favorites as CERCLA, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act -- better known as Superfund. I sometimes spell it $uperfund, because the mistakes of the past are VERY costly.
The acronyms are many because both the science and the legalities are complicated. This is not because bureaucrats enjoy complexity, but rather because every simple law to curtail pollution will be met with resistance that requires increasingly sophisticated methods to close potential loopholes. The so-called free market and common decency are not enough to make or keep the environment clean.
Enter JetPunk, a great example of how the business of naming companies has changed since the days of brick-and-mortar businesses. Company names related to those of the company's founding owners, its geographic location, or -- heaven forfend -- its actual product or service. Rather, it is trendy -- and a cheap way to signal one's trendiness -- to name a company by mashing together two unrelated words, such as "punk" and "jet."
I first became aware of JetPunk close to a decade ago, when a friend asked me to recommend online geography games for his kids. I enjoy the JetPunk map quizzes and use them with my own students. In fact, they figure prominently in the syllabus of the Advanced Global Thinking course I will begin offering next year. It seemed the perfect vehicle to help my enviro-regs students begin to learn some important acronyms, so I set about making a quiz for that purpose. I soon realized that there are A LOT of acronyms to learn, so I divided them thematically into three quizzes:
These overlap a bit, but serve to give my students -- and other interested learners -- manageable learning objects. Lagniappe: The Context
This is the first time I have taught the course since the 2016 election, which has led to systematic efforts to dismantle environmental protections of all kinds at the Federal level. For this reason, I am grateful that the Daniels text is organized in a way that includes Federal programs but also details the work of state and local government as well as citizen-led organizations. All were important before, as the Federal programs have been far from perfectly effective, but are even more so in the coming months and years.
Looking at the environment more broadly, a recent report reminds us that in many parts of the world, environmental activism can be fatal. More optimistically, though, journalist Timothy Egan argues that broad attacks on longstanding environmental protections are likely to lead to a "Green Wave" in the November 2018 election. If so, my students will be well-positioned to help rebuild a fractured environmental infrastructure.
Hearing this interview on my local NPR station today reminded me of The One Who Got Away ... the academic version.
When I was at University of Arizona during the early days of climate-change, Dr. Diana Liverman was a guest speaker a few times. I also met her -- and more importantly her graduate students -- at conferences. I almost transferred to Penn State, where she was on the faculty, even though PhD students do not really do that.
It did not work out, and she ended up coming to Arizona, too late for me to have a decent advisor, though I eventually wiggled my way through.
Hearing her cogent discussion on the radio took me way back, but I have no regrets -- I love what I do now and work with her would have kept me in the R-1 orbit.
Like many geographers, she is deeply worried but not yet resigned -- we could not continue to teach if we did not retain at least some hope. And like many geographers, her work is deeply interdisciplinary. The interview draws on a recent report -- Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene -- that she published with a global team of scientists from many disciplines.
I will be sharing this with many of my students, including those in my Environmental Regulations class this fall. In addition to her insights on the physical science, she mentions something that I will be stressing all semester: the U.S. Federal government is an important environmental actor, but it is not the only one. While it is abdicating its environmental responsibilities, other nations and our own state and local governments -- as well as individuals and private corporations -- must and will fill the void.
It is sad -- an inexplicable, really -- that the fisherfolk of Louisiana were counting on the current administration to protect fisheries from the ravages of the petroleum industry. One reason we have Federal environmental laws is that state and local politicians so often pursue a regulatory race to the bottom, and few places have found a lower bottom than Louisiana.
Those who depend on the Atchafalaya for their livelihood also depend upon the
Federal government for protection from polluters.
Image: Photojournalist Vaughn Hillyard, NBC News
That leaves the Federal government -- through its Environmental Protection Agency, Army Corps of Engineers, and other branches -- as the best hope for the protection of fisheries against polluters. As I wrote in Eagle and Condor in 2016, politicians of both major parties have been overly friendly to the developers of pipelines. It should come as no surprise that a deeply anti-environment and anti-science administration would offer even less resistance to those who threaten Louisiana's riparian environments.
Lagniappe
This blog includes many references to Louisiana. I will highlight just two relatively recent examples, one bad and one good: Louisiana in Tough Shape and Hot Island Hot Spot.
Aside from the Bill of Rights, the most valuable aspect of the U.S. Constitution is the balance of powers among the three branches of government, and the access ordinary citizens have to all three.
In the area of environmental protection, for example, Congress writes laws, executive departments (mainly EPA and Interior) promulgate regulations to implement those laws, and the courts ensure that the intent of the laws is reflected in the details of the regulations. Citizens can participate in public hearings on proposed regulations, and can file suits if the regulations do not seem to meet legislative intent.
The system is currently under stress, however, as secretaries of several executive departments were nominated primarily on the basis of their antipathy to the mission of their departments. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, for example, is responsible for the protection of public lands, but is ideologically opposed to the very concept of public lands. (The exception is in his home state of Montana, a character flaw I explored in my Secretary NIMBY post last November.)
The Senate, of course, has the responsibility to confirm the nominations only of persons qualified to carry out their constitutionally-mandated duties. It would seem that open hostility to the purposes and programs of a department would be a disqualification, but the current Senate has not seen fit to carry out even that minimal level of oversight with respect to the departments of Interior, Environmental Protection, Education, and several others. In some cases a Senator of the President's party has risen to speak against a nominee, but none has voted accordingly, with the sole exception of the vote to confirm a CIA director with an ambiguous (at best) record on torture.
My course on environmental regulations will be a bit complicated in the fall. A wrecking ball has been taken to the relationships among law, regulation, and guidance documents. It will take lawyers and judges years to fix the paperwork damage, and some of the real-world damage will never be fixed. The implementation of regulations through law has always been subject to political wrangling, and particularly in many areas of environmental law in which the public good often has serious opponents with narrow economic interests. The 2018 version of this course will be the best opportunity I have had to explore the machinations that are always present to some degree.
A New Level of Obstruction
The failure of the Senate to fulfill its "advice and consent" responsibilities, however, has resulted in some situations that are different in kind, not just degree, from the manipulations of prior administrations. A recent example in Secretary Zinke's department is the directive to wildlife officials to Shut Up About Mandatory Endangered Species Permits.
As reported by journalist Mary Papenfuss, new wildlife regulations will allow applicants for Federal permits to make their own decisions about the applicability of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, and to avoid adverse decisions by simply not including possible habitat-related takings in their application materials. This will be achieved by prohibiting wildlife staff from mentioning the requirement.
The order challenges the Act's requirements related to the non-deliberate loss of endangered plants and animals by means of habitat change. These have been critical to the effectiveness of the Act. Thy have also proven most bothersome to property developers who see themselves as gaining little from their share of the aggregate benefits of such protections while paying a high individual cost. This is an instance of Garrett Hardin's classic Tragedy of the Commons, which the Congress specifically set out to address.
In the 45 years that the Act has been in force, a couple of presidents and Interior Secretaries (most notably James Watt) have sought to weaken it, and of course many court challenges have been mounted. The current gag order is an effort quietly (silently, in fact) to give developers what they have been hoping for, without the open processes of Congress or the Courts.
Advocates for preservation, of course, will find their way to the courts, but in the process will reduce their ability to do actual environmental work or to contest the Administration's maneuvering in other areas of regulation. Forcing advocates to re-litigate an entire century of environmental law, of course, is part of the Administration's scorched-earth (that's not just a metaphor) policy.
Creeping Authoritarianism
The order imperils both the eagle and the freedoms it represents.
The order is also an infringement on the heretofore American values of free speech and due process. When a government entity orders its citizens -- even those who are government employees -- to shut up about that which they know or believe to be true, one cannot help but think of authoritarian regimes -- and of resistance to them.
The particular phrase "shut up" brings to mind the Portuguese equivalent, cale-se. It is a homophone of calice, or chalice. It is the title of Chico Buarque's song of resistance during the height of the 1964-1985 military rule in Brazil. I describe the song and its uses in two earlier blog posts, Creative Resistance and Overcoming Condor.
The short version of the story is that Buarque's song was on one level about the Last Supper and the Passion of Christ (chalice), while on another level it repeated and mocked what the regime was always telling resisters: shut up.
Although my first visit to Brazil was a decade after the end of the dictatorship, I have done a lot of reading and thinking both about the regime and about the resistance to it, so this song is also mentioned in several other posts, most importantly Wrestling the First Amendment. I am beginning to find unexpected relevance to the politics of resistance in my own country.
Geography asks three questions:
