What We Make Children Stand For
Montana, Maui, generational justice
The children won.
In the first case of its kind to reach a verdict, Held v. State of Montana, Judge Kathy Seely found wholly in favor of 16 young Montanans who sued their state over the violation of their constitutional right to a “a clean and healthful environment.”
Judge Seely found:
“Plaintiffs have proven that as children and youth, they are disproportionately harmed by fossil fuel pollution and climate impacts.”
This isn’t just a moral victory; the ruling invalidates a state law designed to be friendly to the fossil fuel industry, and it creates a precedent as the first time a U.S. court has ruled against a government for violating a constitutional right in a climate change-related case.
The plaintiffs testified to how climate change has affected their family’s livelihoods, their health, their mental health, and even their heritage and traditions.
This last point highlights how the harms of climate change aren’t just generational; they’re intergenerational.
For example, 17-year-old Sariel S., who lives on the Flathead Indian Reservation, is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.
Coyote Stories and Creation Stories
As the complaint explains, there are certain stories—Coyote Stories and Creation Stories—that Elders in her tribe can only share when snow is on the ground. In recent winters, the snow melts too fast, so there is no time to tell these stories.
“The passing on of cultural knowledge is incredibly important to Sariel, and she is increasingly worried that the impacts of climate change are threatening her opportunity and right to learn these practices so that she might carry them on. The climate crisis has a profound emotional and psychological impact on Sariel, who stresses about the impacts her community is facing and will face in the near future. Sariel is distraught when thinking about her future and if she will have one.”
The Montana case will not be the last of its kind. Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit that brought the case, is pursuing similar legal action in all 50 states. There is also a revived Supreme Court case, Juliana v. US.
By cosmic coincidence, the next youth climate trial will be heard in Hawaii next summer, the state which has just seen the deadliest wildfire in the United States in a century. Most of the Hawaiian defendants are Indigenous, and their testimony, like Sariel’s, will cite the loss of culture and tradition as one of the harms they are experiencing from climate change.
This verdict is fundamentally to be celebrated. I’m in love with the strategy of holding governments and the fossil fuel industry accountable and demanding restitution. This is the kind of movement that vaporizes despair.
And I am, basically, as a writer, an advocate and a mother, trying to wrap my life around the motto that climate change is a generational justice issue. Meaning that it affects people worse the later they are born. Meaning that elders especially owe it to the young to address it.
Children born in 2020 are between two and seven times as likely to experience an extreme weather event compared to people born in 1960.
But this outcome, and the cases to come, also make me really sad and angry. What is wrong with everyone? Why are we all perpetuating this situation where our children have to get up on witness stands, or sit in traffic, and literally beg and plead for their lives, their pasts and their futures? Is this what it takes to shock our jaded consciences?
I’ve been writing about generational justice my whole career. My first book was called Generation Debt, and was about the economic disenfranchisement of Millennials, especially through student loans.
But I didn’t name the through line until researching my most recent book, The Stolen Year. Our responses to COVID harmed children disproportionately and in predictable ways, in part because children are a disenfranchised and marginalized group in American society. Not only that, their very status as disenfranchised and marginalized is often overlooked. Older people are more likely to treat younger people with sentimentality than empathy, and to speak for them rather than listen to them. Generational justice means recognizing young people’s rights as well as our responsibilities toward them.
Generational justice means recognizing young people’s rights as well as our responsibilities toward them.
There’s a deeply, compassionately reported new story in New York Magazine about the influx of migrants from Central America. Climate change is an overlooked factor driving them north. Many are supporting themselves selling candy in the New York City subways right now.
This includes many children.
“Even if their parents might want to put them in school, they know a simple truth: Children sell more.”
This is the logic of youth-led climate justice campaigns and court cases like Held v. Monstana, too. There’s a reason Greta Thunberg became an international icon. There’s a reason the constitutional right to a livable climate was first recognized in relation to children.
Children sell more. They are appealing; they automatically hold attention and excite emotion.
I know there are many young people, including children, who are true climate leaders and their voices deserve to be heard.
But it’s not fair to put the pain of our most vulnerable people on display just to get the rest of us to pay attention to what we damn well ought to know is an emergency. We ought to let them be children, let them go to school and play, while we adults take care of the hard work of building a better future.
Some links; Good news
Wind and solar power are breaking records, and renewables are now expected to overtake coal by 2025 as the world’s largest source of electricity.
You can get in on the action! Read this quick guide to using federal incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act to decarbonize your home, even if you rent.
And if you’re really excited, consider joining Voltage Vixens : “an online course and community dedicated to educating women and nonbinary people about home electrification and climate tech. Statistically, women make 91% of decisions for their entire household, but are being left out of conversations. We believe that educating women is the fastest climate solution out there.”
I was happy to be name-checked for my Covid reporting on Ezra Klein’s podcast.
My summer reading: Mobility by Lydia Kiesling is an engaging look at the oil industry, influenced by Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (which was also the source material for There Will Be Blood, a pretty good climate change movie). The Guest by Emma Cline is about women as objects and “woman” as a performance, and led me to this very, very good 1972 essay by Susan Sontag on “The Double Standard of Aging.” Pod is a novel where all the characters are ocean mammals; it’s a little bit like Avatar 2 but also very dreamy beach reading.
What did you enjoy reading or watching this summer? Leave me a comment or drop me a line.