(Source: MarcusObal on Wikimedia)
“Playing with fire” is an idiom that has become popular on more than one level. Cambridge Dictionary describes it as “to act in a way that is very dangerous and to take risks.” I am writing this blog in NYC, which is currently (hopefully for only a short time), the most polluted big city in the world, due to a weather system driving the smog from major wildfires in Eastern Canada in our direction. One can combine this idiom with reality in many major environmental indicators. To demonstrate the issue and offer a possible solution, I will start with the US Supreme Court. About two weeks ago, the Supreme Court announced an important, unanimous environmental decision, the essence of which is summarized in the New York Times article below:
After half a century of painstaking restoration under the Clean Water Act, streams and wetlands nationwide are once again at risk of contamination by pollution and outright destruction as a result of a ruling on Thursday by the Supreme Court.
The Environmental Protection Agency has long interpreted the Clean Water Act as protecting most of the nation’s wetlands from pollution. But now the court has significantly limited the reach of the law, concluding that it precludes the agency from regulating discharges of pollution into wetlands unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to bodies of water that, using “ordinary parlance,” the court described as streams, oceans, rivers and lakes.
At least half of the nation’s wetlands could lose protection under this ruling, which provides an even narrower definition of “protected waters” than the Trump administration had sought.
The full ruling is posted on the court’s webpage.
I want to emphasize that although the ruling was unanimous, it came with four separate justifications, each of which will probably have a strong impact in terms of the future authority of the EPA or, more broadly will put such authority to the test again in a not-so-distant future. Below is the essence of Justice Kavanaugh’s separate reasoning (to which the three liberal justices joined). He agreed with the ruling but was troubled about the potential ramifications:
I write separately because I respectfully disagree with the Court’s new test for assessing when wetlands are covered by the Clean Water Act. The Court concludes that wetlands are covered by the Act only when the wetlands have a “continuous surface connection” to waters of the United States—that is, when the wetlands are “adjoining” covered waters. Ante, at 20, 22 (internal quotation marks omitted). In my view, the Court’s “continuous surface connection” test departs from the statutory text, from 45 years of consistent agency practice, and from this Court’s precedents. The Court’s test narrows the Clean Water Act’s coverage of “adjacent” wetlands to mean only “adjoining” wetlands. But “adjacent” and “adjoining” have distinct meanings: Adjoining wetlands are contiguous to or bordering a covered water, whereas adjacent wetlands include both (i) those wetlands contiguous to or bordering a covered water, and (ii) wetlands separated from a covered water only by a man-made dike or barrier, natural river berm, beach dune, or the like. By narrowing the Act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands, the Court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States. Therefore, I respectfully concur only in the Court’s judgment.
In different words, Justice Kavanaugh is accusing some of his colleagues of being ignorant about basic environmental workings, like the interconnections of the global water cycle. To put it more broadly, he accuses other justices of playing with fire when it comes to our environmental well-being.
The last few blogs (starting on April 25th, with the Earth Day blog) focused on colleges’ attempts to include the accelerating global realities that will affect students throughout their lifetimes into the official strategic plans. I indicated that faculty can be prepared for such instruction only through conducting and/or following timely research. Most of these reality changes are anthropogenic. They break the traditional separations of physical and social sciences. It is not surprising that the impact of these changing realities doesn’t stop at the gates of universities but has spread to affect all of us and everything we do, including the role of supreme court judges.
This is starting to come to life in another decision, still pending before the Supreme Court, regarding the admission criteria that colleges and universities are allowed to use. David Brooks makes an interesting point in his op-ed, suggesting that race-based affirmative action be replaced by a class-based equivalent:
We now have whole industries that take attendance at an elite school as a marker of whether they should hire you or not. So the hierarchies built by the admissions committees get replicated across society. America has become a nation in which the elite educated few marry each other, send their kids to the same exclusive schools, move to the same wealthy neighborhoods and pass down disproportionate economic and cultural power from generation to generation — the meritocratic Brahmin class.
And, as Michael Sandel of Harvard has argued, the meritocratic culture gives the “winners” the illusion that this sorting mechanism is righteous and inevitable and that they’ve earned everything they’ve got.
And then we sit around wondering why Trumpian populists revolt.
Worse, this system is built on a definition of “merit” that is utterly bonkers. In what sane world do we sort people — often for life — based on their ability to be teacher-pleasers from age 15 to 18?
The last sentence in the citation can be rewritten: In what sane world do we ask people to perform any job — often for life — based on their ability to be teacher-pleasers from age 15 to 18?
There should be prerequisites for judging environmental issues. We need to redirect, to fill skill deficiencies regardless of age. This is obviously not limited to environmental issues, nor to issues that require a solid science education (STEM). Recently, such a need emerged in another majority decision accusing Andy Warhol of stepping on copyright requirements. Again, it looks like only one minority opinion (Justice Elena Kagan) knew what she was talking about.
Mid-career or career-shift education seems to be the right remedy for acquiring job-relevant knowledge of the fast-changing reality. Adult education is being offered now in many colleges. I will expand on this issue in my next blog.
One good example of how this works is the accelerating emergence of Artificial Intelligence (see ChatGPT) in our everyday life and the emerging realization of the need for government regulations to limit misuse and prevent disasters. A few months ago, one member of Congress recognized the need for more information and took the appropriate step to increase his knowledge of the issue:
For Northern Virginia Congressman Don Beyer, it’s never too late to go back to school. At 72 years old, Beyer — who represents Arlington, Alexandria City, Falls Church and parts of Fairfax County — is a part-time student at George Mason University.
“I’m pursuing a graduate degree in computer science with emphasis on machine learning, and according to George Mason University, that’s the closest to quote unquote artificial intelligence,” said Beyer, a 1972 graduate of Williams College in Massachusetts.
I’m not sure that everyone needs to go back to school but we do need to take care of dangerous gaps in our knowledge as they affect our decisions, especially when those decisions can have such an enormous impact. I will discuss this more in next week’s blog.
