I recently read We the Corporations, a new book by Adam Winkler on how American businesses won their civil rights.
In this meticulously well-documented history, Winkler puts corporate power on center stage.
He charts how corporations systematically and incrementally gained political advantages over a 200 year period culminating in Citizens United which was funded by corporate elites to bend the law in their favor.
Winkler methodically points out that America has been pro-corporate and elitist from the beginning.
After reading We the Corporations, it struck me that our most vital natural resources need the same kinds of rights and privileges as corporations have managed to secure.
They deserve the same level, or more, of well-funded litigation to protect and preserve their rights.
Clearly, trees and water have not been the beneficiary of corporate power. They have been the victims.
In this post, I will review the key points made in five different books concerning the life and rights of trees and water and conclude with a plea for improving their rights moving forward.
I have read all these books, but the summaries below draw heavily from book reviews from multiple sources. I recommend all five of the books, and I’m hoping these reviews will encourage you to take a deep look.
In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben shares his deep love of woods and forests and explains the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in the woodland and the amazing scientific processes behind the wonders of which we are blissfully unaware.
Much like human families, tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, and support them as they grow, sharing nutrients with those who are sick or struggling and creating an ecosystem that mitigates the impact of extremes of heat and cold for the whole group.
As a result of such interactions, trees in a family or community are protected and can live to be very old. In contrast, solitary trees, like street kids, have a tough time of it and in most cases die much earlier than those in a group.
Wohlleben presents the science behind the secret and previously unknown life of trees and their communication abilities; he describes how these discoveries have informed his own practices in the forest around him. As he says, a happy forest is a healthy forest, and he believes that eco-friendly practices not only are economically sustainable but also benefit the health of our planet and the mental and physical health of all who live on Earth.
In The Water will Come, Jeff Goodell argues that “sea level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity.”
He looks back over the history of human reaction to changing sea levels, particularly during the period 15 millennia ago when the last Ice Age ended; then, ocean levels were rising 13 feet per century, and people were forced to relocate inland every few years. Now, of course, it’s not so simple. Goodell writes:
“[T]here’s a terrible irony in the fact that it’s the very infrastructure of the Fossil Fuel Age—the housing developments on the coast, the roads, the railroads, the tunnels, the airports—that make us most vulnerable.”
Goodell concentrates most of his attention on the East Coast of the United States.
He examines how the foundation of Miami Beach, built from scratch as a tourist destination, makes it particularly subject to destruction.
He scrutinizes the Navy base at Norfolk and the efforts of those in charge of maintaining it to prepare for the future in a “climate denial hotspot.” The author also traveled around the world to explore the possibly futile efforts to preserve Venice from rising water and to see what is occurring in the Marshall Islands, whose future as a nation looks insecure. Notes of hope about the possibilities afforded by human flexibility and ingenuity occasionally lighten some of the grimness.
The Water Will Come is a frightening, scientifically grounded, and starkly relevant look at how climate change will affect coastal cities and how the impending rise in sea levels caused by increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the air will make life on the edge of the ocean very different over the next century.
In her engrossing new memoir, Lab Girl, Hope Jahren uses her skills as a geobiologist, scientist, and poet to provide a thrilling account of her discoveries of the secret lives of plants.
A professor at the University of Hawaii, Ms. Jahren conveys the utter strangeness of plants: these machines, “invented more than 400 million years ago,” that create sugar out of inorganic matter—wondrous machines upon which human life itself depends.
Jahren describes the sound of plants growing in the Midwest:
“At its peak, sweet corn grows a whole inch every single day, and as the layers of husk shift slightly to accommodate this expansion, you can hear it as a low continuous rustle if you stand inside the rows of a cornfield on a perfectly still August day.” She also describes the miraculous ability of a cactus to sit, under a blazing desert sun, waiting years for rain: It sheds “its roots to prevent the parched soil from sucking all the water back out of it,” then begins to contract, until its spines “form a dense and dangerous fur protecting what is now a hard, rootless ball of plant.”
In his deeply disturbing book, Plastic Ocean, Charles Moore shares a firsthand account of how plastics pervade our oceans in unimaginable ways, killing marine life and causing wide-ranging environmental and health effects.
Captain Moore, a lifelong seafarer, was spurred to activism when his boat stalled in a remote area of the Pacific and he noticed a visible proliferation of plastic bits and other trash floating on the water’s surface. It was an ominous indicator of the cavalier way in which humans dispose of tons of plastic trash.
This initial discovery led Moore on a decades-long investigation into plastic production, distribution, and chemical makeup, which revealed a level of pollution far more insidious than people realized.
The rise of “disposable” products coupled with inexpensive mass-production processes resulted in an unprecedented number of plastic bottles, lighters, shopping bags, straws, diapers, and other detritus being thrown away each year. Way too much of it winds up in the ocean. Growing numbers of vulnerable animals are ingesting these materials and suffering, as a result, from malnutrition, unhealthy offspring, and death.
Evidence suggests that the entire food chain may be affected.
The Overstory, by Richard Powers, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of the natural world.
Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us.
This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. It is also a story depicting the battles between corporations and environmental activists fighting for whose rights will reign supreme.
It’s clear who is losing that battle now.
Corporations have doggedly pursued rights over the past 200 years that have shaped the law and the playing field in their favor.
It’s time to create a more even playing field, or better yet, tilt the field in favor of the environment.
In an informative post on The Important Relationship between Forests and Water, Austa Somvichian-Clausen makes the case for protecting the rights of both. Below is an excerpt from that post.
“There are few resources, if any, more vital to life than water. Whether it be drinking water, or water in our homes for bathing and cleaning dishes, not one day goes by that we don’t need and use water. The average American uses an estimated 80-100 gallons of water per day. For many of us, having access to clean drinking water and running water in our homes is a necessity that we often take for granted. According the United Nations, 85 percent of the world’s population lives in the driest half of the planet, and 783 million people do not have access to clean water.
But, people aren’t the only ones who need water—animals need clean water too, and for many species, water pollution can mean extinction. The loss of access to clean water, and the pollution of water sources, is partially due to deforestation.
Water availability has a direct impact on the health of forests and their inhabitants, which shows the importance of the relationship between forests and water. Trees are made up of more than 50 percent water and need a steady source of it in order to grow and stay healthy. A healthy 100-foot-tall tree can take 11,000 gallons of water from the soil and release it into the air again, as oxygen and water vapor, in a single growing season. They “drink” in the water using their small, hair-like roots. Water from the soil enters their roots and is carried up the tree’s trunk all the way to the leaves.
Trees serve as natural sponges, collecting and filtering rainfall and releasing it slowly into streams and rivers, and are the most effective land cover for maintenance of water quality. The ability of forests to aid in the filtration of water doesn’t only provide benefits to our health and the health of an ecosystem, but also to our pocketbooks. Forest cover has been directly linked to drinking water treatment costs, so the more forest in a source water watershed, the lower the cost to treat that water. Forests provide these benefits by filtering sediments and other pollutants from the water in the soil before it reaches a water source, such as a stream, lake or river.
Having a buffer of forestland by streams and riverbanks does even more good than just filtering the water. They also help prevent erosion of sediment into the water, help to recharge the water table by allowing water to enter the ground and even the shade of trees play an important role in the lives of certain fish. Fish species, such as trout and salmon, are sensitive to changes in water temperature and will only lay their eggs in cool water, which is where the role of shady trees come in.”
There is no question in my mind that humans need to start standing up for the rights of water and trees. Unfortunately, we haven’t spent the last 200 years and billions of dollars lobbying for their rights. I’m hoping not only that someone soon will write the book, We the Trees and Water, but also that all of us humans can mobilize to fight the right fight—not the right for more corporate power, but the right of all species for sustainability. Environmental rights are far more important to the planet than the rights of corporations. May we make it happen.
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Yikes! Our grandkids are in for a terrible future,. Thanks as always for your discerning discourse on the state of the planet!