Jen will also be collaborating with Dr. Laurie Richmond during her visit to teach a scenario planning workshop and will be participating in a colloquium with students from the Environment & Community Graduate Program.

The series is co-organized by the Schatz Energy Research Center and the Environment & Community Graduate Program.  For more information, see here.

Helton Fellowships provide financial assistance in the form of “micro-grants” for law students and young professionals to pursue field work and research on significant issues involving international law, human rights, humanitarian affairs, and related areas.

Jen will use her fellowship to research community-led relocation in the South Pacific.

Facing Climate Change just released a series of four, five-minute films that tell the story of global climate change through local people living in the Northwest. The films feature oyster growers, potato farmers, and Northwest tribes, revealing changing landscapes and plans for adapting to future change. Facing Climate Change paired the films with short summaries by Jen Marlow.

Watch the films here.

Visiting scholars in Arctic Studies, Law, Indigenous Rights, and Resource Development will teach two exciting courses in spring quarter:

1) Business in the Arctic—Working with Law and Policy in Resource Development (3 credits), Thursdays, 1:30–4:20 PM

Dr. Sari Graben, UW 2012–13, Canada–US Fulbright Chair

The course will provide an overview of the most recent legal and political developments in the Arctic, this course will emphasize challenges posed by environmental and global changes and developments in various areas of Arctic governance and will be organized around particular resource development activities. This will allow students to be exposed to the complex issues facing the Arctic from both an international and domestic perspective and to address legal/policy frameworks for dealing with them. (Photo: Jen Marlow.)

2) Indigenous Land Claim Treaties in North America and the Arctic (5 credits), Fridays, 9:30–12:30 PM

Tony Penikett, JSIS 2012–13 Visiting Scholar; Senior Advisor Arctic Security Program, Munk Centre of Global Affairs and the Duncan Gordon Foundation; former premier of the Yukon

The course will address the precedents or foundations of 20th century land claims agreements in North America including the Mexican conquest, the Cherokee cases at the Marshall Court, and the 400-plus Canadian and U.S. treaties that followed. Treaty negotiations and settlements in Alaska and northern Canada will be compared to those in Greenland and Norway.

More information on the scholars:

Sari Graben, LL.B. LL.M. Ph.D., currently serves as an Arctic Policy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Queen’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy, Queen’s University, Toronto. Graben’s primary research interests are in the field of administrative law, contract law, and comparative law with a special focus on issues raised by environmental contracting, privatization, and collaborative governance in the Arctic.

Tony Penikett, a Vancouver-based mediator, served in politics for 25 years including two years in Ottawa as Chief of Staff to federal New Democratic Party Leader Ed Broadbent MP; five terms in the Yukon Legislative Assembly; and two terms as Premier of Canada’s Yukon Territory (1985-92). His government negotiated final agreement for First Nation land claims in the territory and passed pioneering education, health, language legislation, as well as leading a much-admired bottom-up economic planning process.

Links to Additional Resources about the Arctic

Re-Locate Project: Three Degrees is supporting Re-Locate, a group of artists, architects, anthropologists, and others from around the world working to identify issues underlying planned and forced relocation, expose obstacles to human mobility, and instigate situational, culturally specific responses in the built environment.

Brookings Institute: The Brookings Institute recently hosted an event in Washington, D.C., ”Arctic Indigenous Peoples, Displacement, & Climate Change: Tracing the Connections.” See here for audio file, presentations, and case studies presented by experts.

“In the Beautiful, Threatened North:” Ian Frazier’s review of Subhankar Banerjee’s book, Arctic Voices.

I spoke on Friday evening in conjunction with Land of Rivers, a film by the Environmental Justice Foundation. On Sunday I participated on a panel about ”Climate Justice, Human Rights, and Video Advocacy” with two other women climate justice lawyers: Julia Olson, Executive Director of Our Children’s Trust, an organization that empowers youth to protect the Earth’s climate for Future Generations; and Kelly Matheson, Program Manager at WITNESS, an international human rights NGO that uses video to change human rights law. We had a great time.

Here’s the description of our panel presentation:

With the rise of popular movements such as Occupy and Arab Spring, citizens around the world have—once again—reoccupied the public realm with powerful arguments for human rights and justice. It is no different in the context of climate change. Here in the U.S., youth from over 12 states are reoccupying the atmosphere. As part of the TRUST Campaign, these youth are suing the U.S. and state governments to protect the atmosphere for present and future generations. This workshop will walk participants through the impacts of climate change on human rights both here and abroad, setting the global context for why the TRUST Campaign is so important. We will introduce the young and courageous plaintiffs behind the case, provide up-to-date status on current TRUST litigation, and claim the power of film to support climate change litigation.

Youth in Washington (represented by Our Children’s Trust) filed the original case seeking to protect the atmosphere for present and future generations under the public trust doctrine.

Amici argued in their brief that the inequities of climate change threaten human rights and that international human rights law is applicable in the youth plaintiffs’ atmospheric trust case.

In its Answer, the State argued that human rights arguments are “irrelevant to the issues before the Court,” (Answer at 3) and that public trust law in Washington is well-defined, making “the Court’s resort to anything outside the judicially-determined doctrine unnecessary” (Answer at 6).

You can read the State’s Answer here. What are your thoughts about the State’s position?

Also note: A trial court in Texas finds the atmosphere protected under the public trust doctrine and the Texas Constitution.

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote in Upside Down that poor people cannot eat promises. Galeano also wrote that among all the rights encompassed within UN treaties, the right to dream is missing from the list. Fearing that the climate debate has become overly technocratic and bureaucratic, I leave Rio fearing that by attempting to provide an accurate analysis and accounting of what actually happened there, I might miss big picture themes that demand a different, more nourishing outcome than a legally binding agreement. What about a different way of life, a different way of solving problems than the status quo, or renewed belief that systemically dreamy solutions are indeed possible?

At his booth at the People’s Summit, the director of a Portuguese climate justice organization told me that “our problems are as big as our ignorance. And our ignorance is big. We don’t know ourselves and we’re trying to change the world.” What future do we want? Do we even know how to live our vision, even if the text bound us legally to it? I left the Rio+20 Conference on Thursday afternoon following youth and civil society groups that staged a walk out, chanting, “The future we want is not from here.” As David Nussbaum, head of WWF UK, Tweeted, “’The Future We Want:’ It’s more a case of The Future We’ll Get If We Rely on Politicians.”

“If They Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let Them Sleep.”

It’s virtually certain that my dream of a world that is not only livable in 100 years but that is also equitable and ecological, where laws and policies revolve around the rights of Earth and all of its peoples, will not come by way of an international environmental treaty convened in a machine gun–patrolled pavilion two hours away from the People’s Summit. If not done in legally binding texts, how will the global community implement a shared vision for the future and hold itself (and ourselves) accountable? One way might be through a power shift that reifies imagination as the seat of true power. At Friday’s People’s Summit, one speaker at the concluding session said, “If they don’t let us dream, we won’t let them sleep.”

Demands of participants of the two opposing camps—1) the boring and dreary official Conference crowd huddled inside air-conditioned tents in Barra de Tijuca reaffirming old agreements and 2) the crowd at the People’s Summit camp pissing in flooded Porta potties and jumping over mud puddles the size of the buses in the Flamengo Park brownfield dreaming of new ideas—grew increasingly apart as the days went on. Judging from this scenario, the winds of radical behavior change will blow from the bottom-up rather from the top-down. In her role as an Elder advising heads of state during a high-level roundtable, Mary Robinson said “the legacy won’t be the document you endorse but the mobilization of people to create the future they desire.” Former Irish President Robinson concluded by quoting Michelangelo, who said: “The greatest danger is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it’s too low and we reach it.”

Nevertheless, despite the purpose of the UN meeting to promote cooperation and global connection, fragmentation contributed to deep-seated rifts among competing left- and right-brain approaches to sustainable development. I felt, and I talked to others who agreed, meaningless walking around the Conference center trying to pretend that the meeting was important. How could something so meaningful feel so meaningless? Perhaps the real reason why 50,000 people decided to attend Rio +20 was the need to cope and connect with others over the reliable disappointment that the only thing Rio would deliver is the expectation of disaster. Across the city at the People’s Summit, folks were not waiting for governments to act. Expression and dreams were alive, full, and contagiously lovely.

Rio+20 at Heart Shows a Power Shift from West to East, North to South

As one speaker the People’s Summit put it, false solutions must be demystified. So, what about human rights? What role do rights play in sustainability? Any hint of rights-based language proposed in the Rio+20 text was all but stricken by the United States, a country that arguably supports the most robust and developed legal system in the world. It’s looking more important that rights come from dreams not treaties. Maybe then we would live differently, if we stopped waiting for people to speak alive what we in our hearts already know? Maybe the right to dream is more important than pretend rights that exist on paper only. Paper counts for naught, as youth activists at the Rio+20 Conference demonstrated by ripping up the final Rio+20 text in an act of disappointment and defiance.

What might be examples of other false solutions? Brazil (among other countries including India) embedded the right to food in its constitution. But last night on my way out the door to the airport, my Brazilian friend Carlos expressed his view that Bolsa Família, an anti-poverty social welfare program for Brazil’s poor, is nothing more than a vote-buying scheme to keep corrupt politicians such as President Dilma (who apparently have lifelong pensions) in power. In Carlos’s eyes, social welfare schemes thus become yet another platform for leveraging power.

The same argument can be made against calls for a “green economy.” How important was the “green economy”—considered by Gro Harem Bruntland and many other top western officials to be the Conference’s defining issue—to the sustainable development debate? At the People’s Summit, people chanted, “Nao economia Verde!” holding signs saying, “We reject the GREED economy.” Under the green economy, the world becomes merchandise. Women become merchandise. Rights, even, become merchandise. Probably the most powerful expression rejecting the calls for a “green” economy was statement by a representative of NGO Focus on the Global South who replaced the concept of sustainable development with a new maxim. “The objective,” he said, “is of sustainable redistribution, not sustainable development. We can’t grow forever.” Meanwhile, back at Barra de Tijuca, the United States crossed out any reference to “common but differentiated responsibilities” that would require wealthy, industrialized countries to work harder than poorer countries to remediate their ecological footprints.

However, Nick Clegg, the head of the UK delegation, picked up on the telltale signs of a power shift from west to east. “We no longer live in a neocolonial world where a small number of governments can get together and write a text and say to the rest of the world[,] you have to accept this. The developing world is much more assertive.” (Adam Vaughan, “Rio +20 Summit: The Final Day as it Happened,” The Guardian, June 22, 2012.) Clegg went on to say that “[t]he political significance of Rio is that the G77 nations are antagonistic to our European ideas on the green economy. They were worried about some of the process issues around the [Sustainable Development Goals].” (Id.) Rio’s focus on the green economy interpreted sustainability to mean sustained growth, which is the opposite of sustainability.

Is Happiness Replacing Human Rights?

Impending questions circled like hawks around whether Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs] will work on a parallel track with Millenium Development Goals [MDGs], or whether this new focus on a green economy will drive a wedge between the environment and development? Secretary General Ban Ki Moon expressed his hopes that the two tracks will merge. The expectation is that SDGs and MDGs will be fully complimentary, but we must wait and see while a small working group of  states hammers this out. Also, despite that the UN Charter and the Stockholm Conventions both recognized the right to a healthy environment, the Rio Principles do not include the right to a healthy environment. We are going backwards and forwards at the same time.

Although some gains were made on operationalizing Principle 10, a remnant of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit that emphasizes procedural rights to participation in environmental decision-making at the national level, Principle 10 doesn’t go far enough to address substantive global issues like climate change. As one UNEP official said to me, the rights to a healthy environment continue to be considered 3^rd generation rights. A healthy environment is a precondition to the full realization of the entire suite of human rights, so the right to a healthy environment should be—by order of common sense—a first generation right as important as voting and freedom of speech. First generation rights protect that which is essential to human life and dignity. The right to a healthy environment is a core right, not a sideline right that should be relegated to the bench. My fear is that all the talk at Rio+20 about measuring “happiness” (Gross National Happiness Index) as an alternative to GDP is replacing talk about human rights. Human well-being, and the rights essential to realizing human well-being, are essential. Yet with out such rights, what’s next? Happiness? I don’t think so.

So Why Go?

It’s so easy to be cynical and to find a problem in every answer. Perhaps the deep seated frustration will motivate people to work outside the UN process to fill in the gaps left by Rio+20, as Mary Robinson suggested during her roundtable comments. Perhaps lawyers and judges can work on a parallel track to ensure the implementation, compliance, and enforcement of  conventions on biodiversity and climate change at a national level. While judges do not see themselves as advocates for international action on the environment, lawyers can play the role of ensuring that citizens have access to justice in order to hold governments accountable.

So, what’s the point of attending these meetings when you don’t expect much out of them? What’s the value of your dissent if you’re an insider playing pretend? The problem is that you don’t expect much out of the process, and it doesn’t expect much out of you. As Guardian reporter Jo Confino put it, “Watching the heads of state at Rio read out their prepared statements, one after the other in a seemingly endless procession, is far worse than watching paint dry…. You literally feel one’s life force being sucked out.”

That said, one benefit of attending was being present to the pain and excitement of it all. Another was feeling the satisfaction that comes from refusing to participate passively from the convenience and comfort of home. As Malcom Gladwell wrote in the New Yorker, “the revolution will not be tweeted.” The question I, and many others, are left with is: Rio plus what? Let’s unleash the power of dreaming, imagination, and innovation. As my former boss at Ecotrust, Spencer Beebe, has written in Grist, “When we look at the world through the [local] lens, we see reasons for hope that have been building these 20 years. Looking back through that local lens, we see what is possible, not what has failed. We see what can happen when you release the energy of people working at home, rooted in its particularities, drawing on the immediacy of local self-interest in improving the health and resilience of the community and ecosystems upon which people depend.”

My eyes are wide open after walking through the air-conditioned tents at the official Conference one day and hopping muddy puddles the size of busses at the People’s Summit the next. Now I am exhausted. I am home. Rio plus what? = now. What will I do with this knowledge? I will dream.

~Thanks to Dean Chahim for introducing me to Eduardo Galeano.

In the May 9, 2012, Op-Ed, Game Over for the Climate, Dr. James Hansen, the esteemed NASA climate scientist, spoke out against the ethical implications of inaction: “Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait—we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.”

The technical environmental issues related to emissions reductions have now become moral issues. They have become issues of human rights and human dignity. Climate change affects the very elements that lie at the heart of human rights doctrine.

It is thus difficult to conceptualize the human rights impacts of climate change without taking into account the disproportionate impact that global warming will have on the poor and on future generations.

A group of faith-based communities serving the citizens of Washington state who are concerned about these impacts recently filed an amicus curiae memorandum in support of direct review in the Washington Supreme Court of a case filed against the State of Washington to protect the atmosphere for future generations. The Superior Court dismissed the case in February, 2012.

Washington youth (“Our Children”) brought the case against the Washington State. Our Children are requesting the Washington Supreme Court to declare that the atmosphere is a public trust resource and that the State has a duty to protect it according to best available science. Our Children also request injunctive relief in the form of a plan that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent per year.

By filing an amicus curiae memorandum, Amici are drawing the Court’s attention to the important links between climate-induced human rights impacts and the diverse calls of faith-based communities for moral action on climate change.

Amici include Bishops Wm Chris Boerger, Robert D. Hofstad, and Martin D. Wells of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; Faith Action Network; The Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ; The Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Methodist Church; The Right Reverend Gregory Rickel, VIII Bishop of Olympia, The Episcopal Church in Western Washington; The Sisters of St Joseph of Peace; and Washington Unitarian Universalist Voices for Justice.

Amici urge the Washington Supreme Court to consider drawing upon international human rights instruments as guidance when interpreting Washington’s public trust doctrine. To warrant direct review, the Court must find “a fundamental and urgent issue of broad public import which requires prompt and ultimate determination.” RAP 4.2(a)(4). The atmosphere is a common, essential natural resource, and its substantial impairment threatens the fundamental human rights of citizens in Washington and around the world, particularly those of the most vulnerable. The atmosphere’s protection under the public trust is consistent with principles of international law, and its destruction is fundamentally an issue of broad public import that merits direct and urgent review. Accordingly, Amici submit that this Court should grant Petitioner’s Petition for Direct Review.

Read a copy of the Motion and the Memorandum.

For more information on atmospheric trust litigation, or to get involved, please visit the website of Our Children’s Trust.

After the week-long course, one of my biggest learnings was that more advocates should seek out tools (like scenario thinking) that allow new ideas to refresh old ideologies. For as statistician John Tukey said, “Far better an approximate answer to the right question, than an exact answer to the wrong question.” Too often we get stuck asking and answering the wrong questions. It’s safe. But safe futures are unseen futures.

I’ll be more specific. How did my thinking change?

The training was very hands-on. Participants broke up into three teams, and each team shaped a scenario around a focus question. My scenario teams’s initial focus question was, “How will changing global inequality impact social stability over the next ten years?”

My old assumptions were that 1) the environment and climate change would be central to the storyline; 2) stability would decrease under all scenarios; and 3) change would be slow (too slow). None of these turned out true.

Thus, new beliefs emerged: 1) Other forces besides climate change exert equally strong leverage on social stability—climate change was an underlying force rather than a separate issue and the scenario was just as relevant; 2) nothing is inevitable; and 3) logic can contradict and still be logical.

Areas that I identified I need to learn more about: 1) What military leaders think about the security narrative for the 21st century in light of increasing inequality?; 2) Keep looking to the developing world as a laboratory for the future. New institutions and leaders are emerging outside the industrialized countries that will reshape the world as we know it. What as an internationally minded lawyer does this mean about the role of transnational law in the future?; and 3) How can I  learn more about presidential leadership in emerging countries (young leaders especially, such as Kim Jong-un of North Korea).

After the week-long scenario exercise, a new focal question emerged in my mind. What question were we really asking when we started? I came up with this: Which parts of the developing world will have the most significant impact on optimism in America over the next 20 years?

Overall, scenario thinking tools gave me the freedom and courage to interrogate official futures as well as my own logic and assumptions. I left still wondering whether scenario thinking tools can be as useful for the powerless as they have been for the Fortune 500 companies that have used scenarios to shape markets for decades.

Here’s a graphic recording (click here to enlarge) of the workshop’s final debrief, highlighting themes and elements of story, uncertainty, creativity, and collaboration as key to the process of developing and using scenarios to plan for uncertainty. Image credit © Lynn Carruthers, GBN

Rio+20 will be, in the words of the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “one of the most important conferences in the history of the United Nations and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to gear the world on sustainable development path.” More than 100 heads of state or government have confirmed attendance and the Brazilian host government is expecting fifty thousand people. Over 18,000 people have registered for the Conference.