Forum: Ruling won’t end effort for the rights of natural world
Published 1:30 am Saturday, November 29, 2025
By Don Dillinger / Herald Forum
“This story is far from over.”
So said Rachel Kurtz-McAlaine, of Standing for Washington, in her statement in The Herald (“Judge invalidates legal rights for Snohomish River approved by voters,” The Herald, Nov. 24)
The “story” is the ongoing conflict between human greed and the natural world; the battle between human health and the health of the biosphere, the war between corporate “persons” and the community’s right to a clean environment. The corporate world seems to always hold the winning cards, in part because a basic principle of our legal system is private property, naturally enough.
The judge in this case made the necessary decision, under current Washington law.
It is obvious that we can’t survive on the planet without making use of natural materials, like air, water, oil and minerals. We rely upon living things too, like wheat, corn, cattle, fowl; these we actively (and lovingly) cultivate, to supply our bodies with fuel and our bank accounts with credits. But it is finally becoming obvious, to all but those whose salaries depend on their not noticing, that the limits of natural adaptation to human activity are being tested. Our legal system evolved in a different world, when the notion of limits to growth was utter fantasy: a whole continent stretched endlessly westward.
That was then. And now? Humanity confronts a new and daunting reality. Almost everywhere one turns there are planetary boundaries on the verge of, or in the active stages of, collapse. (See forthegenerations.org for more information. Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, New Mexico are doing likewise.)
There should be a bright legal boundary drawn to mark the No Mans Land where the digging, mining, growing, dredging, paving, burning pauses. That is the line that a Green Amendment draws in a state constitution. In the Bill of Rights section a place of sufficient legal force to play the role it must play, protecting human health and the millions of species we in turn depend upon: our ecosystem.
A Green Amendment like the one the people of Pennsylvania and Montana voted into their constitutions, which elevated clean air, water and soil to the level of a fundamental human right, like freedom of speech and religion. That made it possible for a community group’s lawsuit to prevail in the Montana Supreme Court against a massive proposed gold mining project jeopardizing the Yellowstone River in 2020, and for a student group to win another Supreme Court decision against the state’s fossil fuels-based energy policies in 2023.
The destruction of lakes, rivers, forests, species, ground water and air for growth’s sake, “to provide affordable housing,” is, happily, not needed. We can continue intelligent managed growth under the state’s Growth Management Act; but we really should hew more tightly to its provisions. And we might consider adopting a Washington Green Amendment, to incarnate the values of clean air and water for all life. For our grandchildren’s children.
Don Dillinger lives in Snohomish.
