Environmental rights amendment could justify almost anything
Belief that the world, or at least Connecticut, can be changed by grand but empty proclamations isn’t confined to the Lamont administration and its environmental protection commissioner, Katie Dykes, who recently tried to proclaim the prohibition of gasoline-powered cars. The belief infects much other environmental advocacy in the state, as indicated by the state constitutional amendment being promoted by leading Democratic state legislators and environmental activists.
It’s called the Environmental Rights Amendment.
“Each person,” the proposed amendment says, “shall have an individual right to clean and healthy air, water, soil, ecosystems, and environment and a safe and stable climate for the benefit of public health, safety, and the general welfare. The state shall not infringe upon these rights and shall protect these rights equitably for all people regardless of race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, gender, socioeconomic status, or geography.
“The state shall serve as trustee of all of the natural resources of this state, including its waters, air, flora, fauna, soils, and climate, and shall conserve, protect, and maintain these resources for the benefit of all people, including present and future generations. Any funds supporting the state in its obligations as trustee as stated in this section shall not be diverted for nontrust purposes. The rights stated in this section are equivalent to all other inalienable rights and may be directly invoked and enforced by the residents of this state.” What the heck does all this mean?
Is it another mechanism for requiring Connecticut residents to trade their reliable gasoline-powered cars for unreliable electric ones? Does it mean converting more electric power generation to politically correct mechanisms?
Will it affect the siting of power-generation facilities? Will it impede farming, hunting and fishing, housing and road construction, and industrial production?
How about human reproduction, population density and the state’s total population? After all, environmentalism tends to oppose population growth.
And exactly how may these new rights “be directly invoked and enforced by the residents of this state”?
No constitutional provision enforces itself, nor is any constitutional provision “enforced by the residents of this state,” at least under the state’s current form of government. Implementing all constitutional provisions requires action by the various branches of government — legislative, executive and judicial.
Nobody can know what the Environmental Rights Amendment
means, and that seems to be its point: to let people construe the amendment however they want, to bring lawsuits citing the amendment as authority for their policy desires that are not yet enacted, and to try to get courts to agree, thereby transferring legislative power away from the elected branches of government, the General Assembly and the governor, to the unelected branch, the judiciary.
The amendment easily could be construed to upend all life in Connecticut without ever submitting any specifics to the people or their elected representatives. So much for the right of the people to understand what government is doing or setting out to do. By approving the amendment, the people would be surrendering all their rights.
But if grand and vague constitutional amendments are the way of the future, how about proclaiming other rights for the courts to construe?
Why not the right to efficient government, a government that pursues the public interest instead of the special interest? Why not the right to schools that educate rather than propagandize and socially promote, and the right to be free of crime?
Environmental issues aren’t the only ones Connecticut has yet to resolve perfectly.
Indeed, to improve its environment Connecticut hardly needs something as grand but empty as the Environmental Rights Amendment. The state could do all sorts of ordinary things.
It could appropriate more to improve sewer and storm water drainage systems. It could invest more in converting trash to energy. It could legislate to reduce unrecyclable consumer product packaging. It could outlaw sales of “nip” liquor bottles, millions of which mar the landscape to pad the profits of the liquor lobby.
Issues like these are already pending. They just lack the grandeur of a constitutional amendment and the opportunity for pious posturing.