Our Children’s Trust: Where are the Baby Boomers?
In March, 2019, CBS 60 Minutes interviewed the young people involved in the lawsuit against the United States, Juliana vs. U.S. They were suing the nation.
In 2015, 21 youth, and organizational plaintiff Earth Guardians, filed their constitutional climate lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, against the U.S. government. Their complaint asserts that, through the government's affirmative actions that cause climate change, it has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources. READ MORE
We were moved by these young people. They spoke with such clarity and strength. We donated money to Our Children’s Trust. We breathed a sigh of relief. Someone else was taking care of the problem. They were young. They were smart and full of energy.
In our early adulthood, we had joined with others to protest nuclear power. We stood with others at the first major demonstration against the SATSOP plant in the state of Washington. We appeared again at protests against the Wolf Creek plant in Kansas. Soon after these protests and other modest efforts we retreated, along with the rest of the complacent generation, the baby boomers. We each got jobs, bought and remodelled homes, travelled, and entered the world of the 401K. Others were doing their part: they were buying 6 bedroom homes with 4 car garages, SUVs, and second homes.
This was our generation.
We supported the environmental movement only by donating money. That’s what many baby boomers did. We became passive resisters. We did passive things: we rarely owned more than one car. We recycled. It was our hope that someone else would get organized. Someone else would do the work for us. Now we’re burying the world in our own debris, shipping our plastic containers and shopping bags to China, Indonesia, and others. And now many around the world are saying: “No Mas! Keep your toxic trash, your shopping bags, and computer waste. Don’t send it to us.” And what we’ve learned most: solving the world’s garbage crisis cannot be left to households, to individuals, to individual choice, to recycling. The titans of industry were very clever in shifting this burden downward and by making this a problem for households to solve. By making recycling an individual burden our common responsibilities placed aside. There’s no better example of this than the failed recycling public messaging like the California effort to teach children to be personally responsible for our collective debris, Listen to that messaging. And then we can turn a blind eye. We expect can others to solve the problem for us: Indonesia, China. Let them eat our shopping bags and spent computer parts."
Please, please, take 20 minutes and listen to this BBC, Inquiry, podcast: Is Recycling Broken?
And for a time we even imagined that philanthropies might in some small way solve problems governments were failing to accomplish. Listen here to Anand Giridharadas’s interview with Trevor Noah. What we’ve learned: NGOs, philanthropies, civil society, are not saving the planet. We live in a world increasingly desperate: economic inequality, racism, authoritarianism, anti-semitism, rogue states, stateless societies, climate change.
For decades now we’ve heard the cry for reinvigorating the civil society (NGOs, Non-Profit, Local Communities…on and on). Government can’t take care of our problems so we create yet another fantastic imaginary (just like letting industry off the hook for recycling). Here we imagine that government is somehow distinct from the people who elect the government. And this fantasy produced a binary: government sector vs. non-government sector, or third sector. And the fantasy, ironically, has fueled right-wing, anti-government sentiment. And many sociologists articulated these communitarian fantasies and added to anti-government frenzy. We made government an alien OTHER. What the communitarians have almost universally failed to do is articulate that government is structured to serve particular interests and it’s not government that should be attacked but the particular interests it serves.
“Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now--broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized control trials--do not work. They fail, Cartwright and Hardie contend, because they do not enhance our ability to predict if policies will be effective.”
Nancy Cartwright
We turned to the liberal policy wonks and think tanks. We had hope that with good evidence-based policy the world might become a better place. It hasn’t. Nancy Cartwright, a contemporary British Philosopher (Durham University) has written a series of essays and books where she challenges nearly everything we believe to be true about policy science.
“As millions of Baby Boomers reach their golden years, the state of retirement in America is little short of a disaster. Nearly half the households with people aged 55 and older have no retirement savings at all. The real estate crash wiped out much of the home equity that millions were counting on to support their retirement. And the typical Social Security check covers less than 40% of pre-retirement wages—a number projected to drop to under 28% within two decades. Old-age poverty, a problem we thought was solved by the New Deal, is poised for a resurgence.”
And there are good reasons to be worried about the 401K retirement fraud. But how do we let that worry keep us from recognizing that the young and the old have so much in common.
Listen here to the January 2020 meeting of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. They have moved us closer to doomsday than ever before; and soon, late January 2021, we’ll almost certainly hear even more dire predictions. What is to be done? Can we continue to be passive resisters? Or do we join with the young people who have formed, Our Children’s Trust, not just by donating money, but by standing with and beside them, as they demand our attention. Or do we wait for environmental and nuclear disaster to wake us up from our 401K worries?