Beginning on Monday, June 12, 2023, in the Lewis & Clark County District Court in Helena, Judge Kathy Seely presiding, attorneys for 16 youth plaintiffs in the case ofHeld v. State of Montana began. We have recorded the proceedings via Zoom, and produced for you this daily audio digest.
Judge Seely opened the second day of this trial at 9 a.m on June 13, 2023, one year to the day of the Great Yellowstone River flood of 2022, which closed Yellowstone National Park, and wreaked havoc along the path of the river, including Livingston, hometown of one of the youth plaintiffs, Eva.
Dr. Cathy Whitlock
Today’s hearing began with expert testimony from Dr. Cathy Whitlock, an earth scientist and professor emeritus at Montana State University, who is an expert in environmental change and paleoclimatology, and was a lead author of the 2017 Montana Climate Assessment. http://kgvm.org/show/held-dr-cathy-whitlock-testimony-6-13-23/
At 9 a.m. on Monday, June 12, 2023, in the Lewis & Clark County District Court in Helena, Judge Kathy Seely presiding, attorneys for 16 youth plaintiffs in the case of Held v. State of Montana began. We recorded the proceedings via Zoom, and produced this audio digest, which begins with opening statements by Plaintiff Attorney, Roger Sullivan, and Defense Attorney for the State of Montana, Assistant Attorney General, Michael D. Russel, which is broadcast in their entirety.
The plaintiff’s first expert witness was Mae Nan Ellingson, who had been the youngest delegate to the 1972 Montana Constitutional Convention, which established inalienable rights to “a clean and healthy environment,” which she spoke of passionately and proudly. She explained the process by which a bipartisan group of 100 delegates from all over the state of Montana met 51 years ago to create our current Montana State Constitution. http://kgvm.org/show/held-mae-nan-ellingson-testimony-6-12-23/
Then, the lead plaintiff, Ricki Held, was called to the stand. Unfortunately, there were technical problems that rendered her testimony so garbled, that we can not offer it in this audio digest. She spoke about the impacts that, just in her lifetime, have negatively affected her life and her family’s livelihood on their 3,000 acre ranch and motel near Broadus, MT, particularly the effects of drought and flood on the Powder River, which runs through it. http://kgvm.org/show/held-v-state-of-montana-ricki-held-testimony-6-12-23/
Fortunately, the audio problems were addressed by the time Steven Running, International Panel on Climate Change 2007 Nobel Laureate and University of Montana professor emeritus of ecosystem and conservation sciences, took the stand. Plaintiff attorney, Philip Gregory, questioned Professor Running at length about numerous aspects of the science of climate change, which we excerpt in this broadcast. Defense attorney, Mark Stermitz, raised several objections most of which Judge Seely denied. We include Mr. Stermitz’s entire cross-examination of Professor Running. http://kgvm.org/show/held-dr-steve-running-testimony-6-12-23/
In the afternoon, two more of the youth plaintiffs took the stand, Grace Gibson-Snyder, from Missoula, MT, who was 16 when the lawsuit was filed and is now 19, testified how smoke and excess heat affect her ability to play soccer, hike or any outdoor activity because of threats to our health. Here is an excerpt from her testimony. http://kgvm.org/show/held-v-state-of-montana-grace-testimony/
Eva, from Livingston, MT, who is now 17, but was 14 when the suit was filed, declined to give her last name on the stand. She testified to the effects climate change has had on her and her family. She described 7 hours of packing sand into sand bags as the waters were swiftly rising during last year’s flood of the Yellowstone River, which she noted occurred one year and a day before this trial was beginning, on June 13, 2022. Her family was forced to move from their home, when bridges connecting them to Livingston washed out in 2018.
According to a press release from Our Children’s Trust, “Held v. State of Montana is a constitutional climate lawsuit brought by 16 Montana youth against their State to protect their equal rights to a healthy environment, life, dignity, and freedom. They are suing because their government keeps promoting and supporting fossil fuel extraction and burning, which is worsening the climate crisis and harming these youths’ lives.
The youth are suing to protect their state constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment” as well as the air, waters, wildlife and their public lands that are threatened by drought, heat, fires, smoke, and floods. They are also suing to have their rights to individual dignity and equality enforced under the Montana Constitution.
The youth plaintiffs do not seek money. They are asking the court to declare that Montana’s fossil fuel energy policies and actions violate young people’s state constitutional rights.
The 16 youth plaintiffs in this case are represented by attorneys with Our Children’s Trust, the Western Environmental Law Center, and McGarvey Law.
Our Children’s Trust is the world’s only nonprofit public interest law firm that exclusively provides strategic, campaign based legal services to youth from diverse backgrounds to secure their legal rights to a safe climate. We work to protect the Earth’s climate system for present and future generations by representing young people in global legal efforts to secure their binding and enforceable legal rights to a healthy atmosphere and safe climate, based on the best available science. Globally, we support youth-led climate cases in front of national courts, regional human rights courts, and UN bodies.” http://www.ourchildrenstrust.org
Brendan Ballou is a federal prosecutor, who served as Special Counsel for Private Equity in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. Previously, he worked in private practice, and before that, in the National Security Division of the Justice Department, where he advised the White House on counter-terrorism and other policies.
His book, PLUNDER: PRIVATE EQUITY’S PLAN TO PILLAGE AMERICA, is published by Public Affairs Books. He is clear in stating that “The views expressed in this book do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Department of Justice.”
He pulls no punches in characterizing what private equity firms are doing as PLUNDER and a PLAN TO PILLAGE AMERICA.
We spoke with Brendan Ballou via Skype on June 2, 2023 from his office in Washington, D.C.
The Bozeman Film Society presents the premiere of Montana-made feature film Mending the Line on Thursday, June 8, at the Emerson Crawford Theater. It’s A benefit for the Warriors & Quiet Waters Foundation, and the evening kicks off at 6 PM in the ballroom with a no-host social, raffles, and booths with Warriors and Quiet Waters, Yellow Sally, Anglers West, RO Driftboat, and the American Legion. Raffle items include G4 Waders from Simms | The Rivers Edge, women’s fly-fishing clothing from Yellow Sally, a Patagonia Fishing pack from Angler’s West, the Steve Ramirez “Casting” book collection from Lyons Press, 2 Sage Foundation fly-rod combos from Far Bank and more! $10 raffle tickets sold online and at the door.
Tickets available online at bozemanfilmsociety.org or at the door and include 1 free raffle ticket!
A panel discussion follows with Stephen Camelio, Mending The Line Screenwriter/Producer; Brian Gilman, WQW alumni/staff and MTL cast member Larry Weidinger, CSM US Army (Ret); and Joe Urbani, Urbani Fisheries.
We spoke with Mending the Line’s director, Joshua Caldwell on May 30, 2023 via Skype. He is pictured at the top of the post on location with Sinqua Walls and Brian Cox.
Wes Studi, Sinqua Wells, Brian Cox & Perry Mattfield
From Oscar-winning filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, WILD LIFE follows conservationist Kris Tompkins on an epic, decades-spanning love story as wild as the landscapes she dedicated her life to protecting. After falling in love in mid-life, Kris and the outdoorsman and entrepreneur, Doug Tompkins, left behind the world of the massively successful outdoor brands they’d helped pioneer like Patagonia, The North Face, and Esprit, and turned their attention to a visionary effort to create National Parks throughout Chile and Argentina. WILD LIFE chronicles the highs and lows of their journey to effect the largest private land donation in history.
WILD LIFE will screen at the Mendocino Film Festival on Friday, June 2nd at 10:00 a.m. in the Festival Tent, as well as Sunday, June 4th at 10:20 a.m. at Coast Cinemas.
Screen shot from WILD LIFE showing five national parks created by Kris and Doug Tompkins in Chile and Argentina.
GROUNDWORKS travels from traditional acorn gathering spots to the studios where the “Groundworks” performance was rehearsed before being shared at sunrise on Alcatraz—nearly 50 years after the Indians of All Tribes occupied the island and brought attention to Native American rights. Originally initiated by contemporary dance company Dancing Earth Creations, the “Groundworks” project was designed to amplify the oft-forgotten Native presence everywhere in the Americas.
Groundworks weaves together four artists’ stories and their contemporary ways of sharing traditional Indigenous knowledge. By exploring their creative practices, it highlights these Native artists’ contemporary relationships to the Pomo, Ohlone, Tongva, and Wappo/Onastatis territories, languages and traditions. Their efforts to “re-story” the land through creative reclamation are important facets of the Land Back movement.
Bernadette Smith is a Pomo singer, musician, and playwright from the Point Arena Manchester Band of Pomo Indians. She is an activist leader involved with Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and brought her whole family to Standing Rock to protect water rights. She is currently working on reclaiming land traditionally used by her tribe for their acorn harvest, and on protecting the source of those acorns—the tan oak—from hack-and-squirt clearing to make way for managed redwoods.
Profiled in the documentary are Ras K’dee, Pomo, a musician with ties to multiple bands in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties; Bernadette Smith, singer and dancer from the Manchester-Point Arena Band of Pomo Indians; Kanyon Sayers-Roods, a multidisciplinary Ohlone artist from Indian Canyon, a sovereign Indian Nation outside of Hollister, California; and L. Frank, a Tongva-Acjachemen artist, tribal scholar, canoe builder, and language advocate.
We spoke with director, producer, writer and cinematographer, Ian Garrett, about his film, GROUNDWORKS, via Skype on May 16, 2023.
GROUNDWORKS will be screening at the Mendocino FilmFestival on June 4 at 3pm in the Festival Tent. A special program with Coastal Pomo dancers will open the program and a panel discussion will follow.
Maria Niro is a New York City-based artist and award-winning filmmaker whose work has been broadcasted on television and screened in theatres, festivals, and museums worldwide. She is a member of New Day Films, a filmmaker-run distribution company providing social issue documentaries to educators founded by American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist Julia Reichert in 1971.
She serves on the advisory board of More Art, a nonprofit organization that supports collaborations between professional artists and communities to create public art and educational programs that inspire social justice.
As the National Gallery of Art put it for the East Coast Premiere of The Art of Un-War:
“Internationally renowned artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has dedicated his work and life to denouncing militarization and war. Maria Niro’s recent documentary The Art of Un-War follows Wodiczko’s trajectory from his birth in Warsaw during World War II, to his expulsion from Poland by the communist regime, to today. Combining sculptural elements and technology, Wodiczko’s projects often function as interventions in public spaces, disrupting the valorization of state-sanctioned aggression. Since the 1980s, his deft, site-specific projections of images onto the facades of office and government buildings have grown to incorporate recordings of personal stories told by war veterans, refugees, and immigrants, projected directly onto war memorials, often animating the busts of revered historic leaders. Niro documents many of his major works, including The Homeless Vehicle Project (1988–1989), created in collaboration with homeless communities in Montreal, Philadelphia, and New York City; The Hiroshima Projection (1999), projected onto the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, Japan; and the as-yet-unrealized project of transforming Paris’ monument to war, the Arc de Triomphe, into a temporary site for peace activism.”
As a nation, we are in the throes of a re-examination of history, but whose history, and who gets to tell it, and how do we live today with various versions of our history, that were memorialized in the past? How do we best evaluate and live with the impacts of different versions of history and the potential harm and even re-traumatization that a particular version creates?
What role does art play in this process? whose art? and for whom?
These are among the questions addressed by the filmmakers, Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, in their documentary, TOWN DESTROYER, which screens on Friday, June 2nd, at 1:00 PM at The Coast Cinemas.
You may recall the furor over whether or not to destroy or cover up the 13 panels of the 1930s murals by Popular Front artist, Victor Arnautoff, THE LIFE OF WASHINGTON, at San Francisco’s George Washington High School. Snitow & Kaufman film students, parents, Native American activists, artists of different ethnicities, scholars, and museum directors, all against a background of vivid cinematography of the controversial panels, as well as many other relevant works of art, both at the high school, and elsewhere across the country.
Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman’s films include the award-winning “Company Town,” “Between Two Worlds,” “Thirst”, “Secrets of Silicon Valley”, and “Blacks and Jews.”
Alan was a producer at the KTVU-TV News, the Bay Area Fox affiliate, for 12 years. Before that, he was an award winning News Director at KPFA-FM. He has served on the Boards of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, Film Arts Foundation, California Media Collaborative, Food and Water Watch, and much more.
Deborah Kaufman founded and for 13 years was Director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the first and largest independent Jewish film showcase in the world. She has been a Board member of the California Council for the Humanities, the New Israel Fund, and Amnesty International USA. She has been a consultant, programmer, lecturer, and activist with a variety of human rights, multicultural and media arts organizations.
We spoke with Deborah and Alan on May 8, 2023 via Skype.
“Early Days” Pioneer Monument by Frank Happersberger, Installed 1894 in SF Civic Center Plaza
The documentary, BODY PARTS, traces the evolution of “sex” on-screen from a woman’s perspective, uncovering the uncomfortable realities behind some of the most iconic scenes in cinema history and celebrating the courageous individuals leading the way for change. It’s an eye-opening investigation into the making of Hollywood sex scenes, shedding light on the actors’ real-life experiences, and tracing the legacy of exploitation of women in the entertainment industry, as well as recent hard fought changes in that industry.
On May 1, 2023, we spoke with Director, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, and Producer, Helen Hood Scheer, about BODY PARTS, which will be screening at this year’s Mendocino Film Festival at Crown Hall on Sunday June 4 at 1pm.
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is an Associate Professor at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television, where she heads the MFA Directing Documentary concentration. She has been making documentary films that focus on gender and representation for nearly two decades, starting with a 1999 experimental documentary about a blow-up doll (which screened at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, among other venues). Guevara-Flanagan’s documentary and experimental films have screened at the Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, and HotDocs film festivals and the Getty Museum. Her work has been broadcast on PBS and the Sundance Channel, received numerous awards, and been funded by ITVS, the Sundance Institute, the Tribeca Institute, Latino Public Broadcasting and California Humanities.
Helen Hood Scheer is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, freelance producer, and associate professor at California State University Long Beach, where she spearheads the creative nonfiction track and serves as the internship advisor for students in the Department of Film and Electronic Arts. In 2023, she won CSULB’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Throughout her instruction, service, and professional work, Helen is a strong advocate for students. In 2020, she received the Advancement of Women Award from the CSULB President’s Commission on the Status of Women, and both Helen and her students were featured in Claiming the Director’s Chair, an article expressing the CSU’s commitment to preparing the next generation of female filmmakers for California’s multi-billion dollar entertainment industry.
Katherine S. Newman became the Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs of the University of California in January of 2023. She was simultaneously appointed as the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at U. C. Berkeley. Dr. Newman is the author of fifteen books on topics ranging from technical education and apprenticeship, to the sociological study of the working poor in America’s urban centers, middle class economic insecurity under the brunt of recession, and school violence on a mass scale. She has written extensively on the consequences of globalization for youth, on the impact of regressive taxation on the poor, and on the history of American political opinion on the role of government intervention.
Her latest, co-authored with Elizabeth S. Jacobs, a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute, is MOVING THE NEEDLE: WHAT TIGHT LABOR MARKETS DO FOR THE POOR, published this month by the University of California Press. We spoke with Dr. Newman on April 24, 2023.
We end this edition of Forthright Radio with audio from the last floor speech that Montana’s first transwoman elected to Montana’s State Legislature, Zooey Zephyr, before she was censured by the necessary 2/3 vote of House on April 26, 2023. Her offense? Calling out that the gender affirming health care they were outlawing would result in deaths, and used the phrase, “blood on their hands.”
Articles pertinent to this edition of Forthright Radio:
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