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
Sacramento State University Professor, Kathy Kasic, in Antarctica documenting the SALSA Project (photo courtesy of Billy Collins)
The Bozeman Doc Series afforded us the opportunity to interview the filmmaker of the film, of THE LAKE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD, Kathy Kasic, and the ‘main character,’ Professor of Ecology in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences at MSU Bozeman, John Priscu.
John Priscu holding a container extracted from Mercer Lake
He has been organizing expeditions since 1984. He is a principal investigator in the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project and SALSA, the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access project, which is the subject of this film. His work, and the work of his teams, have revolutionized our understanding of our Earth, as well as the diversity of life on our planet and beyond.
Kathy Kasic is a director/cinematographer and Associate Professor at California State University Sacramento. Twenty years ago she traded researching evolutionary biology in the Ecuadorian Amazon for filmmaking. Since then her artistic vision and craving for adventure have brought her to film off the bow of a ship, underwater in wild mountain rivers, and on the ice fields of Greenland and Antarctica. Using a sensorial emphasis on place to unveil the human relationship with the natural world, her 100+ productions have appeared at international festivals, on television (BBC, Discovery, Smithsonian, PBS, National Geographic), art galleries, museums (The Hirshhorn, Portland Art Museum, The Crocker), and won numerous awards. Most recently, Kasic field directed for BBC’s Earth Shot: Repairing Our Planet (feat. David Attenborough and Prince William) and directed The Lake at the Bottom of the World, a sensory vérité feature film about an international team of scientists exploring a subglacial lake 3,600 feet beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. She has been part of three National Science Foundation grants and mentored 12 graduate students. She believes that filmmaking is a way to give voice to what is not voiced, to see and hear more deeply, and to foster compassion across cultures.
THE LAKE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD will be screening at the Emerson Crawford Theater on Sunday, April 30th, 2023 at 7pm.
In this edition of Radio Goes to the Movies, we inquire about a new documentary from Bozeman based Grizzly Creek Films with director, Eric Bendick, PATH OF THE PANTHER.
Drawn in by the haunting specter of the Florida panther, it follows a wildlife photographer, veterinarians, ranchers, conservationists, and Indigenous people, who find themselves on the front lines of an accelerating battle between the forces of renewal and the forces of destruction that have pushed the Everglades to the brink of ecological collapse.
Once ubiquitous in North and South America, but now perched on the edge of extinction, this perilously small, sole remaining population of the panther east of the Mississippi is an emblem of our once connected world. A vision of what could be again.
We spoke with the Emmy Award winning director of Path of the Panther, Eric Bendick, about his work and this powerful new film via Skype on April 5, 2023.
It will be premiering on the National Geographic/Disney+ channel on April 28, 2023.
Source: FloridaWildlifeCorridor.org; Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission.
Dr. Michael Shermer is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is the co-founder of The Skeptics Society and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine. He has been a college professor since 1979, teaching courses such as Skepticism 101. He was a monthly columnist for Scientific American for 18 years.
Among his books are WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS; WHY DARWIN MATTERS; THE SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL, and GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE: REFLECTIONS OF A SCIENTIFIC HUMANIST. His latest book, CONSPIRACY: WHY THE RATIONAL BELIEVE THE IRRATIONAL, is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
We spoke with him via Skype on December 5, 2022. The next day, a New York jury found The Trump Organization guilty of 17 felonies, including conspiracy. The day after that, 3,000 officers conducted searches at 130 sites in 11 of Germany’s 16 states against the group, Reich Citizens, whose members it said adhered to a conglomerate of conspiracy theories, including the QAnon cult and the so-called Reich Citizens movement.
Articles and videos pertinent to this interview can be found here:
On October 27, 2022, attorneys for two environmental organizations, WildEarth Guardians and Project Coyote, a project of Earth Island Institute, filed a lawsuit against The State of Montana, by and through the MT Dept of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, and the MT Fish & Wildlife Commission. The suit was filed in MT First Judicial District Court in Lewis & Clark County.
The case named, WildEarth Guardians v. FWP, Cause No. DDV-25-2022 DK, alleges that the state’s wolf hunting and trapping policies violate the Montana Constitution, Montana Administrative Procedure Act, Public Trust Doctrine, and several federal laws meant to protect wildlife on federally-managed lands.
On November 10, 2022, a motion was filed asking The Court to prohibit the start of the state’s wolf-trapping season, as well as immediately halt the on-going wolf-hunting season, while the merits of the lawsuit are being considered. The conservation groups filed the time-sensitive motion with the wolf trapping and snaring season set to begin on November 28, 2022. The hunting season began in September. This motion asks the court to issue a temporary restraining order, followed by a preliminary injunction, to stop all recreational killing of wolves in the state pending resolution of the lawsuit.
On November 15, 2022, District Court Judge Christopher D. Abbott, granted a partial Temporary Restraining Order, with a hearing set for November 28, 2022. It’s set to expire November 29, 2022 at 5:00 p.m. The partial TRO requires MFWP to return to 2020 regulations with respect to wolf hunting and trapping quotas and “bag limits”, prohibits the use of snares, and limits quotas in former WMUs 110 (bordering Glacier NP), 313, and 316 (bordering Yellowstone NP).
In the 2021-2022 season, 273 wolves were killed by hunters and trappers—including 19 Yellowstone wolves—with nearly 70 percent of the wolves killed, after the trapping season began. As of November 15, 2022, hunters had already killed 56 wolves, while regulations permit hunters and trappers to kill an additional 395 wolves before the season ends in March 2023. The motion alleges that the conservation groups’ interests will be harmed beyond repair, if the court allows the hunting and trapping season to proceed while they fully litigate their case.
The motion—and the underlying lawsuit—claim that there are significant flaws in the population model used to estimate the total number of wolves in the state, and that since the quota of 456 wolves for this season relies upon a flawed population model, reaching the quota could have devastating consequences on the state’s wolf population. The motion states, “Montana does not have an accurate picture of how many wolves are living in Montana, and cannot sustainably and legally manage the species through another wolf hunt this winter.”
A listener asked us to investigate, and we share interviews with four people knowledgeable about the issues, Lizzy Pennock, an attorney with WildEarth Guardians;
Greg Lemon, Administrator of MFWP’s Communication and Education Division;
Pat Byorth, MT Fish & Wildlife Commissioner for Region 3, below
Michael Waasegijig Price, of The GREAT LAKES INDIAN FISH & WILDLIFE COMMISSION, which joined six tribes, who sued the state of Wisconsin in September of 2021 to prevent further wolf slaughter there.
Documents, articles and links pertinent to this episode of Ecotones:
Returning to Forthright Radio, award winning science journalist, broadcaster and author, Gaia Vince, has a new book out from Flatiron Press, NOMAD CENTURY: HOW CLIMATE MIGRATION WILL RESHAPE OUR WORLD.
Her first book, Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made, won the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, making her the first woman to win that prize outright.
We spoke with her via Skype on August 22, 2022.
The original broadcast included audio excerpts from the 100th birthday programs honoring James Lovelock, whose Gaia Theory revolutionized the way we approach global crises. Links to the full programs can be found below.
Articles/videos pertinent or referred to in the program can be found here:
Sara Dosa wrote, directed and produced the extraordinary documentary, FIRE OF LOVE. It premiered at this year’s Sundance Festival as the Day One film in the US Documentary Competition, & won the Jonathan Oppenheimer Editing Award for Erin Casper & Jocelyne Chaput’s superb editing, as well as raves from critics. Her work has won a Peabody Award for AUDRIE & DAISY and an Emmy Award for REMASTERED: TRICKY DICK AND THE MAN IN BLACK.
National Geographic Films acquired FIRE OF LOVE for release in 2022. It screens at the Mendocino Film Festival audiences on June 3rd & 4th at the Coast Cinemas.
FIRE OF LOVE recounts the love between, and work of, two young French volcanologists, Katia and Maurice Kraffts, whose courageous exploration and documentation of volcanoes revolutionized our understanding of Earth processes. They dedicated their lives to trying to answer questions like “what forms & re-forms the world.” and “What is it that makes the Earth’s heart beat, her blood flow?”
They were one in their obsession with volcanoes, but they were complementary in their approaches and division of labor, which certainly advanced the success of their work. When asked if they were the only volcanologist couples in one of their many media appearances, Maurice said he “doesn’t think there are any other couples, & if there are, I pity them, because it’s very hard for volcanologists to live together – it’s volcanic…. We erupt often.”
FIRE OF LOVE is dedicated to the 43 people who lost their lives on Mt. Unzen on June, 3, 1991, which is when Katia and Maurice Krafft were finally consumed by that eruption they were studying.
This interview with Gillen D’Arcy Wood was originally broadcast on June 10, 2015. His book, TAMBORA: THE ERUPTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, had just been published by Princeton University Press.
“Out of sight and out of mind, Tambora was the volcanic, stealth bomber of the early 19th century. Be it the retching cholera victim in Calcutta, the starving peasant children of Yunnan, China or County Tyrone, Ireland, the hopeful explorer of a North West Passage through the Arctic Ocean, or the bankrupt land speculator in Baltimore, the world’s residents were oblivious to the volcanic drivings of their fate.”
In 2015, it was 200 years after Tambora erupted cataclysmically with extremely dire global consequences. What can we learn from this event as we face our own challenges in a rapidly changing climate?
Gillen D’Arcy Wood is a professor of English and an environmental historian at the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he directs The Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities. Gillen D’Arcy Wood has written extensively on the cultural and environmental history of the 19th century, and is the author of The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860 (Palgrave, 2001), Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770-1840: Virtue and Virtuosity (Cambridge UP, 2010), an historical novel, Hosack’s Folly (Other Press, 2005).
Indigenous artisans, cooks and farmers tell us this story (in Spanish and in their own languages) about the origins of indigenous corn and how their ancestors have guided the evolution of seeds from the dawn of agriculture to the 21st century; a collective effort that spans more than 350 generations.
To their voices are added those of community leaders, scientists, cooks and many others whose knowledge and activism are committed not only to the defense of food sovereignty and genetic integrity, diversity and the collective property of indigenous seeds, but also for the defense of an enduring cultural legacy and way of life.
Filmmaker and Chair of the FIlm & Digital Media Department at UC Santa Cruz , Gustavo Vazquez, brings us to Oaxaca to experience the wisdom of various indigenous communities, as they explain that “Corn was not domesticated by man – Man was domesticated by corn.”
Professors Ignacio Chapela (UC Berkeley) and Alan Bennett (UC Davis) discuss the merits and dangers of genetically modified organisms, and the characteristics of different landraces of corn that have co-evolved with the people of Oaxaca – continuing co-evolution vs. exploitation for patenting and profit.
Susana Harp, Senator from Oaxaca, works to protect the heritage and health of her region, and to respect the validity of their approach. “Corn & its surrounding rituals are tied to the cosmology of the indigenous people – by extension, the essence of being Mexican, linking our lives to corn.”
Forthright Radio 