Our Constitution represents a brilliant delineation of our civil liberties as Americans. Regarded the world over as a model of a people's foundational rights, it is viewed by many as divinely inspired.
Our rights to free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom from unlawful search and seizure, freedom of religion, separation of Church and State, in addition to our rights to privacy, our rights to own private property, and, indeed, many other fundamental liberties we hold as necessary for the congress of our worthy nation, our close-knit communities, and our meaningful individual aspirations as proud citizens of the United States, are guaranteed within the Constitutional articles and amendments upon which we all rely.
The founders were balancing myriad concerns in 1787, when the Constitution was composed, including the balance between state and federal governance, the rights of slaves and the critical question of their future, the place of women in the workings of the nation, the methods by which the co-equal callings of the legislative, judicial and executive branches of government could check one another when necessary, and much more.
So, we can forgive them for what they left out. The task of identifying what is missing from the Constitution now falls to us to determine, with wisdom, courage, and clarity of purpose.
And good people, it is this:
Our rights are of inestimable worth to the future of our people and the sovereignty of our nation.
But they will all go away if we do not formalize the responsibilities on which they rely.
In addition to upholding our human rights, we must fully comprehend the requirement that we stand as much better stewards of the environment of the Earth.
Without our understanding that our freedoms depend on our responsibilities to steward the environment, we will lose everything we set out to preserve.
Without breathable air, clean water, pristine land, and a thriving wilderness, we have no rights at all -- nothing to bequeath to our children and grandchildren, no legacy we would wish to claim.
And this is the unsayable thing.
We have overtaxed the environment to such astonishing degree that we are now risking the future of humanity, and all of our beloved freedoms alongside this future.
Because we have not yet understood the seriousness of the manner in which our rights and our responsibilities are inextricably bound to one another, we are seeing serious losses of environmental resources around the globe, alarming loss of diversity of wildlife, the extinction of whole species and ecosystems which developed over thousands of years.
Humanity is part of this narrative, not separate from it.
Human populations are so high at the current time that the global environment is facing stressors that are unsustainable. And that climate crisis is happening now, not fifty years from now.
As a direct result, we are seeing broad movements toward totalitarianism worldwide. With these changes, we will experience not only a broad decimation of our human rights. Totalitarianism also brings other losses, more shocking, more historic, and more indelible.
Good people, as tragic as this territory is, it was foreseeable. And, in fact, it was foreseen.
What messaging did we need that we didn't have? We needed the military to be assigned a forward role in speaking to the American public, and indeed, to other nations, about goal-setting regarding climate markers, so that all of us could have engaged in assiduous efforts to change our way of life early and profoundly in defense of the environment as a whole.
Climate change will never be a politically easy topic for elected officials to address. The oil companies are too powerful for meaningful transitions in energy consumption to be made without de-politicizing the issue through coordination with our military leaders. Entrenched interests easily create enough uncertainty regarding climate science for the public to be distracted, polarized, and conflicted regarding critical requirements for change.
So, we needed our most respected Generals to stand before the public as early as possible in explaining that the Earth's environment doesn't care whether Americans are Democrats or Republicans. It doesn't care about our race, our gender, our religion, or our personal orientation. In making critical changes, it is our commitment to our families, our communities, our national security, and the world as a whole that matters, not the superficial differences that can serve to divide us.
Such a course of guidance from our military would not have represented an autocratic course, but rather one that assigned politically fraught but critical issues to those required to stand separate from the political sphere.
And this should have occurred beginning forty to fifty years ago.
In many ways, we required a companion document to the Constitution, one which formalized our responsibilities in reaching climate sustainability and in maintaining it indefinitely.
We still need this document to guide us in the future toward humanity's preservation, alongside the realization of our greatest potential.
Without it, we will not succeed.
At this moment, our task is to identify every possible inflection point regarding the environment's trajectory and to intervene in it with the highest quality of leadership, wisdom, commitment, courage, and integrity we can muster.
Part of that analysis involves identifying critical environmental inflection points that were missed over the past forty years.
Our current challenges are immense and immediate, but they are not insurmountable.
We need all of our talents, gifts, insights, knowledge, creativity, resourcefulness and acumen in establishing a better way forward that seeks to reclaim Americans' human rights in the long term, and that seeks to rescue our national sovereignty at the same time.
Those approaches will not be conventional, predictable or assured, just as any moonshot endeavor is not a humble or meager attempt to change the course of our reach into the future.
But they must now occupy our hearts and minds in forming our unified resolve to manifest them.
And we must ensure that we have all the resources necessary to bring them to fruition.
My case before the Supreme Court continues to gather those resources. Let's ensure that they are preserved for this most urgent task.
Lane MacWilliams
