Montana, climate-change pioneer
MAE NAN ELLINGSON was a widowed 24-year-old graduate student when she was elected to be a delegate to Montana’s constitutional convention. She was from Texas but her late husband had taken her back to his home state. They spent their honeymoon car-camping through Montana, snowshoeing in Glacier Park. When Ms Ellingson co-wrote the constitution’s preamble in 1972, she put the state’s natural assets at the very top. The people of Montana are “grateful to God for the quiet beauty of our state, the grandeur of our mountains, the vastness of our rolling plains”.
Montanans dress as though a hike may present itself at any moment, and indeed one might. Mountains envelop the freeway. Pickup trucks park on the shoulders of I-90 while their drivers fish the Clark Fork river. Their relationship with the outdoors is codified in the state’s constitution. The legislature is tasked with ensuring that the state “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment…for present and future generations”. Pointing to this document, a group of 16 youth plaintiffs are taking the government to court on June 12th, arguing that, by favouring fossil fuels over renewables, the state’s energy policies have violated their constitutional right.
One spokesperson for the state’s top prosecutor has called this case, Held v State of Montana, a “show trial”; another accused Our Children’s Trust, the non-profit firm behind it, of “exploiting” children. When the suit was filed in 2020, the plaintiffs ranged in age from two to 18. One of the older plaintiffs, Grace Gibson-Snyder, is a sixth-generation Montanan. She talks of the wildfire smoke that has kept her from backpacking and the glaciers that she has seen melt over the years.
2023-06-08 08:48:58
Original from www.economist.com