IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
hen in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

A previously announced decision to place a hold on solar project applications in six states has been reversed by the Bureau of Land Management. It seems that a little public opinion pressure can still be a persuasive force.

The Bureau of Land Management on Wednesday said it reversed an earlier decision freezing solar project applications in six Western states and would accept new applications.
“We heard the concerns expressed…about waiting to consider new applications and we are taking action,” BLM Director James Caswell said in a statement.

The concerns being expressed had a lot to do with the contrasting treatment of applications for oil and gas exploration in many of the same states.

Three stories in the news this morning taken together form a picture of a United States that is lagging behind when it comes to addressing the problems of global warming and climate change, and also showcase the importance of U.S. politics when it comes to international agreements.

First, here’s an article from the AP detailing how, when it comes dealing with global warming, the U.S. has been the worst of an at best mediocre bunch.

The U.S. government has done the least among the world’s eight biggest economies to address global warming, a study released Thursday found.

The G8 Climate Scorecards 2008, released Thursday ahead of next week’s gathering of the Group of Eight on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, also found that none of the eight countries are making improvements large enough to prevent temperature increases that scientists think would cause catastrophic climate changes.

No really good news there for anyone, the best countries, Britain, France , and Germany, are about half where they should be, and the study doesn’t include rapidly developing countries like China, India, and Brazil. But it doe3s show the U>S> seriously behind the other developed countries.

Next, Reuters explicitly links the G8 climate talks with the up-coming U.S. presidential elections.

G8 leaders could well cobble together some agreement next week on goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but bolder progress in climate change talks will probably have to wait until a new U.S president takes office.

The Bush Administration has so far refused to agree to goals for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The Bush administration, though, says it will only set targets if big emerging economies such as China are on board.

“The G8 countries could certainly take a leadership stand and agree to that (a long-term goal), but I think that really depends on whether Bush is ready to take that leap or not,” said Jennifer Morgan, director for climate and energy security at Berlin-based think tank E3G. “Up to this point in time, the U.S. has shown no flexibility on this point.”

Which basically means everyone’s looking to what might happen when Bush is gone.

Still, with Washington’s climate stance expected to shift under a new president, environmentalists are already looking beyond Hokkaido. Democratic candidate Barack Obama and Republican Senator John McCain both want to introduce cap and trade systems for greenhouse gases as part of a goal of big cuts by 2050.

The statement in the Reuters article about McCain and Obama’s positions on greenhouse gases leaves the impression that they are basically equivalent. While they share some similarities, there are also differences in the candidates’ positions that are worth paying attention to. Luckily, Triple Pundit has just posted a comprehensive analysis of Obama and Mccain’s plans for dealing with global warming and climate change.

Regardless of who is elected next November, both candidates agree that climate change is a fact and not a theory.

“I know that climate change is real,” said John McCain. “We can have a debate about how serious it is, but the debate about climate change is over.”

John McCain and Barack Obama however vary widely in their response to this issue, leaving the American people with a choice of approaches when choosing the next president.

Congress is getting ready for a holiday break, and over the weekend politicians will be headed home to appear at celebrations, community events, and fireworks displays all over the country. If you get a chance to talk to or ask a question of one of them, here’s a good outdoors related topic to bring up.

Senator Jeff Bingaman introduced a major lands bill, S. 3213, yesterday, before Congress began its July 4th recess. The Chairman’s package contains more than 90 titles, including more than a half dozen wilderness measures to protect over 900,000 acres of wild land in Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, Virginia and West Virginia.

The bill includes the following provisions specifically relating to wilderness.

The Copper-Salmon Wilderness Act, to protect 13,700 acres of pristine old-growth forest in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest;

The Lewis and Clark Mount Hood Wilderness Act, to permanently protect more than 128,000 acres of national forest on Mount Hood in Oregon;

The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument Voluntary and Equitable Grazing Conflict Resolution Act, to protect 23,000 acres in southeastern Oregon’s Soda Mountain region;

The Owyhee Public Lands Management Act, which will protect as wilderness 517,000 acres in Idaho’s Owyhee-Bruneau Canyonlands;

The Rocky Mountain National Park Wilderness and Indian Peaks Wilderness Expansion Act, to protect nearly 250,000 acres (94 percent) of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park;

The Wild Monongahela Act, to protect 37,000 acres of wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia;

The Virginia Ridge and Valley Wilderness and National Scenic Area Act, protecting 43,000 acres of the Jefferson National Forest as wilderness, and another 12,000 as a national scenic area.

So again, if you get the chance, let your senator or congressperson know that you support the wilderness provisions of the public lands bill. It will not only show them that people care about these issues, but should also impress them with just how up to date you are.

Haven’t had a cute animal story here for a while, so here’s one about a couple of otters who found themselves trying to make it in the big city.

Two baby river otters are safely in the care of a wildlife rescue group after a weekend excursion that took them through several Petaluma neighborhoods, including a stop at a local pub.

Residents began calling the Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue hotline Friday night, reporting sightings of the pair slinking across porches and diving under fences.

The sad part is they probably lost their mother. The good news is they’re in a wildlife care center where they’ll be taken care of, then released back into the wild.

it’s another in a long series of warning signs that something is out of whack out there. But people know and like penguins, so perhaps their plight will help mak e molre people aware.

Penguin populations have plummeted at a key breeding colony in Argentina, mirroring declines in many species of the marine flightless birds due to climate change, pollution and other factors, a study shows.

Dee Boersma, a University of Washington professor who led the research, said the plight of the penguins is an indicator of big changes in the world’s oceans due to human activities.

“Penguins are in trouble,” Boersma, whose study appears in the journal BioScience, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “They certainly are canaries in the coal mine.”

It’s going to be appealed, it may not stand up, but it’s surely an interesting move in the on-going story of how to deal with pollution from coal.

In a ruling believed to be unprecedented, a Georgia judge halted the construction of Dynegy’s Longleaf coal-fired power plant because it had not made provisions for reducing its emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas most widely implicated in man-made global warming.

The way this ties into the Environmental Protection Agency is that the judge, Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore, based her ruling on last year’s Supreme Court decision ordering the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

In the ruling released late Monday afternoon, a state judge relied on a decision by the Supreme Court last year that carbon dioxide could be regulated as a pollutant. Carbon dioxide, which is colorless, odorless and not directly harmful to animals or plants, is not now regulated, and the Bush administration has signaled that it would not issue such regulations before the president leaves office.

But the judge, Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore in Superior Court in Fulton County, Ga., said that federal air pollution control laws required pollution permits to cover all pollutants that could be regulated under the Clean Air Act, not just those for which there is “a separate, general numerical limitation.” The case had been brought by the Sierra Club and a local environmental group, Friends of the Chattahoochee.

If the ruling that stands from this is that a business has to abide by the requirements of the clean Air Act regardless of whether or not the EPA has actually issued regulations on a specific pollutant, then this could go down as a major, precedent setting decision. It might even take some of the politics out of the EPA

Some of the most memorable camping and backpacking trips I’ve taken have been in Montana, so it’s always good to hear that more of the mountains, forewsts, and streams are being saved for conservation and outdoor recreation.

Some of the most prized land in the northern Rocky Mountains is being protected from development in a conservation land deal hailed as the largest of its kind in U.S. history.

More than 300,000 acres of critical habitat for threatened and endangered animals, including grizzly bears and lynx, will be transferred to public ownership in a $500 million deal with Plum Creek Timber. A ceremony was held Monday in Montana to sign the agreement.

The land is in the Swan Valley between Missoula and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, an area wher development has expanded rapidly in the last twenty years. I’ve been through there several times, and it’s good to know it will still be there the next time I get out to Montana.

We need a little background on this one. You’ll recall that last year the EPA denied California’s request for a waiver under the Clean Air Act in order to enforce the state’s more stringent standards for emissions from trucks and cars. Sensing an opportunity, automakers then sued, arguing that because the EPA was not likely to grant the waiver any time soon, they shouldn’t have to comply with California’s law, which sets standards for emissions starting in 2009.

A federal judge didn’t buy it.

A federal judge has denied the latest attempt by automobile manufacturers to invalidate the California law that regulates greenhouse gas emissions from cars.

On June 23, Judge Anthony Ishii ruled that the automakers and dealers were not entitled to overturn this law.

In his decision Judge Ishii wrote, “..so far as this court can discern, the choice to proceed as though California would never be granted waiver of federal preemption is fundamentally just a business decision that, like any other, may have negative consequences if wrongly made. It is not up to the courts to deflect the burden of such business decisions.”

In other words, you can’t be exempted from a law just because you made business decisions based on the gamble that law would not be enforced. That may sound like an obvious decision, but it’s a form of reasoning that doesn’t always get applied to big business in the US. You can bet this decision will be appealed.

But court decisions take time, and other events could get in the way. Like, for example, a new president appointing an EPA Administrator who will immediately grant California’s waiver.