The age of climate trials starts now. June 12 is the first day of the first trial in U.S. history concerning the government’s responsibility for perpetuating climate change. In a Helena, Mont., courtroom, 16 young people are squaring off against state officials. At issue is whether the state’s affirmative actions to authorize, permit and encourage fossil fuel extraction have harmed young people to such an extent that Montana has violated rights guaranteed to them in the state’s constitution — including their “right to a clean and healthful environment.”
But this isn’t just happening in Montana. In a few months, a second climate suit based on environmental rights contained in a state constitution will go to trial in Hawaii. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court just opened the door to trials possibly proceeding in several long-running climate cases in which cities and states have sued oil companies — a decision some advocates have said is “like a dam breaking.”
When did oil companies first learn that their business model was imperiling civilization? What did the state know, and when? What did the framers of the Montana constitution intend? Historians have filed explanatory briefs, and attorneys have quoted archival documents to help answer these questions. But few have noted that this very model of change — a lawsuit, a trial, advocates suing the state to vindicate their right to the natural world and a livable future — is the product of a history spanning more than 50 years.
In the spring of 1966, a young attorney named Victor Yannacone sued Suffolk County, N.Y., to try to stop it from spraying the pesticide DDT. Foreshadowing modern climate cases, he brought suit “on behalf of all of the people of the United States, not only of this generation, but of those generations yet unborn.” He claimed that the county’s spraying of deadly chemicals violated rights contained in the U.S. Constitution.
Yannacone also invoked the public trust doctrine, an ancient legal principle stating that the government holds natural resources “in trust” for the public. While the public trust doctrine is the foundation of many climate cases today, back in the 1960s it was mainly thought to protect riverbeds. Yet legal academics — especially a young professor at the University of Michigan named Joseph Sax — were beginning to rethink the doctrine in far broader terms, expanding the range of resources it could protect.