by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
As appearing in the Daily Sentinel
Years ago as a high school and college debater, I was trained to begin making my case by defining key terms. A debate gets incoherent if the two sides don’t agree on what the topic is, or what is being proposed. Voltaire famously wrote, “Define your terms… or we shall never understand one another.”
The website CrossExamined.org says, “Defining terms is extremely important in conversations. In normal language, certain words have an accepted definition that is assumed based on the context.” In our national discourse on the environment, there may be no such thing as “normal language.”
I recalled that old training while reading about the new “Lakota People’s Law Project,” which is raising money to pay members of various Native American tribes, because their “sacred” lands were stolen, and are not being properly cared for. The effort is titled “Sacred Defense National Parks and Monuments Initiative,” and proponents “call upon the 325 million travelers who will make these parks and monuments a travel destination this year to donate to the original peoples of the place.”
Specifically, the initiative targets visitors to 14 national parks and monuments (Arches, Bears Ears, Crater Lake, Death Valley, Devils Tower, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Hawaii Volcanoes, Rocky Mountain National Park, White Sands, Wind Cave, Yellowstone, Yosemite and Zion). Visitors are asked to donate to the initiative, which will give annual payments to members of various tribes who apply — whether or not they or their ancestors ever lived in any of those parks. Indeed, several observers have noted that the Lakota tribes themselves never inhabited any of those areas.
