And though i am biased, i firmly believe it is the best one in the country. So thank you for being here. We are absolutely delighted today to have two unbelievably talented authors on our panel talking about the environment both past and future. Im going to start at the end. Id like to welcome maya cave and ross and to austin and to the book festival. She is an author. Lawyer and activist. For 30 years, she has led the Delaware RiverKeeper Network, which is the area where she grew up and lives now with her family. And she is the founder of the green amendment for the generations, which is the subject of her book, which has been updated. It is called the green amendment the peoples fight for a clean, safe and healthy environment. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome maya, keith and rossum. And sitting to my right is a gentleman that ive had the opportunity to work with previously, been to the book festival a number of times. This is Douglas Brinkley, who lives here in austin. He is the katherine sarnoff, chair of humanities and a professor of history at rice university. The president ial historian for the New York Historical society, a cnn contributor. That list goes on and on and on. Im going to cut it short. But he has had seven New York Times bestseller, many about the presidency. He has written about teddy roosevelt, fdr, reagan, nixon, jfk, and the current book is called silent Spring Revolution. John f kennedy. Rachel carson, Lyndon Johnson and the great environmental awakening. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Douglas Brinkley, who died in. I think it is always such a pleasure to be part of this book festival and so, again, we welcome you. Were going to visit with the authors for about 30, 35 minutes or so. But we will hope that youll be thinking if you have questions that you would like to ask, well save the last ten or 15 minutes to do so. Please keep those questions brief and as we get to that point, there is a microphone right in the middle that you can go to, but well make an announcement for that as it gets a little bit closer. Im going to start with doug. I was fortunate to work with you at the san antonio book festival when your book on fdr rifle heritage came out. This book actually complete. Its a series of three books that you were working on related to the environment, the previous to conservation and preservation. And this book focuses more on policy. Just introduce us to it and tell us how that came about. Well, when i when i was young, i really got interested in the National Park service. So i used to go visit all the great National Parks. And wherever i go, id see some flier about it was either established by Theodore Roosevelt or Franklin Roosevelt. It was amazing what they did in conservation. Tr. That was john muir. Gifford pinchot generation. They saved 234 million acres of wild america. Theodore roosevelt created the Forest Service up today. He created 51 federal bird reservations since which is the birth really of todays u. S. Fish and wildlife. All of us, everybody on the cspan audience, everybody here, we own 550 plus wildlife refuges, National Wildlife refuges. And the Theodore Roosevelt was the progenitor. Then i wrote that was the first reform wave of conservation. The second wave was when Franklin Roosevelt became president. Whenever he would sign anything in life or occupation, he would put tree farmer. And he lived his whole life on the hudson river and and he ended up creating 800 state parks. Fdr, most of our Texas State Parks are fdr. The civilian conservation corps during the of the new deal, planted billions of trees to combat soil erosion. Dustbowl the third wave and why its a trilogy is silent Spring Revolution. And in this case, it wasnt a roosevelt who led it. It was Rachel Carson from pennsylvania who became the great writer about our oceans and the forties and fifties. She wrote it incredible seed trilogy, the sea around us being my favorite of the three, but she was a super star writer on ocean oceanography and the shorelines, and jack kennedy was a big fan of hers and in 1960, kennedy embraced carson, who was helping kennedy run against nixon. And much of carsons ideas became the Democratic Party plank in 1960. And then her book, 1962, silent spring, came out and had a galvanizing effect because Rachel Carson, in that book, while it was primarily aimed at ddt, which was being sprayed, she also was a fierce nuke antinuclear activist because we were blowing up atomic weapons willy nilly and the nevada range was blowing and making children. Six leukemia went up. Cancer went up. And so her book was saying, weve got to rein in the federal Government Department of agriculture and the pesticide industry. And it really gave birth to the environment, environmental movement. So in my book, i write not just about carson, but this ensemble cast of people that were moved by carson, including president kennedy, lyndon and lady bird johnson. And it even had a hangover effect in a richard nixon. Nixon, after all, creates the environmental protect agency. Nixon bans ddt. Nixon creates the Clean Air Act. In 1970, mammals and Marine Mammal protection act on and on. So it was a revolution in the environmental. It gave birth to the term environment. It replaced conservation in the period really was 60. Jack kennedy running and an xl adamss photographs becoming posters and the like and it ends in 1973 with the passage of the endangered species act, which passed the senate 92 to nothing endangered species. And then the Arab Oil Embargo came in. Oh, concerns watergate and corporate world if you like. The Extraction Industry started organizing and mounting a campaign against all of those environmental win win wins that i write about in my book. And as you say, doug, that the backlash that came at the end of that era, which you referred to, is the long sixties here in terms of the policy, it was driven by mainly two things rising gasoline prices and inflation, which is something that were continuing to hear in this cycle. And as we hear throughout the decades. I want to pivot back to you. First of all, speaking of Rachel Carson and pennsylvania, you have led the Delaware River authority for 30 years and working very hard on this on the ground. I wonder from your perspective, tell us a little bit about how your work, particularly as it related to fracking in and around pennsylvania, led to this idea of the green amendment. So i really appreciate the opportunity to join with all of you and to join with doug and brian. Its a real honor to be here. One of the things that so beautiful about Douglas Brinkleys book is it really talks about the optimism around Environmental Protection and how powerful and important it is to protect our environment in order to protect the health and the safety of all our people. Right. The quality of our lives. And so we had this wave of positive first step laws that were passed in order to protect the environment. But it didnt take too long for a whole boatload of reasons that very quickly, industry sort of got hold of that positive movement. And rather than allow current additional progress on Environmental Protection, industry really started to coopt the movement and make it more about an entitlement to pollute that belonged to industry rather than a right to a clean, safe and healthy environment that belonged to the people. And so that is sort of the foundation where things stood when i entered into my role as the Delaware River keeper and leader of the Delaware RiverKeeper Network about 30 years ago. Its an organization focused on activism and enforcing Environmental Protection laws. And unfortunately, throughout the majority of my work, fighting for the beautiful Delaware River and all of its tributaries and all the communities that depend upon the river, i have experienced the myriad of ways that our system of Environmental Protection laws fundamentally fails us. It is a system of laws at this point focused on legal, rising environmental pollution and degradation. It is a system of laws that allows for the perpetual sacred fighting of communities of color and indigenous communities and low income communities, all in order to benefit the profit and business goals of industry. Part of my work has been throughout the years to battle against fracking and fracking for gas from shale. That is, of course proliferating in the United States of america. While in my role as the Delaware Riverkeeper, we have been successful in keeping fracking out of the boundaries of the Delaware River watershed, including the portions of new york, new jersey, pennsylvania and delaware, with in the watershed where fracking could have happened but now can happen. We have not been successful in preventing the proliferation of fracking in the watershed states outside of the boundaries of the watershed. The commonwealth of pennsylvania is a big fracking state. Fracking came to the pennsylvania in about the mid 2005 and given the state of the law focused on permitting pollution and degradation, a system of laws with lots of loopholes for the frackers, it was pretty easy for the frackers to overwhelm pennsylvanias communities and environments, but for the frackers they wanted to find a way to make it easier. And so they very literally wrote for themselves the piece of law in 2012 that was passed by the Pennsylvania Legislature and signed by the governor. And long story short, was a gift basket to the industry and was going to allow fracking to expand exponentially in the commonwealth of pennsylvania as the Delaware River keeper and leader of the Delaware RiverKeeper Network. I knew that we had to find a way to stop this law because fracking anywhere is bad for all of us. Everywhere. Certainly is bad for my beautiful Delaware River. But the problem is, when you have a law thats passed by the legislature and signed by the governor, what can you do . Mostly people protest or try to elect better people to office. But we realized that actually in the commonwealth of pennsylvania, we had a long ignored amendment in the bill of rights section of the pennsylvania constitution that recognized and protected the rights of all people, including future generations, to pure water, clean air, and a healthy environment and the duty of all government officials in the state to protect pennsylvania Natural Resources for the benefit of all the people, including future generations. So we decided that we could use that long ignored constitutional provision, long ignored for a whole boatload of reasons which i wont tell you now, but grab hold of that. We brought a lawsuit. We challenged this very pro fracking law that had been written by the industry, passed by the Pennsylvania Legislature in 2012, signed by the governor. And we challenged it, claiming that these provisions we were concerned about would result in a violation of the environmental rights of the people of pennsylvania and the pennsylvania environmental rights amendment. The case went all the way up to a very conservative pennsylvania Supreme Court, and in december of 2013, because we had a constitutional right, we defeated those pro fracking elements of the law and stopped the law from starting right before it could wreak its devastating harm. In the wake of that victory, i thought, wow, so powerful what we had achieved. And i looked at every constitution across our nation and i found that there was only one other constitution, montana, that lifted up environmental rights to give it the same highest standing as the other fundamental rights we hold dear, like free speech and freedom of religion. Like pennsylvanias what i now call green amendment accomplished. And i decided that i was going to change that and hence started the Green Amendment Movement. And that was the reason why i wrote the green amendment book and that i think i think what is so striking about that is something that so many of us would think of and almost take for granted that the idea that our right to a clean environment, clean water, clean air is something that we deserve and as a right given to us in the same way that we have rights enshrined in the and the u. S. Constitution and the bill of rights and what we have in the state constitution to assemble free speech, freedom of religion, those types of things. But youre saying at that point in the seventies, only two state constitutions really had that in montana in pennsylvania, yeah. Almost every constitution across the United States actually talks about the environment and even environment rights within the constitution. And many of those amendments were added in the late sixties and the seventh, the time that Douglas Brinkley talks about, but only two states did it in a way that put environmental rights on par with those other fundamental rights issues. Excellent. And then speaking of that, then toggling back to the federal level, because i know your work, maya, is focused on state legislatures and sort of working the remaining 48 states. And theres certainly been progress made. I wonder when you think when i think of putting together jfk, lbj and richard nixon, doug, i dont know that i immediately think of the environment. But clearly with the case that you lay out, i should have what was sort of foremost in their minds in this sort of series of legislation, federal legislation that that came into effect. And as you say, how was it that some of these things, which seems unheard of now, that would pass with near unison unanimity, was able to get through, obviously much different from what we see today. Look, lets just go stick with pennsylvania for a minute. 1948, the nora small ag incident, the entire town of dunmore, pennsylvania, got trapped in a killer smog where everybody either died or got rushed to a respiratory hospital. If you go to dinner, pennsylvania today, youll see its the birthplace of its really where smog started being talked about. If you cut to 1960 when jack kennedy is running against nixon, you cant breathe in los angeles. Its grassroots womens groups out of pasadena, in irvine, in places that are going and screaming about, weve got to have clean air because people were getting smoked. You couldnt avoid smog in new york city. People died and scores of people died in london from killer smog. Were just spoiled that we got the Clean Air Act of 1963 and 1970, and now we have an air amnesia about how bad things were. So you couldnt couldnt ignore it. And incidentally, pennsylvania gave birth not only to Rachel Carson, but harold ickes, the fighting secretary of interior under fdr, was the birthplace of edward albee, who wrote the classic 1968 book desert solitaire. It was where william of zannys or that found Leading Light of the Wilderness Society was from 1964, lbj put aside 9. 1 million acres of wilderness roadless areas. Go look at the wilderness zones places like the bob marshall in and montana that the other state were talking about right now. Texas ran a book festival, a book by john graves. Goodbye to a river talking about the danger of damming rivers and killing it in the sixties, there became a huge anti damming movement which and eventually won over lyndon and lady bird johnson. There was push to dam the grand canyon, the colorado and david brower in the sierra club ran a campaign taking out ads in the New York Times, saying this would be like flooding the Sistine Chapel to destroy the grand canyon ecosystem over these dams and dams are just pork barrel for the bureau of reclamation and the army corps of engineers. So in what happened was all of these people had enough. They couldnt take it anymore, and they mobilize. And it came from many different areas. Cesar chavez, san dolores, where to working for farmworkers and the united farm workers in california were dealing with pesticides that were deforming children. We had a need to save some remnants of Scenic Rivers and lbj got deeply involved. So we now have areas that are designated red, wild and Scenic Rivers. But the key figure on all of this becomes william moe douglas from the Supreme Court. And he has most to do with the work mayas doing in the sense that douglas at the Supreme Court today, this is all pre Environmental Protection agency. The epa is not created till 1970. So in the sixties, people are demanding