As we near the annual Independence Day holiday, Pierre Tristam, editorial writer of the Daytona Beach News Journal offers a piece that should give pause for thought.  He begins with a story of how Walt Disney proposed a despicable plan to deface the Sierra National Park with a ski resort.  Fortunately, the resort was never built.

Tristam wrote: "The case went to the Supreme Court, where, in 1972, the court ruled that the Sierra Club couldn’t sue on behalf of inanimate objects like trees, however stately.

"The 4-3 decision wasn’t a victory for the development. Potter Stewart in the majority opinion gave environmentalists a how-to guide on how to win standing (all they had to show was that one of them liked to hike in the forest and that the development would sully the experience). Then there was William O. Douglas’ dissent, brief in words but grander in scope than a forest of sequoias: “Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation…. The ordinary corporation is a ‘person’ for purposes of the adjudicatory processes, whether it represents proprietary, spiritual, aesthetic, or charitable causes. So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life.” Douglas wanted nothing less than to “make certain that the inanimate objects, which are at the very core of America’s beauty, have spokesmen before they are destroyed… Perhaps they will not win. Perhaps the bulldozers of ‘progress’ will plow under all the aesthetic wonders of this beautiful land. That is not the present question. The sole question is, who has standing to be heard?”

"In the words of the great naturalist Edward O. Wilson, 'Perhaps the time has come to stop calling it the ‘environmentalist’ view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.'

"July 4 reminds us what a giant step forward the Declaration of Independence represented in the history of human freedom and dignity - of the notion of individuals as sovereign in place of autocrats or clerics or, to put it in more contemporary terms, ideologues. The concept of environmentalism as a real-world view stands as an almost equally monumental contribution to the planet.

"The Library of America (libraryofamerica.org), which since 1982 has been issuing six or seven volumes a year of the best in American thought and letters, just did. It published “American Earth,” a 1,000-page collection excerpting the greatest environmental works by 100 writers since Thoreau.

"With these pages in the palm of one’s hand it doesn’t take a road trip (...gas prices permitting) to rediscover - beyond politics, beyond ideology, beyond these days of oppressive anxiety - where we’re blessed to live, and what we’re called on to ensure for our children’s inheritance. For the pursuit of their happiness, it’s one inheritance tax we should proudly pay every day of our lives."

We must be the caretakers of the earth that we enjoy today so that generations coming after us are afforded their pursuit of happiness with the beauties of the environment they inherited because we preserved it for them.