Is The Declaration of Independence a ‘Scientific Paper’? - by Joe Romm

Nearly twelve score years ago, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Interdependence:
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Okay, the Declaration of Interdependence sounds a lot like the Declaration of Independence.

By saying that it is a self-evident truth that all humans are created equal and that our inalienable rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, our Founding Fathers were telling us that we are all in this together, that we are interdependent, that we have a moral duty to protect these inalienable rights for all humans.  President Lincoln, perhaps above all others, was instrumental in making clear that the second sentence of the Declaration was “a moral standard to which the United States should strive,” as Wikipedia puts it.

The double appeal to “Nature” — including the explicit appeal to “the laws of Nature” in the first sentence — is particularly salient.  For masters of rhetoric like the authors of the Declaration, a repeated word, especially in an opening sentence, is repeated for the singular purpose of drawing attention to it.
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Jefferson was grounding the nation’s Declaration of Independence in the scientific laws of nature — a key point detailed at length in the book "Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison" by I. Bernard Cohen, the great historian of 18th century science.  That is why, for instance, Jefferson wrote about truths that were “self-evident,” which is to say axiomatic.

Today, it is the laws of Nature, studied and enumerated by scientists, that make clear we are poised to render those unalienable rights all but unattainable for billions of humans on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions.  It is the laws of Nature that make clear Americans can’t achieve sustainable prosperity if the rest of the world doesn’t, and vice versa.

Moreover, founding fathers like Jefferson firmly believed we had an equal duty to future generations, as is clear from The Constitutional Law Foundation’s discussion of “Intergenerational Justice in the United States Constitution, The Stewardship Doctrine”:

The most succinct, systematic treatment of intergenerational principles left to us by the founders is that which was provided by Thomas Jefferson in his famous September 6, 1789 letter to James Madison.  The letter was Jefferson’s final installment in a two year correspondence with Madison on the proposed Bill of Rights.  Given the importance of this letter as background material for the bill of rights, and its independent value as a brilliant statement of intergenerational equity principles, it serves as the natural starting point for a discussion of the founders’ views on specific intergenerational issues.

The key question for Jefferson was very simple:  must later generations “consider the preceding generation as having had a right to eat up the whole soil of their country, in the course of a life?”  Soil was an obvious focal point for examining the issue of intergenerational equity for a Virginia planter like Jefferson.

The answer to Jefferson was another self-evident truth: “Every one will say no; that the soil is the gift of God to the living, as much as it had been to the deceased generation.”

It is immoral for one generation to destroy another generation’s vital soil — or its livable climate.  Hence it is unimaginably immoral to Dustbowlify their soil and ruin their livable climate irreversibly for many centuries if not millennia.  Yet that is what we are currently on track to do according to a 2015 NASA study — along with many other recent studies.

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