The Role of Expert Witnesses in Environmental Law Cases, as an aspect of legal strategies and tactics, especially as regard the voir dire of these “experts”.

By Joel A. Wendt, 80 years of age and a self described “white-privileged, Christian, son of Montana, American citizen, shaman, and professional heretic”. He went to the USAF Academy for three years, then transferred to University of Denver, getting a BA in pre-seminary studies. Took the LSAT, got 698, and went to the University of Montana School of Law, graduated in 1967, with the high A in Evidence. Licensed to practice in both Montana and Colorado, and spent 6 months as clerk on the Montana Supreme Court. This latter experience ruined his idealism, and the law fell to the side for a life time of self-education, while working in restaurants and mental hospitals. His e-business card is here, and his CV there. [0]

I have a client. She is both visible and invisible. She speaks to us through what we call Rogue Weather, and is the Guide and Rider of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. [1]

We moderns live in a world where the dominant religion is what I call “unnatural science”. This view is entirely materialistic – all is matter, there is no spirit. It arises from habits of thought that only measure and count – everything is seen as number – a fully quantitative view. [2]

In philosophical circles, the central question concerns the nature of “qualia”, such as the taste of a tomato. Scientific materialism shoves this fact under the rug, precisely because it involves giving equal or more value to the remarkably rich qualitative, and subjective, aspects of human experience.

In the last few decades, the pursuit of this kind of quantities-only science ran into to two boundary conditions. One in physics, the other in brain/mind studies. At issue is the same question: What is human consciousness?

Physics tells the tale that, at the quantum level of particle interactions, consciousness is required for the potential to become the real [3]. For the brain scientists, consciousness is studied as an aspect of the physical and biological effects of the nervous system, centered in the brain. [4]

If we follow the coming into being of these riddles, we find that the leading ideas have to be called theories. They have little empirical basis, mostly being conjectures. Not all those who let themselves be labeled as scientific experts appreciate this. Our explanations of human existence, under scientific materialism, consist of a large number of unproven conjectures, woven into a few dominant threads of theoretical thought. [5]

The crucial point is to realize that the expert has a “religion”, and a careful voir dire can reveal the existence of views entirely faith based, in the scientific communities, which are more like churches, ruled by priests. This is a situation made all the worse by the kind of politics internal to university departments, and the infusion of money in terms of defining, supporting, and rewarding “research”. [6]

This is only a little bit a tragedy. She gives us lessons, and the current one, the plandemic-Pandemonium Reboot, is harsh indeed. The crucial aspect of Her works of Art are not found in the Events, so much as the Aftermath. She is Divine Providence. [7]

For example, if we accept the ancient’s ideas of there actually being Fate and Fortune (rather then chance and random), we just might notice that what has/is happening is the bringing to a halt a civilization that is rushing too fast. The “plague” is not so much about death, as it is about life. The life we want, but don’t get, because we have to work three jobs to keep bread on the table. [8]

“Western” Civilization is dying into new becoming. The plague slows the rush to a crawl, with folk now isolated, fearful, confused, and faced with issues of daily scarcity. I once called this observable process, in its early stages, as the third-worlding of America. Nothing much to do but reflect, something previously impossible given the rush and the endless noisy distractions. Event and Aftermath, a principle that is individualized, although common. Chaos is often a necessary precondition to real changes.

For example, … in what claims to be the richest Nation in the world, there is no excuse for homelessness, given the huge number of unused homes, falling into decay because no one is there taking care of them. Homes owned not by humans, but by a corporation-world, using/creating the pyramid of debt the Lords of Finance crave. [9]

Scientific materialism does not understand the true nature of death, or the role of illness in life. A curious person, not easily miss-led, might wonder that if the Divine Mystery is Real: Why did we lose the connection once known (still today, in practice and point of view) in the ancient Earth Religions?

Love wishes Their children to be free. To “choose” to go Home, back to the Garden, and enjoy the waiting Feast. A choice. Dare we say the Goddess Natura and Her companions are to be “courted”? [10] Of course, the sentient consciousness inside the world of the senses has Her/His Ways. Love requires two. In point of fact, environmentalism is a natural hunger for just this – to know the Mystery, personally. No priests, even of science, are to tell us what to think, feel, or do.

Not everyone will make such a choice. All the same, this is true: If a Corporation can be a Person before the Law, then certainly a Planet can be a Person before the Law.

Let me next lay out a possible scenario:

Beginning this coming Earth Day, various environmental law firms, all over the planet, file suits against corporations for their abuse of their workers, their customers, and the living environment all have a right to share. Other suits, ongoing and needed badly, can get a lift from the annual world wide celebration of the sentient nature of the so-called: “environment” [11]

The Client for these suits is the Planet. This places in the Courts of Law a remarkable question, which does not have to be realized – in the beginning – with anything we might call a “win”. It is a valid strategy to use such a tactic, to offer an opportunity for engaging the Court of Public Opinion.

Such suits should include the joining of at least three multinational corporations. This creates a situation where those companies may attack each other – via separation of defendants petitions: It’s not us, its the other guy.

The point is to understand the power of a regular Earth Day Rite, which faces directly the underlying truths that the reason we are dying in this plague is because of the failure of scientific materialism to produce a viable scientific medicine. The human world is being killed by anticipated greed and ordinary human ignorance. [9, again] All the same, Her Wisdom is that we are all the right people, in the right place, at the right time.

Of particular importance is to consider the opening moves of such law suits. Some will argue that the “Planet” has no standing, for example. Others will insist the plaintiffs get past a motion to dismiss. Where’s the evidence – that the Planet has an interior sentient self consciousness – some might ask?

As to the latter, there is a literature with which I am very familiar. Science with spirit. If the motion to dismiss seeks evidence, we can do our version of a “document dump”. I recommend 14 books. [12] There are thousands.

To appreciate this historically, recall (if you once knew) the idea of the Copernican Revolution. In the 16^th Century the Roman Church killed heretics, who later became heroes of the emerging “scientific” religion. This Revolution reached its – all is matter, there is no spirit – peak in the mid-19th Century. Thus arose the religion of Scientism, which is the belief that scientific theory is actually scientific fact. Its core beliefs are: Big Bang Cosmology [13], and Darwinian Evolution [14].

At the same time, there was a counter-Copernican stream of thought, where the idea of spirit was kept alive. Not all scientists were materialists. In the Romantics and Transcendentalists movements, this spirit in favor of spirit, while remaining true to scientific principles, came alive anyway. S.T. Coleridge, Emerson, Goethe, Kepler, and Faraday are some of their luminaries. The ultimate result was the Anthroposophy work of Rudolf Steiner, an aspect of which he called: Spiritual Science.

Steiner was a kind of midwife, inspiring a spiritual Anthroposophical medicine, a spiritual scientific methodology (Goetheanism), a spiritual agriculture (Biodynamics), a spiritual education (Waldorf Schools), and much else besides

Most of the 14 books [15], pointed to above, are rooted in those communities that have risen from these fields of thought in the 20^th Century. One of the minds that contributed to this list (Owen Barfield) wrote another book called “Speaker’s Meaning”.

He “reads” the history of meaning and the meaning of history, through the study of the phenomenological developments that arise over time in the ever changing meanings of words. In this book Barfield points out that languages have a birth-youth, phases of development, and then maturity.

In their youth they are completely literal. If it was experienced, it was given a name. From those millennia ago cultures came all the Great Myths of the ancients. Those peoples actually saw gods and goddesses and fauns and gnomes.

The choice to re-embrace a scientific sense of the spirit (the ancient Egyptians had what they called: Hermetic Science, aka Magic [16]), … this choice belongs to the individual, whatever social forces various religions, politics, or businesses apply to resist accepting our true human heritage.

Bullet points: Modern science is a religion, and its experts mostly believers in one or another of unproven scientific theories. A proper voir dire can force the “expert” to admin the limitations of his/her way of knowing. On a wider scale, the idea of the Earth Day Rite means to focus annually on the deeper Mystery: If a Corporation can be a Person before the Law, then certainly a Planet can be a Person before the Law. It is unnecessary to “win” such suits. That they are happening will have a deeper influence in the Court of Public Opinion, than in Courts of Law. Effecting public awareness translates into a change in the overall conversation, which opens all manner of new and unpredictable doors into the future.

The author of this Note is available for video consultations, at no cost.

[0] e-card: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/wendtagency.html and CV: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/thetree.html

[1] https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2020/09/27/earth-motherholy-mother-and-the-mystery-rite-of-the-plandemic-pandemonium-reboot/ uses a phenomenological mode of thought to find the real meaning of the underlying spiritual nature of catastrophic world-wide events. Given that some readers of this Note will have justifiable doubts, I offer this for certain details as regards the “pandemic”: https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2020/06/12/the-theology-of-the-germ-theory-of-dis-ease/

Further necessary reading: The Invisible Rainbow, Plague of Corruption, and the works of Tom Cowan, heretical (the AMA just took his license to practice) medical doctor: “Human Heart, Cosmic Heart”; “Vaccines, Autoimmunity, and the Changing Nature of Childhood Iillnesses”; “Cancer and the New Biology of Water; https://www.chelseagreen.com/writer/thomas-cowan-md/ and “The Contagion Myth” https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Contagion-Myth/Thomas-S-Cowan/9781510764620

[2] “The Idea of Mind” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/tidom.html “The Quiet Suffering of Nature” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/qsfnt.html Early considerations of fundamental questions.

[3] https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2019/05/20/letters-about-magic/ is a dissertation on the relationship between the classical elements of antiquity (fire/will; air/intellect; water/feeling; and, earth/consciousness, and the four fundamental forces/transformations of modern physics (gravity, electo-magnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear interactions). Here is a point of view from an MIT engineer about the non-empirical idea of “indeterminacy” required for quantum physics: “God Does Not Play Dice”, by David Shiang https://www.amazon.com/God-Does-Not-Play-Dice/dp/0980237300/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1557063687&sr=1-1

[4] “I am not my brain, the map is not the territory” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/brain.html Decades ago it was common for scientific thinkers, on the brain and our personal consciousness, to recognize the “assumption” nature of their view that the brain does it all. “It is old hat to say that the brain is responsible for mental activity. Such a claim may annoy the likes of Jerry Falwell or the Ayatollah, but it is more or less the common assumption of educated people in the twentieth century. Ever since the scientific revolution, the guiding view of most scientists has been that knowledge about the brain, its cells and its chemistry will explain mental states. However, believing that the brain supports behavior is the easy part: explaining how is quite another.” (Mind Matters: How the Mind and Brain interact to Create Our Conscious Lives, Michael S. Grazzanica Ph.D. pp 1, Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1988). This older recognition of the assumption nature has disappeared, and today the conjecture is being treated as fact.

[5] “The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html I took the fundamentals of certain spiritual truths- such as reincarnation and karma, especially at the level of social phenomena, and expressed those ideas as a “theory”, in order to fit my work on a spiritual social science properly into the scientific way of knowledge. A central idea is to realize that the Mystery is “distributed”, each aspect makes their own contribution, especially including the human being

[6] “Eisenhower’s Farewell Address” https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=90&page=transcript We all remember the bit about the military industrial complex … he also saw the impact of money on our universities as equally dangerous to our way of life.

[7] https://thecollectiveimagination.com/the-great-unsettling-the-3rd-millennium/ https://thecollectiveimagination.com/the-moral-aesthetic-the-reason-the-world-is-full-of-woe-and-drama/ Help for the reader to see the effect on modern life that is born in the Mystery.

[8] https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2020/10/11/why-are-so-many-dying/ The pandemic narrative is mistaken. The sources of its flaws are a natural consequence of scientific materialism. The real meaning of the global plague, when stripped of the self-serving presentations of the Narrative from corporations and government officials, … this real meaning will help us face more easily the continuous oncoming tsunami of future history.

[9] “Economic and Social Rebellion – in an Age of social political chaos” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Rebellion.html A “how to” book, exactly crafted for this foreseeable crisis.

[10] “Electricity and the Spirit in Nature” Materialist science fell into the trap of believing that if they found the fundamental part, they would know from where and when came our existence. Reality comes in wholes … this essay helps see that http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/electricityandthespiritinnature.html

[11] https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520290068/eco-alchemy “Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism” Written by Dan McKanan, the Emerson Chair at the Harvard Divinity School, this work traces the influence of Steiner on environmentalism on multiple levels and moments.

[12] https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2019/10/29/tiger-saucy-writes-an-open-letter-to-greta-thunberg/ Books and such, for her further education were she to appreciate more modern works, born in the spiritual core of the seven liberal arts.

[13] http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/space.html “The Misconception of Cosmic Space as exists in the Modern Ideas of Astronomy” A discussion of the history of the ideas of red shift, and parallax, revealing that our materialistic view of the stellar world is missing crucial spiritual knowledge.

[14] “Dogma and Doubt” by Ron Brady: https://www.natureinstitute.org/ronald-h-brady/dogma-and-doubt Of what value is a theory that can’t be tested? The Nature Institute is itself a locus of deep earth scientific wisdom

[15] – the “14” (1) “Poetic Diction”, Owen Barfield; (2) “A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception, Rudolf Steiner; (3) “The Plant”, vol. 1 and 2, Gerbert Grohmann; (4) “The Nature of Substance – spirit and matter”, Rudolf Hauschka;(5) “Human Heart Cosmic Heart”, (6) “Vaccines, Autoimmunity, and the future of Childhood Illnesses”, and (7) “Cancer and the New Biology of Water” – all by Tom Cowan; (8) “Man or Matter – introduction to a spiritual understanding of Nature, on the basis of Goethe’s method of Observation and Thought”, Ernst Lehrs; (9) “On Becoming an Alchemist – a guide for the Modern Magician”, Catherine MacCoun; (10) “Sensitive Chaos – the creation of form out of flowing water and air”, Theodor Schwenk; (11) “Eco-Alchemy – Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism”, Dan McKanan; (12) the Way of the Fool – the conscious development of our human character, and the future* of Christianity – both to be born out of the natural union of Faith and Gnosis”, and (13) “The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything” by me, Joel A. Wendt. (14) “The Slow Regard of Silent Things” Patrick Rothfuss.

[16] In this regard, the writings of Franz Bardon on Hermetic Science are superior in every way: “Initiation into Hermetics”; “The Practice of Magical Evocation”; and, “The Key to the True Quabbalah”. Very ironic if, as Arthur C. Clark suggested, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”