From Charlottesville to Yosemite

The Ahwahnee Hotel in 1980 (George Rose)

Daniel Duane has an interesting piece in yesterday's New York Times on genocide of the Yosemite Valley's natives and the replacement of their names with Anglo ones, and it all starts from a trademark dispute. After detailing the killing and renaming of places in Yosemite carried out by California militia, Duane explains both the legal dispute and the complexity of the name issue:

The recent furor over the name of the Ahwahnee began in 2015, when a subsidiary of the Delaware North Corporation, which operated the park’s hotels, restaurants and shops for more than two decades under a government concession contract, lost its contract to Aramark (no tragedy there — the burgers were criminal). The government says Delaware North quietly registered the trademarks for the names on the hotel and the other places and is now demanding payment for their use. The National Park Service came up with new names and told Delaware North to get lost. Now there’s a federal lawsuit.

I dearly hope Delaware North loses, but I also hope that the National Park Service sticks with the new names, however ridiculous — and, while they’re at it, changes dozens of others. My vote would be to change Tenaya Lake to Pywiack Lake, relabel Yosemite Valley itself Ahwahnee and sprinkle the park with new historical plaques saying things like “On this spot, in 1851, American militiamen shot Tenaya’s son in the back, let him bleed out in the grass, then dragged Tenaya up to have a look and enjoyed watching him weep.” 

Spirit over the waters

Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal, original Lockport Lock (American Canal Society)

I recently came across Paul Janicke's website Spirit Over the Waters, which contains libraries of cases having to do with the Lake Michigan water diversion controversies (1900-present) and related patent infringement controversies on wastewater treatment (1914-1947). The site explains the first set of cases:

Twenty percent of the world’s fresh water in the world is in the Great Lakes. That water has drawn significant interstate controversies for over 100 years. States have had recourseto the Supreme Court seven times, testing what a state can or cannot do with the water of Lake Michigan. The most important of the cases, the one between Illinois and the other lake-bordering states, was filed in 1922 and is still open today. The central issue has been the withdrawal by Illinois of significant quantities of Lake Michigan water to use as flush water for Chicago’s human and industrial wastes, sending them westward into the Mississippi .Other issues evolved as well. 

The Supreme Court has been the main decider.

In most instances of controversy the Supreme Court appointed a special master to gather the evidence and recommend resolution. The Court’s decision in each instance is readily available, but none of the underlying masters’ reports and related briefing are in the Court’s records today. For this library all the special masters’ reports, and much of the states’ briefing, has been recovered, along with significant evidentiary and background materials. It is hoped that scholars and members of the public will find this long story pertinent to contemporary discussions regarding water supply in an era of major droughts in many parts of the country.

And the second:

The Old Man and the Sea

I recently came across an unusual blend of environment, law, history--and literature--in Enrique Guerra-Pujol's article, "Misappropriation and The Old Man and the Sea". The abstract:

We consider whether the great writer Ernest Hemingway may have committed the tort of misappropriation when he published his masterpiece “The Old Man and the Sea.” In summary, Hemingway either borrowed or stole (depending on one’s perspective) the following elements of his timeless novella: (i) the actual story itself, (ii) the “back-story” and other biographical details of the main character of the story, Santiago, as well as (iii) Santiago’s ascetic persona and physical characteristics. Although we concede that Hemingway combined these ingredients into a new and original artistic work, the question we are considering in this paper is whether Hemingway’s creative combination of such elements is enough to negate a claim of misappropriation under current U.S. or Cuban law. (We must consider Cuban law in addition to U.S. law since Hemingway lived in Havana, Cuba when he wrote and published “The Old Man and the Sea.”) That is, if Hemingway were writing “The Old Man the Sea” today, could he be liable under the common law doctrine of misappropriation or even under Cuban law?

Environmental history and capitalism in Monsanto v. Bowman

In a surprise to nobody, today the US Supreme Court handed a major victory to Monsanto, the St. Louis-based agribusiness giant. Vernon Bowman, a 75-year old soybean farmer, harvested genetically-modified seeds on his Indiana farm. These were not just any old seeds, and Bowman signed a contract upon purchase agreeing not to save any seeds from the harvest. Like about 90% of all soybeans in the united States, these contained the  Roundup Ready® gene, making them resistant to the herbicide Roundup, also a Monsanto product.

Bowman’s lawyers argued patent exhaustion; Monsanto (and others) argued that patent protection was necessary to recoup their R&D costs, and that without patent protection “there would be no financial incentive to continue investing in technologies with easily replicable features.”