MISSION & VISION
Advancing community
resistance + resilience.
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) exists to spark and grow a revolutionary movement for people and nature. The movement’s aim is to advance community resistance + resilience focused on establishing democratic, economic, social, and environmental systems in right relationship with people and place. Acts of resistance and resilience, combined, will aid in dismantling the corporate state.
CELDF’s mission is to aid in establishing and fostering self-governing communities that live harmoniously within the boundaries of ecology.
OUR BACKGROUND
Three decades of commitment to the cause.
30 years ago, CELDF was born from a belief that what communities and ecosystems needed was legal support for enforcing existing environmental law in the United States. Our fledgling organization soon came to realize that our focus was wrong: certainly the natural and human environments required support, but we had mistaken the strategy and tactics needed to fight against a corporate and governmental system fixed to counteract real environmental protection.
That realization is responsible for the revolutionary work propelling the organization to where it is today. We’ve worked hard to connect and equip real people, in real places, with the means not only to advocate for themselves and the land they are a part of but also to become change agents for the way we live and govern. Our first-in-country, first-in-world campaigns and lawmaking efforts turned the idea of the rights of nature into an enforceable law, empowering local authorities to protect themselves, inspiring others around the world to do the same, and creating shockwaves within the system of so-called corporate rights.
MILESTONES
- First in the world to recognize Rights of Nature through law (Tamaqua Borough)
- First US law recognizing the rights of a specific ecosystem (Lake Erie)
- First US laws directly prohibiting corporate rights (Pennsylvania)
- First city to ban fracking for violating Nature’s Rights (Pittsburgh, PA)
- First Rights of Nature law introduced to a state legislature (Great Lakes Bill of Rights, NY)
- First state constitutional amendments drafted to recognize Right of Local Self-Government and Rights of Nature (PA, NH, OH, CO, OR)
Features
Media & News:
- New York Times, The Guardian, PBS, The Daily Show, Rolling Stone, Democracy Now!, NPR, and many more
Documentaries:
- We the People 2.0
- Invisible Hand
- Hellbent
- What We Do to Nature, We Do to Ourselves
Books:
- We the People
- How Wealth Rules the World
- Wouldn’t You Say?
- Rebelling Against the Corporate State
- Death by Democracy
- Can You Handle the Truth?
OUR ROADMAP
Creating a true paradigm shift.
CELDF aims to invest in community resistance and reslience, strategic direction, and ultimately community level action that effectively disengages from the illegitimacy of the dominant system. Collaboration and expanding local efforts will achieve the rise of a necessary social movement, strong enough to accomplish transformational change. However, in the same moment, we can expect the dominant system to double down on its efforts to contain and eliminate those who oppose it so there is a real need to be prepared.
To build up a people’s movement powerful enough to resist the dominant system, CELDF by way of its experience, collaboration with others, and envisioning a new means of organizing and engagement, has identified pathways for achieving our goals for people and the environment.
In CELDF’s future, we foresee a confrontation between ecosystem rights, which encompass basic human rights, and corporate constitutional rights or the pursuit of profit for profit sake over everything else. As this movement continues to grow, CELDF will continue to push for the structural change needed to win communities the basic power to heighten protections for their civil, human, and ecosystem rights. We see this happening through our efforts and those of others transpiring through various points of engagement in the name of community resistance and resilience.
