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Sep 17, 2024
Feature photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash Opposing harmful industrial projects – like mines, aerial pesticide spraying, factory farms, or toxic waste disposal facilities – is scary and difficult work. Feeling this fear and confronting the difficulty of the work, it is tempting to cling to false, but comforting beliefs that the communities we belong to… Read more »
Read More | BlogsJun 18, 2024
The prospect of liability introduced by conferral of personhood status monetizes the relationship between humans and the rest of nature.
Read More | Blogs, Community Rights, Democratic Rights, Rights of NatureMay 8, 2024
Feature photo by Christine Roy Like Junk Mail, Junk Speech is Trash Talk Freedom of speech isn’t what it used to be. Toward the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st, its definition was changed in two unprecedented rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court. Today, what’s called free speech has… Read more »
Read More | Blogs, Community Rights, Corporate 'Rights', Corporate Agriculture, Democratic Rights, Extraction & Pollution, Rights of NatureMay 7, 2024
The Great Salt Lake. Image by Erin Testone. A growing number of American jurisdictions are outlawing Right of Nature as we embark on the greatest rates of extinctions in our planetary history. In this essay, Will Falk, encourages Rights of Nature advocates to recognize that we cannot wait for courts and governments to enforce Rights… Read more »
Read More | Blogs, Chemical Trespass, Extraction & Pollution, Rights of NatureMar 27, 2024
Testimony of a Community Organizer CELDF’s Consulting Director, Tish O’Dell, submitted her testimony, “Am I an Activist?” to the 2024 Spring Activism Peace Chronicle publication. Tish has been involved in community rights and Rights of Nature work starting in her own community of Broadview Heights, Ohio, which led to the adoption of Ohio’s first Home… Read more »
Read More | Blogs, Chemical Trespass, Community Rights, Democratic Rights, Extraction & Pollution, Rights of Nature, Water PrivitizationAug 22, 2023
Featured photo: The plaintiffs in Held v. State of Montana walking and chatting outside the courthouse. (Photo: Robin Loznak) It will take an extended commitment to community organizing to expand the Held ruling into tangible relief as a vital state constitutional protection for nature. The 16 child plaintiffs in Held v. State of Montana, the Children’s… Read more »
Read More | Blogs, Chemical Trespass, Community Rights, Corporate 'Rights', Democratic Rights, Extraction & Pollution, Rights of NatureAug 17, 2023
The centuries-long Enclosure (privatization) Movement in the U. S. is nearing completion.
Read More | Blogs, Chemical Trespass, Community Rights, Corporate 'Rights', Democratic Rights, Rights of NatureJul 31, 2023
Feature photo by Paul Vernon AFP via Getty Images In 1979, the children’s educational television series Schoolhouse Rock! broadcast a now-classic episode titled “Three Ring Government” about the three branches of the U.S. government — executive, legislative and judicial. “No one part can be more powerful than the other,” proclaimed the narrator, who explains that our system of government… Read more »
Read More | Blogs, Community Rights, Democratic Rights, Rights of NatureJul 25, 2023
Anti-intellectualism is as American as hot dogs.
Read More | Blogs, Chemical Trespass, Community Rights, Corporate 'Rights', Corporate Agriculture, Democratic Rights, Extraction & Pollution, Houselessness, Rights of Nature, Water Privitization, Worker ExploitationJul 10, 2023
In our legal system, one is either a legal subject (humans and corporations) or a legal object (nature)
Read More | Blogs, Chemical Trespass, Community Rights, Corporate 'Rights', Corporate Agriculture, Democratic Rights, Extraction & Pollution, Rights of NatureJul 7, 2023
Difficult as it may be, we’d all be better off focusing on how to change the legal system itself instead of pleading for stricter regulations.
Read More | Blogs, Chemical Trespass, Community Rights, Corporate Agriculture, Democratic Rights, Extraction & Pollution, News from the Grassroots, Rights of Nature, Water PrivitizationJul 3, 2023
If the persistence of the people of Grant Township in pursuit of justice took ten years for them to prevail, it is because they insisted on the primacy of justice over law that serves the interests of an opulent minority.
Read More | Blogs, Chemical Trespass, Community Rights, Democratic Rights, Extraction & Pollution, News from the Grassroots, Rights of NatureJun 2, 2023
The American dream has turned out to be a nightmare. Wouldn’t you say?
Read More | Blogs, Chemical Trespass, Community Rights, Democratic Rights, Extraction & Pollution, Rights of Nature, Worker ExploitationApr 4, 2023
“It seems like legal rights for community and for nature would almost be unnecessary if our attitude toward the world were based on reciprocity, responsibility, and accountability instead of maximizing personal advantage.”
Read More | Blogs, Community Rights, Democratic Rights, Rights of NatureMar 24, 2023
A more honest report on the East Palestine disaster and details how the system itself is to blame and why these horrific and deadly events keep happening and our communities and nature keep bearing the brunt.
Read More | Blogs, Chemical Trespass, Community Rights, Corporate 'Rights', Democratic Rights, Extraction & Pollution, Rights of NatureMar 22, 2023
We must start trusting in ourselves and in our community members to be able to meet our needs, solve our problems and create truly participatory community-based forms of government and public spaces.
Read More | Blogs, Community Rights, Democratic Rights, Rights of NatureMar 14, 2023
The posting of this piece is a reflection of CELDF’s commitment to featuring diverse perspectives and ideas in the quest to bring about a community rights and rights of nature existence into full being.
Read More | BlogsMar 3, 2023
We are used to extracting not only metallic ores and fossil fuels, but ourselves and our communities from the natural world, and yet we don’t notice the increasing distance placed between us and our natural habitat by the human-made environment.
Read More | Blogs, Community Rights, Rights of NatureFeb 7, 2023
The person in this position will play an integral role in expanding CELDF’s support for its mission to advance democratic and environmental rights. This is a part-time remote contract position, with the possibility of an expanded role over time.
Read More | Blogs, News, News from the Grassroots, ResourcesJan 19, 2023
At the risk of expediting the die-off of most life on the planet, including most humans, judges continue to turn a blind eye toward the rights of natural communities – where humans live in harmony with their environment – while giving full-throated support for legal rights vested in corporate property.
Read More | Blogs, Rights of NatureJan 16, 2023
The challenge: How to overcome the white dominance/Black subordination relationship. How to decolonize.
Read More | Blogs, Democratic RightsJan 5, 2023
We must think about our history- the Revolutionaries were proposing an alternative to being a colony of England, abolitionists were fighting for an alternative to slavery, the suffragists for an alternative to patriarchy and on and on.
Read More | Blogs, Democratic RightsDec 20, 2022
Let’s be generous and call the COP–15 agreement a plan for conserving 1% of Earth’s biodiversity. That means that negotiators agreed to sacrifice 99% of Earth’s remaining biodiversity on the altar of human consumption for profit.
Read More | Blogs, Chemical Trespass, Community Rights, Democratic Rights, News from the Grassroots, Rights of NatureNov 8, 2022
Lakota advocate and water protector Debra White Plume (Wioweya Najin Wina), upon being introduced to the history of municipal subjugation in the United States during a Democracy School hosted by residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, remarked that “municipalities are the white man’s reservations. The only difference is, we know we’re on reservations.”
Read More | Blogs, Community Rights, Democratic Rights, News from the Grassroots, Rights of NatureSep 23, 2022
The law locks up the man or woman, Who steals the goose from off the common, But leaves the greater villain loose, Who steals the common from off the goose
Read More | Blogs, Issues, News, Rights of NatureSep 12, 2022
You wouldn’t think, in a rational society, that anyone would have to be told this, but reality doesn’t care what anybody believes is true; it just is. And what isn’t, isn’t.
Read More | Blogs, Issues, News, News from the Grassroots, Rights of NatureAug 21, 2022
Refuse to be complacent. Refuse to be complicit. Refuse to be irrelevant.
Read More | Blogs, Community Rights, Democratic Rights, News, News from the GrassrootsAug 5, 2022
Do you know what’s not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution? For one thing, government by the people.
Read More | Blogs, Community Rights, Corporate 'Rights', Democratic Rights, News, News from the GrassrootsJul 19, 2022
The Right to Property is Inalienable, Right?
Some rights are defined as inalienable, meaning that they can’t be taken away from you. Heck, you can’t even sell them, trade them, or give them away.
Jul 1, 2022
The Right of Free Speech Includes the Right to Clean Air to Speak With Look, if corporate property can be called a legal person, and if that person has a right to speak freely, but no mouth, and if corporate-cozy judges can make us all pretend for real that spending money is the way corporate… Read more »
Read More | Blogs, Corporate 'Rights', Extraction & Pollution, News, News from the Grassroots, Rights of NatureMay 11, 2022
While we’re being told by scientific authority that decisive action to reduce carbon emissions is mandatory within the 2020’s, the legal theory underlying Juliana is risky and time-consuming. Worse, “victory” in Juliana would mean contradictory and self-defeating technological fixes which are misleadingly cast as proven ways to salvage life on the planet. In these potentially closing moments of human existence, the inhabitants, human and otherwise, deserve a whole lot better.
Read More | Blogs, NewsMay 4, 2022
Over the last 15 years, grassroots work that establishes rights for human and natural communities has expanded in ways that no one could have foreseen. And while we will celebrate the legal and the political victories, the truth is that none of this would have happened without people…
Read More | Blogs, NewsApr 27, 2022
The system has worked hard to create obedience in a number of ways and to cover up and misdirect the true impacts of what our obsession with stuff has resulted in. Yet the misdirection continues to keep our obedience to stuff as if the seeking out and possessing of stuff is akin to our biological need to breathe.
Read More | Blogs, NewsApr 20, 2022
“Claiming to fight for clean water because the human community depends on clean water to bring in more tourism or that we need to destroy an entire ecosystem for lithium so that humans can continue as they have, misses the point of why we need to change. The other species in the river don’t benefit from more tourism and the plants and the animals on top of the lithium deposit and the aquifer beneath it won’t benefit either.”
Read More | Blogs, NewsApr 13, 2022
Earth Emancipation Now!
Synopsis: The American Empire was built on the model of European colonialism and the enclosure of the Commons. The Federalists, who crafted the U.S. Constitution, emulated Old World Empires by privatizing government and transforming the whole natural world into property. They erected an aristocracy of wealth by vesting in property itself the authority to govern. Our common environment is legally enslaved to the whims of its owners and they, by virtue of that ownership, govern us. There is no alternative to save planet Earth but to emancipate Nature from legal enslavement as property.
Jan 11, 2022
Dear friends, Tom Groover, an NCRN and COCRN Board member, along with his wife Karen recently lost everything in the Boulder County Colorado Marshall Fire that started on December 30, 2021. Tom has been on the Board of NCRN since its inception in 2014-2015. I initially spoke with Tom on Sunday January 2nd and then briefly… Read more »
Read More | BlogsJan 7, 2022
Nov 19, 2021
Justice continues to be denied in Oregon. Community rights efforts in Lane and Lincoln counties have, quite wrongly, found themselves mired in the Oregon court system on issues that should’ve been considered and resolved by the people of their respective counties.
Read More | BlogsNov 16, 2021
Community Rights Lane County educates and mobilizes citizens about their rights to local community self-governance. They believe decisions affecting communities must be made by community residents – the people directly impacted by these decisions and laws that authorize harmful corporate activities.
Read More | Blogs