Host a community or virtual event to start the conversation around Community Rights or Rights of Nature in your community. Contact us to set up a screening of one of the films below. CELDF staff members are available to help plan a panel discussion, workshop, or Q&A as well as facilitate screening set up between your community and the filmmakers. Use the contact form at the bottom of this page to get started.
Invisible Hand
INVISIBLE HAND is a “paradigm-shifting” documentary about the global ‘Rights of Nature’ movement. The defining battle of our times where Nature, democracy and capitalism face off in rural America. Produced by award-winning actor Mark Ruffalo, INVISIBLE HAND takes you behind the curtain of the global economy.
“This is an inspirational movie of effective civic action, where these communities have broken new legal ground for protection of the lakes, rivers, and aquifers that up until now have had no agency.”
In the fall of 2014, for the first time in United States history, an ecosystem filed to defend itself in a lawsuit claiming its ‘right to exist’ in Grant Township, Pennsylvania. For attempting such a radical act, Grant’s rural community of 700 people were sued by a corporation, then by the state government, and are now locked in a battle to defend the watershed they call home through civil disobedience. The water they drink, the Rights to Nature laws they’ve passed are all on the line in this exclusive story.
In Toledo, Ohio an earth-shattering vote was passed to enact the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR), granting personhood to international waters. Half a continent away in Standing Rock, North Dakota, the same industry threatening Grant Twp. is using militarized force against indigenous tribes and allies fighting to protect Mother Earth.
The People Vs. Agent Orange
The inspiring and enraging film follows women-led resistance to the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, and its use in Oregon, following the war. The film tells a story of the inhumane war economy and its homecoming through the pesticide industry. The viewer witnesses intimate behind-the-scenes access to grassroots resistance in Oregon and Vietnam and gut-wrenching first-person accounts of sacrifice and resolve.
The film, directed by Kate Taverna and Alan Adelson, features Carol Van Strum, an active participant in Community Rights and Rights of Nature organizing in Oregon. As part of her activism, Van Strum has supported lawmaking efforts in Lincoln County, Oregon to ban aerial spraying and recognize the rights of ecosystems. She is the human spokesperson for the Siletz River watershed in active litigation coming out of a challenge to the aerial spray ban Lincoln County enacted in 2017. That law, drafted with help from CELDF, successfully banned aerial pesticide spraying for two years and recognized the rights of local ecosystems. (CELDF recently briefed that case for the Oregon appeals court.)
Photo by Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash