How can you get what you want in your community? Where can you learn more about “community rights organizing?” How is the Community Rights Movement growing? Find the answers here, in publications by CELDF. Some are free, some cost a low fee – click on the publication for more information.
Common Sense – New Edition!
Trying to protect your community from environmental harms such as fracking, or social justice harms, such as unfair elections? Check out Common Sense and learn how our decision-making authority has been stripped – and what communities across the country are doing about it. Our organizing primer is for volunteers, activists, community groups, and others working for change. Learn how to bring Community Rights to your community! (Note: the pdf is designed for 11X17 paper).
Rebelling Against the Corporate State: Forging a community rights movement
Purchase here! Our popular Community Rights Papers were printed between 2014 – 2017 and re-frame contemporary and historical events through a Community Rights lens. They are compiled here in book format, offering a vision of what is possible when using a rights-based legal framework. From the foreword by Karenna Gore, attorney, advocate, writer and educator, and Director of the Center for Earth Ethics: “This nation was based on the conviction that local self-government was an inherent natural right. Only the voice of people who deeply care about the land they live on is powerful enough to push bureaucracies to pay attention to the ecological crisis. In the name of both American democracy and life on Earth, this community voice must be heard.”
How Wealth Rules the world: saving our communities and freedoms from the dictatorship of property
CELDFs national organizing director, Ben Price, reveals that our constitution and legal system were intentionally designed to give more rights to the wealthy propertied class than the rest of us. Price exposes how this hamstrings our ability to effectively address a host of pressing social and environmental problems – and what we can do about it. Get your copy today!
How Dams Fall
Purchase here! “The Colorado River speaks,” Will Falk insists in How Dams Fall. Written while Falk was involved in the first-ever American federal lawsuit seeking personhood and rights of nature for a major ecosystem, the Colorado River, this essay, at once lyrical and analytical, explores the American cultural, and his personal, relationship with one of the world’s most famous―and most misunderstood―rivers. Responsible for speaking on the Colorado’s behalf in court, Falk spent weeks traveling with the river asking her who she is and what she needs. With brutal honesty and an unflinching commitment to witnessing the river’s wounds in all their painful detail, How Dams Fall is an intimate conversation between a human and a river. In a time when the Colorado River is at record low levels and water shortages look inevitable, this essay is a must-read for outdoor enthusiasts, naturalists, water advocates, and anyone who has ever fallen in love with the natural world.