Publication: How to Protect Your Community — Enact Local Democracy Now!
~A New Hampshire Booklet~
The health of communities and ecosystems is under attack. As the climate crisis accelerates and racial and economic inequality deepens, localized collective action becomes essential. Communities can take a stand to show that alternatives to our extractive and abusive economy are possible. This expands our collective imagination and flexes power to fight for a truly just system where communities have real power to hold corporations and government accountable, moving toward a sustainable future for all.
We have to get serious about building systems that are not reliant on endless growth and which dismantles the legacies of colonialism and the violence it has enacted.
Corporations, public officials, and the policies and practices set in place from their interdependent relationship are causing real physical and psychological harm to us and the places we live. The New Hampshire Community Rights Network (NHCRN) has compiled an in-depth booklet to explore a transformation of New Hampshire’s form of government. (Booklet attached below.)
Many residents of the state have the false impression that New Hampshire, with its town meeting form of local governance, possesses an empowered form of “local democracy.” However, as the inhabitants of the state have discovered, when these meetings do endeavor to curtail corporate projects at the scale where political engagement is most genuine, there is no local democratic authority. A state legislature obsessed with centralized control and captured by corporate and regressive interests continues to repress local political action when it challenges the extractive and racist status quo.
Corporate-lobbied laws, upheld by the courts, works to repress organized local power.
“Enough is enough!” says NHCRN board member, Michelle Sanborn. “We cannot protect ourselves, the environment we are a part of, nor future generations if we do not understand how our forms of government work, why they were designed as they are, where they fall short, and what we can do differently to create and legalize the protections we envision in the places we live, work, and play.”
The booklet How to Protect Your Community – Enact Local Democracy Now! features historical and contemporary analysis, theory, and case studies. It will be distributed in New Hampshire and is now available for broader audiences as a free download or hard copy.
Contact NHCRN to receive a hard copy: nhcommunityrights.org.
