Search Results for: rights of nature

Over the weekend of Earth Day, the documentary video “Youth v. Gov,” the story of the Juliana v U.S. climate lawsuit, was nationally released. Also known as the young people’s climate change lawsuit, the documentary covers the travails of twenty-one charismatic young people (the youngest was 7 when the suit was initially filed in 2015) who seek to have U.S. federal courts recognize that they have a constitutional right to a safe, healthy environment. The plaintiffs are represented in court by Our Children’s Trust (OCT), which calls itself the “world’s only non-profit public interest law firm dedicated exclusively to securing the legal rights of youth to a healthy atmosphere and safe climate, based on the best available science.” OCT “aims to ensure systemic and science-based climate recovery planning and remedies at federal, state, and global levels.”

“Youth v. Gov” tells a story that’s well-conceived for public relations purposes, featuring diverse, articulate, and charming child plaintiffs in a climate-rescue sojourn that has gone on for nearly seven years. Juliana v. U.S. was filed in federal court in Oregon and raises claims based on constitutional and public trust doctrines. The lead plaintiff, Kelsey Juliana, expressed at the outset that “maybe we don’t have Congress or the Presidency behind us, but we’ve always got the courts,” a perception that has visibly changed as time went by and the hijinks, dirty tricks and sheer manipulations perpetrated by the Department of Justice and corporate lobbying groups stalled any trial. By 2020, the plaintiffs seemed to be adjusting to the reality that their righteous cause had matured into a lifelong fight.

My point isn’t to criticize these laudable young people for trying to elevate public visibility of the accelerating climate crisis through high-profile litigation; it’s to discuss what they want the courts to do, and to inquire whether the larger agenda behind Juliana is downright contradictory and self-defeating. The plaintiffs are asking for recognition of their right to a livable climate and a court-ordered prescription of the massive legal, technological, and administrative requirements needed to avert an expected 1.5º Celsius planetary overheating by 2100, which is a noble pursuit. But the means that OCT proposes to restrain the global burn to 1º C. are controversial, and likely will waste time and resources on desperate technologies that won’t work while precluding recourse to other drastic strategies that might.

First, the legal approach of Our Children’s Trust is likely to fail. The “Public Trust Doctrine” (PTD), as it is called, is a mostly judge-made concept where the government has a duty to preserve certain natural and cultural resources for the benefit of the public. Courts have generally limited application of the PTD to navigable streams and their tributaries, or to beaches and shores. OCT seeks to expand the PTD to encompass the atmosphere.

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In a 2011 cautionary episode, OCT sued Oregon’s governor for a ruling that the Public Trust Doctrine requires Oregon to serve as a trustee to protect various public natural resources from being damaged by greenhouse gas emissions, which cause climate change and ocean acidification. The plaintiffs sought to order the State to implement a carbon reduction plan protecting the natural resources, which the court would supervise to ensure enforcement. The Oregon Supreme Court refused to expand the Public Trust Doctrine to include the atmosphere because it was “not easily held or improved,” and held that the PTD was meant “to protect public resources for the benefit of the public’s use of navigable waterways for navigation, recreation, commerce, and fisheries.” The argument that the “Public Trust” should be enlarged so the judicial system can implement a newly-found constitutional right to a healthy climate seems a very tough sell. In a corporation-dominated federal court system that is poised to abolish the constitutional right to abortion, the creation of new governmental protections from ineffective environmental management has very unlikely prospects.

But even if the Public Trust Doctrine were expanded, the OCT’s prescription is corporate and suspect. In OCT’s “Pathway to Climate Recovery” pamphlet, the group cites “transitioning to 100% clean energy” as imperative. OCT’s defining vision of “clean energy” is found in a “groundbreaking” 2019 report by a consulting firm named Evolved Energy Research (EER) for the international Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project. OCT headlined its press announcement, “Groundbreaking Report Shows the United States Can Lead the Way Toward Climate Recovery Without Economic Hardship.”

Given the explosion of wildfires in the American West, the spread of epochal drought, increasingly severe tornadoes and hurricanes, movement of the climatological zones northward, and rising water levels in coastal cities, our economy and way of life are already being unpredictably disrupted. All credible predictions are that worse will happen and that the unfolding catastrophe will continue as the Great Unraveling.

In support of its wistful assurance that humanity will be able to stay at 1º C. without economic or lifestyle disruption, EER touts controversial or counterproductive climate rescue solutions: vastly increased industrial wind farms and photovoltaic arrays; biomass burning, including waste-to-energy garbage incineration; large-scale industrial carbon capture and storage; extended use of decaying nuclear power reactors; and widespread deployment of next-generation “advanced” nuclear reactors. EER foresees no downside to the replacement of hundreds of millions of fossil fuel-powered vehicles with electrical ones.

The critical documentary “Planet of the Humans” and the book Bright Green Lies expose the reality that “renewable” energy is heavily dependent on things that aren’t so renewable. Mining for lithium and other precious metals and rare earths, for example, induces the same problems of neocolonialism, disastrous extractive mining, and denial of environmental justice that previous modes of raw resource exploitation cause. Biomass wood-burning and waste-to-energy garbage incineration is not a carbon-neutral energy source. Carbon capture and storage are not commercially workable and remains largely experimental. Many aging nuclear power plants are being closed for ostensibly economic reasons that camouflage looming safety concerns accrued in plants operated beyond their planned useful lifetimes. The Davis-Besse nuclear power plant near Toledo, Ohio, for example, has chronic and uncontainable micro-cracking going on in the walls of the shield building that supposedly protects the reactor from being damaged by outside sources. The Palisades plant in southwestern Michigan is classified as having the second most embrittled reactor vessel in the American nuclear industry, with the potential for disastrous shattering if there is too extreme a temperature change in the water circulating through it. The extension of aging reactor operations implicates safety and is not an easy question of keeping them open for a longer time.

So-called “advanced” nuclear reactors encompass an untested range of 10 different types. Some of the advanced designs — none of which have been commercially built — can explode or melt down. Other types would use isotopes from radioactive waste as fuel. The reprocessing of nuclear waste would also separate weapons-grade plutonium, a highly desirable commodity for illicit black-market trading. Still, other advanced reactor types would make nuclear weapons proliferation a global nightmare. None of the advanced nuclear reactors being studied will be commercially possible before the early to mid-2030s. Advanced reactors are “too late, too expensive, too risky and too uncertain.”

There are several lessons to be learned from the Juliana case and the international litigation activity spawned by Our Children’s Trust.

● The outcomes of future struggles cannot for the most part be left to lawyers, experts, and friend of the court briefs. Juliana began as a “silver bullet,” targeted lawsuit that has been forced off course by law and politics. After 7 years, there’s no end in sight. The plaintiffs will be parents themselves, and years into adulthood, before there is a court result. Courts follow history; they rarely lead it. The high point of the lawsuit may have already occurred, with the trial and appellate courts’ acknowledgments that the other branches of government are failing the public on climate chaos. The Juliana plaintiffs hopefully will not let themselves become helpless bystanders. Neither they nor the country can afford more years of legal melodrama awaiting the American “justice” mirage to generate an outright defeat or weak symbolic victory.

● OCT must stop marketing Juliana as the gateway to a painless transition when authoritative environmental science predicts widespread economic dislocation and social deterioration. OCT’s current message is that solving climate chaos can be left to lawyers and the courts to fix. Yet politics-as-usual, endless material consumption, inequitable distribution of wealth, incomplete implementation of human rights principles, and the dysfunctional physical environment are aggravating the mounting crisis. Climate chaos will not be resolved by switching from gasoline to lithium batteries, ignoring the unsustainable consumptive North American lifestyle, and relegating determination of the climate crisis details to the courts.

● Depending on the courts to use the atmospheric Public Trust Doctrine to reinvent themselves as society’s climate saviors is magical thinking. The Congress and Executive branches of government are not leveling with the People about the coming crises, and it is unrealistic to expect the politicized and reactionary federal courts to step up as the adult in the room. A Rights of Nature-based legal framework, which would emphasize the hierarchy of ecological existence for survival, could much better illustrate the recalibration needed for human survival and provide standards to guide decision-making. Indeed, OCT’s most solid court victory to date was achieved in Colombia, where its affiliate advanced a Rights of Nature legal theory to protect the Colombian Rain Forest. In 2018 the Supreme Court of Justice conferred legal personhood on the Rain Forest and ordered the Colombian government to create and implement plans to curb deforestation; update and orient existing land use management plans to address climate change and adaptation; and develop an “intergenerational pact for the life of the Colombian Amazon” in collaboration with the plaintiffs, affected communities, and research and scientific organizations.” Despite this smashing breakthrough win for the Rights of Nature doctrine – which has been recognized internationally – Our Children’s Trust clings to the Public Trust Doctrine as the legal game-changer to rescue the Earth’s habitability.

● Notwithstanding the high-fiving and precocious victory laps taken by OCT’s generational stand-ins, movement building has only just begun. Sustained human resistance to the corporate and governmental perpetrators of climate chaos must become the pre-eminent focus in our politics. Protracted and creative civil disobedience will become obligatory. The new combinations and intersections of activism require more than celebrity and more than writing letters requesting the support of elected members of Congress for the Juliana case. Local advocacy is essential to cause changes in lifestyle and carbon consumption through changing mass transit policy, advancing local food production, opposing war industries, pushing energy conservation in public facilities and land-use decisions, and organizing for recognition of the rights of nature and against the privatization of public utilities and the commons in general.

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.

 Tish O’Dell, CELDF

On the evening of Earth Day 2020, I along with the other Community Rights Organizers at The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), hosted a Q & A titled “50 Years of Earth Day- What are we Celebrating?”. I wanted the title to be “50 Years of Earth Day…and the Earth is Fucked”, but we all know life is full of compromises! 

This was also the evening of the premiere of the Moore/Gibbs documentary, Planet of the Humans, so I didn’t get to watch it until the next day. I started watching while having my morning coffee and I was immediately riveted. Not because Gibbs was pointing out that I had been duped again…not because I drive a Prius and had illusions of that helping slow down the climate disaster, but because he was revealing a truth about the “environmental movement.” A truth that capitalism, which is based on endless expansion and consumption as a measure of progress just isn’t compatible with reality. Reactions to the movie by some critical environmentalists have since been shown to be shallow, self-serving, and not all that serious.

The truth addressed by Gibbs wasn’t new to me. I discovered it years ago when I began my work as a Community Rights and Rights of Nature organizer. During that decade of activism, I’ve too many times felt the wrath of environmental activists who seemed unable to grasp the weight of their complicity in the global crisis. Instead of pouring every bit of their efforts into protecting the planet, they seemed more devoted to protecting a privileged way of life. And yet here were Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs coming out and challenging that deep-seated belief that we can do both: save life on Earth and still hold onto the luxurious amenities (that only some get to enjoy), made possible by access to seemingly inexhaustible sources of energy.

I felt so happy that morning, after watching the film. Not that it’s a cheery message, but it was like being vindicated for all the times I had tried to explain the hard facts about so-called alternative energy and got nothing in return but criticism, anger, and the shocking experience of being blackballed from environmental forums.

At the beginning of my current work with Community Rights and Rights of Nature, I was actually naïve enough to believe that if I could see the uncomfortable truths about our system, and yes they were uncomfortable for me too, so would everyone else once I shared what I’d learned and discovered. 

Because I was momentarily elated that the unvarnished facts were finally going public, I had a temporary blackout and forgot about the all-too-common consequences of truth-telling. I posted the link to the movie on social media and praised the movie for having courage on my Facebook page. Uh-Oh. My memory came back as I hit the “send” button. I knew what was coming next. An onslaught of hate and name-calling. What was the source of this animosity? I was viewed as joining the ranks of traitors who dared call out true believers in our economic and political systems and consumer culture that make life bearable for people who don’t want to face the truth: …that within our current system, by insisting lifestyle change is off the table and continuing this illusion of “progress”, every pseudo-solution to planetary catastrophe intensifies exploitation of the natural world.  Environmentalism of this sort mirrors the behavior of the diabetic who’s willing to do anything to improve their health – except quit sugar— my mother was a diabetic, so I understand it is hard to do. Apologists for greenwashing the climate crisis will do anything it takes to protect the environment except alter their lifestyles which, it turns out, are actually a big part of the problem. And, I acknowledge this is also hard to do, but necessary, if we are truly going to make the changes we need to protect life on Earth.

So as the day went on, I watched the predictable reactions of the public unfold. The name-calling and even the calls to remove the film from public viewing. “Take it down” was repeated in emails, posts and texts from all directions, including Josh Fox, Bill McKibben, and others linked to this “green” revolution. Usually, it is industry and the “conservative right” making these calls for censorship, but this time and a lot more often in 2022, they were coming from the “progressive liberal left” along with industry (renewable energy investors this time) and what was normally the opposition (oil and gas) was praising the film. At first glance, it seemed that all was out of whack. But when you understand the system and culture that props up Trojan Horse activism, it isn’t out of whack at all.  

As a Community Rights Organizer, I try to educate and expose how our deeply ingrained beliefs in democracy, capitalism, our legal system, and environmental protection system are all an illusion. For true believers, it’s an unwelcome message. My hope is to help people in communities pull away the veil that keeps them blind to institutional illusions and unrealistic beliefs. I want the truth to empower everyone who cares to take responsibility for creating the community they envision for the future. While a disturbingly honest film like Planet of the Humans got shouted down and taken down from several platforms, including YouTube for over a year, every unbelievable superhero flick that comes along is breathlessly anticipated, and dutifully attended like it’s a revival of faith in the gods of old, and that we deserve divine intervention on the side of all that’s luxurious and convenient. 

But there are no heroes waiting in the wings. The government won’t save us; Elon Musk won’t save us, and mining lithium for electric car batteries won’t protect your air, water, or food. Nature and people don’t need cleaner cars. We need a lot fewer cars. We need an end to the exploitation of ecosystems, communities, and laborers for the production of more, which we confuse with progress. Consider that a single Tesla battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. At this rate, over the next thirty years, we will need to mine more mineral ores than humans have extracted over the last 70,000 years.

In conversations with community allies and activists about the film, I learned that a lot of their criticisms stemmed from the fact that Gibbs/Moore didn’t tell us exactly how to fix the problem. But is it really the job of a few filmmakers to give us a step-by-step guide on how to save the planet in a 90-minute video? I’ve heard this same criticism directed at me more than a few times when organizing for Rights of Nature and Community Rights. There seems to be a reservoir of untapped anger that explodes to the surface when we expose the economy of surplus production and gluttonous consumption and suggest that its every-day beneficiaries are obligated to end their addictions or take everyone and everything down with them to the rock bottom that’s unavoidable without drastic change. 

My goal in Community Rights organizing is to get people to understand that they have to take responsibility for their children’s future and the survivability of thousands of at-risk species by coming up with solutions, collectively as a community, with some basic shared values. Now, I have to admit that if we look at the problems on a national or global scale they can seem overwhelming, almost to the point of paralyzing people into inaction. It becomes an excuse—the problem is too big for me to make a difference so I won’t do anything. Of course, many of these same people will post quotes on their social media feeds like “we are the ones we have been waiting for” or “never doubt what a small group of people can do to change the world.” But they’d rather believe in false solutions, like buying an electric car, than even imagine we might actually have to abandon the luxury of a car in every garage, whether it runs on fossil fuels ripped out of Earth’s crust or lithium batteries ripped out of Earth’s crust and charged by solar and wind “farms” that require fossil fuels and many other resources from nature.

The necessary changes to this system of corporate-controlled, monopolistic extractive industries and the mechanisms of government that give it control over our lives at every turn are at the core of the Community Rights Movement. The closer to the people the decisions are made, the better it is for both people and nature. Instead of only seeing energy production as a commodity on a centralized grid to be bought and sold by the highest bidders, communities need to take charge of energy production for their local community’s use. Without the option of destroying someone else’s community to fulfill their needs, people will become very creative. It’s not that we don’t have solutions or ideas on how to live differently; it’s that the system is so good at keeping us from developing and implementing them. This open-ended ability to plunder the Earth feeds the illusion of endless resources. 

When I speak with people about imminent harm facing their community, I ask them what they think would solve the problem. They always have lots of ideas, but almost immediately they stop themselves by saying “oh we can’t do that; the state won’t let us; the law won’t let us.” They self-censor creative solutions and the profiteers leeching off the current system couldn’t be happier about that.

Throughout the film, Gibbs offers solutions or at least several times hints at what we must do (quotes from the film):

• “Is it even possible for industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?” 
• “Technology fixes lead us to more technology problems” 
• “We are taking desperate measures not to save the planet, but to save our way of life.” 
• “We have a culturally destructive belief system…humans don’t like to be called animals and we have an anxiety over death, we search for immortality….we make tragic decisions based on these beliefs” 
• “Capitalism is about more—more consumption, more profits, more growth” (Green investments are simply betting on more consumption and growth of a different industry’s profits), “Less must be the new normal” 
• “It’s not a carbon dioxide molecule destroying the planet but us-We have to get ourselves under control”. 

The reason we can’t hear these as clues to solutions is that it goes against everything we have been taught. But our culture and way of life have to be on the table if we hope to make any change of significance. Indigenous peoples and the land they live on have been sacrificed for capitalism and colonialism for hundreds of years. Perhaps the dominant culture has been so hell-bent on destroying traditional, indigenous cultures because they are a reminder that many humans have lived sustainably for thousands of years before this one came along.

Another major criticism I heard repeated over and over was that the film had “old facts/data”. Is it outdated to say that renewable energy requires rare earth minerals for energy collection and storage, which requires intensified mining, which requires fossil fuels? Is it an obsolete observation to say biofuels are destroying the planet? Do we really believe that we can use “animal fat, sugar cane, or seaweed” to fuel our current lifestyles without having a detrimental effect on nature?  Are Gibbs’ facts about the monetary connections of Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill McKibbon wrong? Will investing in a “green fund” and carbon credits actually solve the problem or just continue to allow wealthy polluters to pay to pollute? 

I have worked with activists who get so bogged down in data that it becomes an obsession. They must have the latest and most up-to-date “facts” to support claims that a proposed industrial project will be harmful or beneficial. In the end, they wind up going in circles, researching continuously, and never doing anything else. Of course, industry many times pays for a study that contradicts the activists’ study and creates the doubt necessary to keep this endless loop going on for decades….all while more and more harm and destruction to the environment continues.

I think of the organizing effort that I was so fortunate to be a part of in Toledo Ohio, that resulted in the democratic passage of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. Along with CELDF, I helped people in the community, from drafting their law to fighting all the challenges just to get it on the ballot, to the campaign to get it passed and the challenges that came after it briefly became law. The people never wavered once they had collected enough data pointing to the source and depth of the problem. They didn’t need more and more studies to challenge a system that only sees nature as a resource to be exploited, and they knew in their hearts at the time, that our system needs to change and recognize nature as a living being with inherent value in her own right, along with the legal right to live and flourish. The community members in Toledo never got a bit of help from any of the big Green groups mentioned in Planet of the Humans. As a matter of fact, in a prior initiative effort in Bowling Green Ohio, employees of the Ohio Sierra Club and members of the state Green Party publicly commented that the idea of rights for an ecosystem posed an illegal and unconstitutional challenge to state preemption and corporate rights.

Look: I recognize we’ve all got a lot to learn, and unlearning old tropes that have deceived us for years takes a lot of work. But we have to be willing to evolve and try new approaches.

The film and filmmakers aren’t perfect, none of us are, but the film didn’t deserve the amount of vitriol and censorship lavished on it by the environmental movement. I continue to stand behind Moore and Gibbs for their courage to be truth-tellers and start important conversations because of their film. Moore’s current Earth Day essay continues to do this.

Two years have gone by since then, and the main change in the environmental movement is the shrinking pot of funding to be squabbled over by organizations still unable to admit and adjust their missions to difficult truths that challenge their reason for being. It’s not like we’re at a loss for successful models of human communities to emulate. 

Note: If you are wondering why I chose to write about a movie released 2 years ago, my original commentary, just like the film was censored. However, on Earth Day 2022, it seems even more relevant today.  Tish O’Dell

 Ben G. Price, CELDF

Great Expectations; Ignoble Disappointments

The lament of every elected official confronted by a roomful of angry citizens  could be summarized on a bumper sticker that says, “we wish we could help, but our hands are tied.” It’s the mantra that every one of us hears when we show up at a municipal meeting to ask local officials to do something to stop environmentally destructive Project X. You know: the pipeline, the frack wells, the power lines and microwave towers, the industrial wind farms, rampant overdevelopment, the landfill expansion, the big box store, the latest money-maker that nobody wants and everyone fears.

The people we elect locally aren’t universally apathetic about the needs of their communities. They generally do what they can with what they’ve got, which is less and less as states breach their responsibilities to citizens more and more to avoid corporate lawsuits and save money for other priorities, like tax cuts for the rich and subsidies for the biggest of businesses. When they tell us they can’t help us, our elected officials are telling mostly the truth, although they always have a choice to buck the system and do what’s right. The ones who will take that stand are the ones community rights organizers like my colleagues at CELDF love to bump into. They are the salt of the earth, the ones who offer hope that the precedent-driven repetition of errors of the past can be corrected. They are the special ones who know that neither the state nor the federal government can legitimately forbid public servants from standing up for the rights of the neighbors who elected them. They understand that you can’t protect wealth at the expense of everybody and everything else and pretend that’s the way it should be. True environmental protection will become real when they become the norm rather than an anomaly.  

Somebody (and we know who) Stole the Republic

By now many of us know that the U.S. Supreme Court decided on its own, without direction from elected representatives of the people or precedent from judges of the past, that corporate property has constitutional rights. Not corporate stockholders. Not corporate directors. I mean the property they own in common – the piece of paper that says that property is a corporation. This is an example of what I mean when I say that law – including case law — lodges unalienable rights intended for people within property. 

The Supreme Court didn’t invent the idea of stowing extra constitutional rights within property, although the choice of corporate property was a real innovation. They took their lead from the men who wrote the Constitution. Those Federalist counter-revolutionaries got the ball rolling when they injected rights to extraordinary political representation within the privileged property of slaves. Until the Civil War, the U.S.Constitution declared that slaves counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of proportional representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. That doesn’t mean they had three-fifths of the rights of white male Americans. With the Three -Fifths Clause, the Constitution attached political rights of additional representation in the national government onto human chattel and gave slave owners palpable political advantages over all American white males represented in non-slave states, where one propertied white male citizen had one vote and no more.

When the Federalists met in secret to write their corporate constitution, the delegates representing the patrician plantation culture of the South cut a deal with Northern proto-industrialists and, so as not to stir another revolution against them, avoided the most overt trappings of aristocracy in exchange for the over-represented political power of an aristocracy. Possession of privileged property in slaves translated into superior power in the governance of the nation for otherwise out-numbered possessors of human chattel.

With the 13th Amendment, humans could no longer be considered legal property, unless convicted of a crime and incarcerated or conscripted for military service, but soon after that emancipation, corporate property was declared to be a legal person by the high court. A century full of additional court decisions put the Bill of  Rights into the service of corporate  property so that it now constitutes privileged property capable of conveying extra governing power to corporation owners. 

It must be said that neither inert corporate property nor enslaved people are able to enjoy the rights law deposits in them. They are mere vessels for conveying the rights of property to their owners, who capitalize on the extra political power thus conveyed. Corporations and slaves are examples of this power transferring legal talisman, that special form of property I call privileged property. 

It also should not be lost to history that privatizing the power to rule over others by vesting governing rights in land and resources long predates the U.S. Constitution. The British enclosure movement put an end to what’s referred to as “the commons,” a term referring to untitled land shared by tradition among local residents. With the enclosures, monarchs marked boundaries around land, parceled it out and gave title of monopolistic ownership to privileged friends of the sovereign. In so doing, the equal right of access long enjoyed by the resident community members was denied and in fact criminalized. The new owner appropriated the land and resources associated with it, and those privileges were legally enforced against the revoked rights of all others.

~ Continued ~

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European empires used this same model of commandeering the commons and privatizing land and resources to colonize the Americas. They accomplished this hemispheric theft by the genocide of millions and removal of thousands of indigenous communities from their homes, their symboitic relationship with the Earth. They were stripped of their right to self-govern. The bitterly ironic invention of privileged property gave European landowners in the U.S. a right to participate in colonial government by instituting property qualifications for voting and holding public office. Thus, white men not in possession of the privileged property of land were shut out of governance. These hubristic landlords imported (kidnapped and exiled) Africans who became labeled “property” under new laws that gave ownership of their muscles and brains to bestial tyrants who used them to build for them a nation that the oppressors have long sardonically called a land of law and liberty. As then, today that “liberty” is the liberty to possess what once was free to all, and that law is the coerced defense of governing authority attached to privileged property.  

For commoners of European heritage, violence never rose to the same level, because white commoners willing to kill Indians, hunt escaped slaves and temporarily stake their claims to dispossessed land were useful tools in the expansion of empire. But once a nation was established, governing it was not to be shared with the useful idiots of empire who owned no privileged property.

Upon its ratification in 1789, the unamended federal constitution included methods of privileging only the wealthy with governing rights other than those rights attached to land ownership.  Authority to wield political power was transferred to the best hoarders of capital by establishing the means and processes of production and wealth accumulation as new forms of privileged property. The power to govern, supposedly won by white male revolutionaries, who battled the British Empire for their emancipation, was privatized and made unavailable even to the average unpropertied white man, especially on issues impinging on rights in wealth. This was accomplished by inclusion of constitutional provisions like the Commerce Clause, the Contract Clause, and the Fugitive Labor Clause. These wealth-biased constitutional nuggets impose legal obligations on each citizen, without the consent of each citizen. 

The long-term effect has been to privatize decision-making on many issues that would otherwise reasonably be considered matters of public concern and democratic governance, like protection of air, water and soil from poisoning. Over the past two hundred and thirty-plus years, a succession of politically appointed Supreme Court judges has gone further than the Federalists dared by infusing all sorts of property with new governing powers that are transferable to the owners. Recent outrageous judicial decisions have caused an uptick in the number of people conscious of and alarmed by the ploy.

Citizens United versus Federal Elections Commission is the Court case decided in 2010 in which the judges gave corporations a constitutional right to spend unlimited amounts of money to corruptly influence the outcome of elections. A sleeping public that hadn’t noticed that American law already put the rich in the driver’s seat was suddenly roused. Some thought the worst thing about the decision was that corporations had been declared legal “persons.”

They hadn’t been taught in school that the courts made that decision a hundred and twenty-four years earlier. Few realized that the decision wasn’t about corporations at all. It was about clearing the way for the wealthy to decide who will govern in the United States. A scattering of voices could be heard calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision.

If they succeed, it won’t be nearly enough. The totalitarian reach of privileged property transcends the corporate form. It is at the heart of a totalitarian materialism that threatens to kill most life on Earth, all for the continuing accumulation of wealth, the totem of privilege. 

Half-Fast Measures

The Supreme Court betrays every American with rulings like Citizens United, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the courts have found ways to include corporate property in the Constitution, although corporations are never mentioned there. Over time, devotion to the “founders” became a more powerful meme than fealty to the ideals of the Revolution. Our awareness of betrayal has been sublimated beneath the surface of American nationalism. This explains the general reluctance to demand systemic change.

The most drastic proposals from constitutional reformers go no further than calling for constitutional amendments to overturn the damage done by Citizens United. The short of it is this: it’s a losing strategy. Because the legal mechanisms for conveying extra power and authority to the wealthy are deeply ingrained in U.S. law. Even if those amendments were adopted, they would do little to free us from the dictatorship of privileged property. There’s no delicate way to say it. We have much bigger problems.

Judges have regularly attached legal privileges to property, particularly corporate property. Case law (the accumulated collection of court decisions) is a veritable La Brea tar pit filled with the preserved remnants of an extinct democracy, all covered in the black goo of legal double-talk. Judges have solemnly doled out legal opinions, insisting their job is to serve the law and not administer justice, all without making it clear that precedent and the laws they serve favor a propertied class of aristocrats. 

We are at a moment in history when a movement is afoot to amplify and strengthen legal rights attached to wealth. Occasional “rogue” court decisions, like Citizens United, are taken as the exception even though the U.S. Supreme Court has never failed to preserve the law’s protection of rights in property over the rights of people and nature. And that’s at the heart of our inability to protect our communities and our local environments from toxic corporate invasions. 

Planetary Emancipation

 There is a movement afoot that could undermine our current dystopian reality. An international movement for the legally enforceable Rights of Nature is underway. It began humbly, in a little borough in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Then it spread to Ecuador, to Bolivia, to New Zealand and India and elsewhere. It has a life of its own and that is why it is unstoppable.

 How can recognizing unalienable rights for nature challenge and defeat the juggernaut of rights attached to property and transferred to serial owners?  The answer is in the question. When nature is no longer categorized in its every aspect as property; when owning land and resources no longer gives owners of such privileged property authority to set policy, define commerce, lord it over workers and, in-short, govern; and when forests, mountaintops, aquifers, coal seams, ore deposits, genetic material, natural medicines, and every subset of the natural world is emancipated from the legal status of property; then the threat to our rights and our common inheritance posed by the hegemony of private ownership of Earth can be ended.

The Land Must be Liberated: Emancipating the Planet

The Community Rights Movement of which the Rights of Nature Movement is a part, has in mind a much more inclusive definition of “community” than the framers of the U.S. Constitution had in mind. For them, white men who own property were the legitimate rulers of the nation. Women, Native Americans, African Americans, paupers of all sorts, non-Christians and unpropertied white men, not to mention people who identify as other than cis-gendered, or neurodiverse, had no place in the governance of the community or the nation. Nor did the rivers and mountains, the forests and landscape or any creature living within them. It’s time to open the gated fortress where people and their possessions separate themselves from nature, fellow human beings and responsibility to them, smug in their presumed superiority. We can reconstitute community as it should exist: people living in symbiotic harmony with nature,

rather than as parasites. Nature is the greater community and we, all of us, are a part of it. We are nature.

We aren’t helpless to begin the task of correcting and making amends for the cultural, genocidal and ecocidal errors of the past. Or if we are, then the visceral longing for freedom and real justice and preservation of the planet are lost causes. But that is an intolerable outcome. Emancipating Earth from those who claim to own her must coincide with liberating We the People and all life from the dictatorship of privileged property. These inextricably interwoven causes have the same goal: right relationship and true freedom.

By now the Rights of Nature movement has become something of a cause celebre. Beneath the legal fight to protect the planet and its living systems is a battle to the death – or to life — over legal and governing rights attached to property and the status of nature in the eyes of the law.

In the U.S., more than forty cities, municipalities and counties have enacted laws recognizing nature as a rights-bearing entity. No longer mere property in which special privileges are stored for their owners to harvest, nature is recognized in those communities as fully qualified to enjoy its own rights and to have them defended in court. 

The reason that nature needs recognition for her legal rights is not that nature should be considered a legal person. Nature is not a human being. And it’s not a mere “juristic person,” or corporation. It has its own priorities and deserves and needs these protections because  Western law and the rule of property treat nature as the slave of its many owners. It is the privilege to destroy that makes the owners of land and “resources” dangerous to life on Earth. The rest of us, who do not claim to own the world, have unalienable rights including the right to withdraw presumed privileges of property ownership when they threaten others’ rights and do harm to the world. The privilege to destroy is among the cache of governing powers conveyed to land and resource owners by the rights of property. It has brought to the world the climate crisis, a mass species die-off, and the ecocide of the oceans, not to mention the proliferation of disease, dislocation, misery and suffering for people and life in general. To argue that the community has no authority to bring this carnage to an end is a blithe absurdity.

There is no doubt that making the needed changes to privileges associated with property will be one of our culture’s greatest challenges. Emancipating nature from bondage to its owners will alter the meaning of the word property in ways that will defy centuries of institutionalized privilege for those who possess the lion’s share of everything. The elite minority propertied class will resist any change that diminishes their dominion over us and the entire living world. They will employ uninformed friends, family and strangers as their paid workforce to subdue our efforts. They will engage in propaganda and misinformation, name-calling, villainization, and criminalization of our efforts, our gatherings, even our thoughts, to stop us from wresting total control from them. The stakes could not be higher. To lose is to lose everything. Earth Day is not enough. Earth Emancipation Now!

This text is excerpted and updated from the author’s book “How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property.”