Williams County residents build on Ohio’s growing Rights of Nature and Community Rights movement.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Tish O’Dell, Ohio Community Organizer CELDF.org tish@celdf.org 440-552-6774
WILLIAMS COUNTY, OH: Today, members of Williams County Alliance turned in over 2,500 signatures at the Williams County Board of Elections to place a county charter on the November ballot. The initiative would establish a charter for Williams County that recognizes the right to local self-government and strengthens state protections for human and civil rights. The proposed charter also recognizes the rights of ecosystems, including legally enforceable rights for the Michindoh Aquifer. It would ban corporate activities that violate those rights.
Williams County community members’ organizing efforts represent the most recent expansion of a rights-based movement growing around the state, which includes Toledo’s adoption of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights in February.
Williams County residents face a threat to the Michindoh Aquifer, the sole source of drinking water for the county. A private corporation, Artesian of Pioneer (AOP), is proposing to pump and sell water from the Michindoh Aquifer to communities located outside the aquifer boundaries. These communities already have multiple sources of water, including from Lake Erie.
“As soon as AOP’s plan to privatize and profit off the water became public, local residents were immediately opposed,” said Sherry Fleming, Organizer with Williams County Alliance. “We are facing a water crisis, but we must respond by uplifting democratic, human and ecosystem rights above the profit motif. We see water as a human right and part of an ecosystem—not a commodity to be sold for profit. In Williams County, we have no other economically feasible source of water, there is no recognition of our right of local control, and the state has failed to act.”
“Once a pipeline to extract and sell the water to entities outside the aquifer is built, there will be no turning back,” said community activist Lou Pendleton. “Rather than a business selling our drinking water for profit, we should conserve the aquifer for future generations.”
Of the 2,500+ signatures residents turned in, 1,363 must be valid in order to qualify for the November ballot.
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund assisted in drafting the Williams County Charter.
About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) is building a movement for Community Rights and the Rights of Nature to advance democratic, economic, social, and environmental rights – building upward from the grassroots to the state, federal, and international level.
The Center for Humans & Nature explores and challenges ideas about who we are as humans and how we might better relate to each other and the whole community of life. They pose big-picture questions, and here they post essays responding to the question: “Does fracking violate human rights?”
This week is the international Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on the Human Rights Impact of Fracking. The PPT has collected people’s stories on the threat of fracking and climate change to human rights and the rights of nature. The stories here will be part of the evidence that is presented to the international panel of judges.
CELDF is presenting an amicus curiae brief arguing that fracking violates the rights of nature and the human right to a healthy environment at the PPT on Wednesday, May 16th, 4:45 p.m.
Wild weather is occurring all over the world and yet news reports seem to miss the obvious link between these extreme weather events and the ongoing effects of climate change. Joining us to discuss the limitations – and possibilities – of news coverage on climate change is Andrew Revkin. Andrew is the Dot Earth blogger for the New York Times and a senior fellow for environmental understanding at Pace University.
A new strategy is catching on that gives communities the right to kick corporations out of their communities, while granting ecosystems “rights”.
Then, a new book explores the why it is that one in three children is chronically ill. Host Daphne Wysham speaks to Alice Shabecoff about her book Poisoned for Profit. Alice is the former national director for the National Consumers League. Her co-author on “Poisoned for Profit” is Philip Shabecoff, a former environmental reporter for the New York Times and the founder of Greenwire.
Music for this edition of Earthbeat includes “Freakin’ Frackin’” by Op-Critical and “Modern Age” by Eric Hutchinson. Our theme music is “Baladi” by Tony Anka, Bellydance Superstars vol. 2.
Photo of the Brisbane flooding of 2011 – by Erik Veland. Used via a creative commons license.
Here’s Erik’s comment on the flooding: “While I am not directly affected by the flood myself, as a freelance designer most my clients have and I am left without work. If you want to license any of these photos commercially, please contact me. You are still free to use the photos for non-commercial purposes, but if you can, please consider making a PayPal donation to erikveland@gmail.com so I can continue to eat and pay my rent. In return, I contribute shelter and power to those in need around me. If you are affected by the floods and need space or power, please also contact me.”
If you’d like to hear this edition of Earthbeat – please send us an e-mail
CELDF note: Here’s a commentary from one of our Democracy School graduates. Maybe it’s time for you to host a School in your community…
A couple of years ago, my son Logan and I completed the Daniel Pennock Democracy School. The 2-day program is offered by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) in Chambersburg, PA. The notion that nature somehow has rights has captured my imagination since my involvement with the Interfaith Roundtable on Sustainability in 1998, discussed in an earlier post on this site. I have to say that the program had a profound impact on my thinking about the meaning of sustainability and I am grateful to Thomas Linzey, Ben Price, and the other staff members for a weekend of education about the roots of U.S. culture.
Among the many notions I took away from that class, the two that have stayed with me is that corporations once had to serve the public’s interest. If it failed to do that, its charter could be revoked. The other one is the idea that nature, in some way, has rights, that can codified, at least locally, and now I learn, throughout a country. According to CELDF, a few months ago, Ecuador in September considered a new constitution that provides to the country’s “tropical forests, islands, rivers, and air” similar rights to humans. Clearly we need to continue to think about how to do this, but my view is that what CELDF is doing may be some of the most important work on the planet today.
I thought of CELDF as I have read excerpts from Tom Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. I enjoy Friedman’s writings on a number of issues, and this book is no exception. But, I was hoping for something else, and I found it, but not until the very last page where he describes a eulogy delivered by Amory Lovins at Donella Meadow’s memorial service:
A biologist, perhaps E.O. Wilson, noted that bees, ants, and termites, through not very smart individually, display high intelligence collectively-and then he added, “People seem just the opposite.” Dana was no exception. She was one of those promising specimens that are turning up more and more often in the search for intelligent life on earth-one of those much higher primates whose love, logic, radical stubbornness, courage, and passion awaken the rest of us to our ability and our responsibility to save the world…She wrote three years ago, “By nature I’m an optimist; to me all glasses are half-full,” yet she didn’t shrink from reporting bad news, always blended with encouragement about how to do better. She treated the future as choice, not fate, and she defined with luminous clarity how to do (as one sometimes must) what is necessary. She shared Rene Dubos’s view that despair is a sin, so when asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she’d always say that we have exactly enough time-starting now. Two years ago, when emailing an unusually somber column about events that made her weep, she appended the following note as the counterpoint: “A CEO was having to babysit for his young daughter. He was trying to read the paper but was totally frustrated by the constant interruptions. When he came across a full page of the NASA photo of the Earth from space, he got a brilliant idea. He ripped it up into small pieces and told his child to try to put it back together. He then settled in for what he expected to be a good half-hour of peace and quiet. But only a few minutes had gone by before the child appeared at his side with a big grin on her face. “You’ve finished already?” he asked. “Yep,” she replied. “So how did you do it?” “Well, I saw there was a picture of a person on the other side, so when I put the person together, the Earth got put together too….”.
Friedman then says:
There is so much to admire in that eulogy: the conviction that the future is our choice, not our fate, that when you put people together you put the planet together, that there is nothing in the universe quite as powerful as six billion minds wrapping around one problem…
Great. I totally agree. But, at least for me, there is another message here. That literally behind a whole earth is a whole person, and I don’t believe we will ever be whole until we acknowledge our total physical and moral interdependence with nature and bring that awareness into every dimension of human endeavor, including governance, through the work of organizations like CELDF, and through economics, as we are trying to begin.
“Great Lakes and State Waters Bill of Rights” introduced in New York State Assembly
BUFFALO – What if bodies of water were guaranteed the kinds of legal rights that would criminalize their destruction? What if communities had the authority to enact laws that prevented pollution, extraction, and waste-dumping?
This would be the case under a new bill introduced into the New York State Assembly by Patrick Burke on Friday. If it becomes law, New York Assembly Bill AO5156A, the Great Lakes and State Waters Bill of Rights, would recognize “unalienable and fundamental rights to exist, persist, flourish, naturally evolve, regenerate and be restored” for the Great Lakes and other watersheds and ecosystems throughout New York State.
“All people deserve healthy ecosystems and clean water, and recognizing the inherent rights of nature to exist and flourish is the best way to protect this,” says Assemblyman Burke. “Protecting one watershed or regulating toxins one at a time isn’t enough. All New Yorkers are connected through our water, and so this bill protects all of us.”
Representative Burke previously introduced an earlier draft of this bill in 2022. The new version incorporates feedback from the community and expands ecological rights beyond the Great Lakes watershed to include all the waters of New York.
It also empowers municipalities and counties to democratically enact rights of nature laws for their local ecosystems. Many states have forbidden this practice. In addition, the new bill contains provisions to protect treaty rights for indigenous people and tribal nations in New York.
Burke represents New York’s 142nd district, made up of South Buffalo and the surrounding areas on and near the shore of Lake Erie. Buffalo is located less than 5 miles south of Lake Ontario.
This measure received overwhelming support in Burke’s constituent survey, including from Dr. Kirk Scirto, who received his medical doctorate at the University of Buffalo, teaches public health in the United States and internationally, and works as a clinician for the Tonawanda Seneca Nation.
“This bill means communities having the freedom to finally decide what corporations can and can’t do in their backyards,” Dr. Scirto says. “It means communities having the power to say ‘No!’ to outsiders who’d steal their resources and leave behind only contamination. It means having the ability to protect our waters–and therefore our health. It means justice!”
“For States to take action could be a game-changer”
The law was drafted with the assistance of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) which has been at the forefront of the rights of nature movement for more than 20 years, and incorporates input from constituents and tribal members living in the NY and Great Lakes ecosystems. Since writing the first law to recognize legal rights of ecosystems in 2006, CELDF has partnered with more than 200 communities across the United States to enact community rights and rights of nature laws.
“The rights of nature movement is gaining momentum around the world as global warming, species extinction, fresh water scarcity, and climate-driven migration are all getting worse,” says CELDF’s Education Director Ben Price, who helped draft the law. “Meanwhile, the U.S. is being left behind. For states to take on these issues in the absence of federal action could be a game-changer, as it was for women’s suffrage when the states led the way for years.”
The bill would also enshrine the right to a clean and healthy environment for all people and ecosystems within the State, the right to freedom from “toxic trespass,” and would prohibit the monetization of the waters of New York State.
The bill is of cross-border interest, and will be part of an upcoming symposium on the health of the Great Lakes in Toronto in March where CELDF will be presenting.
“Serious threats” to the waters of New York
Lake Erie and Lake Ontario provide drinking water to 6.2 million New Yorkers. All told, the Great Lakes provide drinking water for more than 40 million people, contain 95% of all the surface freshwater in the United States, and make up the largest freshwater ecosystem on the planet.
But this ecosystem is struggling. According to experts, billions of gallons of raw sewage entering the lakes, increasing toxic algae blooms, invasive species, global warming, and both historic and ongoing industrial pollution represent serious threats to the ecosystem and human health.
According to Dr. Sherri Mason from Gannon University in Erie Pennsylvania over 22 million pounds of plastic are dumped in the Great Lakes annually.
Experts such as Daniel Macfarlane, Professor of Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University, say that the people of the U.S. have become “complacent” after early efforts to clean up the Great Lakes curtailed obvious issues such as the Cuyahoga, Buffalo, and Chicago rivers catching fire due to petrochemical waste dumping in the 1960’s.
In August 2014, a toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie linked to fertilizer and excrement from industrial farms shut down the drinking water supply to the city of Toledo, Ohio, home to 270,000 people, for 3 days.
This led to the community to overwhelmingly vote to pass a similar law to the one introduced by Assemblyman Burke called the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, which was also drafted by CELDF. The story of the pollution entering Lake Erie, the 2014 water shutdown, and the effort to protect the lake was profiled in a 2024 documentary produced by artist Andrea Bowers and titled What We Do to Nature, We Do to Ourselves.
The Rights of Nature movement
Recognizing the legal rights of nature is becoming increasingly popular around the world. Since CELDF assisted the people of Ecuador to amend their constitution to include rights of nature in 2008, the movement has seen hundreds of other laws passed in countries like Columbia, New Zealand, and Canada.
Just days ago, the Lewes District Council in East Sussex, England affirmed the Ouse River Charter, recognizing for the first time the rights of an English river.
The U.S. is lagging behind these international efforts, with only local communities asserting the rights of nature thus far. CELDF’s consulting director Tish O’Dell has worked with many of these communities.
“Brave people and communities have attempted to promote the new idea of rights of nature and challenge the current system, but we have never found a state legislator courageous enough to introduce such a law at the state level,” she says. “Representative Burke is the first to build on this grassroots movement for change.”
CELDF’s Living in Nature year-end campaign theme emerges from our Truth, Reckoning, and Right Relationship with the Great Lakes gathering, the release of CELDF’s “Wouldn’t You Say?” book, our time in the Amazon with the Sarayaku people, and the launch of a rights of nature continuing legal education series, among other projects, presentations, and community support efforts. We hope you enjoy the articles, factoids, features, and spotlights of the people who make CELDF the powerhouse that it is through our 2024 End-of-Year Newsletter.
Nearly every day, for almost 30 years now, people have been reaching out to CELDF for help. There is a knock at the door, and without hesitation, we welcome people in with a readiness to listen to what they have to say. We’ve had thousands of conversations leading to system-rattling challenges and changes and established long-running friendships with people and organizations from around the world. That willingness to be present, as well as being honest with those thousands of people is why CELDF has persevered over three decades and why we look to be around for years to come.
So thank you to those who have been supporting CELDF for a long time. And, an advanced thank you to all you new donors to CELDF. Individual donations are critical to our existence and continued work. We need your help. Communities and ecosystems all over the planet need our help.
On April 25th of 2024, The Conversation published “Can granting legal ‘personhood’ to nature stem biodiversity loss?” by Viktoria Kahui of the University of Otago. It was reprinted by GreenPeace on April 26th. Spoiler alert: Kahul’s article concludes legal personhood for nature cannot “stem” biodiversity loss, and we agree. But not at all for the same reasons.
We take exception to the article’s equating legal personhood of ecosystems with a rights of nature (RoN) framing. There are zero parallels. We understand how the author may have come to this misapprehension, given the frequency of environmental and journalistic imprecision on this point.
Neither The Conversation nor GreenPeace questioned the article’s conflation of ‘personhood’ as a fictional designation in law with the more fundamental, pre-existing, and unalienable rights of nature. Tellingly, corporate-backed opposition and official stalling over the adoption of real RoN legislation somehow didn’t occur to the authors as the true cause for the failure of attempts to challenge unjust legal precedent and to protect the natural environment through litigation and ballot initiatives, as well as adopting policy outlawing rights of nature in states like in Ohio, Utah, and Florida as a result of such attempts
A particularly sharp example of this unpardonable conflation of legal personhood and rights of nature appeared in multiple accounts of the changed legal status of the Whanganui River in New Zealand. For many years, the Māori people insisted the river and its watershed be assigned a special status commensurate with the reverence they hold for this sacred being. The Crown Government of New Zealand remained implacable to their entreaties, insisting the Commonwealth nation could not possibly relinquish sovereign power over Whanganui.
‘Personhood’ was the legal category settled upon. By ascribing personhood to the River, the Crown retained government supremacy over a particular river while seeming to confer entity status equal to that of corporations. The Whanganui acquired the power to sue, via human guardians representative of both Indigenous and colonial populations, but it also gained vulnerability to being sued, and the Crown retained an ultimate veto over the River’s assertion of rights.
Thus, while the River gained status as an independent entity to be reckoned with, for the first time, it was made liable for damage caused to human enterprises. The Whanganui could be enjoined from flourishing in the event human persons needed levees or to use aquacides to get rid of some species. A personified river that might overflow its banks could be targeted via countersuit to blunt claims brought by the Whanganui’s guardians to protect the River, or to assert leverage to structurally alter the River itself to mitigate harms to human enterprise.
Photo by Jack Anstey
The prospect of liability introduced by the conferral of personhood status monetizes the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. By pulling the River in as just another player, personhood portends a synthetic relationship that skews court scrutiny in favor of commerce and profit; all becomes grounded in the law of property. Hence the River was monetized and subordinated to capital. This is nowhere near the exceptional status intended for the River by rights of nature advocates. Legal personhood does very little to provide genuine protection of the ecological integrity of a huge watershed on which so many species depend. It does not cure the flaws of the failed environmental regulatory system.
The difficulty is not that RoN laws are too vague to be enforced. The rights to exist, flourish, evolve naturally, and be restored when harmed have unambiguous meaning and need no quantification. The Whanganui’s rights, in other words, provide the benchmarks and standards. Existence, flourishing, natural evolution, and restoration all have readily ascertainable meanings and counsel primacy of and protection of the River. Contrary to the vagueness criticism, the Whanganui possesses defined legal rights for enforcement by guardians.
The question then becomes, what guardians? Who, after all, will speak for the River? We think the answer should be obvious. The humans living in permanent relationship with a natural ecosystem are living members of that natural community. It is Indigenous and non-Indigenous resident human members of ecosystems who have the capacity and the inherent legal standing to speak for and enforce RoN as members of the local environment.
Instead of well-defined rights limited to what legal precedent can tolerate, in the future the Whanganui must be recognized as a being whose rights supersede: legalistic personification, property claims against it, sovereign dominion over it, and best practices for polluting industries. Its protection requires that the Whanganui be perceived, not as subject to human law, but that human law be located in the context of nature. This is the urgently needed alternative to anthropocentric policies like legal personhood and natural asset formulae that are designed to serve commerce while they fail the natural world.
Kahul takes pains to point out that RoN laws have been overturned primarily because the rights asserted for ecosystems have been non-quantifiable and thus legally vague in terms of enforcement through legal liability. But the fundamental rights of human beings, and those assigned to corporations, such as the right to free speech, demonstrate that legal rights are enumerated in very general terms. That they should be made specific in the case of nature for the convenience of litigants suggests a continuing anthropocentric bias that values quantified and therefore monetized relationships between people and nature.
This would be appropriate only by maintaining that human beings are external to nature instead of organic, co-participants in the natural world.
If we reject the underlying premise that nature is property to be managed within human legal frameworks, then human oversight of nature through legal fictions like personhood is by definition unnatural. Since human law currently recognizes only one legal status for nature — as property — adding a gloss of narrowly defined legal rights to that status would, at best, make nature no more than a favored slave.
Notably, Ecuador’s legal system sees nature not as a legal person but as an entity with a collection of broadly stated inherent rights. Ecuadorian courts have been issuing rulings that avoid the pitfalls that personhood presents while demonstrating that rulings in favor of nature aren’t suffering from vagueness of language.
Photo by Olga Bast
Kahul’s conclusion is that biodiversity can only be protected through the same kind of administrative bureaucracy as the one that has regulated its destruction over the past half-century. But such mere revisions of the Public Trust Doctrine cannot succeed. Trusting government, with its anthropocentric politics, to engage in faithful stewardship of nature builds failure into the system. Concessions to colonial and imperial subjugation of natural communities – composed as they are of humans in inherent relationship within nature – allow the conceit of the Public Trust Doctrine to be substituted for rights inherently residing within an ecosystem.
By commodifying nature and dragging it into our legal frameworks, we subject it to the less-than-tender mercies of empire, which imposes universal monetization, privatization, and merely transactional social intercourse. These weapons of materialism do not respect rights inherent in nature – or humans – but instead, tether nature to the processes of its destruction. Unless there is a complete departure from legal precedent and adoption of exceptional and reverential status for natural communities that include human and other-than-human members, biodiversity will not survive, and neither will we.
What if, instead of shoehorning the whole of creation into human-made and commerce-friendly legal definitions, we take as real that which presents itself to us in the real world? What if the natural persons living as full-time residents of a local ecosystem become rightly identified as members of a natural community that includes the non-human environment as constituents of the community? Such an identity would attribute unassailable legal standing to the human part of the community. Indigenous or not, those members of every local ecosystem would have natural standing to speak on behalf of their unalienable rights.
Legally recognizing local human communities as constituent parts of ecosystems can initiate other non-legalistic shifts in our cultural worldview. Such changes have the potential to transform society, empower communities to make self-determinative decisions and reconstitute healthy intrinsic relationships between people and their environments in ways that western culture obliterates through colonial expansion and resource colonization.
Reunification of people with nature recommends an organic answer to the question of who should have legitimate authority to assert rights for the natural community. The call to erect new limited liability agencies to do the job with predictable insincerity promises more of what we’ve already seen. The rights of humans and of the other-than-human natural community would be vindicated. Perpetuation of the injustices bestowed by conquest, empire, the enclosures, privatization, and servitude could be overcome.
Why aren’t these options championed? Rights of Nature keeps running into attempts to quantify, valuate, and narrow down the scope of the rights recognized so that they don’t interfere with commercial priorities. Dancing around this fact and calling for narrowly defined rights and a legal status that creates legal liabilities for ecosystems indicate deep resistance to changing anything. Rights of nature encompasses human rights because humans are part of nature. Narrowing the scope of those rights to protect the privileged status of some continues the historic role of law in serving injustice.
On May 20, 2024, Rockland Sierra Club, Lower Hudson Group and ROAR (Religious Orders Along the River) hosted this conversation titled: SHOULD RIVERS AND TREES HAVE LEGAL RIGHTS?
A new movement is growing around the rights of nature, arguing that rivers, lakes, and forests should have legal rights for themselves, not for their value to human beings. Life on earth depends on the integrity of these ecosystems. Is this just another strategy, or is it a very different way of viewing the world, expanding our moral compass circle to include nature?
Sister Carol De Angelo of ROAR introduces her organization’s work in environmental justice and connecting humans to the natural environment.
Tish O’Dell, Consulting Director for the Community Environmental Defense Fund, presents some background on this new movement, which is based on traditional ways of honoring the natural world, and then opens up the conversation to participants in the meeting.
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As 2023 draws to a close, we at CELDF are truly grateful for your friendship and support.
With your support, CELDF can deliver the expertise it possesses, provide the outreach and education needed, and support place-based action that works to push for transformational change for People and Nature; People are Nature. As we have in this year’s end-of-year newsletter as well as last year’s, CELDF subscribes to the need to bring together the fact that we live from Nature, with Nature, in Nature, and as Nature.
If you haven’t already, please make your 2023 year-end, tax-deductible gift in support of Community Rights and Rights of Nature TODAY.
Consider donating to CELDF in your end-of-the-year planning. Your financial gift means having the funding to pay for communications, content development, staff time, travel, partner collaboration, and countless hours of pro bono support to communities on the leading fronts of community rights actions. With your donation, the probable becomes possible. Time is of the essence.
Rights of nature laws to protect ecosystems are increasing around the world, it is time the U.S. follows these examples; Cincinnati group shows how it can be done
Cincinnati, OHIO: CROW, Citizens for the Rights of the Ohio River Watershed, will be announcing the kick off of their Rights of the Ohio River Watershed charter amendment initiative petition campaign tomorrow, April 18 at 11:00 am on the steps of City Hall, 801 Plum St. The local group formed after doing research on Rights of Nature with the passage of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR) in 2019. CROW needs 5,246 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot providing Cincinnati voters with a chance to make history. The kickoff event will feature speakers from the CROW group, additional advocacy groups for the Ohio River, CELDF and students from Ohio University.
The decision to move ahead with legal rights protection for the watershed began with hosting a Rights of Nature speaker series in the fall of 2019. It’s been common knowledge that the Ohio River has been abused by corporate polluters for decades, including the DuPont C8/Teflon poisoning of the river which was featured in the film Dark Waters starring Mark Ruffalo as local Cincinnati attorney Rob Bilott. Coupled with that dirty history was learning that the EPA listed the Ohio River as the most polluted River in the United States for many years, which then pushed Cincinnati residents to learn more on how this could’ve happened, by hosting a Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) Democracy School. Municipalities across Ohio, facing similar environmental degradation and threats, have been working with CELDF since 2011 to assert their rights and protect their communities and nature from harmful corporate projects.
“I am so excited to have met this great community of people willing to take a risk to protect what they love. The community of Cincinnati and the Ohio River Ecosystem is their home,” stated Tish O’Dell of CELDF. “These people have done their homework and are eager to share their knowledge with others in their community and to put in the hard work of circulating petitions to give their neighbors a voice through a vote, which is what democracy by the people is really all about. At a time when it seems so many issues divide the community, this campaign is about bringing the community together.”
Members of CROW learned how the residents in Toledo, Ohio found themselves in a similar place on Ohio’s northern border. They also sought the help of CELDF. In 2019, Lake Erie became the first named ecosystem to be protected by a Rights of Nature law in the United States. Thanks to 61% of the people voting to amend the Toledo city charter, Lake Erie’s right to exist, flourish and naturally evolve was democratically established. However, in 2020, a Federal judge overturned the will of the people, at the insistence of an agribusiness corporation. The Cincinnati group studied the court’s decision and with legal guidance from CELDF decided they wanted to take their law a step further and spell out exactly how a Rights of Nature law could be enforced. In other words, they built upon what Toledo had accomplished and make it even better.
“We began to understand through this process that we are not only connected to the Ohio River, but that we are part of the ecosystem,” stated Jim Schenk of CROW. “There is no way that we humans can be healthy, if the ecosystem itself is not healthy and if the system is not set up to recognize this, then we have to be the catalyst for that change to the system. It is about a cultural shift as much as it is about a legal shift.”
Cincinnati Part of Growing National and Global Movement
Ohio residents are advancing Rights of Nature as part of the broader Community Rights Movement building across the United States. Local communities and state Community Rights Networks across the country are partnering with CELDF to advance fundamental democratic, environmental, and economic rights. They have worked with CELDF to establish Community Rights and the Rights of Nature in law, and prohibit extraction, fracking, factory farming, water privatization, and other industrial activities as violations of those rights. Communities are joining together within and across states, working with CELDF to advance systemic change – recognizing our existing system of law and governance as inherently undemocratic and unsustainable.
“This effort is also about bringing the community together on an issue that is non-partisan. We all can agree that we want clean water for our families now and for the generations to come after us”, said CROW member Susan VondarHaar. “Rights of Nature is not new, it has been developed from Indigenous knowledge and understanding that we are completely interconnected with nature and the River and are not separate from it. We live in a system that recognizes rights and currently only humans and corporations have recognized rights in our system of law. It is time nature is also recognized as having rights to create the necessary balance.”
Additional Information
For additional information about the Community Rights Movement, visit www.celdf.org.
About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit, public interest law firm providing services to communities facing threats to their local environment, local agriculture, local economy, and quality of life. Its mission is to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature.
CELDF invites you to join this conversation with Talking Wings about our connection to and responsibility to Nature. Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo together make up Talking Wings. Blake is a filmmaker, illustrator and author and Tzintzun is an environmental artist-scholar and story weaver, striving to plant the seeds of a regenerative future. This amazingly creative team was able to take CELDF’s verbal description of our Rights of Nature work and transform it into creative illustrations and logos to convey our message visually. Art has always played an important role in movements for systemic change.
Using illustrator and writer Shaun Tan’s short story “Bears with Lawyers” as a touchstone, this discussion will interrogate the societal conception of rights (and rites) within our current legal system and beyond.
Is our current legal system the only valid governance structure? What is the difference between the “western” conception of rights and the ancestral notion of rites and rituals? Do other species have their own societal rights and rites? Are human beings the only stewards of planet Earth?
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.
For over fifty years in the United States environmentalists have tried to “protect the environment” by regulating the rate of destruction of the natural world. Despite the Clean Water, Clean Air and Endangered Species Acts, creation of the federal EPA and state-level agencies, changing the rate of destruction has succeeded in lulling conservationists into a stupor for more than fifty years, while Nature bleeds out.
Who will argue that we must continue to subject the living planet to the deceit of scientifically managed ecocide, whether through more environmental regulations, hollow “30 X 30” plans, or poster-child activism of the “Save the Polar Bear” variety?
Photo by Gryffn M
We know why the strategy of regulating the rate of ecological destruction failed – it was never meant to halt the profitable extraction of resources, the use of toxic technology and energy sources, and the over-production of frivolous commodities out of the very substance of the living world.
The arguments against adopting local, state, national and international Rights of Nature laws that criminalize extinguishing communities of living beings for the accumulation of commercial profit insist that “the economy” must be protected at all costs. Especially against constraints on ecocide.
Feels like the mainspring in the wind-up toy of modern industrial society just popped a weasel. Wall Street and the survival of life on Earth, including human life, are in direct competition for strong political action and Wall Street is winning hands-down. That’s irresponsible, in fact it’s reprehensible. Wouldn’t you say?
Privatizing the Rights of Nature: the Latest Scam
It is still controversial to demand legal recognition and enforcement of the Rights of Nature, because the commodity-consuming society we’re constantly reeled back into by commercial propaganda is hooked up to an I-V drip shooting high-grade disinformation straight to our brains through every electronic orifice we’ve been gullible enough to bring into our homes and our children’s lives. Those sounding the alarm against further commercial exploitation of the environment are cast in the role of Luddites naively opposing so-called scientific “progress.” But science has been enlisted as Wall Street’s offensive lineman, clearly no longer an objective observer in the game of being human. The results of environmental impact statements and scientific studies on mining, logging and water usage are routinely skewed to handicap nature, to give the destroyers a seat at the table where the acceptable amount of poisoning and habitat eradication are negotiated. Environmental bureaucrats sit on team Wall Street’s side of the table. Meanwhile, Nature hasn’t been invited. Her interests are mostly irrelevant and her defenders are routinely sidelined for lacking legal “standing” to represent those interests.
In industrialized nations, Nature is believed to be a smorgasbord of consumables, and in legal terms is utterly subordinate to the laws of property – which means that her every aspect is subject to privatization, removal from the sphere of public interdependence, and subject to monopolization over her uses and who will benefit by her exploitation.
Now the Rights of Nature paradigm is gaining traction globally. It’s an idea with deep roots in Indigenous cosmology, wherein the people who never separated from Nature conceive of Earth as a living community to which they belong. Initial industry reaction to advocates for the Rights of Nature was dismissive, then hostile.
These days, capitalists still insist that Nature consists of infinitely subdividable parcels of property. Property law still protects wealth accumulation against even nominal environmental regulations. The legal doctrine that if you own it, you can destroy it has not changed.
Photo by Christine Roy
But now Wall Street’s flying monkeys of capital are suddenly willing to publicly embrace Nature’s rights as a slogan and simultaneously invent clever ways to rebrand it, to make Rights of Nature work just fine for the bottom line.
There’s clever guile behind money-powered projects to co-opt Rights of Nature as a market-friendly meme. According to the Next Billion website, quoting from “Natural Asset Companies (NACs): A New Way to Invest in our Planet” by IE Magazine Correspondent David Stead,“Natural Asset Companies (NACs) are a potential game-changer on a global scale. NACs will be newly formed, sustainable enterprises that hold the rights to the productivity and health of natural assets like land or marine areas. They are a new asset class on the New York Stock Exchange enabling owners to convert nature’s value into financial capital, using that capital to re-invest in the natural assets to protect them or improve their sustainable use.”
Preternaturally, this scheme will guarantee that the legal owners of ecosystems will have authority to decide which and how many habitats get protected, and which and how many get “improved” for their owners’ sustainable use, and they can decide what that means, even to the point of evicting Indigenous and non-indigenous residents of land to which they lay claim, on the premise that they are diligently protecting Nature and her rights.
Illustration by Blake Lavia
NACs are poised to write the final chapter in the privatization of everything, bringing to fruition what George W. Bush ominously proposed twenty years ago as the establishment of an “ownership society.” Corporate ownership and control over strategic swaths of the natural environment would effectively complete the enclosure of the commons, posting virtual No Trespass signs everywhere, placing the environment off limits to the bulk of humanity, and commandeering all of her for commercially defined sustainable use.
That seems more like a plan to undermine the fundamental principle of the Rights of Nature movement, which recognizes those rights as legal obligations on all of us not to place human interests above the integrity of the natural world, its biodiversity and ability to sustain its organic functions.
Preventing the emancipation of Nature by doubling down on her legal status as property seems like a very bad idea. Wouldn’t you say?
Normalizing Abnormality
With the normalization of Natural Asset Companies, the empire of capital or, more tellingly, the totalitarian matrix of deceit that is capital, will have transformed the world in its image. In direct opposition to the Rights of Nature movement’s insistence on humanity’s return to right-relationship with the rest of creation, promoters of NACs seek to immortalize the mindset that is responsible for climate change, human bondage to debt, and the sixth and intentionally inflicted great extinction event on Earth.
In 2006, following consideration of legal arguments for establishing rights for ecosystems raised by law professor Christopher Stone, in his 1972 book Should Trees Have Standing?, I was involved in drafting the first law to be enacted anywhere recognizing such rights. Two years later, the people of Ecuador, with a large Indigenous population, ratified a new national constitution recognizing the Rights of Pachamama (Mother Earth). In the ensuing years, other nations as well as numerous U.S. local governments have initiated legal actions affirming the legal status of Nature as a rights-bearing entity.
Yet, as with so many attempts to advance rights for people dehumanized in the legal realm by empire, religion, colonization and politically manufactured bigotries, reactive counter-measures are in play to neutralize the advancements of the movement to institutionalize enforceable Rights of Nature. One might ask: why has the legal system, along with the other arms of government, so predictably found it expedient to rule in favor of corporations dead-set on making a profit regardless of the ill health inflicted on human and non-human life? It is astounding to watch one court decision after another not only uphold the property-based rights of corporations over the human and civil rights of people but, even more baffling, that the courts refuse to hear arguments that would challenge that supremacy.
Photo by Annie Spratt
Until you realize that rights vested in property and transmitted to owners of that privileged property are the cornerstone of U.S. federal and state jurisprudence. Many judges have gone the extra mile to expand those privileges and sanction community legal counsel for challenging the corrupt arrangements.
Legal precedent has normalized a judicial pathology that goes undiagnosed by political scientists and pundits.
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.
Decades ago, satirist Robert Anton Wilson toyed with red-baiting apologists for the “cold war” between the Soviet Union and the United States, saying they were “immanentizing the eschaton.” In other words, they were hurrying along the end of the world with their nuclear brinkmanship. Some true believers in the Book of Revelations were eager for the final showdown. Skeptics of their Christian utopian fantasies agitated for nuclear disarmament. Only the realization that a nuclear strike by one would precipitate a devastating nuclear strike by the other was effective in creating a stalemated detente. They called that pragmatic epiphany MAD, for “mutually assured destruction.”
Where’s the equivalent realization that the transformation of capital into an accelerating march toward global extinction is a bad idea? The eschaton is imminent, with no god promising eternal life for capital’s faithful. With no promise of any life, for that matter. Aren’t they in the least concerned? Are they so afraid of change? They’re going to hate the changes they’re working so hard to bring about. Wouldn’t you say?
The overturning of Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) and the weakening of the EPA (West Virginia v. EPA) by the US Supreme Court sent shock waves across the nation, generating a flurry of coverage, activism, and policy development at the national and state level. Those court decrees have emboldened many and outraged many more.
And as the reverberations continue to be felt today, there are a number of critical analyses as to how we have arrived here that are still not being discussed as they should be. The activism and conversations generated have largely stayed only at the surface level of reflection and not looked deeper into root causes and definitely not looking further out on the horizon…to the future. The dialog has focused mainly on electoral politics and electing one party over the other as the path to getting back what was taken. Are we actually riding a wave toward a solution or are we being tumbled about in the surf?
Photo by Alex McCarthy
As we analyze these court opinions from 2022, we are reminded that they have roots that go back to the early 1970s, an era of much resistance and many challenges to the status quo of the time. Back then the people used many approaches to push for transformational change – direct actions/civil disobedience, legislation, court challenges, music and art. It is an era defined by social and cultural unrest.
Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, was the subject of the Dobbs decision. To refresh everyone’s memory, the recent Supreme Court case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruled that the US Constitution does not confer a right to an abortion. With this one decision, Roe v. Wade was overruled and states were handed the authority to regulate abortions. The Clean Air Act initiated in 1970, was the subject of the West Virginia v. EPA decision. That case centered on the ability and authority of the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions related to climate change.
And let’s remember there was much more happening 50 years ago in addition to the Roe case and the EPA being created. Women fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, which was ratified by Congress in 1972, though it later died and was therefore never added to the Constitution.
In addition, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act passed in 1972, after other major Civil Rights legislation passed in the late 1960’s including the Voting Rights Act (1965) and the Civil Rights Act (1968). None of these changes came easily, the marches, the protests, the court filings, the horrifying deaths of women, the photos of rivers on fire and the polluted air we breathe, all led to the federal legalization of abortion and a federal agency, the EPA, to protect the environment. Victories to be celebrated for the ages….or so we thought.
Photo by Unseen Histories
But how did so much promise for equality, environmental and human protection and justice get so twisted and turned upside down? Roe has been overturned. The authority of the EPA has been gutted and the Earth is on the verge of ecological collapse despite the adoption of major national environmental laws. People of color are still not treated equally. Workers are earning less today when adjusted for inflation than they were in 1968. And the 100+ year quest of women to be recognized as equals through the Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be adopted.
Asking Big Questions
There was so much energy for change in the 1960’s and into the 1970’s. There was a deep commitment and positive attitude to change societal structure and values. The goal was for the people to have a real voice in creating a government and society that reflected the people’s values. Values of equality, fairness, equity and protection of the environment that sustains all life. What we should be doing is learning from these examples. What did they do well and where did their movements fall short? As a culture we seem to only focus on “wins” and perceived victories and tend to sweep losses and ugly truths under the rug. Maybe if we did more reflecting on our failures and shortcomings, the rights of all people, future generations, and nature could be genuinely protected and enforced and not simply glorified as hollow victories that can be pulled out from under us at any time the political winds change.
Democracy?
Maybe we need to start at the beginning with a reflection on Democracy. When we use the word, it is assumed that the people have some voice or hand in the decisions and laws that are made to govern over all of us. Well, this could be our first clue as to why the “promise of the 70’s” has not panned out for the majority of people and nature. It turns out that there is a difference between having a “voice” and having real decision making authority.
Did we ever get to vote on whether women have the right to an abortion? Did we ever vote to turn over the protection of our community’s air, food, water and other necessary life sustaining functions to government non-elected agencies? Think of almost any major issue that is important to you and ask yourself if the government has ever given you the chance to vote on it.
Many of you will be saying, but we live in a “republic”, a “representative democracy”. Well if we go down that road, the representatives you elect are actually supposed to represent yours and the community’s views, values and best interests, but are they? Today we see electeds making decisions and passing laws that represent the monied interests and their own personal interests over the people and environment. One of the more definitive examples proving this is the Princeton Study. This deeply researched report clearly shows that people’s interests are not being represented, that the US is no longer a democracy, but rather an oligarchy in which only the interests of the wealthiest are represented by the government.
On a daily, ad nauseum basis, the media and the politicians speak of democracy and the importance of preserving it. Whether it is sending weapons, sanctioning other countries or threats of war to protect “democracy” abroad, one would think we must live in a democracy here. Functionally though, we don’t have a democracy, yet we have an innate pull to want to believe in and defend the idea of democracy. What would it look like if we actually created a real democracy– one that addressed the needs of people and nature and corralled the devastating impacts of concentrated wealth and power? What would your community look like if citizen power was a cultural, practiced norm and not simply a pipedream used as propaganda by those who want nothing to do with sharing power?
Political Parties?
A second big conversation topic we should be dialoguing about has to do with political parties. For all intents and purposes, we live in a two-party system. The theory is that your party will represent your interests and values. The reality of that looks different from the local up to the state and then on to the national, but the net effect is that powerful economic interests are having their needs met while the majority of people and nature are either ignored, placated, or used as pawns in dangerous political games that impact economics, civil rights, and environmental health. The separation between the two major parties is quite narrow despite the rhetoric trumpeted by each. The two-party system has shown its distaste for democracy and an undying allegiance to concentrated power. Even George Washington warned us back in his 1796 Farewell Address about partisanship and political parties:
It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.
Photo by Library of Congress
It makes sense that if there are only two parties to choose from, it creates an either/or situation. Are you with us or against us? Well, let’s be real, all our personal beliefs and views don’t fall into two distinct categories. We are all combinations of many beliefs and experiences that shape our views. And yet we throw out labels like liberal/conservative, red/blue, left/right all the time. These all come with assumptions and prejudices and sure don’t help us come together to dialog on important issues. And how many elections have you felt like you were forced to choose between the “lesser of two evils” or that you had to vote against a candidate and platform instead of for one that you truly believed in?
What would it look like if campaign finance was overhauled to protect the people and not the wealthy elite? What would it look like if there was a robust political arena dominated by ideas and not by self-serving interests of political parties which are merely corporations interested in its primary shareholders over that of the masses? What if citizen assemblies and citizen forums were the dominant means of political discourse?
Capitalism: The American Dream or Nightmare?
Lastly, we need to look at our deep seeded belief that capitalism is not only the best way, but the only way. We need to be able to have open dialog about a system that is based on producing and consuming more and more, year after year, and if that is really sustainable and in line with our values.
Photo by Mike Erskine
We know that the United States only has about 5% of the world population but we consume at a rate of over 20% of the world’s resources. We take and take from nature and poorer countries and even US communities without concern for the sustainability of this consumption.
With capitalism at the forefront and the rights of corporations to increase profits year after year, we have to ask if this represents our values? How does this connect to the rights of women and rights of nature, the environment? These are the tough questions we should be grappling with and figuring out a better, more sustainable way, if we want a future for life on this Earth.
Organizing for Big Change
If the promisesof the 70’s were thwarted largely because the people attempted to make change working through the system but we now realize that the system itself, corrupted by monied interests, cannot actually provide what is needed to create the just and healthy communities for future generations, what are we left to do? The good news is we have been here before in history. It was in those moments when people gave up hope of making change within the system that people conceived of alternatives or alternative systems.
The word alternative means a choice or an option. We must reject knee-jerk reactions when alternative approaches and solutions are brought forward. We should pause and think critically about what we are being told in the media—is it propaganda to keep us from contemplating alternatives? 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. Reflecting back on the promise of the 70’s, people like The Janes provided a medical alternative to women in Chicago, the Black Panthers an alternative to community policing and providing basic services to community members, Maine farmers turned away from industrial agriculture in 1971 and created an organic model and the Public Worker Strikes of the 1970’s, where workers had to fight not only against employers but also the unions that were supposed to represent them.
An illegal national postal wildcat in 1970—not approved by union leaders—set contract standards postal workers are still defending today. The government tried to use the military to deliver mail. Photo: San Francisco Bay View.
All the changes that were inspired in those times were amazing and many people put time, effort and even their lives on the line to take a stand for what they believed in. But nothing in life remains static. Change is part of life. So when looking ahead, we need to learn from the past and evolve to new ways of thinking and creating for what works now and into the future. We need to consider whose voice and whose power is considered when making important democratic decisions that will affect all of us and not just leave it to a minority with power. We need to ask if we can get to where we want to go by working within the existing system or do we have to take more risk and go outside the system using an alternative means to get there? Do we want to keep being thrown about struggling for air, water and rights or can we learn how to change so we can create new ways to not control but to ride in harmony with the waves?
Once again an important court decision upholding the legal rights of nature has come out of the country of Ecuador. This high court decision protecting the inherent rights of mangroves (September 2021) actually came out before the Los Cedros (November 2021) decision which CELDF featured in September 2022. It’s an important decision for the recognition and enforcement of another distinct yet interconnected ecosystem’s rights. This decision not only recognizes the rights of mangroves by preventing harm, it is also holding those accountable for harm already done. It is why CELDF has put time and resources into the English translation of both these decisions. The hope is that more people, including judges and lawyers all over the world will read them and gain an understanding by these real world examples of how courts could uphold and lawyers argue for the Rights of Nature if they were codified into law.
Mangroves, according to the Ramsar definition, are considered wetlands – an area that CELDF is also helping to evolve by participating in the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Wetlands. Mangroves are a group of trees and shrubs that live in the coastal intertidal zone, which in Ecuador and elsewhere in the world often constitute zones of conflict between the needs of the ecosystem and commercial and industrial activities of humans. This particular case from Ecuador deals with certain articles of the regulatory code or what is known as the Organic Code of the Environment (“COAM” Código Orgánico del Ambiente). One of the central challenges in this case centered around a listing of allowable activities in mangroves where there is a general catch-all provision that does not explicitly specify the need to protect the integrity of mangroves. The court ruled that this was a violation of the rights of mangroves.
It is worth repeating that this case is significant because it takes action to rectify a condition that could lead to harm of mangroves and violate the mangrove’s rights before such harm occurs. Like Los Cedros the orientation of the court stemming from the constitutional language protecting nature or Pachamama is about precaution and prevention, not just monetary awards after the harms have occurred.
Read the Ecuadorian high court decision to protect the rights of mangroves in English or Spanish.
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.”
What do we mean by “community” when we say community rights? Native Americans like Wioweya Najin Wina have had their communities decimated by genocide, appropriation of their land, and forced relocation, but many retain their culture, their communities and traditions despite that history.
Non-native Americans of every ethnicity reside in communities established by law rather than by custom, and so when we advocate for the rights of those communities, we are often talking about communities defined by the political boundaries of municipalities and counties. It is, admittedly, arbitrary and a concession to coercive historic realities. But central to the idea of “Community Rights” is the notion of community as being a local society connected to the place on Earth that the people occupy and where they do their living and dying.
Photo by Shane Rounce
When we talk about the rights of communities, we generally talk in terms of communities that are place-based, with legitimate authority to exercise self-determination rooted in community traditions and cultures, always tempered by the obligation of each community to respect, protect, and enhance the equal rights of every member of the community.
For Native People, that community includes Nature and all the various species as members of the community, with full liberty to carry out their traditions and make choices for their communities based on their cultural norms.
For non-native people, the Community Rights approach has been to help communities exercise democratic rule-making to protect the health and safety of their human population and their local natural environment, and to recognize them as interdependent members of the same community, with the people empowered to represent the ecosystem in which they partake in all administrative and legal matters.
In simplest terms, our mantra at CELDF has been that community self-determination and Community Rights are best achieved when those who are affected directly by governing decisions are the ones who make them. Sounds reasonable, wouldn’t you say?
Broken Promises: Declarations and Treaties
In the late eighteenth century, commoners in the British colonies of North America were persuaded to join a rebellion against the Empire with promises of liberty from central government control. Most descendants of these colonists and immigrants that came after them don’t make the connection that their ancestors desired the same independence from coercive domination that Native Americans desire from domination by their occupiers. Also not gleaned from popular history is the fact that American revolutionaries waged a war of secession from the British Empire specifically and primarily to secure the right of local community self-government.
As mentioned in a previous column, the very first grievance colonists brought against the empire in the Declaration of Independence was denial of community self-governing rights. The complaint that’s mentioned first said of the king: “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” It is abundantly clear that neither the revolutionaries nor their descendants have seen the rights to which they aspired come to fruition. That denial of the right of community self-determination, of course, goes doubly for Native Americans.
Photo provided by the Boston Public Library
Almost since its inception, CELDF has challenged the institutionalization of Dillon’s Rule, the predominant legal theory thwarting realization of the right of local self-governance for colonizer communities. Dillon’s Rule makes political communities in the U.S. into state property, and gives each state total authority over them, including the power to override any local law, even if it would protect the community from harm, along with the power to overturn local elections, annex the municipality, or dissolve it completely. Under Dillon’s Rule, residents in a municipal jurisdiction are considered “mere tenants of the municipality,” with no right to local self-government.
Liberating every non-Native American from the straight-jacket of Dillon’s Rule is a project akin to compelling the U.S. government to honor its treaty commitments to the first Americans. Dillon’s Rule is the monolithic legal obstruction to one of the key components of the project at the heart of our organizational mission. When people complain that it’s not fair for state and federal laws to deprive communities of democratic processes that would allow them to prohibit corporations from harming people and the local environment, the answer they so often get to their complaints is that familiar mantra: “but it’s the law.” We understand that.
It’s the law that says NO to people governing their own communities. It’s the law that makes it legal for the federal system of government to refuse non-Native Americans the same rights refused to Native Americans, and that were refused revolutionaries by the British Empire prior to 1776.
Photo by Giam Marco
Perhaps the most prominent feature distinguishing Community Rights within the federal system, for all those living under it, is its utter absence. Wouldn’t you say?
The Common Denominator in Empire’s Assault on Community: Law
Legal rights would be unnecessary were the current civilization not antagonistic toward human communities and antithetical to people living in community with the natural world. We would not need to demand civil rights for descendants of emancipated slaves if the U.S. empire permitted them justice. We would not be advocating for the Rights of Nature if the global empire of capital were not engaged in unrelenting assaults against the natural world. And we would not be struggling to establish and institutionalize Community Rights if the dissolution of communities did not serve the agenda of empire.
All empires of the past have left their structures behind for us to speculate about, their artifacts abandoned like dead coral reefs, leaving behind people to reclaim or reconstitute human culture closer to Nature. We have the evidence that the current global empire is unlikely to be the first to survive indefinitely.
Photo by Motoki Tonn
The organic human relationship to Nature, currently denied reality by the unrelenting drive for material gain, is what requires preservation, because it defines humanity’s authentic place in the world. We call that authentic relationship Community Rights, by which we mean that every community of people, both Indigenous and settler, and including the natural ecosystems of which they are a part, have the right to defend and enforce the collective rights of the community and the rights of its individual members and natural environment.
The necessary alternative to the foolhardiness of open-ended product extraction and consumption is people living in community with Nature, if humanity itself is not to expire. That makes Indigenous Rights and Community Rights among the most important causes we can undertake. Wouldn’t you say?
Ben Price, Organizer
717-254-3233 benprice@celdf.org
Buffalo, NY – New York State Assemblyman Patrick Burke has introduced legislation that will create a Great Lakes Bill of Rights with the goal of securing legal rights for the entire ecosystem and giving people and nature a role in the decision-making process regarding current and future projects that impact the ecosystem.
The language was drafted with the assistance of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) at the invitation of Assemblyman Burke’s office. CELDF has been at the forefront of Rights of Nature legislation for over 20 years. Beginning with its pioneering work to draft the first law recognizing legal rights for an ecosystem in 2006, CELDF has now partnered with dozens of communities across more than 10 states to enact rights of nature laws.
The Great Lakes Bill of Rights, A3604, recognizes, “that the people and the natural environment, including each ecosystem of the state of New York, shall possess the right to a clean and healthy environment, which shall include the right to clean and healthy Great Lakes and the Great Lakes ecosystem.”
The motivation for introducing a Great Lakes Bill of Rights is the recognition that no person, institution, or nation has the right or authority to participate in activities that contribute to irreversible changes of the Earth’s natural cycles or undermine genetic and species diversity, the consequences of which would fall irrevocably on succeeding generations.
“As climate change affects the Great Lakes, which accounts for over 20% of the world’s freshwater and over 80% of North America’s freshwater, it is up to us to take steps to protect this precious ecosystem. The damage is ours; the obligation is ours,” said Burke.
The legislation recognizes that the Great Lakes have legal rights to exist and would allow the state or affected localities to sue polluters on its behalf. Originally introduced as the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, the measure received overwhelming support in Assemblyman Burke’s constituent survey.
Recognizing that the health of the Great Lakes adjacent to New York State is inextricably tied to the entire Great Lakes ecosystem, the bill has been amended to encompass Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, within the jurisdiction of New York State. Beyond the lakes themselves, protecting the ecosystem includes the waters which flow into them, which is why the legislation also has been strengthened to include the right of the entire ecosystem to be free from monetization and toxic trespass.
As Dr. Dave Reilly of Niagara University puts it, “A Great Lakes Bill of Rights is a logical and important step toward acknowledging our collective responsibility as stewards of our environment. Our actions as contributors to a kind and compassionate world must reflect what Barry Commoner labeled the first law of ecology: that everything is connected to everything else. Healthy ecosystems promote healthy communities. Promoting biodiversity starts with respecting the essentiality of each species and the intrinsic value of nature. To ensure ecological balance, we need to establish the rights of nature and to reorient our values and behavior to reflect a holistic perspective that integrates our social and ecological systems in a sustainable manner.”
The bill addresses past and ongoing government complicity in environmental destruction not only in New York State, but in other jurisdictions. In other words, communities and ecosystems in New York should no longer have to simply accept harms and pollution in Lake Erie or Lake Ontario that originated elsewhere without recourse.
For over 50 years, New York has legislated ‘permissible’ levels of harm and charged its agencies to issue permits that legalize those harms and grant immunity from liability to commercial operations doing real damage to ecosystems and human communities.
Regulating ecosystem destruction has not resulted in the overall preservation of the natural world, as the very logic of harm regulation is fatally flawed. As Ben Price of CELDF put it, “Other socially harmful behaviors, like burglary and arson, aren’t ‘regulated.’ There isn’t an acceptable amount of assault and battery and permits certainly aren’t issued to legalize violence and protect perpetrators from prosecution.”
According to Representative Burke, “We have shown ourselves abysmally unwise and abundantly foolish to think the Great Lakes and its complex hydro cycles could filter the enormity of our toxic assault on its watershed. Without immediate consequential action to change course, we will, every one of us, be complicit in that crime against Earth and humanity. Now is the time to act decisively.”
Victory, Backlash, and Lessons for Community Rights in Buffalo, NY
Buffalo, New York is the state’s second largest municipality and one of the most impoverished, racially segregated cities in the country. Its scars from an extractive, post-industrial economy are on full display. In 2021 it came within inches of electing a community rights mayor who promised to “draw power down” to ordinary, working-class people through bold structural changes. That would-be mayor, Democratic nominee India Walton, lost the November general election to four-term incumbent, Byron Brown, who stayed in the race as a write-in candidate after Walton defeated him in the June primary.
The movement that Walton came from and built on isn’t about to vanish. Although it might experience some attrition, as all movements do after setbacks, the energy she helped channel within it remains a powerful force for radical change. Wielding that power in the days and years ahead will mean learning from Walton’s loss and identifying new targets, strategies, and tactics for prioritizing community rights in Buffalo. To aid those exercises, this article presents a condensed retelling of the mayoral race using the five “key lessons from past people’s movements” – published in the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s (CELDF) 2015 pamphletOn Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability – as an organizing framework. What emerges is a sentiment that, despite any deflating feelings that might accompany Walton’s general election loss, Buffalo’s capacity to build dual power – to truly “draw power down” to the people in a way that will put collective community needs ahead of ruling class profits – is arguably greater than ever.
Lesson 1: Movements start locally, with people who are personally harmed by existing systems
For readers unfamiliar with Buffalo, JoAnn Wypijeski’s pre-general election article in The Nation on the recent, post-1990s history of the city’s progressive movement provides critical context for how and why India Walton’s candidacy came to be. Consistent with CELDF’s analysis, people who were personally harmed by Buffalo’s legacies of redlining and disinvestment, industrial pollution, and, more recently, gentrification, formed organizations like PUSH Buffalo, the Partnership for the Public Good, the Clean Air Coalition, Grassroots Gardens, and numerous others – as well as mutual aid networks to fill gaps in public services – that advance social, racial, and economic justice at various spatial scales.
Walton, who grew up poor on Buffalo’s east side, and who left high school early after giving birth to her first child at the age of 14, was drawn into the world of politics through her personal experiences with struggle and perseverance. She was food insecure as a child, lived in a group home as a teenage mother, carted three children on and off the city’s neglected public transit infrastructure, and was subjected to racial discrimination within the health system her twins depended on. Walton’s eyes were opened early to the ways in which prevailing policies and institutions create and widen social inequalities.
At first, she fought against and resisted those systems as an individual. Citing the disrespect she’d felt during her twins’ hospital care, she returned to school to get her GED, and, later, a nursing degree, which she used to secure a job in the same children’s hospital that had previously felt so unwelcoming. When she began attending meetings and actions sponsored by Buffalo’s growing constellation of progressive organizations in the 2010s, her resistance became more firmly grounded in collective action. She eventually completed an Emerging Leaders program through Open Buffalo and dedicated herself to community organizing. She left her nursing job to co-found a Community Land Trust (CLT) in the Fruit Belt neighborhood of Buffalo.
The Fruit Belt is a historically African American, working-class neighborhood east of the city’s Main Street “dividing line.” A little over a decade ago, it became a hotbed for gentrification when billions of public dollars were leveraged to create the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC) on its doorstep. As a registered nurse who was living near and working at the medical campus, Walton acknowledges that she played an unwitting part in the gentrification pressures that BNMC created. But, between her own struggles with poverty and her increasingly clear analysis of social injustices, she was determined to fight back. She staged a one-woman protest that helped reserve street parking for community residents who were losing their spots to BNMC workers, and embraced her role as the first Executive Director of the Fruit Belt CLT.
A CLT is a mechanism for collectivizing land ownership and preserving housing affordability. Often a nonprofit organization controlled by community residents, a CLT holds land in trust within a geographic neighborhood. Structures sitting on that land can still be bought and sold using more conventional housing market mechanisms, but, by taking land out of the equation – i.e., homebuyers purchase structures only, not land – CLTs lower the cost of homebuying. These tools – collective land ownership and deed restrictions to eliminate property speculation – extend ownership and rental opportunities to lower income households and make affordability permanent. A CLT is therefore an institution for protecting community rights to collectively control land and how it is used in a neighborhood.
After declaring her candidacy for Mayor in the closing days of December 2020, Walton hit the campaign trail with a bold vision for scaling up local solutions like CLTs.
In addition to CLTs, Walton also proposed participatory budgeting (PB) to enable community residents to pitch and then vote on ways to use public funds; a municipal bank to provide non-extractive financing for community-anchored projects that could include democratically-owned and -controlled businesses; and an amendment to the city charter that would establish a host of sweeping protections for tenants. She also flirted with even deeper structural changes.
Around the time she announced her candidacy, I published a proposal to use Buffalo’s municipal Home Rule powers under the state constitution to form a charter commission, engage in extensive localized public education and organize around community rights. The goal was to rewrite – and, with hard work and organizing, vote to adopt – a rights-based charter to assert powers needed to control land use and protect environmental rights, worker rights, democratic rights, and rights of nature in neighborhoods. The city’s daily newspaper ran an op-ed on that proposal a few weeks later, which Walton shared on social media, hinting at her support for it.
Lesson 2: Movements move slowly
Mirroring the city’s broader progressive movement, Walton’s campaign operated mostly outside the mainstream’s view, plausibly creating perceptions among those not on her team that her candidacy wasn’t going anywhere. Although it’s just one indicator, the graph below shows the Google Trends search interest index for India Walton from the time she announced her candidacy to the present. Except for a few minor blips in the first five months of 2021, the graph suggests that most of the world didn’t take notice of Walton until the June Democratic primary.
Image Text: Google Trends: Search Interest in India Walton over Time; Weekly interest index, 6 December 2020 through 29 December 2021; From Google: ‘Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means that there was not enough data for this term.’ Chart by @RustBeltGeo
When she upset Brown in the primary, she shocked the Buffalo political establishment and, perhaps, the nation. The only people who weren’t surprised were Walton and her team. For months, they slowly and steadily logged long hours and late nights planning, door-knocking, making phone calls, and generally spreading a message of hope for a Buffalo that cares and works for all its residents.
By refusing to even acknowledge Walton or mention her name, let alone respond to her multiple requests for a pre-primary debate, Brown and his (over)confidence lulled much of the rest of the city into an electoral slumber. Brown’s victory in the primary was a foregone conclusion. Only it didn’t happen that way.
Notably, she carried more affluent, whiter neighborhoods in June while losing in working class communities of color; but in November those patterns were inverted. (See below map showing which precincts Walton won in November.)
Lesson 3: People who fight for fundamental change are ridiculed
As CELDF’s analysis of past people’s movements would have predicted, defenders of the status quo – and, presumably, its uneven distributions of wealth and power – were quick to wage personal attacks on Walton. Borrowing CELDF’s words, she was painted as too “radical, [her] ideas were ridiculed, and even [people] who sympathize with [her] cause argue[d] that the changes [she] seek[s] are too big” or too soon.
Brown’s incumbency, well-stocked campaign finance account, growth-friendly politics, and networked power allowed him to dominate headlines and control messaging after he lost the primary. The national media watchdog group FAIR put out a scathing post-election analysis in November that documented ways in which the local media, particularly the daily newspaper, reported on unverified talking points from Brown loyalists that actively sabotaged Walton’s public image. As Branko Marcetic put it in Jacobin, “Brown successfully turned the election debate to the petty personal mistakes of Walton…[and] it worked: a week before election day [in November], more than half of voters said their opinion of Walton had gotten worse since the primary.”
That turn of public opinion proved fatal to Walton’s campaign.
Lesson 4: Movements experience setbacks
Running parallel to the smear campaign targeting Walton was a coalition built by Brown. Unlike Walton, who strives to meet ordinary people where they are and bring them into a base of working-class power, Brown’s campaign catered to the already powerful. Brown conspired with establishment Democrats, millionaire developers, prominent Republicans and Republican financers, and the city’s formidable police union to consistently add fuel to the anti-Walton fires burning in the local news media.
Brown’s willingness to court and take large donations from Republicans came as a surprise to some, insofar as Brown is a lifelong Democrat and former Chair of the State Democratic Party. However, the move is far less surprising when viewed through the lens of working-class people collectively challenging the ruling class. InPedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire cautions that:
“The elites call for harmony between classes as if classes were fortuitous agglomerations of individuals curiously looking at a shop window on a Sunday afternoon. [But] The only [real] harmony…is that found among the oppressors themselves. Although they may diverge and upon occasion even clash over group interests, they unite immediately at a threat to the class.”
Brown’s well-funded campaign of scare tactics and misinformation harmed Walton’s image with voters and mobilized support against her.
The election chapter of the story is over – it’s part of the past, another data point to be integrated into future analyses.
Yet, how the story develops in its next chapter is unwritten. Here’s where CELDF’s lessons can come into play. The important thing for Walton’s organization to do now is to reframe her loss not as an end, but “as a means to attain long-term structural change.” By the time of the general election, Walton’s base had become a multiracial, working-class bloc that transcended the city’s “Main Street dividing line” in ways that haven’t been seen in prior citywide elections. The seeds of collective “people power” in Buffalo seem to be sprouting.
Lesson 5: Creating systems change requires direct action
If elected, Walton may well have established the mechanisms she championed to prioritize community rights in Buffalo. But, without robust civic infrastructure in place to make full use of those mechanisms, any executive-level changes Walton could have made would still have had limited range. Put another way, systems change doesn’t hinge on electing the right candidate – it’s advanced most forcefully when organized communities engage in direct action.
Before the Buffalo mayoral election, one of the most common refrains about leftist candidates for major offices was that they mostly only win educated white voters. Their embrace of “socialist” policies, it’s been argued, doesn’t appeal to working class communities and communities of color. If that argument were true, then the horizon for community rights wouldn’t be particularly bright. An inability to win over and unite the working class – the ordinary masses who are the majority of people – guarantees more of the same. It means that the ruling class minority won’t face a credible challenge to their disproportionate power and influence in society.
While this sort of rigidity and inertia in the existing, unequal political-economic system is unfortunately the rule rather than the exception, Walton’s electoral performance gives hope that the shields around the status quo might soon be pierced in Buffalo. Directly contradicting the common narrative about leftist candidates’ limited appeal, data suggest that Walton’s base was made up of unpropertied voters, voters of color, and voters living in the city’s lowest wealth communities.
My own statistical estimates show that Walton won the renter vote by nearly a 2-1 margin. She also appears to have won a majority of ballots cast by Black voters; and, while there’s too much uncertainty to say that Walton definitively won among Latinx voters and other voters of color, the evidence points in that direction.
Simply put, between the primary and general elections, Walton ostensibly evolved her base into a geographically and racially diverse coalition of working-class voters tired of the status quo. That’s precisely the type of base that, if properly reinforced and activated, can acquire and wield the level of people power sufficient to build a new system that values and protects community rights. Moving in that direction means tapping into the energy and momentum that Walton helped to harness. Drawing on CELDF’s lessons for people’s movements, it means formulating a long-term theory of change, crafting strategies, choosing tactics, and bringing the envisioned change to life through direct action.
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.
Russell Weaver is a geographer and Director of Research at the Cornell University ILR Buffalo Co-Lab, where he studies collective action and economic democracy. The views expressed in this post are his and do not reflect the opinions of his employer.
Ben Price
Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
Organizer
CELDF.org BenPrice@celdf.org
717-254-3233
Rev. Evelyn Morrison. MBA
We the People Citizens Reading, Pennsylvania, Berks County abbasadvocates@gmail.com
610-780-8360
Reading, Pennsylvania residents launch ballot initiative campaign, speak out about environmental racism.
READING, PA: Petitioners in Reading, Pennsylvania have officially kicked off a campaign to amend the Reading City Charter to outlaw “toxic trespass,” the poisoning of people and the environment within the city. The ballot initiative is in response to unaddressed toxic waste and environmental racism in the post-industrial city.
The proposed amendment launches direct public oversight through an Environmental Justice Advocate who would have authority to seat a local Environmental Justice Court made up of local residents.
It includes a “community bill of rights,” encompassing a Right to Establish a Freedom from Poisoning Policy, a Prohibition Against Toxic Trespass and a Right of Ecosystems to be Free from Toxic Trespass.
Reverend Evelyn Morrison is a lead petitioner, with the support of local multicultural/racial/bilingual organizations and members of We the People Citizens Reading, Pennsylvania (Berks County), Abba’s Advocates and The Diana Rivera O’Bryant Civil Rights Institute. The Institute was established by the nonprofit Reading Community Housing Development Corp. The Institute’s Rev. Morrison and Sheila Perez say the ballot initiative project is inspired by their long-time friend Diana Rivera O’Bryant, former Executive Director of the City of Reading Human Relations Commission and renowned fair housing advocate. O’Bryant, like so many of their neighbors, family and life-long friends tragically died of environmentally induced cancer.
“We can’t do anything for the people who have died, but we can try to avoid another generation of sickness,” says civil rights leader Rev. Evelyn Morrison. “This is opening up a discussion about our post-industrial environment and environmental racism in Reading.”
“Persons owning and managing corporations that manufacture, distribute, disturb, sell and deposit chemicals and chemical compounds found to be trespassing on and within the bodies of residents of the City, or into the ecosystems within the City of Reading, must be held liable for those trespasses,” the proposed amendment reads.
Proponents developed the charter amendment in collaboration with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF).
The Petition Committee members are Cesar Cepeda, Pastor Maria Vializ, Angelita Peralta, Angel Torres, and Rev. Morrison, who also serves as an advisor to the Committee along with Dave Kurzweg and Sheila Perez.
The campaign builds off Rev. Morrison’s and Sheila Perez’s membership on the previous Reading City Charter Commission. Their work on the Commission led to a ballot initiative to place new local term limits.
“All the advocates are grateful for the collaboration and the ‘meeting of the minds’ with the members of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund,” says Rev. Morrison. “To God Be The Glory!”
More information to come.
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About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) is helping build a decolonial movement for Community Rights and the Rights of Nature to advance democratic, economic, social, and environmental rights – building upward from the grassroots to the state, federal, and international levels.
