Search Results for: rights of nature

The Rights of Nature & Self-Governance – San Andres Archipelago, Colombia

by celdf

by CELDF
July 20th, 2015

For over a century, the Raizal people of the Archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina off the coast of Colombia – islands with a long history of colonization and the brutality that brings to people and nature – have fought for independence.  They’ve sought relief from the United Nations and other international bodies, but to no avail.

Several years ago, the International Court of Justice ruled in a long-running dispute between Colombia and Nicaragua, that Colombia will retain authority over the islands, and Nicaragua will control much of the marine areas around the islands.

Shrimp and lobster are abundant here, as part of the traditional fishing grounds of the Raizal people, which are threatened now by Nicaraguan exploration for oil extraction. Coral reefs, marine life, and wildlife on the islands are at risk. In addition, rising sea levels from global warming are threatening the Archipelago.

Representatives of the Raizal people contacted CELDF for help in establishing their right to self-determination and the rights of nature. This month, CELDF is traveling to the Archipelago for the launch of the Raizal Self-Determination School, and will be presenting at their Emancipation Week conference. The School is modeled after CELDF’s Democracy School but tailored specifically to the Raizal people and their unique history.

Learn more about the Raizal people, and help support CELDF’s partnership with them by donating here.

Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation Funds CELDF’s Work to Advance Rights to Local, Democratic Self-Governance and Rights of Nature

by celdf

July 14th, 2015

We are so grateful for the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation’s (LDF) support of CELDF’s work across the country, building sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature. Thank you, LDF!

Check out LDF’s work here, and see CELDF highlighted here.

 

Thank you, Leo!

CELDF in Otavalo, Ecuador, for a Rights of Nature conference.

by celdf

February 16th, 2014
In 2010, CELDF helped found the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.  CELDF has served on the Alliance’s Executive Committee and chairs its Legislative Assistance Working Group.

This January, the Alliance held a conference in Otavalo, Ecuador, with more than 60 participants from around the world discussing the growing interest in Rights of Nature.  CELDF presented on its work in the U.S., Ecuador, and other countries assisting people, communities, grassroots groups, and governments to advance Rights of Nature legal frameworks.  The conference concluded with the first Rights of Nature Tribunal, held in Quito.  The Tribunal considered cases of ecosystem harm, and how Rights of Nature laws would protect against and restore such harms.

CELDF has worked with the communities in the U.S. to establish first-in-the-nation Rights of Nature laws, and in 2008, assisted Ecuador’s constitutional drafting process.  The people of Ecuador ratified their new constitution in September 2008, becoming the first country in the world to establish Rights of Nature in its constitution.  CELDF is now partnering with organizations in Australia, Nepal, India, and elsewhere to advance Rights of Nature law and policy.

Rights of Nature laws establish the rights of ecosystems to exist and thrive, and empower people and their governments to protect against violations of these rights.  These laws are paradigm shifting – transforming away from existing environmental laws which regulate our use of nature, under which nature is considered “right-less” – to a new structure that recognizes the inalienable rights of ecosystems to life and well-being, such that protection of nature is paramount and any activities that may interfere with ecosystem rights are prohibited.

CELDF partner in Rights of Nature work, Fundacion Pachamama, Shut Down by Ecuadorian Government

by celdf

December 6th, 2013

Friends,

CELDF works closely with Fundacion Pachamama – an Ecuador NGO – which we first partnered with several years ago to establish Rights of Nature in the Ecuadorian Constitution.

On December 4, the organization was closed by the national government of Ecuador. This is another example of President Correa’s efforts to shut down organizations that work to expand human, indigenous, and nature’s rights. Learn more here, and how you can help: http://pachamama.org.ec/fundacion-pachamama-requests-solidarity/

Thank you,

CELDF

Fundación Pachamama Requests SOLIDARITY

The Ecuadorian government has other NGOs in its sights

QUITO – On Wednesday, December 4th, 2013, plain-clothes police officers appeared at the offices of Fundación Pachamama and proceeded to shut down the facilities, leaving a resolution from the Ministry of Environment ordering the dissolution the organization.

This dissolution is an arbitrary act that seeks to oppress our legitimate right to disagree with the government’s decisions, such as the decision to turn over Amazonian indigenous people’s land to oil companies, in direct violation of their constitutional rights.

Fundación Pachamama’s position is founded upon the defense of Human Rights and the Rights of Nature, and is upheld by the rule of law. Over the last 16 years, we have offered accompaniment and solidarity to indigenous organizations that legitimately represent the ancestral peoples of the Amazon.

In addition to being an arbitrary act, the dissolution of Fundación Pachamama is a demonstration of the government’s unease about the collection of signatures by civil society to prevent the destruction of the Yasuni National Park.

Fundación Pachamama, which fought for the Sarayaku people in the Inter-American Court for Human Rights, was one of the organizations that supported the constitutional debates in the Montecristi Constitutional Assembly about the environment and the Rights of Nature. Fundación Pachamama has, in every moment, supported the Yasuni-ITT initiative to leave oil underneath the ground, and has backed the legal action of the Amazon Defense Front in the  Chevron-Texaco case.

Fundación Pachamama also does important work to support the sustainable development of the Amazon, such as implementing a solar boat transportation system, the first such system in the world, and working with healthcare professionals to train women and communities in safe birth practices.

We cannot allow for this aggression to distract attention and debate from the larger issues, such as the violation of the collective rights of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, the Human Rights of all, and the Rights of Nature.

At the moment that Fundación Pachamama was dissolved, there was a complete absence of due process of law, and our constitutional rights were overridden by the Ministry of the Interior, which also indicated that this operation will extend to other foundations and organizations.

Fundación Pachamama must be reopened, not only for our own good, but also for the good of all social organizations, indigenous and educational, that are at risk.

We request that the Ministry of Environment revoke its order dissolving Fundación Pachamama.

Fundación Pachamana
@FPachamama_Ec
www.pachamama.org.ec

Dr. Stephen Cleghorn signed the 1st Rights of Nature based legal easement on his 52 acre organic farm in late 2012. Click here to view a stirring speech he gave in 2011, passionately taking a stand to stop fracking and protect the land.

by celdf

This is a really energetic presentation by Dr. Stephen Cleghorn, a sociologist and an organic farmer from Jefferson County, PA, and was recorded at the Epic No Frack Event at Ithaca College, Saturday, June 25, 2011.

Pachamama Hosts Global Alliance for Rights of Nature in San Francisco

by celdf

 

https://vimeo.com/23075110

 

 

4/26/2011
Moderator: Bill Twist – Co-Founder and CEO, The Pachamama Alliance Pachamama.org
03:38
Cormac Cullinan, LLB, LLM – Director, Cullinan and Associates, Inc. and EnAct International Enact-International.com
21:46
Natalia Greene – Political Program Coordinator, Fundación Pachamama Pachamama.org.ec
35:30
Thomas Linzey, Esq – Executive Director, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund CELDF.org
Books mentioned:
Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice by Cormac Cullinan. Available on Amazon.com
The Rights of Nature, The Case for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. Co-produced by Global Exchange, the Council of Canadians, The Pachamama Alliance, and Fundación Pachamama. To order contact Kylie@Global Exchange.org
Organizations mentioned:
Global Exchange: globalexchange.org
The Council of Canadians: canadians.org
The Pachamama Alliance: pachamama.org.
Fundación Pachamama: pachamama.org.ec
Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature therightsofnature.org
Contact info@pachamama.org if you would like to download or request a DVD copy of this presentation for classroom or community presentations.

Press Release: Ecuador Approves New Constitution: Voters Approve Rights of Nature

by celdf

Ecuador Follows Lead of U.S. Communities:  First Country in the World to Shift to Rights-Based Environmental Protection, Working With Legal Defense Fund

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Stacey Schmader
Administrative Director
Info@celdf.org
717-498-0054

By an overwhelming margin, the people of Ecuador today voted for a new constitution that is the first in the world to recognize legally enforceable Rights of Nature, or ecosystem rights.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is pioneering this work in the U.S., where it has assisted more than a dozen local municipalities with drafting and adopting local laws recognizing Rights of Nature.

Over the past year, the Legal Defense Fund was invited to assist the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly to develop and draft provisions for the new constitution to put ecosystem rights directly into the Ecuadorian constitution.  The elected Delegates to the Constituent Assembly requested that the Legal Defense Fund draft language based on ordinances developed and adopted by municipalities in the U.S.

“Ecuador is now the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights,” stated Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

“With this vote, the people of Ecuador are leading the way for countries around the world to fundamentally change how we protect nature,” added a CELDF representative.

Article 1 of the new “Rights for Nature” chapter of the Ecuador constitution reads:  “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.  Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public bodies.”

Legally Enforceable Ecosystem Rights: From the U.S. to Ecuador

The Legal Defense Fund has assisted communities in the U.S. – in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Virginia – to draft and adopt first-in-the-nation laws that change the status of ecosystems from being regarded as property under the law to being recognized as rights-bearing entities.

From Tamaqua Borough in Pennsylvania, to the Town of Barnstead in New Hampshire, to Halifax in southern Virginia, the Legal Defense Fund works with communities that recognize that environmental protection cannot be attained under a structure of law that treats natural ecosystems as property.

All of the major environmental laws in the U.S. – including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and similar state laws – treat nature as property under the law.  These laws legalize environmental harms by regulating how much pollution or destruction of nature can occur.  Rather than preventing pollution and environmental destruction, these laws instead codify it.

The Rights of Natures laws developed by the Legal Defense Fund for local municipalities in the U.S. represent changes to the status of property law, eliminating the authority of a property owner to interfere with the functioning of ecosystems that exist and depend upon that property for their existence and flourishing. These local laws allow certain types of development that do not interfere with the rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish.

These local laws – and now Ecuador’s constitution – recognize that ecosystems possess the inalienable and fundamental right to exist and flourish, and that people possess the legal authority to enforce those rights on behalf of ecosystems.  In addition, these laws require the governments to remedy violations of those ecosystem rights.  

The Ecuador constitution operates in the same way.

Background

The Legal Defense Fund, founded in 1995, is the only public interest law firm in the U.S. that specializes in building a body of law focused on establishing Rights of Nature.

The Legal Defense Fund has served as special legal counsel to over one hundred municipal governments across the U.S., and serves as a legal advisor to organizations and governments in other countries, including Ecuador, who are focused on driving similar laws into their governing frameworks.

Today’s environmental laws are failing.  By most every measure, the environment today is in worse shape than when the major U.S. environmental laws were adopted over thirty years ago.  Since then, countries around the world have sought to replicate these laws.  Yet, species decline worldwide is increasing exponentially, global warming is far more accelerated than previously believed, deforestation continues unabated around the world, and overfishing in the world’s oceans is pushing many fisheries to collapse.

The people, communities, and governments that the Legal Defense Fund works with recognize that environmental protection cannot be attained under a structure of law that continues to treat natural ecosystems as property.

The Pachamama Alliance, with offices in San Francisco and Quito, played a key role in facilitating the Legal Defense Fund’s involvement in the drafting of Ecuador’s new constitution.

Interview on the Great Lakes and NY State Waters Bill of Rights: Does Nature Have Rights?

by Outside Publication

This interview was conducted by the Environmental Coffeehouse welcoming Ben Price, CELDF Education Director & Tish O’Dell, Consulting Director of Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) who are working with Max Wilbert, Publicist for CELDF on the NYS Assembly Bill AO5156A, the Great Lakes and State Waters Bill of Rights, which is currently IN the NYS Assembly.

This new bill introduced into the New York State Assembly by Assemblyman Burke of the Assembly District 142, representing New York’s 142nd district, made up of South Buffalo and the surrounding areas on and near the shore of Lake Erie. 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.

“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. This bill is of cross-border interest with Canada since both share the magnificent Great Lakes.

Watch Interview Here

New Book Reflects on 30 Years of Activism for Community and Nature’s Rights

by celdf

Author, Ben Price, was interviewed on the Project Censored Show by Eleanor Goldfield about his new book, Wouldn’t You Say, A Collection of Essays on Environment and Community. In the book and in their conversation, Ben explains that what we’re seeing today is not a perversion of the promise of America, it’s actually a proof of concept, a continuation of foundational ideologies never meant to protect we, the people, and certainly not to protect the ecosystems of which we are a part. Ben discusses rights of nature not as a legal north star but as a need to shift our thinking about relationships, between ourselves, the law, and empirical reality.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 17, 2024                                                                                                          

Contact:

Ben Price, Education Director

BenPrice@CELDF.org, 717-254-3233

Kai Huschke, Executive Director

Kai@CELDF.org, 509-607-5034

“Wouldn’t You Say? A Collection of Essays About Environment and Community”

BOWMANSTOWN, PA — A new book of essays written by a trailblazer in the Rights of Nature movement tackles the enduring myths behind the environmental crisis.

“Wouldn’t You Say? A Collection of Essays About Environment and Community” was written by Ben Price and published by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) in November.

Price was a central force behind the first-ever law to recognize the Rights of Nature in the United States, back in 2006. He has been a grassroots organizer for twenty years with CELDF, assisting dozens of communities to pass laws restricting corporate power and recognizing nature’s rights.

“For over fifty years in the United States, environmentalists have tried to protect the environment by regulating the rate of destruction,” Price writes in the book. “But despite the Clean Water, Clean Air, and Endangered Species Acts, and the creation of the federal EPA and state-level agencies, this has only succeeded in lulling conservationists into a stupor while Nature bleeds out.”

The book points to the climate crisis, ballooning pollution and toxicity issues, and the biodiversity crisis as examples.

For solutions, Price suggests radical, even revolutionary community organizing for sovereignty against corporate power that goes far beyond ineffective and co-opted methods of regulation and environmental lawsuits.

These strategies have stirred a hornets’ nest of opposition. Price writes:

“During our two decades of organizing communities and drafting municipal legislation, the CELDF team encountered every variety of opposition from corporate lawyers and judges — [but also] from established environmental organizations and their directors who insisted our ‘radical’ legislation would interfere with their ‘serious’ and ‘mature’ attempts to negotiate with regulators and polluters.

In every community we organized, we were honest with our local partners about the unlikelihood of prevailing through litigation. They heard from us first about how they could expect to be ridiculed, dismissed, and ostracized for not taking what they could get after negotiating for some portion of their rights and the rights of the non-human part of their communities.

We shared our hope that gradually, eventually, the idea of legal rights for living ecosystems would be normalized and accepted. We were, we explained, not so much engaged in a legal strategy as we were testing a theory of experiential education and cultural change.”

Today, CELDF continues to present the idea of Rights of Nature through proposed legislation like the Great Lakes Bill of Rights introduced into the New York State Assembly by Member Patrick Burke, and a number of pending local bills. The organization is also expanding its efforts into community resistance and resilience efforts.

You can order a copy of  “Wouldn’t You Say? A Collection of Essays About Environment and Community: The Necessary & Natural Relationship” for a special pre-order price of $20. Until the end of the year, any donors who contribute at least $150 will also receive a copy of the book, as well as CELDF’s prior publication, “Rebelling Against the Corporate State.”

Mr. Price is now available for radio and broadcast interviews, book talks, and podcast appearances. Kai Huschke, CELDF’s Executive Director, is also available. 

More information about CELDF, including photos pre-approved for media use, can be found in our press kit.

###

About Ben Price

Ben Price has worked with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund since 2004, initially focusing on organizing with communities in Pennsylvania before expanding nationwide. Ben’s work has included assisting the first community on settler colonial-controlled land on Earth to recognize legal rights for ecosystems (Tamaqua, PA, 2006) and working with the City Council of Pittsburgh to adopt a community bill of rights banning fracking, directly challenging state preemption of local control over oil and gas corporations, and recognizing Rights of Nature.

Today he works on municipal efforts nationwide. Ben participated in the founding of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (Ecuador, 2010), and authored the book “How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property,” which won the Independent Publisher’s 2020 silver medal. He lives on ancestral lands of the Delaware/Lenape and Mohican people, in Pennsylvania.

About the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) is helping build 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 levels.

Begun as a traditional public interest law firm seeking to protect the environment, CELDF sought to protect communities from projects such as incinerators and waste dumps that cause environmental harm. Along the way, they encountered barriers put in place by both government and corporations. Such barriers included corporate constitutional “rights” and the unilateral preemptive authority of state government – both of which are used to override community decision-making and local democracy.

Today, through grassroots organizing, public education and outreach, and legal assistance, nearly 200 municipalities across the U.S. have advanced CELDF-drafted laws to establish rights for ecosystems as well as human rights to water and a liveable climate, as well as to ban practices including fracking, factory farming, sewage sludging of farmland and water privatization.

Further, CELDF has worked with the first U.S. communities and the first country (Ecuador) to establish the Rights of Nature in law – recognizing the rights of ecosystems and natural communities to exist and thrive and empowering people and their governments to defend and enforce these rights.

This Rights of Nature movement has since blossomed and today enjoys tremendous public support and enthusiasm throughout the world.

###

Published in the Columbia Free Press on 2-8-25.

Newsletter: Asheville Climate Bill of Rights Begins Signature Gathering

by celdf

With leadership from Kat Houghton, the group Community Roots has now begun collecting signatures to place the Asheville Climate Bill of Rights ordinance on the 2022 ballot. The group and a coalition of partners came up 27 valid signatures short in 2020. They need just under 11,000 valid signatures.

CELDF’s Ben Price has collaborated with the group on the ordinance language. The ordinance includes “things like the right of residents to live in a place without pollution to the air, water, or soil; the right to have sustainable energy production in the city; and the right of residents to oppose any mandated agreement with a utility company that uses fossil fuels – namely, Duke Energy, which has a near-monopoly of the energy sector in North Carolina,” the Asheville Citizen Times summarizes. Duke Energy has tremendous political power in North Carolina.

The ordinance also includes language asserting that “Ecosystems and natural communities, including but not limited to forests, rivers, wetlands and subsurface water systems, within the City of Asheville possess the right to naturally exist, flourish, regenerate, evolve, and be restored, which includes the right to be free from all activities that threaten these rights, including but not limited to toxic trespass. Specific violations of these rights include clearing land of living flora and fauna for the siting of dwellings to be occupied either permanently or temporarily by anyone paying the owner for such occupancy.”

This ordinance also explicitly challenges North Carolina’s infamous state preemption scheme and privileges afforded private corporations.

For a copy of the ordinance and to learn how you can support the effort, contact BenPrice@celdf.org.

Podcast (Climate One): “Should Nature Have Rights?”

by celdf

On May 28, 2021, CELDF’s Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin joined Rebecca Tsosie (constitutional and Indigenous law scholar of Yaqui descent and regents professor of law at the University of Arizona) and Carol Van Strum (Lincoln County Community Rights) on the nationally syndicated Climate One podcast.

They discussed the Rights of Nature movement and the book The World We Need.

Climate One’s podcast and radio program are aired on NPR stations around the country (including WAMU and WHYY) and have a global weekly listenership ranging up to 165,000. Past guests include Katherine Hayhoe, Gina McCarthy, John Kerry, and many other leaders.

This is a must-listen!

From Climate One:

In the last several years, a growing number of countries and places within the United States have tried to establish legal standing for natural ecosystems. 

“The concept really posits that the way that we envision a person having particular rights and standing to sue in case somebody harms you, that that can be extended beyond human persons to aspects of what we would describe as the natural world and ecosystem: a river, a mountaintop, a national park, whatever the case may be,” says Rebecca Tsosie, a Regents professor of law at the University of Arizona.

In 2017, New Zealand granted the Whanganui River the full legal rights of a person. India also recently granted full legal rights to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, and recognized that the Himalayan Glaciers have a right to exist. In the United States, those efforts have been more complicated, and frequently overturned by courts.

Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin, a lawyer associated with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, says the rights of nature concept has moved from an “unthinkable” idea a few years ago to now exploring the details of “how would this actually work? What are the legal mechanisms by which this works?” 

He says those mechanisms will determine whether the rights of nature becomes a paradigm shift or “simply recuperates a system that is ultimately destroying the earth on which we depend.”

For example, a legal person usually has the right to sue and be sued. 

“Should ecosystems have that same set of personhood rights, or should it be different?  I think that we should be very careful about the idea of ecosystems being able to be sued or being able to have liability,” Schromen-Wawrin says.

Decades ago, Carol Van Strum’s legal battle opposing the use of herbicides in her local national forest eventually led to a ban on aerial herbicide spraying on national forests across the country. 

More recently, she and others in Lincoln County, Oregon, organized a measure banning the use of aerial spraying of pesticides on corporate timberlands, using the rights of nature argument. Voters passed the measure in 2017 but the timber companies immediately challenged it in court. The judge ruled that state law preempted the local ordinance. 

Van Strum’s group is appealing the decision.

“[The judge] did not allow the river system … to intervene against the timber companies, but she did give a little speech saying she thought even though nature didn’t have rights now, it should and will,” Van Strum says.

Single-Field Email Subscription Form

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.