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.
Nottingham, New Hampshire is fighting for a clean and healthy community
Energy democracy works for local control of our energy sources.
The global movement for energy democracy works with communities for local control of renewable sources of energy to help ensure equity, reliability, availability, and affordability. As stated by Denise Fairchild and Al Weinrub in the Introduction to their edited volume Energy Democracy: Advancing Equity in Clean Energy Solutions (2017), energy democracy is “a way to frame the international struggle of working people, low-income communities, and communities of color to take control of energy resources from the energy establishment and use those resources to empower their communities.” (p. 6). It is not enough to simply push corporations to adopt renewable energy; such a path may provide renewable, greener options, but these options will primarily benefit corporations and wealthier communities at the continued, extreme cost to the working-class poor and people of color. What is needed is a path that puts the power into the hands of local people to determine, manage, and even own the energy production that will best suit the needs of their community.
More and more folx are recognizing the value in working for deep-rooted, structural, and systemic changes by engaging in community advocacy and activism. The literature on energy democracy expounds on the efforts of local groups engaging in collective action to take on large fossil fuel corporations to gain control over the communities’ economic, environmental, and cultural futures. Craig Morris and Arne Jungjohann, in Energy Democracy: Germany’s ENERGIEWENDE to Renewables (2016), sees an opportunity to call for urgent action now because our current push for “energy transition represents a one-time window of opportunity to democratize the energy sector” (p. 13).” The time is now to ride the wave of this new movement for radical changes in how we not only switch to healthier renewables but how we stand with historically marginalized peoples to author their own goals and needs and to fulfill them through equitable democratization of energy production and distribution.
Nottingham, New Hampshire is fighting to uphold energy democracy’s principles.
In 2008, a resident community group, now called the Nottingham Water Alliance (NWA), drafted and proposed for town meeting, the Nottingham Water Rights and Self-Governance Ordinance, a rights-based ordinance created to protect their town’s water. USA Springs was slated to come into Nottingham to withdraw 439,000 gallons daily, bottle it, and sell it overseas, If allowed to do so, Nottingham residents would have suffered from lowered levels of groundwater, which forces wells to be dug deeper (which is costlier), and the withdrawal contaminates groundwater with harmful chemicals that jeopardize the health and wellbeing of citizens through the process of extraction.
More recently, working with Michelle Sanborn from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), NWA developed a new rights-based ordinance, which passed in March 2019. This Freedom from Chemical Trespass ordinance was written and passed to protect Nottingham from the harmful impacts of noxious chemicals being dumped in their town. The Ordinance prohibits any corporate or government agency from disposing of toxic waste in Nottingham.
But the fight continues. Currently, NWA is working with Michelle Sanborn and attorney Kira Kelly, contracted with CELDF, to uphold a town ordinance that was voted in by Nottingham residents in March 2019. This Freedom from Chemical Trespass ordinance protects community members and ecosystems from the harms caused by noxious chemicals polluting the soil, water, and air.
NWA chair Peter White cannot understand why Brent Tweed of G&F Goods, LLC has a problem with the ordinance. Tweed moved into Nottingham just before the ordinance passed, and he is weaponizing corporate personhood privileges to challenge the law. “He runs an entirely online business. I wouldn’t think his personal or business rights would be affected by this ordinance.” Far from interfering with the disposing of cardboard, which Tweed’s lawyers argue in his lawsuit against the ordinance, the law protects the people and ecosystems of Nottingham from intentional corporate dumping of toxic waste. The ordinance goes after state and corporate authority to pollute in Nottingham. Tweed’s lawsuit against the ordinance was heard in the Rockingham Superior Court. Because the ordinance was passed by a legal and binding vote, it is the sworn duty of the Selectmen to defend it. Yet, as White said, “Our selectman chose not to defend it, even though they promised to do so.”
Brent Tweed argued that the ordinance is not sufficiently clear on what does and does not count as an actionable offense. He claimed to be “chilled” from doing business under such a vague threat of $1000/day fine plus liability for harm done to ecosystems. He wanted the ordinance declared unconstitutional, contrary to state law, and unenforceable. The ordinance does, however, specify what sorts of harms it opposes.
The ordinance reads that Nottingham will be free from “chemical trespass resulting from the physical deposition or disturbance of toxic wastes, which, for purposes of this ordinance, includes petroleum refining wastes, coal combustion wastes, sewage sludge, heavy metals, chemical residue from manufacturing processes, mining residuals, radioactive wastes, or any other waste that poses a present or potential hazard to human health or ecosystems [and] … . from all corporate activities that release toxic contaminants into the air, water, and soil, including chemical trespass resulting from the physical deposition or disturbance of toxic wastes.”
Certainly, it may seem “chilling” to corporations who want free reign to put profit over the health and wellbeing of the community. However, if we do not take such measures to protect our environment, local economies, and the purity of water, soil, and air, the degradation to our capacity to sustain human life will become far more chilling than the worries of any single corporation.
The Rockingham Superior Court ruled in favor of Tweed.
According to the NWA, they are defending their rights as stated in the New Hampshire Constitution, Article 1, established in 1784: “All men are born equally free and independent; Therefore, all government of right originates from the people, is founded in consent, and instituted for the general good.” When the state and corporate powers take away the ability of local people to determine what is good, healthy, and sustainable for their communities, we risk becoming an oligarchy: a government ruled by a few over the masses without their informed consent.
But they weren’t even allowed to “intervene” to defend the ordinance. This despite the fact that even according to the State of New Hampshire website, an “intervener” is: “Any person shown to be interested may become a party to any civil action upon filing and service of an Appearance and pleading briefly setting forth his or her relation to the cause.” The Supreme Court ruled that NWA had no legal standing, and attorney Kelly defended her clients’ rights as intervening parties in her appeal to the court.
A community rights-based approach shows the power of local control. Each community is unique in its cultural make-up, land use, economic opportunities, public and service institutions, and thus its needs and interests. It is therefore important, as the literature on energy democracy notes, that each community devise and develop their own methods of empowerment and change. The NH Community Rights Network (NHCRN) has been working to empower ordinary citizens, many of whom do not see themselves as “activists,” but residents who care about the health and wellbeing of their communities, to effectively face down the profit-over-people motives of mega corporations.
There are many legal doctrines that give corporations far more power than people. These doctrines have been enshrined since the late 1800s and early 1900s due to the incessant lawsuits corporations have thrown against local, state, and federal governments to muscle their way into leveraging more and more power. One such doctrine is ceilingstate preemption which is the authority of the state to unilaterally override local laws and policies. A balanced relationship between state and local is needed, but what we have instead offers no power or protection for local decisions, especially when they challenge the status quo.
Simultaneously, corporations, through charters that are issued by the state, have far more legal standing than people, ecosystems, or local governments, giving corporations the authority to use this power to override the expressed interests and needs of state and local residents. The U.S. Supreme Court has given these corporate charters the status of legal contracts and privileged those contracts in what constitutional anthropologist Jane Anne Morris called “an orchestrated corporate effort to escape state regulation.”
Of course, there’s also corporate “personhood.” These rights include equal protection under the law, freedom of speech, the Fourth Amendment privacy right to keep their poor working conditions and environmentally harmful procedures secret. If anyone interferes with their ability to operate, corporations are entitled to be compensated for present and future lost profits.
This is all an impediment to energy democracy.
Can small communities defeat large corporations? Asking that a small community effectively challenge a multi-million-dollar corporation that is protected by state and federal laws would seem to be sending David against Goliath, a highly improbable task outside biblically heroic tales. Yet, as Marshall Ganz shows in Why David Sometimes Wins, there is a way to “turn what we have into what we need to get what we want,” and this is precisely what CELDF helps prepare communities to do. Following the spirit of energy democracy principles, CELDF works with communities when invited to help locals design and set up structures that block unwanted corporations from moving in. This challenge to power is an essential first fight on the road to energy democracy.
Because it’s near impossible to beat corporations at their own game, we must change the game. CELDF knows of the painfully slow and often unsuccessful process of fighting regulatory agencies, that end up serving to buffer corporations from the will of communities, and ultimately legalizing and legitimizing harmful activities. That’s why they play by a different set of rules. They challenge corporations head-on.
It is important to point out that CELDF is not anti-corporation; rather they are pro community empowerment. Corporations can and are beneficial to local communities, bringing jobs and needed services and industry. However, when one is a threat to local residents and ecosystems, CELDF helps communities block such threats, not by slightly reducing the level of harm, but by preventing the harm entirely.
Members of different towns and cities across New Hampshire have worked with the guidance of CELDF to create Rights-Based Ordinances (RBOs) that have leveraged enough power to either stop unwanted corporations from moving in or prevent them from engaging in harmful practices. While not always 100% successful, engaging in these fights pushes the right buttons for advancing real energy democracy. Challenging corporate supremacy is formidable. RBOs are not a silver bullet, but a tool to substantively engage in the fight to re-orient power that energy democracy requires.
Put simply, RBOs fight to put our democracy back into the hands of people. They empower local residents to block corporate activities. They are ordinances (municipal decrees) created by volunteer community members and supported by a majority vote in a local municipal meeting, and they delineate rights and protections to set a higher standard for human rights that corporations may not degrade.
RBOs are an exercise of self-determination. They are an exercise of the type of local control that energy democracy movements world-wide are working to advance. In New Hampshire, according to the NH Community Rights Network (NHCRN) website, fully 12 RBOs have been written and voted in since 2006 to protect against such things as water extraction, unsustainable energy infrastructure, industrial ridgeline wind projects, gravel mining, and religious identification requirements.
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.
References Johnson, D. and Lewis, A. (2017) Organizing for energy democracy in rural electric cooperatives in Energy Democracy: Advancing Equity in Clean Energy Solutions, Denise Fairchild and Al Weinrub (Eds.). Island Press: Washing, D.C. pp. 93-112.Morris, J.A. ( 2008). Gaveling Down the Rabble: How “Free Trade” is Stealing our Democracy. The APEX Press. Boulder, CO.
Gillian Davies
Universal Declaration of the Rights of Wetlands, Co-Convener
Society of Wetland Scientists Professional Certification Program, President-Elect gdavies@bscgroup.com
A growing list of groups have signed onto a declaration for the rights of wetlands, spearheaded by an international group of wetlands scientists
In December, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) officially endorsed a proposal for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Wetlands, organized by lawyers and scientists with the Society of Wetland Scientists’ Rights of Wetlands and Climate Change and Wetlands initiatives. The group is planning to share the Declaration with the 171 signatory countries of the Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar Convention), and inviting them to work with others to move toward a framework that ensures the rights of wetlands are understood, respected and upheld, including through contributing knowledge and guidance on designated Ramsar Wetlands of International Importance. “CELDF is excited to endorse the efforts as a step toward recognizing and enforcing the rights of wetlands,” we wrote in December.
“The ongoing destabilization of the global climate and rapid loss of biodiversity impress upon us the urgency for shifting the human–Nature relationship to one of greater reciprocity and respect for Nature,” the authors of the Declaration write.
A growing number of groups are signing on in support, and in addition to CELDF and the Society of Wetland Scientists, include Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, Rights of Mother Earth, Rights of Nature Sweden, Wetlands International, Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature Europe, The Gaia Foundation, Earth Thrive, Funcaión Lagunas Costeras, Funcaión Montecito, Virginia Community Rights Network, Stichting Mission Lanka, Cobra Collective, National Community Rights Network, Earth Lore, Afrie, African Biodiversity Network, Grabe-Benin and Society for Alternative Learning & Transformation.
As we collectively advance a paradigm shift in how ecosystems are treated by dominant systems of law, it will be critical to simultaneously develop interpretations of the rights of specific ecosystems, based upon local indigenous ecological knowledge, and the best available scientific research. This effort within the conventional scientific discipline to begin to apply science for the interpretation of ecosystem rights is exciting and needed.
“The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Wetlands and its proposed adoption by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands is an important step forward for ecosystem protections,” says Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin, one of CELDF’s lawyers. “Existing environmental law has not reversed ongoing ecological destruction, even as it has sometimes been effective at protecting particular habitats. We must both fight with the tools we have, while also creating new tools to respond to interconnected ecological and humanitarian crises. We look forward to working alongside wetland scientists and the parties to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.”
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.
Two women, one American and one Vietnamese, fight to hold the chemical industry accountable for a devastating legacy.
The award-winning documentary “The People vs. Agent Orange” follows the primary component of the notorious chemical Agent Orange. The film, directed by Kate Taverna and Alan Adelson, follows resistance in the United States, France, and Vietnam, and features Carol Van Strum, an active participant in Rights of Nature organizing in Oregon and lawmaking campaigns in Lincoln County.
The film has been premiering across the nation, including screenings co-sponsored by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
The inspiring and enraging film follows women-led resistance to the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, and its use in Oregon, following the war. The viewer witnesses intimate behind-the-scenes access to grassroots resistance in Oregon and Vietnam and gut-wrenching first-person accounts of sacrifice and resolve.
As part of her activism, Van Strum of Oregon has supported lawmaking efforts in Lincoln County to ban aerial spraying and recognize rights of ecosystems. This work has led her to become the human spokesperson for the Siletz River watershed in active litigation coming out of a challenge to the aerial spray ban Lincoln County enacted in 2017. That law successfully banned aerial pesticide spraying for over two years.
Van Strum has accomplished a lot while dealing with seismic personal tragedies — one directly connected to her activism and another due to systemic racism. In her book A Bitter Fog, she writes that “it [community rights] is the ticket to overturn the corporate rule of law.”
Her work, alongside Community Rights Lane County, was the subject of an investigation by The Intercept into corporate backlash to rights-based organizing in Oregon.
Film description:
The Agent Orange catastrophe did not end with the war in Vietnam. Today, all over the world, a primary component of that toxic herbicide controls weeds in farming, forestry, parks–even on children’s playgrounds. The chemical wreaks havoc on the human genome, causing deformed births and deadly cancers. After decades of struggle and tragic personal losses, two heroic women are leading a worldwide movement to end the plague and hold the manufacturers accountable.
In France, Tran To Nga is suing the American chemical industry for poisoning her in Vietnam. In America, Carol Van Strum exposes the continuing use of toxic herbicides. Incriminating documents disappear. Activists are threatened. A helicopter technician secretly films the contamination of reservoirs, while a massive industrial cover-up goes on.
Module three: Decolonizing Nature – a Movement’s Voice in the Rebellion
Tuesday, Sept. 29 at 6:30 pm EST.
For decades Lake Erie has had a reputation as a “dead lake.” It’s time for that to change.
In 2014 nearly 500,000 people lost their water in and around Toledo, Ohio due to a harmful bloom of toxic algae. In 2019, Lake Erie became the first ecosystem in the nation to have it’s right to exist, flourish, and thrive recognized in law – the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR). The law has since been stifled by corporate opposition and state preemption, but these actions only reinforce that LEBOR posed a real threat to the status quo.
Join us for this final installment of a three part webinar series. In parts 1 and 2 we looked at a Community’s and a Great Lake’s rebellion against a system that allows both to be harmed. In this webinar we will broaden out the strategy of Rights of Nature as a global movement for systemic change. In order to profoundly change our relationship with Nature we must decolonize the law. Rights of Nature is rooted in Indigenous knowledge and must be expanded into western law and culture. Join us for an open discussion with CELDF legal professionals on decolonizing law, culture, and our relationship with Nature.
This is a three part series – please register for each module separately.
Module 1: A Community’s Voice in the Rebellion: Impacts on Nature and Community Thursday, September. 3 at 6:30 pm EST. Watch Module One.
Module 2: A Lake’s Voice in the Rebellion: Violating the Rights of Lake Erie Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 6:30 pm EST. Watch Module Two.
Module 3: A Movement’s Voice in the Rebellion: Growing a Rights of Nature Movement Tuesday, September 29, 2020 at 6:30 pm EST. Watch Below!
Speakers
KiraKelley is the chair of the Vermont National Lawyers Guild and a contract attorney with CELDF. As an anarchist and an abolitionist, Kira’s life’s work is to render the legal profession obsolete.
Lindsey Schromen-Wawrinis an attorney in Washington State, in Klallam Territory (nəxʷsƛ̕áy̕əm̕), where he also serves as a city councilmember. He has represented the Little Mahoning Watershed, Crystal Spring Ecosystem, and Lake Erie Ecosystem, and published on rights of nature in Representing Ecosystems in Court: An Introduction for Practitioners, 31 Tulane Envtl. L.J. 279 (2018); Nature’s Rights through Lawmaking in the United States, in La Follette & Maser (Eds.), Sustainability and the Rights of Nature in Practise (CRC Press 2019); and a forthcoming law textbook on earth law by Wolters Kluwer. He graduated from Oberlin College, and from Gonzaga University School of Law with highest honors and pro bono distinction.
Will Falk is a biophilic writer and lawyer. He believes the intensifying destruction of the natural world is the most pressing issue confronting us today. His first book How Dams Fall describing his relationship with the Colorado River and his involvement in the first-ever federal lawsuit seeking rights for a major ecosystem was published by HomeBound Publications in 2019. He is currently traveling through the Ohio River basin writing a book tentatively titled, The Ohio River Speaks. You can follow his journey at TheOhioRiverSpeaks.org.
Karen Hoffmann is an attorney at Syrena Law in Philadelphia. Since 2017, she has worked with CELDF to represent communities across Pennsylvania fighting to protect their environment by advancing rights of nature. She also practices immigration law, and received the 2019 Pro Bono Award from the U.S. District Court for N.D. Illinois for litigation to reunite separated families. She believes the wrong ICE is melting.
For decades Lake Erie has had a reputation as a “dead lake.” It’s time for that to change.
In 2014 nearly 500,000 people lost their water in and around Toledo, Ohio due to a harmful bloom of toxic algae. In 2019, Lake Erie became the first ecosystem in the nation to have it’s right to exist, flourish, and thrive recognized in law – the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR). The law has since been stifled by corporate opposition and state preemption, but these actions only reinforce that LEBOR posed a real threat to the status quo.
Join us for this second installment of a three part webinar series. Industrial agriculture isn’t the only assault on Lake Erie. In this segment we will take a closer look at the many threats that harm Lake Erie and the communities she supports. Too often, the impacts of these harms are disproportionately felt across a community. We’ve got three legal professionals representing the voice of Lake Erie – sharing their knowledge on the harmful impacts of fracking “brine”, renewable energy and how both the pollution and the system create ecological as well as social justice issues for communities. Activities that impact the ecosystem as a whole may call for a more unique approach to finding a solution. Is our energy best spent on tackling single issues? We’ll look at these issues from a systems perspective.
This is a three part series – please register for each module separately. Below is the registration for our first module.
Module 1: A Community’s Voice in the Rebellion: Impacts on Nature and Community Thursday, September. 3 at 6:30 pm EST. Watch Module One.
Module 2: A Lake’s Voice in the Rebellion: Violating the Rights of Lake Erie Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 6:30 pm EST. Watch the recordingbelow.
Module 3: A Movement’s Voice in the Rebellion: Growing a Rights of Nature Movement Tuesday, September 29, 2020 at 6:30 pm EST. Watch here.
Speakers
Taru Taylor went to law school to learn all about how We the People are the first branch of government, that as jurors and electors we check and balance the other three branches of government. Actually, he learned most of this popular-sovereignty and social-contract stuff on his own. But now he has a fancy law degree to show for all the lies of omission his law professors told him.
Heather Kuhn lives in Buffalo, NY, and is currently attending the University of Buffalo School of Law. Heather has had a passion for environmental and social justice. Heather has worked with other community members on multiple issues in Buffalo, ranging from labeling genetically modified food, organizing food cooperatives to incorporate local businesses and ideas, and banning hydraulic-fracturing in New York. She is currently networking with people in the Western New York area to protect Lake Erie from corporations who want to install wind turbines to export energy and resources from the Western New York region to downstate New York, NY. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Community and Human Services. She then received her Post-Bachelor’s Paralegal certificate and worked as an intern with the Reddy Law Firm working on civil rights litigation. She then went on to work at Neighborhood Legal Services as a paralegal and worked to help people with Public Benefits issues, homeless issues requiring placement in homeless shelters, and she also helped people with supplemental security income appeals.
Terry Lodge is an Ohio trial lawyer living in Toledo who has represented many clients in civil rights, civil liberties, and environmental cases. An advocate for the public interest in energy policy issues, he has litigated nuclear power safety and environmental issues for over 40 years. He has also represented opponents of nuclear weapons and mountaintop removal mining. More recently he has also been working with the nonprofit Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund assisting and defending communities fighting for local self governance and rights of nature. He believes the return to democratic roots is essential to resist climate chaos and be an equitable society
For decades Lake Erie has had a reputation as a “dead lake.” It’s time for that to change.
In 2014 nearly 500,000 people lost their water in and around Toledo, Ohio due to a harmful bloom of toxic algae. In 2019, Lake Erie became the first ecosystem in the nation to have it’s right to exist, flourish, and thrive recognized in law – the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR). The law has since been stifled by corporate opposition and state preemption, but these actions only reinforce that LEBOR posed a real threat to the status quo.
Join us for this first installment of a three part webinar series. In this segment we will frame a local region’s single issue problem in Northwest Ohio and take a look at how corporate agriculture impacts the water quality of the western Lake Erie Basin and how this in turn affects all the residents of the region. These ecological impacts translate back into the community in the form of water affordability issues, expensive treatment upgrades, health impacts and water shut offs. Finally, we’ll take a look at how Toledoans responded to the water crisis by asserting their right to local self-governance as they drove the Rights of Nature into law.
This is a three part series – please register for each module separately. Below is the registration for our first module.
Module 1: A Community’s Voice in the Rebellion: Impacts on Nature and Community Thursday, September. 3 at 6:30 pm EST. See the Recording posted below!
Module 2: A Lake’s Voice in the Rebellion: Violating the Rights of Lake Erie Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 6:30 pm EST. Watch Here.
Module 3: A Movement’s Voice in the Rebellion: Growing a Rights of Nature Movement Tuesday, September 29, 2020 at 6:30 pm EST. Watch Here.
Speakers
Sherry Fleminglives on a small homestead in rural NW Ohio. Over 20 years ago, Sherry and other members of the community found themselves organizing to protect themselves and the environment from the impacts of factory farms. Since that time, she has worked at the state and local level on issues involving environmental justice, local food networks, water quality, industrial scale agricultural and fracking. Sherry co-founded the local citizen group, the Williams County Alliance. In 2019, the Alliance worked to place a community rights-based citizen initiative on the ballot to prevent privatization of the county’s only source of water, the Michindoh aquifer. Sherry currently serves as chair of the Williams County Alliance, board member for the Ohio Community Rights Network and coordinator for the Bryan Co-op.
Alexis Smith started as a part-time intern for Freshwater Future in June of 2019. She helped launch and test Freshwater Future’s storm-water tracking app, assisted with organizing and managing databases, and engaging Toledo community youth in water education and activities. Prior to her work for Freshwater Future, Alexis worked 18 months in the spine orthopedics industry at Life Spine Inc. as a project engineer intern while completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Toledo. She later graduated with a B.S. in Bioengeering in May 2019. She currently works for Freshwater Future full-time continuing her work with the storm-water app, youth and community engagement, as well as supporting Freshwater Future in all of its technology needs.
Alicia Smith manages the Great Lakes Network and guides Freshwater Future’s engagement in state and federal policy. In Alicia’s most recent position she served as the Executive Director of Youth Commission and Manager of Youth and Recreation for the City of Toledo. She is the founder of a Toledo, Ohio community organization, Junction Coalition, that started as an opportunity to help the community help themselves through partnering with others to address social, economic, and environmental issues and improve the community’s quality of life. Alicia’s doctoral studies at the University of Toledo focus on the educational development of youth of color within low socioeconomic and disenfranchised communities. She acquired a Bachelor of Arts in education and counseling, as well as a Master of Arts in criminal justice and juvenile law from the University of Toledo.
Markie Miller is a member of the CELDF communication team. In 2014, nearly 500,000 people in and around her community of Toledo, Ohio lost access to clean and safe drinking water for three days due to a toxic algal bloom in the Western Basin of Lake Erie. This crisis was the catalyst for her work and passion for the Rights of Nature and Community Rights Movements. She quickly became a lead organizer and spokesperson for Toledoans for Safe Water – a grassroots citizens group in Toledo. She played a crucial role in drafting, petitioning, and eventually passing the Lake Erie Bill of Rights – a local law recognizing the legal right of Lake Erie to exist, flourish and thrive. Markie is a volunteer board member of the Ohio and National Community Rights Networks – working to advance the right to local self-governance and the rights of nature at the state and federal level.
CELDF National Organizing Director, Ben Price, discusses preemption and the current legal framework that obstructs local democracy and the advancement of the Rights of Nature.
Board of Elections refuses to certify signatures, deems county charter unconstitutional
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Tish O’Dell, Ohio Community Organizer CELDF.org tish@celdf.org 440-552-6774
BRYAN, OH: On Monday, the Williams County Board of Elections (BOE) attempted to block a proposed county charter initiative brought forward by residents seeking to protect the Michindoh Aquifer from privatization. The initiative recognizes the rights of the aquifer to exist and flourish. The BOE was responsible for verifying signatures and forwarding the initiative to county commissioners. Instead, they determined the initiative was unconstitutional. Petitioners gathered 2,077 valid signatures, well more than the required 1,364.
Williams County residents are threatened by the private company Artesian of Pioneer’s (AOP) proposed withdrawal and sale of millions of gallons of water daily, to outside municipalities and whoever else might want to purchase it. The Michindoh Aquifer spans nine counties across Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. It is Williams County’s only drinking water source. AOP is owned by a local mayor.
The BOE’s action is part of increasing attempts to quash Rights of Nature laws that are gaining momentum across Ohio and other states. Most recently, Toledo residents adopted the Lake Erie Bill of Rights in an effort to protect the Great Lake from pollution. An agribusiness corporation, backed by the Ohio Farm Bureau, and joined by the State of Ohio immediately filed suit to overturn LEBOR. That case is ongoing.
Sherry Fleming of Williams County Alliance (WCA), the local group behind the initiative, stated, “The BOE is responsible for certifying the signatures – not acting as judge to determine the constitutionality of a charter that has not even been enacted. This is beyond their authority. We, the people of Williams County are concerned about protecting our future – our land, water and community. This collusion between the BOE, corporations and our own purported government is clear, but it is not just, and we will not allow our essential drinking water to be privatized for profit.”
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) assisted WCA in drafting the charter. CELDF Ohio organizer Tish O’Dell stated, “The BOE chose to act outside their duties to prevent the initiative from going to the people for a vote. Stripping democratic rights is a dangerous trend we see across the state and the country. The people of Williams County will not give up so easily as our governing system tries to stop them from protecting themselves.”
CELDF filed a federal civil rights lawsuit last winter on behalf of seven Ohio communities who have been blocked from the ballot despite successfully qualifying similar initiatives.
The Williams County residents have requested the BOE initiate a lawsuit in the court of common pleas. The court must rule prior to 4:00 PM next Wednesday in order to give the county commissioners time to meet their required deadline per the Ohio Revised Code.
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 Rights of Nature continues to grow as the White Earth Band of Ojibwe adopted the Rights of Manoomin, or wild rice, law in December 2018. White Earth is part of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.
This is the first law to recognize the rights of a plant species.
CELDF assisted Honor the Earth, an indigenous-led environmental advocacy group, in the development of the law.
media coverage
Check out our press release here, coverage by Yes! Magazine here, and in the StarTribune here. See the Rights of Manoomin video presentation for the United Nations on Earth Day 2019.
9th Interactive Dialogue on Harmony with Nature: Frank Bibeau's Video Message
about manoomin
Manoomin is a sacred plant to tribal nations, providing physical, cultural, and spiritual sustenance. Tribal nations are working to protect manoomin from polluted water sources and global warming.
legal rights of manoomin
The law begins: “Manoomin, or wild rice, within all the Chippewa ceded territories, possesses inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.”
rights of nature where you live!
Become an ally, join the movement. Help grow Rights of Nature in your community. Contact CELDF for more information at info@celdf.org.
Listen to the Australian Centre for the Rights of Nature’s founder Dr. Michelle Maloney, interviewed on ABC Drive (North Queensland) with Adam Stephen, discussing the purpose and push for the recognition of the legal rights of the Great Barrier Reef. (Interview starts at 2:10 and runs until 15:45.)
It’s not every day that a public interest law firm and the communities it serves begin a movement! But what began over twenty years ago as an effort to help communities enforce the nation’s environmental laws, has now fully evolved into a resistance movement focused on driving rights for local self-determination and nature into the highest levels of law.
CELDF and our partner communities are leading the charge! This year was marked by several historic firsts —
The adoption by Lafayette, Colorado’s City Council of the nation’s first “Climate Bill of Rights.” The ordnance bans fracking for natural gas in the City as a violation of the right of residents to a healthy climate, and the right of the climate itself to exist and flourish;
CELDF litigated a case resulting in a landmark ruling: The Ohio Supreme Court overturned an Ohio statute — adopted by the Ohio legislature last year — that enabled local election boards to unilaterally deny ballot placement for local, rights-based laws;
CELDF’s International Center for the Rights of Nature met with Parliamentarians in Nepal and Sweden. Further, CELDF helped to draft new constitutional amendments and laws in India and Nepal that would recognize legal rights for ecosystems and nature;
CELDF helped to draft and file the first lawsuit brought by the Colorado River, Colorado River State of Colorado. The River seeks constitutional recognition for its rights to exist and flourish;
With Tulane Law School, CELDF co-hosted the first U.S. “Rights of Nature” Symposium, featuring speakers from Nepal, Australia, Ecuador, Sweden, tribal nations, and local communities. These key leaders spoke about the movement towards expanding legal rights for ecosystems and nature. Karenna Gore delivered the keynote at the conference;
In New Hampshire, Ohio, and Oregon, CELDF Community Rights Networks continued to advance state-level constitutional amendments. The rights- based amendment would explicitly recognize the local authority of communities to adopt local bills of rights limiting corporate “rights” and recognizing rights for ecosystems and nature;
The Arizona Journal of Environmental Law and Policy published “A Phoenix from the Ashes: Resurrecting a Constitutional Right of Local, Community Self- Government in the Name of Environmental Sustainability.” This is a CELDF law review article that explores the legal doctrine behind the Community Rights movement;
CELDF led several workshops for tribal nations, including the tribes of the Colorado Plateau, the Chippewain Minnesota, andthe Ho-Chunkin Wisconsin, focused on establishing legal rights for ecosystems and nature within their tribal constitutions
CELDF litigated a case resulting in a landmark ruling: The Ohio Supreme Court overturned an Ohio statute
Along with these new initiatives, CELDF continues to support and defend those community partners who we’ve been fighting alongside over the past decade. Those include the people and elected officials of Grant Township, Indiana County, Pennsylvania — recently featured in Rolling Stone magazine — who have steadfastly refused to allow an oil and gas company to inject fracking fluids into their Township. For the past five years, that epic battle between the company and the Township has raged, with the company forcing a jury trial on its claims against the Township for violating the company’s constitutional “rights.” On May 14, 2018, the people of Grant will collide with the oil and gas company in that trial, and CELDF will represent them.
Right down the road, the people of Highland Township, Elk County, are traveling a similar path. Unwilling to allow an oil and gas company to use their Township as a dumping ground for fracking waste, they too have made a stand of their own. CELDF stands with them.
There have been other “firsts” as well, which show the system in its true light. In response to Grant Township standing up against the oil and gas companies that seek to use Grant and other localities as dumping grounds, Grant was hit with another lawsuit from an unexpected source — the state itself. In March, the State’s Department of Environmental Protection sued Grant, seeking to overturn the Township’s ban on frack injection wells. Grant Township is fighting back, and CELDF stands with them.
A big thank you to everyone who has stood with CELDF over the years. Your support allows us to do what we do in the name of Community Rights and nature. If you’re not a supporter, please consider becoming one; and be- coming part of this resistance movement that is changing both the law and our culture.
Stand with us, so that we can continue to stand with the people across this country — and beyond — who are making a difference.
Lindsey Schromen-Wawrinis an attorney in Washington State, in Klallam Territory (nəxʷsƛ̕áy̕əm̕), where he also serves as a city councilmember. He has represented the Little Mahoning Watershed, Crystal Spring Ecosystem, and Lake Erie Ecosystem, and published on rights of nature in 
Will Falk is a biophilic writer and lawyer. He believes the intensifying destruction of the natural world is the most pressing issue confronting us today. His first book How Dams Fall describing his relationship with the Colorado River and his involvement in the first-ever federal lawsuit seeking rights for a major ecosystem was published by HomeBound Publications in 2019. He is currently traveling through the Ohio River basin writing a book tentatively titled, The Ohio River Speaks. You can follow his journey at 
Karen Hoffmann
Sherry Fleming 
Alexis Smith 
Alicia Smith manages the Great Lakes Network and guides Freshwater Future’s engagement in state and federal policy. In Alicia’s most recent position she served as the Executive Director of Youth Commission and Manager of Youth and Recreation for the City of Toledo. She is the founder of a Toledo, Ohio community organization, Junction Coalition, that started as an opportunity to help the community help themselves through partnering with others to address social, economic, and environmental issues and improve the community’s quality of life. Alicia’s doctoral studies at the University of Toledo focus on the educational development of youth of color within low socioeconomic and disenfranchised communities. She acquired a Bachelor of Arts in education and counseling, as well as a Master of Arts in criminal justice and juvenile law from the University of Toledo.
Markie Miller is a member of the CELDF communication team. In 2014, nearly 500,000 people in and around her community of Toledo, Ohio lost access to clean and safe drinking water for three days due to a toxic algal bloom in the Western Basin of Lake Erie. This crisis was the catalyst for her work and passion for the Rights of Nature and Community Rights Movements. She quickly became a lead organizer and spokesperson for 
