Man vs. Nature has been a theme of human civilizations for centuries. Whether it’s manifested in the eradication of entire species, engineering the natural meanders out of rivers, filling in wetlands to build cities, or individual quests in hostile places to claim the prize of being the first, the dominant culture loves to pit humans against everything else, with all bets laid on humans prevailing. We have been groomed to believe we are masters who hold dominion over the natural world as a matter of entitlement.
Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s (CELDF) year-end newsletter of 2022 proposed breaking this habit of thinking and behaving. If human communities want to make it on this planet, the us vs. them approach must vanish. In its place we must learn to live in healthy relationship from Nature, with Nature, in Nature, and as Nature. Last year, as part of a four-part installment, we started with living from Nature. In 2023 we move on to the next installment, which is about living with Nature. Not apart or opposite of, but in community with all of the systems and beings that make life on Earth fantastically rich.
Think about it. How often have you spoken or heard others speak with a sense of awe about the non-human world? The night horizon festooned with the glow and sway of the northern lights. The grace of a porpoise pod breaching the ocean’s surface. A parade of ants moving bits of leaves from tree trunks across the jungle floor back to their high rise nest underground. The sunset or sunrise. The power of a winter storm. The flight of an owl at dusk. The caves,the desert, the mountain tops, the ocean floor, a meadow of young wildflowers. We live with these wonders and more everyday. And everyday we show our appreciation, humility, and connectedness to all that stands with us and next to us.
Living with nature means not only being aware and appreciative, but being resolute that life ‘other than human’ can thrive independently of human needs. CELDF has been working with people, communities, and forwardthinking governments since 1995, advising them to be mindful of protecting the needs of ecosystems and the natural communities that make them whole. Back then, we didn’t yet call it Rights of Nature.
This year-end newsletter we are featuring three amazing stories of what living with Nature is about when communities and systems take their responsibilities to heart. In October, Cleveland played host to CELDF’s inaugural Truth, Reckoning and Right Relationship event, which focused on the health and future of the Great Lakes. In some systems with a history of unfathomable assaults on human rights, we know that it is possible for culpable parties to own their mistakes. The first step to moving in a different direction is to own the truth and reckon with it no matter how dark and violent. The testimonies we gathered in October are now framing the agenda for a two-day gathering in April 2024, where artists, activists, educators, students, physicians, farmers, and Indigenous participants will work on what it means to be in right relationship with the Great Lakes.
With a growing network of Indigenous and non-Indigenous supporters, legislation that would secure the inherent rights of the Great Lakes has been introduced in the New York Assembly. Such a law has the potential to bring the state into greater balance with the ecosystems of which it is a part. In Pennsylvania, the community resilience and resistance lessons coming from Grant Township never seem to end. One of the latest examples is a reminder of the fierceness and love the community has shown in honoring and protecting the Hellbender Salamander that lives in the creeks near Grant. Saving the Hellbender was a key reason the resistance came together nine years ago to oppose the dumping of toxic frack waste in the community. Hellbent is a new documentary that features both the people and the salamander of Grant Township and their aspiration to live with one another.
Many of you who are active community rights advocates and supporters of CELDF have your own stories and challenges of being the best stewards in living with Nature. Your efforts to be resilient and resist a system that wants to dominate Nature are critical to the changes we need. The stories of the Great Lakes and of Grant Township are featured here to applaud all those involved in those efforts, and to remind us all of what deep transformation looks like.
Thank you for all you do and for supporting CELDF. Your donation makes it possible for us to support others. We still have much work to do.
This article is an excerpt from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s 2023 year-end newsletter “Living with Nature.” Click the above button to sign up for a hard and/or electronic copy of our newsletters.
June 27-30, 2023 in Spokane, WA, USA at The Davenport Grand Hotel
On June 28th CELDF’s Kai Huschke will be presenting at the Society for Wetland Scientists annual conference. Joining Kai on the panel Socio-Ecological Resilience and Adaptation: Implementing Rights of Wetlands will be Senior Ecologist/Natural Climate Solutions Specialist Gillian Davis from BSC Group, Inc. and Tufts University Global Development & Environment Institute, Matthew Simpon, Director from the UK based organization 35percent, and Bill Moomaw, Tufts University Professor Emeritus. The four have been active as part of a global collective working on the community and national levels for the legal rights of wetlands. Radical Resilience and Restoration for Wetland Rights Through Cultural Transformation is the title of Kai’s portion of the workshop. Here are two sections from the abstract of the talk:
Globally for the last 200 years the prevailing directive governmentally, legally, economically, scientifically, and culturally has been to extract and exploit the natural world for the wants and needs of a single species – humans. Colonization has never stopped; it has merely changed its stripes and patterns of speech but behaviorally it continues to conquer into submission and extinction the life forces of the planet with wetlands receiving a disproportionate amount of abuse.
The emergence of legal rights of nature efforts over the last 20 years in North America and across the globe is a potent force for the cultural shift necessary to actualize living from, in, with, and as nature. Wetlands restoration efforts in the name of rights of wetlands can only occur if there is a restoration of the human species on a massive scale that would allow for the healthy and harmonious balance of living from, in, with, and as nature. Science along with other aspects of the culture must reject colonizing systems of law, economics, governance, and even science itself and develop methods and systems outside the dominant one.
Rights of nature laws to protect ecosystems are increasing around the world, it is time the U.S. follows these examples; Cincinnati group shows how it can be done
Cincinnati, OHIO: CROW, Citizens for the Rights of the Ohio River Watershed, will be announcing the kick off of their Rights of the Ohio River Watershed charter amendment initiative petition campaign tomorrow, April 18 at 11:00 am on the steps of City Hall, 801 Plum St. The local group formed after doing research on Rights of Nature with the passage of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR) in 2019. CROW needs 5,246 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot providing Cincinnati voters with a chance to make history. The kickoff event will feature speakers from the CROW group, additional advocacy groups for the Ohio River, CELDF and students from Ohio University.
The decision to move ahead with legal rights protection for the watershed began with hosting a Rights of Nature speaker series in the fall of 2019. It’s been common knowledge that the Ohio River has been abused by corporate polluters for decades, including the DuPont C8/Teflon poisoning of the river which was featured in the film Dark Waters starring Mark Ruffalo as local Cincinnati attorney Rob Bilott. Coupled with that dirty history was learning that the EPA listed the Ohio River as the most polluted River in the United States for many years, which then pushed Cincinnati residents to learn more on how this could’ve happened, by hosting a Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) Democracy School. Municipalities across Ohio, facing similar environmental degradation and threats, have been working with CELDF since 2011 to assert their rights and protect their communities and nature from harmful corporate projects.
“I am so excited to have met this great community of people willing to take a risk to protect what they love. The community of Cincinnati and the Ohio River Ecosystem is their home,” stated Tish O’Dell of CELDF. “These people have done their homework and are eager to share their knowledge with others in their community and to put in the hard work of circulating petitions to give their neighbors a voice through a vote, which is what democracy by the people is really all about. At a time when it seems so many issues divide the community, this campaign is about bringing the community together.”
Members of CROW learned how the residents in Toledo, Ohio found themselves in a similar place on Ohio’s northern border. They also sought the help of CELDF. In 2019, Lake Erie became the first named ecosystem to be protected by a Rights of Nature law in the United States. Thanks to 61% of the people voting to amend the Toledo city charter, Lake Erie’s right to exist, flourish and naturally evolve was democratically established. However, in 2020, a Federal judge overturned the will of the people, at the insistence of an agribusiness corporation. The Cincinnati group studied the court’s decision and with legal guidance from CELDF decided they wanted to take their law a step further and spell out exactly how a Rights of Nature law could be enforced. In other words, they built upon what Toledo had accomplished and make it even better.
“We began to understand through this process that we are not only connected to the Ohio River, but that we are part of the ecosystem,” stated Jim Schenk of CROW. “There is no way that we humans can be healthy, if the ecosystem itself is not healthy and if the system is not set up to recognize this, then we have to be the catalyst for that change to the system. It is about a cultural shift as much as it is about a legal shift.”
Cincinnati Part of Growing National and Global Movement
Ohio residents are advancing Rights of Nature as part of the broader Community Rights Movement building across the United States. Local communities and state Community Rights Networks across the country are partnering with CELDF to advance fundamental democratic, environmental, and economic rights. They have worked with CELDF to establish Community Rights and the Rights of Nature in law, and prohibit extraction, fracking, factory farming, water privatization, and other industrial activities as violations of those rights. Communities are joining together within and across states, working with CELDF to advance systemic change – recognizing our existing system of law and governance as inherently undemocratic and unsustainable.
“This effort is also about bringing the community together on an issue that is non-partisan. We all can agree that we want clean water for our families now and for the generations to come after us”, said CROW member Susan VondarHaar. “Rights of Nature is not new, it has been developed from Indigenous knowledge and understanding that we are completely interconnected with nature and the River and are not separate from it. We live in a system that recognizes rights and currently only humans and corporations have recognized rights in our system of law. It is time nature is also recognized as having rights to create the necessary balance.”
Additional Information
For additional information about the Community Rights Movement, visit www.celdf.org.
About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit, public interest law firm providing services to communities facing threats to their local environment, local agriculture, local economy, and quality of life. Its mission is to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature.
CELDF’s Tish O’Dell will be a panelist on for the upcoming discussion, The Myth of American Democracy: The Ruling Class Crusade Against Community & Nature hosted by Athens Community Rights Coalition at Ohio University.
This latest piece by Taru Taylor analyzes a very current problem, police brutality against Black community members, citizens, through a historical lens of laws and court cases that have shaped where we are today. Phrases like “innocent until proven guilty”, “unreasonable search and seizure”, “probable cause” and “due process and separation of powers” are all terms associated with protection of citizens in this country. In this piece Taylor is challenging us all to consider what it means to be a citizen of this country and if being a patriot means protection of its citizens…all its citizens?
Republished from Truthout with permission from the author.
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.
CELDF invites you to join this conversation with Talking Wings about our connection to and responsibility to Nature. Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo together make up Talking Wings. Blake is a filmmaker, illustrator and author and Tzintzun is an environmental artist-scholar and story weaver, striving to plant the seeds of a regenerative future. This amazingly creative team was able to take CELDF’s verbal description of our Rights of Nature work and transform it into creative illustrations and logos to convey our message visually. Art has always played an important role in movements for systemic change.
Using illustrator and writer Shaun Tan’s short story “Bears with Lawyers” as a touchstone, this discussion will interrogate the societal conception of rights (and rites) within our current legal system and beyond.
Is our current legal system the only valid governance structure? What is the difference between the “western” conception of rights and the ancestral notion of rites and rituals? Do other species have their own societal rights and rites? Are human beings the only stewards of planet Earth?
The posting of this piece is a reflection of CELDF’s commitment to featuring diverse perspectives and ideas in the quest to bring about a community rights and rights of nature existence into full being.
For over fifty years in the United States environmentalists have tried to “protect the environment” by regulating the rate of destruction of the natural world. Despite the Clean Water, Clean Air and Endangered Species Acts, creation of the federal EPA and state-level agencies, changing the rate of destruction has succeeded in lulling conservationists into a stupor for more than fifty years, while Nature bleeds out.
Who will argue that we must continue to subject the living planet to the deceit of scientifically managed ecocide, whether through more environmental regulations, hollow “30 X 30” plans, or poster-child activism of the “Save the Polar Bear” variety?
Photo by Gryffn M
We know why the strategy of regulating the rate of ecological destruction failed – it was never meant to halt the profitable extraction of resources, the use of toxic technology and energy sources, and the over-production of frivolous commodities out of the very substance of the living world.
The arguments against adopting local, state, national and international Rights of Nature laws that criminalize extinguishing communities of living beings for the accumulation of commercial profit insist that “the economy” must be protected at all costs. Especially against constraints on ecocide.
Feels like the mainspring in the wind-up toy of modern industrial society just popped a weasel. Wall Street and the survival of life on Earth, including human life, are in direct competition for strong political action and Wall Street is winning hands-down. That’s irresponsible, in fact it’s reprehensible. Wouldn’t you say?
Privatizing the Rights of Nature: the Latest Scam
It is still controversial to demand legal recognition and enforcement of the Rights of Nature, because the commodity-consuming society we’re constantly reeled back into by commercial propaganda is hooked up to an I-V drip shooting high-grade disinformation straight to our brains through every electronic orifice we’ve been gullible enough to bring into our homes and our children’s lives. Those sounding the alarm against further commercial exploitation of the environment are cast in the role of Luddites naively opposing so-called scientific “progress.” But science has been enlisted as Wall Street’s offensive lineman, clearly no longer an objective observer in the game of being human. The results of environmental impact statements and scientific studies on mining, logging and water usage are routinely skewed to handicap nature, to give the destroyers a seat at the table where the acceptable amount of poisoning and habitat eradication are negotiated. Environmental bureaucrats sit on team Wall Street’s side of the table. Meanwhile, Nature hasn’t been invited. Her interests are mostly irrelevant and her defenders are routinely sidelined for lacking legal “standing” to represent those interests.
In industrialized nations, Nature is believed to be a smorgasbord of consumables, and in legal terms is utterly subordinate to the laws of property – which means that her every aspect is subject to privatization, removal from the sphere of public interdependence, and subject to monopolization over her uses and who will benefit by her exploitation.
Now the Rights of Nature paradigm is gaining traction globally. It’s an idea with deep roots in Indigenous cosmology, wherein the people who never separated from Nature conceive of Earth as a living community to which they belong. Initial industry reaction to advocates for the Rights of Nature was dismissive, then hostile.
These days, capitalists still insist that Nature consists of infinitely subdividable parcels of property. Property law still protects wealth accumulation against even nominal environmental regulations. The legal doctrine that if you own it, you can destroy it has not changed.
Photo by Christine Roy
But now Wall Street’s flying monkeys of capital are suddenly willing to publicly embrace Nature’s rights as a slogan and simultaneously invent clever ways to rebrand it, to make Rights of Nature work just fine for the bottom line.
There’s clever guile behind money-powered projects to co-opt Rights of Nature as a market-friendly meme. According to the Next Billion website, quoting from “Natural Asset Companies (NACs): A New Way to Invest in our Planet” by IE Magazine Correspondent David Stead,“Natural Asset Companies (NACs) are a potential game-changer on a global scale. NACs will be newly formed, sustainable enterprises that hold the rights to the productivity and health of natural assets like land or marine areas. They are a new asset class on the New York Stock Exchange enabling owners to convert nature’s value into financial capital, using that capital to re-invest in the natural assets to protect them or improve their sustainable use.”
Preternaturally, this scheme will guarantee that the legal owners of ecosystems will have authority to decide which and how many habitats get protected, and which and how many get “improved” for their owners’ sustainable use, and they can decide what that means, even to the point of evicting Indigenous and non-indigenous residents of land to which they lay claim, on the premise that they are diligently protecting Nature and her rights.
Illustration by Blake Lavia
NACs are poised to write the final chapter in the privatization of everything, bringing to fruition what George W. Bush ominously proposed twenty years ago as the establishment of an “ownership society.” Corporate ownership and control over strategic swaths of the natural environment would effectively complete the enclosure of the commons, posting virtual No Trespass signs everywhere, placing the environment off limits to the bulk of humanity, and commandeering all of her for commercially defined sustainable use.
That seems more like a plan to undermine the fundamental principle of the Rights of Nature movement, which recognizes those rights as legal obligations on all of us not to place human interests above the integrity of the natural world, its biodiversity and ability to sustain its organic functions.
Preventing the emancipation of Nature by doubling down on her legal status as property seems like a very bad idea. Wouldn’t you say?
Normalizing Abnormality
With the normalization of Natural Asset Companies, the empire of capital or, more tellingly, the totalitarian matrix of deceit that is capital, will have transformed the world in its image. In direct opposition to the Rights of Nature movement’s insistence on humanity’s return to right-relationship with the rest of creation, promoters of NACs seek to immortalize the mindset that is responsible for climate change, human bondage to debt, and the sixth and intentionally inflicted great extinction event on Earth.
In 2006, following consideration of legal arguments for establishing rights for ecosystems raised by law professor Christopher Stone, in his 1972 book Should Trees Have Standing?, I was involved in drafting the first law to be enacted anywhere recognizing such rights. Two years later, the people of Ecuador, with a large Indigenous population, ratified a new national constitution recognizing the Rights of Pachamama (Mother Earth). In the ensuing years, other nations as well as numerous U.S. local governments have initiated legal actions affirming the legal status of Nature as a rights-bearing entity.
Yet, as with so many attempts to advance rights for people dehumanized in the legal realm by empire, religion, colonization and politically manufactured bigotries, reactive counter-measures are in play to neutralize the advancements of the movement to institutionalize enforceable Rights of Nature. One might ask: why has the legal system, along with the other arms of government, so predictably found it expedient to rule in favor of corporations dead-set on making a profit regardless of the ill health inflicted on human and non-human life? It is astounding to watch one court decision after another not only uphold the property-based rights of corporations over the human and civil rights of people but, even more baffling, that the courts refuse to hear arguments that would challenge that supremacy.
Photo by Annie Spratt
Until you realize that rights vested in property and transmitted to owners of that privileged property are the cornerstone of U.S. federal and state jurisprudence. Many judges have gone the extra mile to expand those privileges and sanction community legal counsel for challenging the corrupt arrangements.
Legal precedent has normalized a judicial pathology that goes undiagnosed by political scientists and pundits.
At the risk of expediting the die-off of most life on the planet, including most humans, judges continue to turn a blind eye toward the rights of natural communities – where humans live in harmony with their environment – while giving full-throated support for legal rights vested in corporate property.
Decades ago, satirist Robert Anton Wilson toyed with red-baiting apologists for the “cold war” between the Soviet Union and the United States, saying they were “immanentizing the eschaton.” In other words, they were hurrying along the end of the world with their nuclear brinkmanship. Some true believers in the Book of Revelations were eager for the final showdown. Skeptics of their Christian utopian fantasies agitated for nuclear disarmament. Only the realization that a nuclear strike by one would precipitate a devastating nuclear strike by the other was effective in creating a stalemated detente. They called that pragmatic epiphany MAD, for “mutually assured destruction.”
Where’s the equivalent realization that the transformation of capital into an accelerating march toward global extinction is a bad idea? The eschaton is imminent, with no god promising eternal life for capital’s faithful. With no promise of any life, for that matter. Aren’t they in the least concerned? Are they so afraid of change? They’re going to hate the changes they’re working so hard to bring about. Wouldn’t you say?
The overturning of Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) and the weakening of the EPA (West Virginia v. EPA) by the US Supreme Court sent shock waves across the nation, generating a flurry of coverage, activism, and policy development at the national and state level. Those court decrees have emboldened many and outraged many more.
And as the reverberations continue to be felt today, there are a number of critical analyses as to how we have arrived here that are still not being discussed as they should be. The activism and conversations generated have largely stayed only at the surface level of reflection and not looked deeper into root causes and definitely not looking further out on the horizon…to the future. The dialog has focused mainly on electoral politics and electing one party over the other as the path to getting back what was taken. Are we actually riding a wave toward a solution or are we being tumbled about in the surf?
Photo by Alex McCarthy
As we analyze these court opinions from 2022, we are reminded that they have roots that go back to the early 1970s, an era of much resistance and many challenges to the status quo of the time. Back then the people used many approaches to push for transformational change – direct actions/civil disobedience, legislation, court challenges, music and art. It is an era defined by social and cultural unrest.
Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, was the subject of the Dobbs decision. To refresh everyone’s memory, the recent Supreme Court case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruled that the US Constitution does not confer a right to an abortion. With this one decision, Roe v. Wade was overruled and states were handed the authority to regulate abortions. The Clean Air Act initiated in 1970, was the subject of the West Virginia v. EPA decision. That case centered on the ability and authority of the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions related to climate change.
And let’s remember there was much more happening 50 years ago in addition to the Roe case and the EPA being created. Women fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, which was ratified by Congress in 1972, though it later died and was therefore never added to the Constitution.
In addition, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act passed in 1972, after other major Civil Rights legislation passed in the late 1960’s including the Voting Rights Act (1965) and the Civil Rights Act (1968). None of these changes came easily, the marches, the protests, the court filings, the horrifying deaths of women, the photos of rivers on fire and the polluted air we breathe, all led to the federal legalization of abortion and a federal agency, the EPA, to protect the environment. Victories to be celebrated for the ages….or so we thought.
Photo by Unseen Histories
But how did so much promise for equality, environmental and human protection and justice get so twisted and turned upside down? Roe has been overturned. The authority of the EPA has been gutted and the Earth is on the verge of ecological collapse despite the adoption of major national environmental laws. People of color are still not treated equally. Workers are earning less today when adjusted for inflation than they were in 1968. And the 100+ year quest of women to be recognized as equals through the Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be adopted.
Asking Big Questions
There was so much energy for change in the 1960’s and into the 1970’s. There was a deep commitment and positive attitude to change societal structure and values. The goal was for the people to have a real voice in creating a government and society that reflected the people’s values. Values of equality, fairness, equity and protection of the environment that sustains all life. What we should be doing is learning from these examples. What did they do well and where did their movements fall short? As a culture we seem to only focus on “wins” and perceived victories and tend to sweep losses and ugly truths under the rug. Maybe if we did more reflecting on our failures and shortcomings, the rights of all people, future generations, and nature could be genuinely protected and enforced and not simply glorified as hollow victories that can be pulled out from under us at any time the political winds change.
Democracy?
Maybe we need to start at the beginning with a reflection on Democracy. When we use the word, it is assumed that the people have some voice or hand in the decisions and laws that are made to govern over all of us. Well, this could be our first clue as to why the “promise of the 70’s” has not panned out for the majority of people and nature. It turns out that there is a difference between having a “voice” and having real decision making authority.
Did we ever get to vote on whether women have the right to an abortion? Did we ever vote to turn over the protection of our community’s air, food, water and other necessary life sustaining functions to government non-elected agencies? Think of almost any major issue that is important to you and ask yourself if the government has ever given you the chance to vote on it.
Many of you will be saying, but we live in a “republic”, a “representative democracy”. Well if we go down that road, the representatives you elect are actually supposed to represent yours and the community’s views, values and best interests, but are they? Today we see electeds making decisions and passing laws that represent the monied interests and their own personal interests over the people and environment. One of the more definitive examples proving this is the Princeton Study. This deeply researched report clearly shows that people’s interests are not being represented, that the US is no longer a democracy, but rather an oligarchy in which only the interests of the wealthiest are represented by the government.
On a daily, ad nauseum basis, the media and the politicians speak of democracy and the importance of preserving it. Whether it is sending weapons, sanctioning other countries or threats of war to protect “democracy” abroad, one would think we must live in a democracy here. Functionally though, we don’t have a democracy, yet we have an innate pull to want to believe in and defend the idea of democracy. What would it look like if we actually created a real democracy– one that addressed the needs of people and nature and corralled the devastating impacts of concentrated wealth and power? What would your community look like if citizen power was a cultural, practiced norm and not simply a pipedream used as propaganda by those who want nothing to do with sharing power?
Political Parties?
A second big conversation topic we should be dialoguing about has to do with political parties. For all intents and purposes, we live in a two-party system. The theory is that your party will represent your interests and values. The reality of that looks different from the local up to the state and then on to the national, but the net effect is that powerful economic interests are having their needs met while the majority of people and nature are either ignored, placated, or used as pawns in dangerous political games that impact economics, civil rights, and environmental health. The separation between the two major parties is quite narrow despite the rhetoric trumpeted by each. The two-party system has shown its distaste for democracy and an undying allegiance to concentrated power. Even George Washington warned us back in his 1796 Farewell Address about partisanship and political parties:
It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.
Photo by Library of Congress
It makes sense that if there are only two parties to choose from, it creates an either/or situation. Are you with us or against us? Well, let’s be real, all our personal beliefs and views don’t fall into two distinct categories. We are all combinations of many beliefs and experiences that shape our views. And yet we throw out labels like liberal/conservative, red/blue, left/right all the time. These all come with assumptions and prejudices and sure don’t help us come together to dialog on important issues. And how many elections have you felt like you were forced to choose between the “lesser of two evils” or that you had to vote against a candidate and platform instead of for one that you truly believed in?
What would it look like if campaign finance was overhauled to protect the people and not the wealthy elite? What would it look like if there was a robust political arena dominated by ideas and not by self-serving interests of political parties which are merely corporations interested in its primary shareholders over that of the masses? What if citizen assemblies and citizen forums were the dominant means of political discourse?
Capitalism: The American Dream or Nightmare?
Lastly, we need to look at our deep seeded belief that capitalism is not only the best way, but the only way. We need to be able to have open dialog about a system that is based on producing and consuming more and more, year after year, and if that is really sustainable and in line with our values.
Photo by Mike Erskine
We know that the United States only has about 5% of the world population but we consume at a rate of over 20% of the world’s resources. We take and take from nature and poorer countries and even US communities without concern for the sustainability of this consumption.
With capitalism at the forefront and the rights of corporations to increase profits year after year, we have to ask if this represents our values? How does this connect to the rights of women and rights of nature, the environment? These are the tough questions we should be grappling with and figuring out a better, more sustainable way, if we want a future for life on this Earth.
Organizing for Big Change
If the promisesof the 70’s were thwarted largely because the people attempted to make change working through the system but we now realize that the system itself, corrupted by monied interests, cannot actually provide what is needed to create the just and healthy communities for future generations, what are we left to do? The good news is we have been here before in history. It was in those moments when people gave up hope of making change within the system that people conceived of alternatives or alternative systems.
The word alternative means a choice or an option. We must reject knee-jerk reactions when alternative approaches and solutions are brought forward. We should pause and think critically about what we are being told in the media—is it propaganda to keep us from contemplating alternatives? We must think about our history- the Revolutionaries were proposing an alternative to being a colony of England, abolitionists were fighting for an alternative to slavery, the suffragists for an alternative to patriarchy and on and on. Reflecting back on the promise of the 70’s, people like The Janes provided a medical alternative to women in Chicago, the Black Panthers an alternative to community policing and providing basic services to community members, Maine farmers turned away from industrial agriculture in 1971 and created an organic model and the Public Worker Strikes of the 1970’s, where workers had to fight not only against employers but also the unions that were supposed to represent them.
An illegal national postal wildcat in 1970—not approved by union leaders—set contract standards postal workers are still defending today. The government tried to use the military to deliver mail. Photo: San Francisco Bay View.
All the changes that were inspired in those times were amazing and many people put time, effort and even their lives on the line to take a stand for what they believed in. But nothing in life remains static. Change is part of life. So when looking ahead, we need to learn from the past and evolve to new ways of thinking and creating for what works now and into the future. We need to consider whose voice and whose power is considered when making important democratic decisions that will affect all of us and not just leave it to a minority with power. We need to ask if we can get to where we want to go by working within the existing system or do we have to take more risk and go outside the system using an alternative means to get there? Do we want to keep being thrown about struggling for air, water and rights or can we learn how to change so we can create new ways to not control but to ride in harmony with the waves?
Once again an important court decision upholding the legal rights of nature has come out of the country of Ecuador. This high court decision protecting the inherent rights of mangroves (September 2021) actually came out before the Los Cedros (November 2021) decision which CELDF featured in September 2022. It’s an important decision for the recognition and enforcement of another distinct yet interconnected ecosystem’s rights. This decision not only recognizes the rights of mangroves by preventing harm, it is also holding those accountable for harm already done. It is why CELDF has put time and resources into the English translation of both these decisions. The hope is that more people, including judges and lawyers all over the world will read them and gain an understanding by these real world examples of how courts could uphold and lawyers argue for the Rights of Nature if they were codified into law.
Mangroves, according to the Ramsar definition, are considered wetlands – an area that CELDF is also helping to evolve by participating in the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Wetlands. Mangroves are a group of trees and shrubs that live in the coastal intertidal zone, which in Ecuador and elsewhere in the world often constitute zones of conflict between the needs of the ecosystem and commercial and industrial activities of humans. This particular case from Ecuador deals with certain articles of the regulatory code or what is known as the Organic Code of the Environment (“COAM” Código Orgánico del Ambiente). One of the central challenges in this case centered around a listing of allowable activities in mangroves where there is a general catch-all provision that does not explicitly specify the need to protect the integrity of mangroves. The court ruled that this was a violation of the rights of mangroves.
It is worth repeating that this case is significant because it takes action to rectify a condition that could lead to harm of mangroves and violate the mangrove’s rights before such harm occurs. Like Los Cedros the orientation of the court stemming from the constitutional language protecting nature or Pachamama is about precaution and prevention, not just monetary awards after the harms have occurred.
Read the Ecuadorian high court decision to protect the rights of mangroves in English or Spanish.
Changing culture. This isn’t a term that normally comes to mind when people think of CELDF. But the truth is, cultural change agents are who we are at the core. Challenging unjust corporate and elite wealth, championing the rights of community-level decision making power, and diving deep in transforming systems of law to acknowledge, secure, and protect the inherent rights of nature, that is what CELDF has embodied for more than twenty-five years.
We know that our existence has come about by outreach, citizen action, and bold governmental bodies to not only propose Community Rights laws, but also to fight to animate those laws. However, at the heart of all of that necessary provocation, advocacy, and action is culture and the recognition that a culture that subscribes to domination, exploitation, and eradication of people, communities, and natural systems is a culture that must be replaced. That’s what makes CELDF, CELDF.
We try to share what we and our community partners are doing and what needs to be done to break the destructive dominant cultural ways, but in all of that there is the question of what is that new culture? What does that new culture value? We recently came across a publication by The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which discusses a way to conceive of culture, of how change needs to be approached, and most importantly of how we see ourselves, see Nature, and how that view, that valuing process translates into how we treat each other, treat our communities, and treat the natural world. This isn’t our invention but we are using it to guide our work and to bring to you the latest of CELDF within this framework. Perhaps these concepts can be useful to you too. So here are four ways of thinking about relating to the natural world:
Living from nature: emphasizes nature’s capacity to provide resources for sustaining the livelihoods, needs, and wants of people, such as food and material goods
Living with nature: has a focus on life ‘other than human’ such as the intrinsic right of fish in a river to thrive independently of human needs
Living in nature: refers to the importance of nature as the setting for people’s sense of place and identity
Living as nature: sees the natural world as a physical, mental, and spiritual part of oneself
Human and ecosystem viability come when we figure out how to orient our culture to be connected to all four parts: Living from, with, in, and as Nature.
This newsletter starts where the dominant culture is currently at, which is largely about how humans have been living from Nature. We’ll explore several actions, activities, and collaborative achievements of CELDF to both move with more grace from how we live from Nature, and also to how we bring in the functions of living with, in, and as nature for the sake of humans, all life, and the planet itself. We see this as not just being about how the conventional view of protecting the environment can be transformed, but also about how this transformation strengthens the civil, social, and economic rights and responsibilities necessary for healthy, just, and viable human communities.
This article is an excerpt from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s fall 2022 newsletter “The Value of Nature.” Click the above button to sign up for a hard and/or electronic copy of our newsletters.
So say it with us: Living from nature. Living with nature. Living in nature. Living as nature. CELDF and you are changing culture for good.
Lakota advocate and water protector Debra White Plume (Wioweya Najin Wina), upon being introduced to the history of municipal subjugation in the United States during a Democracy School hosted by residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, remarked that “municipalities are the white man’s reservations. The only difference is, we know we’re on reservations.”
What do we mean by “community” when we say community rights? Native Americans like Wioweya Najin Wina have had their communities decimated by genocide, appropriation of their land, and forced relocation, but many retain their culture, their communities and traditions despite that history.
Non-native Americans of every ethnicity reside in communities established by law rather than by custom, and so when we advocate for the rights of those communities, we are often talking about communities defined by the political boundaries of municipalities and counties. It is, admittedly, arbitrary and a concession to coercive historic realities. But central to the idea of “Community Rights” is the notion of community as being a local society connected to the place on Earth that the people occupy and where they do their living and dying.
Photo by Shane Rounce
When we talk about the rights of communities, we generally talk in terms of communities that are place-based, with legitimate authority to exercise self-determination rooted in community traditions and cultures, always tempered by the obligation of each community to respect, protect, and enhance the equal rights of every member of the community.
For Native People, that community includes Nature and all the various species as members of the community, with full liberty to carry out their traditions and make choices for their communities based on their cultural norms.
For non-native people, the Community Rights approach has been to help communities exercise democratic rule-making to protect the health and safety of their human population and their local natural environment, and to recognize them as interdependent members of the same community, with the people empowered to represent the ecosystem in which they partake in all administrative and legal matters.
In simplest terms, our mantra at CELDF has been that community self-determination and Community Rights are best achieved when those who are affected directly by governing decisions are the ones who make them. Sounds reasonable, wouldn’t you say?
Broken Promises: Declarations and Treaties
In the late eighteenth century, commoners in the British colonies of North America were persuaded to join a rebellion against the Empire with promises of liberty from central government control. Most descendants of these colonists and immigrants that came after them don’t make the connection that their ancestors desired the same independence from coercive domination that Native Americans desire from domination by their occupiers. Also not gleaned from popular history is the fact that American revolutionaries waged a war of secession from the British Empire specifically and primarily to secure the right of local community self-government.
As mentioned in a previous column, the very first grievance colonists brought against the empire in the Declaration of Independence was denial of community self-governing rights. The complaint that’s mentioned first said of the king: “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” It is abundantly clear that neither the revolutionaries nor their descendants have seen the rights to which they aspired come to fruition. That denial of the right of community self-determination, of course, goes doubly for Native Americans.
Photo provided by the Boston Public Library
Almost since its inception, CELDF has challenged the institutionalization of Dillon’s Rule, the predominant legal theory thwarting realization of the right of local self-governance for colonizer communities. Dillon’s Rule makes political communities in the U.S. into state property, and gives each state total authority over them, including the power to override any local law, even if it would protect the community from harm, along with the power to overturn local elections, annex the municipality, or dissolve it completely. Under Dillon’s Rule, residents in a municipal jurisdiction are considered “mere tenants of the municipality,” with no right to local self-government.
Liberating every non-Native American from the straight-jacket of Dillon’s Rule is a project akin to compelling the U.S. government to honor its treaty commitments to the first Americans. Dillon’s Rule is the monolithic legal obstruction to one of the key components of the project at the heart of our organizational mission. When people complain that it’s not fair for state and federal laws to deprive communities of democratic processes that would allow them to prohibit corporations from harming people and the local environment, the answer they so often get to their complaints is that familiar mantra: “but it’s the law.” We understand that.
It’s the law that says NO to people governing their own communities. It’s the law that makes it legal for the federal system of government to refuse non-Native Americans the same rights refused to Native Americans, and that were refused revolutionaries by the British Empire prior to 1776.
Photo by Giam Marco
Perhaps the most prominent feature distinguishing Community Rights within the federal system, for all those living under it, is its utter absence. Wouldn’t you say?
The Common Denominator in Empire’s Assault on Community: Law
Legal rights would be unnecessary were the current civilization not antagonistic toward human communities and antithetical to people living in community with the natural world. We would not need to demand civil rights for descendants of emancipated slaves if the U.S. empire permitted them justice. We would not be advocating for the Rights of Nature if the global empire of capital were not engaged in unrelenting assaults against the natural world. And we would not be struggling to establish and institutionalize Community Rights if the dissolution of communities did not serve the agenda of empire.
All empires of the past have left their structures behind for us to speculate about, their artifacts abandoned like dead coral reefs, leaving behind people to reclaim or reconstitute human culture closer to Nature. We have the evidence that the current global empire is unlikely to be the first to survive indefinitely.
Photo by Motoki Tonn
The organic human relationship to Nature, currently denied reality by the unrelenting drive for material gain, is what requires preservation, because it defines humanity’s authentic place in the world. We call that authentic relationship Community Rights, by which we mean that every community of people, both Indigenous and settler, and including the natural ecosystems of which they are a part, have the right to defend and enforce the collective rights of the community and the rights of its individual members and natural environment.
The necessary alternative to the foolhardiness of open-ended product extraction and consumption is people living in community with Nature, if humanity itself is not to expire. That makes Indigenous Rights and Community Rights among the most important causes we can undertake. Wouldn’t you say?
We at CELDF want to recognize and celebrate the 14-year anniversary of this historic date when the country of Ecuador codified Rights of Pachamama into their national Constitution. During that time, they have led the way to show the rest of the world what it looks like when a River, a Cloud Forest, and another animal species file a lawsuit claiming their rights have been violated….And wins!
Thank you to the people and organizations who worked to make this real back in 2008 and continue to push the movement for Rights of Nature forward around the globe. We are grateful that we were able to play a part of this momentous event and movement then and now.
Terry Lodge, an activist attorney with CELDF, is speaking on Panel #2, “Contamination of Land.” This panel will take place on Thursday, March 24 from 11:50 AM – 12:55 PM.Register here.
CELDF’s Tish O’Dell is speaking on Panel #4, “Contamination of Water.” This Panel will take place on Friday, March 25 from 11:40 AM – 12:45 PM.Register here.
American University Washington College of Law’s Program on Environmental and Energy Law and Sustainable Development Law & Policy Brief, in association with the Animal Law Society, Energy Law & Policy Society, Environmental Law Society, and Native American Law Students Association are excited to host this year’s annual Symposium, “Lucrative Losses & Poisonous Profits: An Overview of the Domestic and Global Exploitation of Nature and the Way Forward” over Zoom from 10 AM – 1 PM on March 24 and 25, 2022. Over the course of four panels—activists, professors, legal and policy experts, climate scientists, and professors will discuss the international and domestic contamination and overuse of water and land from modern environmental law, indigenous, and rights of nature perspectives. The panelists will explore the devastating impacts of some of nature’s biggest threats, including pollution, deforestation, and industrial fishing.
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.”
“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.”
Though the exact wording of CELDF’s purpose statement over the last 27 years has changed from time to time, our mission is and always has been to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature.
As a public interest law firm, CELDF assists diverse individuals and communities by offering educational opportunities, training, grassroots organizing support, and legal services as the means to animate the words above. CELDF advocates strongly for the communities we work with, which has led to significant costs to the organization, sanctions against CELDF attorneys, and threats against CELDF staff from the corporate state.
Yet we understand that we are not the story; in our partnering work with communities, those communities are the story. We believe that an effective and ultimately successful movement is the result of the collective. Movements are not about saviors or figureheads; effective movements are made up of everyday people fighting to protect their fundamental needs and to create a different and better future.
With that said, recent events have prompted us to tell more of our personal story, so the public has a clearer understanding of our values. What we are sharing here was initiated by recent articles on the resistance effort at Thacker Pass to a proposed lithium mine. In response we posted this statement.
Since February 2021, CELDF staff has unanimously supported Protect Thacker Pass and the activists opposed to the construction of a 12-to-20 square mile, 400’ deep mine pit at Thacker Pass, located in northern Nevada. It would be a cultural, historical and ecological tragedy to allow this mining to proceed. Even though Protect Thacker Pass is about protecting the ecosystems, the living human communities, and the cultural assets and spirits of the first peoples of that area, the central theme of recent articles has focused on the rights of the transgender community.
As an organization that has been advocating for and supporting efforts of expansive community rights, which include full human rights as well as the rights of ecosystems, we at CELDF made every effort to recognize that such work at Protect Thacker Pass would also be about affirming the rights of the transgender community. We are not aware of any actual ill-treatment of anyone at the site because of gender identity, reflected in the encampment rules prohibiting such behavior.
In our organizational statement linked above, we said this: “We are firm in our support of human and civil rights for all people, no matter how they identify themselves, including the transgender community, without exception. Those rights demand the respect of everyone, and we disagree utterly with those taking a different position.”
That’s our stance. It’s who we are.
Current and former staff and others have accused CELDF of having a culture that espouses transphobia. That story is false and unfounded. Over the last three years, more so than the preceding twenty-four, CELDF has been sharing its internal organizational story with our allies and the public in many different ways as a means to reflect internally the values we espouse in our community rights organizing. After a serious fracturing of the organization three years ago, for example, CELDF moved away from a hierarchical structure of decision making to one that is egalitarian and democratic.
We embarked on internal work related to a broad range of issues from gender identity to cisheteropatriarchy to micro-aggressive behavior to white supremacy to Indigenous rights and traditional ecological knowledge, as an effort to inform us as individuals, as an organization, and in our work with others. We adopted a conflict resolution policy based on restorative justice principles. We have employed a consultant to work through conflict issues within the organization who also subscribes to restorative justice practices. As an action of solidarity we have publicly posted a diversity statement. We reached out to other organizations to brainstorm and then create a symposium to provide a setting to reflect the power of diversity and inclusion as vital to the creation of a people’s movement.
If we had to tell a story about ourselves, this is the true one worth telling.
Are there issues and conflicts within CELDF needing to be addressed? Absolutely, as there are in any other organization. However, those real issues cannot be worked through if attempts to address them are consistently sabotaged and an alternative narrative is substituted for the truth. The issue here is greater than just the internal functionality of CELDF. This misguided, misinformed campaign does real harm to advancing the rights of transgender and all people, as well as the ecosystems of Thacker Pass, and everywhere.
We stand fully and resolutely by our recent statement on Thacker Pass and our publicly posted diversity statement. We stand firmly and resolutely by our commitment to continue to do the necessary work to move beyond a white supremacist colonial structure, both in our internal work and also in how we engage with and continue to assist and support others in rights-expanding efforts.
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.
“The definition of neighbor includes more than human life.”
The General Synod of the United Church of Christ has become the first mainline Protestant body to publicly proclaim that nature has rights. On July 18, delegates adopted a resolution on the rights of nature by a vote of 518 to 18. The United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant denomination, has more than 800,000 members in 4,852 congregations nationwide. The church was also the first mainline denomination to ordain a woman, an openly gay man and the first predominantly white denomination to ordain an African American.
The resolution states an intention to, “Support the Earth Charter, the Nature Rights movement, and the movement of Indigenous Peoples to grant legal standing to nature.”
The resolution builds on the church’s environmental justice work, affirming, “that co-living with Nature involves distributive justice.”
It also includes a commitment to seek reparations for ecosystems and to, “Support the upholding of all treaties with indigenous nations, respecting their lands and kinship natural relations. Ally with and support Indigenous Peoples in their decolonization of Nature, protecting their kinship rights and access to sacred lands.”
We at CELDF are excited to see our friends at UCC take this step.
“In declaring the rights of nature, we are taking an important step in undoing a centuries-old theology of empire and colonialism,” said the Rev. Brooks Berndt, based in Cleveland as the UCC’s minister of environmental justice. “This puts into the dustbin of history worldviews that regard the natural world around us as something to be exploited and consumed by humans with callous disregard.”
What sparked this resolution? How did you arrive at the place of recognizing that nature should have rights considering most monotheistic religions have promoted the idea that humanity is superior to nature and must “manage and tame” the earth?
In my research, I argue that the Hebrew creation spirituality and then of Jesus was formed in the wilderness and stands against imperial colonization in both testaments. There was a more intimate relation to nature than is remembered. I trace Jesus’s radicalness to his wilderness experience and an understanding of the land as a divine gift. Throughout my book, I make a comparison with North American Indigenous peoples, their world views, and the land of Jewish peasants colonized by the Romans, as well as other Indigenous peoples whose land was colonized by other European settlers. Standing Rock taught us a lot about the connection between human and nature rights. Capitalism and colonial settlerism (the beginnings of capitalism) parallel Roman imperial colonization and settler colonialism in North America. The rights of Nature are necessary for a moral human revolution to break down human apartheid separate and above nature. I believe that Earth Bible ecojustice principles are inherent in the Hebrew scripture and the Christian scriptures, countering empires then and now. Today that means challenging imperial Christianity and the fossil fuel empire. Colonizers have always used property rights to usurp Indigenous human rights and over nature’s rights.
Do you believe that Rights of Nature falls into a moral obligation?
Yes. I do. This is the Earth covenant a Church in North Hollywood, CA passed to become the first UCC Creation Justice Church.
Earth Covenant (2012)
We, the MCC / UCC in the Valley, proclaim our love for God’s Creation and profess our belief that the Earth and all life are an interconnected part of the sacred Web of Life. We acknowledge we too are part of the Web of Life.
We covenant together to commit ourselves as a church and individuals in the great work of healing, preservation and justice as we strive to reduce our individual and collective negative impact on the environment and to repair the damage that has been done to God’s Earth. In worship and church life we will express our appreciation and give praise for the Earth and display a reverence for the Earth community of life. We commit ourselves to principles of taking only what we need, clean up our damage to Earth we do, and keep the Earth in repair for the future.
We make this covenant in the hope and faith that through our Earth care we will be able to help improve and sustain the health of the land, air and water for the benefit of all current and future inhabitants of this Planet. Amen!
Our biblical traditions affirm clearly we are citizens and participants in the planetary community of interrelated life. The real moral principles inherent in the Judeo-Christian tradition argue that we are interconnected. A notion of a creation-centered spirituality asserts that there is a distributive justice in creation intended by the Creator Spirit, and life deserves a fair share of the land, resources, and right to thrive and well-being, not just human beings, but all created life. Other eco-theologians, like the late Sallie McFague and retired UCC clergy and Conference Minister James Antal speak of extending Jesus’s commandment to love your neighbor as yourself to the Earth and all life. The definition of neighbor includes more than human life.
The resolution includes a commitment to “support the upholding of all treaties with indigenous nations.” Could this include pushing local settler municipal governments to recognize local treaties?
The UCC Environmental Justice Council has aligned itself with Honor the Earth, which is opposing Line 3 in Minnesota. A number of UCC folks have joined the Ojibwa and Ashinaabe nations in their struggle. One of the delegates to the Synod and on the committee evaluating the Resolution on the Rights of Nature shared what several Indigenous peoples said to him. “The UCC needs to heal its wounds and relationship to Nature before aligning with their struggle.” There is so much truth to that statement. The hope is that UCC Christians will begin to heal our relationship to Nature and Indigenous peoples.
At its 2017 General Synod the UCC passed a resolution declaring “The Earth belongs to Lord and Not Ours to Wreck: Imperatives for a New Moral Era”:http://synod.uccpages.org/res21.html
We have a long educational road ahead of us in understanding “property,” which can be an emotional issue, and its role in the legacy of slavery, that women were once treated as property, and how property functioned in the displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples. We are actively discussing these issues
Powerful corporations oppose reparations for damages to ecosystems. Why is confronting the power of corporations key to advancing the rights of nature?
The greatest challenge will be the economic role of corporations and the property bias of United States law that extends rights to corporations. There needs to be a spiritual revolution in our relation to Nature to generate resistance to fossil fuel industries and ancillary corporate exploiters.
We must hold corporations accountable. Several black women in Warren County, NC blocked a toxic cancerous waste dump site. Their activism led to the coining of the phrase “environmental racism.” This led to a UCC study of toxic waste sites in 1987 and later in 2007. It demonstrated how toxic chemicals, waste, including radioactive disposal, harmed people in a five mile radius. These were primarily poor, black, Asian, Latino, and Indigenous peoples. This was the birth of the UCC’s commitment to environmental justice.
Many of our churches have also divested their investments in fossil fuel companies and reinvested in renewable energies.
What comes next? What has been the response from your fellow clergy and also from the individual congregations?
There is pride within UCC over the resolution. We also believe that other mainline Christian denominations and the Unitarian Universalist Church will follow our example. I have had UCC clergy want to learn more about the rights of nature to promote the paradigm shift. Several plan to subscribe to various centers on Earth rights to keep up on the various campaigns on Nature rights and to educate churches, and vote for Bills of Rights for Nature, and support municipal ordinances to protect water (aquifers, streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, and wetlands) from environmental damage.
We are working to include more environmental justice issues and discussions about the natural world in our services, use our summer camps for children to help them fall in love with nature and become future advocates/activists for Nature in the fight against climate change.
Kai Huschke Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund Community Organizer CELDF.org kai@celdf.org 509-607-5034
Oregon Community Rights Activists Undeterred by Court’s Validation of Timber’s Toxic Legacy
NEWPORT, OR: The Court of Appeals of the State of Oregon issued a one-page decision in late June upholding a trial court decision overriding the will of voters and siding with corporate timber. The court has allowed for the continued use of aerially sprayed pesticides.
The short “affirmed without opinion” decision also denies the ability of the Siletz River watershed to be seen as a rightful party to the case under the popularly adopted (2017) Freedom from Aerially Sprayed Pesticides Ordinance of Lincoln County.
Lincoln County Community Rights has until the end of July to decide if they will petition the Oregon Supreme Court to take the case. The group advocated for the Ordinance, which banned aerial spraying. They are now looking at other means to call out the injustice.
Oregon has a multi-decade legacy of using highly toxic herbicides and pesticides in a monocrop approach to tree farming. Despite the efforts of many in Lincoln County, including Carol Van Strum, author of A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights and spokesperson for the Siletz River watershed in this case, the State of Oregon continues to sanction toxic pesticide use despite its documentable harm to the public, wildlife and the environment as a whole (see the Poison Papers: https://www.poisonpapers.org/).
“[Existing environmental laws] have done nothing, they’ve literally allowed the poisoning to go ahead,” says Van Strum.
“Oregon and the corporate timber industry have been waging a 60+ year war against Oregon residents and the environment. The courts are just as guilty as the corporations by allowing the chemical warfare to continue,” says CELDF organizer Kai Huschke. “Justice for the people and nature has yet to be served, so the community rights activists of Oregon are not going away.”
After qualifying for the ballot the Ordinance was adopted by the voters in May 2017. Almost immediately upon the law going into effect, advocates of the corporate timber industry sued Lincoln County to overturn the ban. Despite nearly 2 ½ years of the ban being in place and not crippling the timber industry as claimed, the trial court overturned the ban in the fall of 2019, relying on an Oregon state law that was written by the American Legislative Exchange Council. Though the lower court denied the Siletz River watershed its right to be a party to the case, in a rare recognition of the validity of ecosystem rights, the trial court invited the Siletz River to appeal the decision and commented that the issue of ecosystem rights “will be gaining more interest as opposed to less in the future.”
The court’s decision in Oregon follows that of a court in France denying the claims of Tran To Nga on the effects of Agent Orange and the need for the corporations involved in its manufacture and sale to be held liable. Tran To Nga and Carol Van Strum were the lead protagonists in the recently-premiered PBS documentary “The People vs. Agent Orange.” Stay tuned at CELDF.org for details.
###
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.
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 Trespassand 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.
###
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.
Tish O’Dell Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund Ohio Community Organizer CELDF.org tish@celdf.org 440-552-6774
Lawsuit advances avenue for participatory Rights of Nature enforcement.
TOLEDO, OH: Last week, Toledo residents who are plaintiffs in a lawsuit to enforce the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR) filed a memorandum of opposition to the State of Ohio’s motion for summary judgment in their case (COMMON PLEAS COURT OF LUCAS COUNTY, OHIO; Case No. G-4801-CI-201902904). Last August, after the trial court granted the State of Ohio’s motion to dismiss, the plaintiffs presented oral arguments in the Ohio Sixth District Court of Appeals to enforce the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR), the first law in the U.S. to secure legal rights of a specific ecosystem. The appellate court ruled that the people did have a justiciable claim, reversed the trial court, and remanded the case back to the lower court. The original lawsuit, filed pro se in June 2019, originates from a clause within LEBOR, which allows residents to file suit to enforce residents’ rights and those of the Lake Erie ecosystem in Common Pleas Court.
The filing documents how the State of Ohio has failed to protect life, liberty, happiness and safety through its “licensing and permitting scheme for agricultural operations in the Lake Erie watershed that causes cumulative harm to Lake Erie,” and consistent failure “to intervene to stop the poisoning of Lake Erie [from] dumping of toxin laden dredge from harbors, and has deregulated highly radioactive road de-icers/dust suppressants, which are becoming ubiquitous throughout the Lake Erie watershed.”
“The Court,” the filing reads, “has the opportunity here to be a partner in solving the existential crisis of the health of Lake Erie, and thus the health of almost everyone in Lucas County as well as the 11 million people who rely on Lake Erie for drinking water. As explained below, no other branch of Ohio government is acting to prevent this harm, so it is incumbent on this Court to step in and protect the people and their home.”
Though a federal judge ruled against LEBOR (Drewes Farms Partnership v. City of Toledo) the plaintiffs pointed out to the state court other legal means to recognize Lake Erie’s rights in order to protect the lake and the people.
This could come through recognition of constitutional protections for the Lake Erie ecosystem, not unlike how courts “found” rights for corporations in decisions they made. Or the court could use the Public Trust Doctrine to protect ecosystems vital for the enjoyment of human life.
The filing also suggests immediate action, including to “order Defendant State of Ohio to stop permitting new confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).” “The defendant State of Ohio permits or turns a blind eye to the factory farm agricultural practices that are causing the Harmful Algae Blooms, and the State can be ordered to stop the harm. This Court only needs the will to do the right thing for the people whom it has sworn to protect,” the filing reads.
A detailed timeline of events, including overt corporate-government collusion against LEBOR, is detailed in the brief.
Multiple courts have recognized that the State of Ohio is failing to protect the lake, including in its refusal to abide by federal environmental law. One federal judge has described “persistent failures,” “noncompliance,” “ignor[ing its] opportunity and its duties.” Due to this failure in the current system of environmental protection, Toledo voters deemed it necessary to alter their government and introduce rights for Lake Erie.
“Currently, American courts are positioned to help stop intensifying ecological collapse,” the filing reads. “But they must find their courage. They must be willing to make rulings that reflect the seriousness of the current environmental predicament.”
“If this court refuses to act, the people of Toledo will be left to their own devices to physically stop the poisoning of their drinking water. They are out of options within this system if this court fails to act on their behalf,” the filing reads.
Contact simon@celdf.org for a copy of the filing, which also includes a succinct analysis of the arbitrary way corporations were granted personhood rights through the co-optation of the 14th Amendment and key points for winning constitutional protections for ecosystems.
More information:
Two months after Toledo voters approved the Lake Erie Bill of Rights in 2019, VOX Media released a documentary (8:08) on the vote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwhcrpJTzGQ
Report: In Plain Sight: Anatomy of a STATE And Corporate Attack on a People’s Movement
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.
