Sample Story 9

Blaine, Pennsylvania where Nature has legal rights.

Mari Margil, the Associate Director of The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, speaks on behalf of Nature’s rights to exist. The presentation was held at Bioneers Conference in California this October:

Mari Margil

“The community environmental legal defense fund was founded in 1995 to help communities protect the natural environment by stopping new incinerators, factory hog farms, and other projects. We helped communities appeal to their state environmental agencies to stop them, but what we found was that the very agencies we looked to for help, were instead handing out permits to corporations to build those incinerators and factory farms.

We helped hundreds of communities appeal these corporate permits, but even when we won, we lost. Because the corporations would either re-write the law, or exhaust communities with permit application after permit application, until they could site their project.

What our experience showed us was that our system of environmental laws and regulations don’t actually protect the environment. At best, they merely slow the rate of its destruction. After several years, we stopped doing that work. We weren’t helping anyone protect anything.

Our work has now fundamentally changed and over the past few years, we’ve had a chance to work with folks like Michael Vacca, a construction worker from Western Pennsylvania, who wanted to protect his community from coal mining. Like Jack O’Neill, a Vietnam veteran and selectboard member from Barnstead, New Hampshire, working to stop the privatization of his community’s water. Like Alberto Acosta, former president of the constitutional assembly of Ecuador, who’d seen his country ravaged by multinational oil corporations.

In 2006 our phone rang with a call from Michael Vacca. He lives in the tiny, rural township of Blaine in Western Pennsylvania deep in the heart of coal country. Over the past two decades, communites across Western Pennsylvania have been devastated by something called longwall coal mining. Mining corporations drive their longwall machines underground, ripping out massive panels of coal over two miles long. When the coal is gone, the land above is unsupported and caves in. Houses, roads, schools, farmland fall into the mine. Rivers and streams run dry.

Michael wanted to stop the mining. As vice chair of Blaine’s planning commission, he wanted to see if he could use local zoning laws to block the mining. But instead he’d found himself stuck inside a box – the same box that thousands of communities across the country have found themselves stuck in – in which the law doesn’t give them the legal authority to say “no.”

That first call with Michael lasted two hours, and at the end he invited us to hold a Democracy School in Blaine. The Democracy Schools are three-day workshops at which we help communities examine how our structure of law works, and for whom.

All three elected Blaine supervisors were at the democracy school. Darlene Dutton, one of the supervisors, asked us why it seemed that a mining corporation – in this case, Penn Ridge Coal headquartered nearly a thousand miles away in Tulsa, Oklahoma – was able to decide what happened in Blaine, rather than the people who actually live there? She then asked us why the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, was actually giving coal corporations the legal authority to mine, when the devastating impacts from the mining couldn’t have been more clear?

In response to Darlene’s questions, we talked about how our environmental laws work – how they’re based on the idea that nature is property. Meaning our environmental regulatory laws merely regulate the rate at which nature is used.

Scott Weiss, chairman of the Blaine supervisors, then asked us about something called “standing” – the legal requirement that you need to prove you have “standing” in order to go to court to protect nature – meaning you’ve experienced some direct harm from logging, or the pollution of a river. Meaning you have to prove that destruction of the environment somehow directly injures you. And then damages are awarded to you and not the ecosystem that’s been destroyed.

At the conclusion of the school, the Blaine supervisors asked us to help them draft a set of ordinances that would ban longwall coal mining while declaring that ecosystems have rights within Blaine township. Passed unanimously by the supervisors in 2006, the ordinances do three things:

First, in support of the ban on mining, the ordinances declare ‘that the Department of Environmental Protection’s enabling of mining corporations has not been the exception in this state and nation, but a normal governmental practice.’

Second, the ordinances establish that ecosystems – including wetlands, rivers, and streams – possess ‘inalienable and fundamental rights to exist and flourish within the township of Blaine.’ And that the people of Blaine have the ability to defend the rights of ecosystems without having to prove standing, and that damages are to be measured by harm caused to the ecosystem itself.

Third, the ordinances strip corporations of something called ‘corporate constitutional rights’. Corporations, declared by the courts to be persons under the law, enjoy 1st amendment free speech rights, 5th amendment rights to due process, and 14th amendment rights to equal protection.

At the Blaine Democracy School, the supervisors asked us why corporate constitutional rights matter. Our answer was that they matter because corporations are able to wield these rights against you, against communities and laws that seek to protect the environment.

In many ways, what the people of Blaine were doing was flipping the law on its head – so instead of the law protecting the rights of property and commerce, they were using the law to protect the rights of people, communities, and nature.

And as expected, last fall two coal corporations sued Blaine township to overturn their ordinances. They’re arguing that the community doesn’t have the legal authority to ban mining, and that the ordinances violate their corporate constitutional rights.

Instead of backing down or counting on the courts to save them, the people of Blaine have decided instead to up the ante. They drafted a home rule municipal charter incorporating the Rights of Ecosystems and stripping corporations of constitutional rights. The charter constitutionalizes the ordinances, and, if adopted, it will become the nation’s first local sustainability constitution.

We’re now working with communities from Maine to California, from Virginia to Spokane, Washington. The people in the communities we work with recognize that the structure of law was never intended to protect the environment, but instead to regulate its exploitation, and that they must write new structures of law – maybe writing their own constitutions – to replace it. These are not people who call themselves activists, or for that matter environmentalists. But they recognize that in order to change the existing structure of law a movement for nature’s rights is necessary. It is time we heard their voices and joined their cause.

The Lorax asked, ‘Who speaks for the trees?’ The people of Ecuador, Blaine, Barnstead, Nottingham, and a dozen other communities have answered, ‘ We do.’

And now I ask all of You. Will you speak for the trees? For if not you, then who? And if not now, then when? Thank you.”

Contact: The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
www.celdf.org
Tel: 717.709.0457