Rights of nature Laws: A way forward for the climate and environmental activism

A better understanding of how communities can create change in the face of a system that prevents it.

From Thomas Linzey’s book: On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability: The Community Rights Movement in the United States

Humanity stands at the brink of global environmental and economic collapse. We have pinned our future to an economic system that centralizes power in fewer and fewer hands, and whose benefits increasingly flow to smaller and smaller numbers of people. Our system of government is similarly medieval—relying on a 1780s constitutional form of government written to guarantee the exploitation of the natural environment and elevate “the endless production of more” over the rights of people, nature, and their communities.

But right now, people within the community rights movement aren’t waiting for power brokers to fix the system. They’re beginning to envision a new sustainability constitution by adopting new laws at the local level that are forcing those ideas upward into the state and national ones. In doing so, they are directly challenging the basic operating system of this country—one which currently elevates corporate “rights” above the rights of people, nature, and their communities—and changing it into one which recognizes a right to local, community self-government that cannot be overridden by corporations, or by governments wielded by corporate interests.

This is part of a trilogy focusing on natural rights’ activism at the community level

• Part One:  Youth vs. Gvt.: How the Youth are Leading The Way
• Part Two : How communities can create change at the municipal level in the face of a system that prevents it
• Part Three: The Green Amendment: Securing Our Right to a Healthy Environment

An informative conversation with Thomas Linzey, CDER: Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights and Rob Moir (interviewer) from the Ocean River Institute

• How can communities create real system change?
• Why does the current system makes it next to impossible to create the changes we want?
• What can communities do to improve the quality of life by rethinking our realities?
• If the regulatory systems were written in cahoots with the corporations that are supposed to being regulated, what can we do at the local level?

From Thomas Linzey’s book: On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability: The Community Rights Movement in the United States

Humanity stands at the brink of global environmental and economic collapse. We have pinned our future to an economic system that centralizes power in fewer and fewer hands, and whose benefits increasingly flow to smaller and smaller numbers of people. Our system of government is similarly medieval—relying on a 1780s constitutional form of government written to guarantee the exploitation of the natural environment and elevate “the endless production of more” over the rights of people, nature, and their communities.

Also from CDER: The Land that Owns itself

But right now, people within the community rights movement aren’t waiting for power brokers to fix the system. They’re beginning to envision a new sustainability constitution by adopting new laws at the local level that are forcing those ideas upward into the state and national ones. In doing so, they are directly challenging the basic operating system of this country—one which currently elevates corporate “rights” above the rights of people, nature, and their communities—and changing it into one which recognizes a right to local, community self-government that cannot be overridden by corporations, or by governments wielded by corporate interests.