Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

This piece, from CELDF’s co-director of community resistance and resilience Max Wilbert, was originally published on Biocentric in August.

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Writing in The Dark Mountain Project last month, artist Richard Koscher discussed the futility of raising awareness:

“The phrase [raising awareness] does not invite thought,” Koscher says.

“…How many times have you seen an image, nodded quietly, felt a small tightening in your chest, and kept scrolling. The ice is melting. Awareness raised. The forest is burning. Awareness raised. A painting is stolen. Awareness raised. The planet is warming. Awareness raised. What happens next is rarely mentioned. The phrase implies that something has been accomplished. Recognition becomes a conclusion rather than a beginning.”

Koscher’s words resonate with an idea I have been becoming increasingly convinced of since attending journalism school twenty years ago: there is too much awareness, and not enough action.

Too many journalists, not enough activists.

Too many storytellers, not enough revolutionaries.

This point was hammered home at Peehee Mu’huh, known in English as Thacker Pass, where myself and many others fought the construction of a 18,000 acre open-pit mine on a sacred, biodiverse mountainside. Over the course of three years of protest camps, rallies, community organizing, federal lawsuits, threats, surveillance, and direct action, thousands of journalists and storytellers visited camp or amplified our story. We were on the front page of The New York Times and Le Monde. We were interviewed on CNN and NBC and NPR. We were featured in The Guardian and The Hill and Politico and all the regional newspapers. Local TV stations, alternative media outlets, and independent podcasts and radio shows covered the resistance. Multiple films were shot and produced. Musicians made songs. Poets wrote poems. Students wrote papers and theses. I was interviewed hundreds of times. Social media influencers and grassroots activists told the story in social media over and over and over again.

Yet in 2023, when the lawsuits failed (as we had warned they would) and the bulldozers began to roll, the time came for direct action to stop the mine. And despite all our work, barely a dozen people showed up.

Why is that?

Koscher writing in Dark Mountain, continues:

“Awareness has quietly become a moral finish line.

The danger is not that people do not care. The danger is that caring has been compressed into a moment so brief it requires nothing of us beyond acknowledgment. Once we know, we are done. We have fulfilled our obligation. We are free to move on....

We live in a culture where millions can watch a climate documentary, feel briefly moved, and return to lives structured in exactly the same way as before. Emissions continue to rise. Systems remain intact. Attention moves on. The illusion of progress is comforting. It allows us to feel engaged without being implicated.”

And implicated we are, because inaction is ultimately a choice.

Our campaign at Peehee Mu’huh changed hearts and minds. We educated hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people about the environmental costs of lithium mining. Our work led many to question green technology’s viability as a method to solve the climate crisis which I believe is essential to actually charting a reasonable course forward.

And yet despite this, the land was destroyed. All that changed was ideas — ephemeral, weightless, internal. In the physical world, the bulldozers clanked and rattled as they crushed old-growth groves of sagebrush and animal burrows and Numu burial places. In the physical world, nothing changed.

My friend, the brilliant revolutionary and Hawaiian sovereignty activist Keala Kelly channeled the anger that myself and many others share about this in her recent essay excoriating the decline of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement in the face of relentless settler-colonial tourism and militarism in Hawaii. She writes:

“Every inch of Hawai‘i is a crime scene, and justice is on the side of an unnamed road, thumb outstretched, looking for a ride to anywhere but here… The Hawaiian world is deeply fractured and being actively carved up... And I am not willing to narrate our ruin like a journalist with no conscience or an umpire calling strikes and outs.”

“Narration of ruin” is practically a job description for many people these days.

Keala’s bone-deep rage, and the commitment to action that it engenders, mirrors my own. I’ve been terrified in the face of ecological apocalypse since I was 12. The crisis came to my attention not by reading reports or watching videos, but because I was embedded in a youth activist group and surrounded by people who were actively trying to change the world for the better. That was more than 25 years ago. In the intervening time, as our world has become increasingly dominated by the internet, I have observed the rise of the armchair analyst. They must have existed beforehand, but these days, they are a dime a dozen: people who write, host podcasts, post on social media, or work as journalists covering the industrial-scale destruction of nature without actually doing anything to stop it. They are narrators of ruin, and there are many of them here on Substack.

To be clear: some of these people are my friends, and I believe that education is important. Some people face real limitations preventing them from taking action. But most of us do not. Our limitations are self-imposed. They are imaginary. They stem from our fear.

The destruction of the planet is not simply a mistake or an accident that we can educate people out of; it’s a deliberately-constructed material arrangement of economic systems, machinery, energy flows, and systems of power which can be confronted and dismantled. Yes, it has an ideological superstructure supporting it and emerging from it, and the two components, material and ideological, are mutually reinforcing. But the material is primary.

Too many of us are content to believe that raising awareness — or having our own mind changed by the things we read or watch — is enough.

It’s not.

As Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us in his brilliant book Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, “Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what’s the use of seeing?”

The point is to change the world, not simply to understand it.

To do so requires courage. I’ve been reflecting lately on the words of Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize winning author and dissident who has been charged with sedition and brought up before the Indian Supreme Court for her support for Kashmiri independence, opposition to dams and other infrastructure megaprojects, opposition to the Israeli terrorist state, and support for the armed Naxalite revolutionary movement.

In an essay on the dumbing down of resistance movements, Roy wrote:

“Real resistance has real consequences.”

This line runs circles in my mind.

It is the real reason we have so many storytellers and so few on the front lines. It is far easier to understand the world than to change it. It is far easier to tell a story than to do something that is worthy of a story.

It is far easier to write or make films or music or poetry or photographs or public presentations than it is to sacrifice your time, your energy, your well-being, your reputation, your financial stability, your physical safety, and possibly even your life on the front lines of resistance campaigns.

This is why only a dozen people showed up for direct action at Peehee Mu’huh: because real resistance isn’t easy. It has consequences. It’s physically demanding. It’s exhausting. It’s thankless. The pay is either shitty, non-existent, or sometimes negative. It’s scary as hell. Violence is a real possibility. It involves very real, very large sacrifices. I’ve been sued, threatened with violence, smeared, physically assaulted, detained by police, surveilled, harassed by the FBI, risked serious injury, and nearly destroyed some of the most important relationships in my life while engaging in frontline resistance. And I haven’t done nearly enough.

We need more risk taking.

I’m very supportive of independent media. I studied journalism, became a writer, and authored two books because I believe in the power of stories to change the world. But this publication, and all my work, is not aimed mainly at raising awareness. I am not asking you to change the way you think. I am asking you to change the way you act. I am asking you to do difficult things.

I am asking you to fight.

Because, as Ai Weiwei says, “A small act is worth a million thoughts.”

This is the heart of why we have so many journalists and storytellers and independent media outlets in this time, and so few on the frontlines of resistance: because resistance is hard, and we do not have enough courage.

The origin of the word courage is the Latin word “cor,” which means “heart.” We need more courage in this time. More heart. More love. Because that is what overcomes fear and carries us to action. That is what gives us the strength to sacrifice for something bigger than ourselves.

This is a challenge to all the writers, podcasters, live streamers, social media users, keyboard warriors, narrators of ruin, and resistance media consumers out there: put down your phone. Shut off your computer. And try to find some way to change the world, physically, here and now. Build a revolutionary movement. Take direct action. Stop the flow of fossil fuels. Defend a forest or other natural place. Battle a data center or housing development. Find what you love, and defend it.

Raising awareness is not enough.

We need action.

Skills are essential for action, which is why CELDF is hosting a two-part training on “community assemblies” on September 30th and October 6th.

The training will be led by two CELDF partners: Dr. Camila Vergara, an academic and organizer who was deeply involved in numerous assemblies held in Chile between 2020 and 2022 as part of the effort to enact a transformative new constitutional structure, and Denzel Caldwell, an organizer with the Black Nashville Assembly working to build black political power in Tennessee.

People’s assemblies are the most basic form of direct democracy: bring the community together, discuss issues of concern, and develop plans for moving forward. They represent a viable and powerful form of organizing that is already being used to respond to the ecological crisis, push back against capitalism and other systems of oppression, and build grassroots power around the world.

But actually organizing assemblies isn’t as simple as getting together with friends. It presents numerous challenges for organizers: How do you inform the community and build legitimacy? What’s the best way to facilitate discussions and move forward during meetings? How often should assembles occur? How are agendas determined? Who should take on what roles? How can we deal with internal disagreements or disruption? The answers are here.

Camila and Denzel will share their hard-earned practical and theoretical knowledge with us during each 90-minute free training.

Register for Part 1 (Sept 30)

Register for Part 2 (Oct 6)

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

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In this episode, we talk with author and organizer Peter Block about relationality, community building, and changing minds through dialogue

In a world where divisions often overshadow common ground, fostering community through meaningful conversations has never been more essential. In this conversation with Peter Block, an author and consultant on community building, we explore the importance of community, the challenges we face in building real relationships, and how intentional dialogue can bridge gaps and foster connections.

Peter introduces a framework he calls the “Six Conversations,” which are designed to promote accountability and connection among community members:

1. Crossroads: Discussing the pivotal moments in life that shape decisions.

2. Possibilities: Exploring the potential outcomes of collective actions.

3. Doubts: Acknowledging the fears and hesitations that hinder progress.

4. Gifts: Recognizing the unique contributions each individual brings to the community.

5. Promises: Making commitments to one another to foster accountability.

6. Invitations: Encouraging open dialogue and participation.

These conversations challenge participants to reflect on their roles and contributions, shifting the focus from participation to active engagement. Peter highlights the importance of social capital — the networks, relationships, and trust that exist within a community which play a crucial role in determining how effectively a community can mobilize and take action.

While the benefits of deep community conversation are clear, Peter acknowledges that there are significant challenges to overcome. Many individuals come to discussions expecting quick solutions or data-driven outcomes, rather than engaging in the messy, often uncomfortable work of building relationships. Peter suggests that community organizers must work to create environments where individuals feel safe to express their doubts and vulnerabilities. Only then can true connection and collaboration flourish.

There is a tendency to rely on leaders or experts to drive change. However, Peter advocates for a shift towards empowering citizens to take ownership of their communities. This requires a commitment to cultivating deeper relationships and fostering a sense of belonging.

As Peter writes in his book Activating the Common Good: Reclaiming Control of Our Collective Well-Being:

“What is needed is local, relational-based activism that endures over time and is less dependent on the transformation of people in the traditional leadership positions. This is where we must adopt new protocols for mobilizing the common good.

Most ways of engaging citizens are cause oriented gatherings and promotions. Progressive news sites. Events designed to convince and persuade and educate. They feature passionate speakers. Experts presenting research findings. Calls for action. Panels on stage. Dialogues and interviews with well known experts. Presentations on what has worked elsewhere.

Traditional forms of activism that enlist, recruit, inspire and pressure others to change are variations of a marketing strategy. They are selling something, treating the audience as consumers. They are likely to inspire and excite in much the same way movies and the arts do. This approach is valuable, but not transformational.

Suppose we decided that the purpose of bringing people together, whether in groups of five or five hundred, was to take advantage of the one irrefutable thing that they all have in common: the fact that they showed up. Say we used each occasion to have them find each other. To have them trust each other… Suppose we used that connection to mobilize their energy to take actions over that which they have control.

This way of bringing people together is different from education, persuasion, research and good examples. We call this approach relational or convening activism. The main intent is to create social capital. It is a counterapproach to strategies that call for better management and leadership, and for someone else to change…..On the question of action, something is needed to convert the consumer who came to listen and support into the citizen who leaves to produce…

The challenge in efforts to create an alternative future is the need for the effort to be sustainable… the path to have citizens more powerfully connected to each other, especially those who were relative strangers up to now. Our traditional ways of doing this are to ask citizens to get involved by attending events as listeners, sending money, completing surveys and writing letters. As a persuasive process, this approach builds support for the cause, but these activities are limited forms of engagement. The heavy lifting is done by people who launched the idea, or who are paid to do it or are heroic volunteers, and by institutions organized around a particular interest. The suggestion here is for us to put the heavy lifting in the hands of citizens. When we search for where the future exists in the present, we find it in the stories of citizens who are connected to each other in unique ways.”

Links and Resources

• Peter’s website

• “A Small Group” website

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocketcasts

• YouTube (video and audio)

• And anywhere else you get your podcasts (click here to find this podcast via your preferred app)

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

Curious to know more?

• Contact CELDF

• Visit our website

• Support our work

• Join the CELDF email list

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

In this episode, we speak with Kate Scott at a direct action against wall construction on the Arizona-Mexico border

Support is urgently needed in Lochiel, Arizona where activists are taking direct action to prevent the construction of a border wall between the US and Mexico. This wall would represent the first time than an entire continent has been severed in two by a wall and would cut off essential habitat for the critically endangered jaguar and ocelot.

Kate Scott, who we’ve been supporting for the past year in her efforts to resist border wall construction, joins us from the front lines of an active direct action campaign. After camping for weeks under an ancient cottonwood tree, Kate helped to catalyze a treesit that is now bi-national with people in the trees on both the US and Mexico sides of the border.

With roots in the community for over three decades, Kate brings a unique perspective to the fight. At the center of Kate’s activism lies a grove she refers to as the “grandmothers”—the ancient cottonwood trees that stand sentinel in the valley. “If they were a mammal, they’d say they were a sentinel keystone species,” Kate notes, emphasizing the ecological significance of these trees.

Reports from the front-lines

For those who aren’t on Instagram, here are some updates from the front lines:

Links and Resources

• https://instagram.com/rally.forthevalley

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocketcasts

• YouTube (video and audio)

• And anywhere else you get your podcasts (click here to find this podcast via your preferred app)

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

Curious to know more?

• Contact CELDF

• Visit our website

• Support our work

• Join the CELDF email list

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

In this episode, we speak with Tom Grotewohl of Protect the Porkies about a new land defense camp — “Animikiiwadiswan” or Thunderbird Nest — in Michigan

The Porcupine Mountains on the shores of Lake Superior are home to the largest old-growth forest east of the Mississippi, a haven for wildlife. Tom explains, “There’s no good place for a mine, but this location should certainly be at the bottom of the list.” The urgency of this mission has sparked a grassroots encampment aimed at resisting a proposed copper mine that threatens not only the forest but the very ecosystem it supports.

We’ve covered this story previously in detail with a lengthy interview. We won’t recap all the details from that episode. Instead, this conversation focuses on the new camp and how people can get involved.

The proposed mining project is spearheaded by an inexperienced Canadian company, which has already clear-cut over 100 acres and destroyed wetlands in their quest for profit. Despite the Michigan government’s repeated denials of funding for the project, the mining company is now seeking a $250 million loan from the Export-Import Bank of the United States.

In response, mine opponents have set up an encampment right next to the mine site, inviting community members and allies from local tribes to join the fight. “The encampment has been great because it invites people to see firsthand why this area deserves protection,” Tom shares.

With the encampment standing as a physical presence against the mining interests, Tom emphasizes the importance of community and connection at the camp. As Tom notes, “Capitalism is a collusion between industry and government.”

Activists are encouraged to join the encampment every weekend.

Links and Resources

• https://protecttheporkies.com/encampment

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocketcasts

• YouTube (video and audio)

• And anywhere else you get your podcasts (click here to find this podcast via your preferred app)

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

Curious to know more?

• Contact CELDF

• Visit our website

• Support our work

• Join the CELDF email list

Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. This piece, which provides an introduction the concept of rights of nature with a focus on the Great Lakes bioregion and includes an interview with CELDF’s Ben Price and Tish O’Dell, was originally written by Tamara Graham and published in Pulse of the Great Lakes earlier this year. It is republished here with permission from the author.

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By Tamara Graham

What Are Legal Rights of Nature? Explained for Humans.

Who Defends the Great Lakes?

What if they could talk? What would they say to us humans?

Do you think they, the wetlands, forests, wildlife, all species, would say we have been good stewards of the ecosystems we depend on to survive?

Or do you think they would ask why the systems that govern human society willingly allow, and sometimes even mandate, their destruction in the first place?

These questions are at the heart of a growing global movement known as Rights of Nature.

Rights of Nature is a legal and cultural shift that challenges the idea that ecosystems (nature) exist only to serve human profit.

We have partnered with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), to help inform and educate the Great Lakes Basin region on Rights of Nature, and to start the movement to bring this law to all eight states that border the Great Lakes. A Rights of Nature bill, the Great Lakes and States Water Bill of Rights, is currently in the New York State Assembly. We have seven more to go.

We recently started a new podcast and article series called Rights of the Lakes to accomplish just that. This article supports Episode 1 of the podcast that you can watch below. In order to bring about a cultural and legal shift, we first must understand what has been taken from us to bring us to where we are.

In our first episode, I spoke with Tish O’Dell and Ben Price, both Community Rights Pioneers with CELDF. We discussed what Rights of Nature actually means, and why the idea is gaining traction in communities across the United States and the globe.

The Misunderstanding Most People Have

When people first hear the phrase “Rights of Nature,” they often think that it means granting individual rights to a deer, a tree, or a fish. But that is not what the movement is about.

According to Tish O’Dell, the misunderstanding of what Rights of Nature is comes from thinking about nature as individual organisms rather than the living system that it is. Rights of Nature laws are designed to recognize ecosystems as living communities—the Lakes, rivers, forests, watersheds, inland lakes, wetlands, and all the life they support. In the same way the U.S. Bill of Rights protects all people rather than naming specific individuals, Rights of Nature recognizes the rights of ecosystems as a whole.

This distinction matters because under current U.S. law, ecosystems have no legal rights at all. And we humans have no legal recourse to protect them. We like to think that we do, but we do not. And corporations? They are given special permission to pollute.

The Problem with Our Current Legal System Explained

Environmental law as we know it today started in 1969 with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), but the first piece of environmental legislation dates back to 1899, with the passing of the Rivers and Harbors Act. Since then, environmental protection in the United States has been solely built on regulation. Not preventing or outright banning pollution, but regulating it. This means that pollution of any kind is not prohibited. We have built a legal system that allows environmental harm (pollution) to stay within the “regulatory threshold” awarded through the permit.

Do you know the old saying give an inch and they’ll take a mile? That seems to be the rule. Because when regulatory thresholds are violated or an “accident” occurs, the regulated body usually gets a slap on the wrist, a small fine, and a scolding of “don’t do that again,” until they do it again, and then it’s rinse and repeat. This is as asinine as it sounds. And we here in the Great Lakes Basin region are paying the price for it, our entire planet is.

Rights of Nature challenges this structure entirely. Instead of regulating pollution it recognizes ecosystems as entities that have the right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve. It gives legal standing to communities and nature against industry and governments that directly harm our ecosystems. Whether it’s through toxic runoff from agriculture using pesticides, industrial extraction, or large-scale infrastructure projects (think data centers and the Line 5 pipeline) that damage ecosystems. It also gives residents the ability to defend the ecosystems they depend on to survive and thrive. And that’s where the conversation becomes even more interesting.

If Corporations Have Rights, Why Not Lakes and Rivers?

One of the biggest challenges Rights of Nature faces—probably the biggest—is corporate personhood. Corporate personhood has been allowed to usurp actual personhood in this country. It dates back to 1886, but it became very powerful with the Supreme Court ruling of Citizens United in 2010. The same law that allows unlimited money in politics and unlimited lobbying to purchase our politicians, also gives seemingly unlimited rights to corporations to harm, pollute, and exploit with impunity. It can even be argued that it’s directly responsible for the dismantling of democracy.

One of the questions that arises through Rights of Nature is: if corporations (entities we do not need to survive) can have legal rights, why can’t lakes and rivers (living ecosystems that we do need to survive)?

Corporate personhood grants corporations many of the same legal protections as humans. In fact, I would argue more. I’ll give an example through an actual case, The Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR). In summary, this Rights of Nature law was drafted in partnership between Toledoans for Safe Water and CELDF and was passed in 2019 by the citizens of Toledo, Ohio with a 61 percent approval.

The legislation was a result of the toxic algae blooms (developed from pollution) in Lake Erie getting into and contaminating the drinking water for Toledo in 2014. The bill allowed citizens to sue on Lake Erie’s behalf. Proponents argued that the legislation was necessary “because the state had consistently failed to protect Lake Erie from pollution, leaving the city’s water supply vulnerable to contamination.”

In 2020, federal judge, Jack Zouhary, invalidated the law citing that it was unconstitutionally vague, unenforceable, and exceeded municipal power. In translation, “constitutionally vague” means that the law violated the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, the 14^th Amendment that is widely believed to give personhood to corporations. Drewes Farms Partnership filed a lawsuit against the City of Toledo the day after the vote, claiming the law threatened their business.

In short, Drewes Farms Partnership was given permission to pollute the water of Lake Erie through industrial runoff for their own profit, while the actual citizens of Toledo were told they had to sacrifice their drinking water for Drewes Farm’s profit. We will talk about LEBOR in depth in Episode 2 of Rights of the Lakes.

The idea of giving legal protection to ecosystems is portrayed as radical to some. But as you read in the LEBOR example, it’s far from radical. It’s where responsibility begins.

O’Dell says most everyday people understand the concept immediately. When communities hear that corporations have rights but the lakes and rivers they depend on do not, the imbalance becomes obvious.

The pushback tends to come from industries doing the polluting, like Drewes Farms, lobbyists, and legal institutions that benefit from the current system (status quo). O’Dell also states that many larger environmental groups are against Rights of Nature becoming law. Their arguments usually center around shifting power away from regulatory agencies (that allow pollution to certain thresholds) and moving it to the courts based on community complaints and lawsuits. Many also believe it’s unenforceable, the same argument Judge Zouhary stated in his ruling.

But history shows us something entirely different. It shows us that every major expansion of rights—from civil rights to labor rights—was once labeled “radical” before becoming accepted law. Rights of Nature are no different in that respect. Where it differs is that we need our ecosystems for survival as a species. All species do.

The Truth We Often Forget

The main argument that Rights of Nature brings to the table is a common sense one:

Humans are not separate from nature. We are nature.

And though we may be the most consciously aware, we are not the smartest part of nature.

Ben Price offers the example of trees. Trees produce bark. Humans do not and cannot produce bark. Trees produce oxygen that we humans need to breathe to survive. Humans do not and cannot produce oxygen. There are a number of untold examples of what nature creates that we humans benefit from for survival—and regardless of how much money we have, we cannot recreate on our own.

Price also lends another example, one that explains definitively how we humans are nature. The human body is mostly made of water. That water comes from somewhere. Humans and other species do not generate the water that we need for survival. So wherever your drinking water comes from, you are part of that water’s ecosystem.

The Great Lakes provide drinking water for over 40 million people and an untold number of species. So for the 40 million of us who call the Great Lakes Basin region home, a significant portion of our body is literally made from these waters. We are part of their living ecosystems. The same holds true for the air we breathe and the soil that grows our food. In simple terms,

destroying the ecosystem is ultimately self-destruction.

The concept is simple, but modern capitalist culture has largely forgotten it. Or maybe capitalism simply dismisses it and says, let someone else worry about it in another generation. Profits are far more important.

Our Western legal system is built on the idea that humans are separate from nature and superior to it. That it is ours to exploit and pillage and do with what we please. This philosophy has shaped every industry, including property law. It’s even become the worldview. But this worldview is now colliding head on with our ecological reality. We are in an existential crisis when it comes to the survival of our ecosystems. Not only here in the Great Lakes Basin region, but throughout the world. Climate change, accelerated through our love affair with unfettered production that generates pollution, is starting to crack everything wide open.

The Role of Profit

The question begs: if harming ecosystems ultimately harms people and threatens our survival, then why do our laws allow it?

We saw it above through the example with Drewes Farms: profit.

Our ecosystems are too often treated as assets that can be extracted, sold, and monetized. Our forests become timber. Our Great Lakes water becomes a commodity. Land becomes real estate to be sold to developers. But as Price explains, the economic value extracted from ecosystem destruction is often temporary, while the damage left behind can last for generations. In many cases, communities are left with polluted water as evidenced above with Toledo (also ask Flint, MI), degraded or poisoned land, and collapsing ecosystems long after corporations and politicians have moved on.

Dr. Seuss’ book The Lorax comes to mind with Ben’s explanation. I have an everlasting image of the Lorax standing in a forest littered with the stumps of all the trees cut down for industry greed. When I was young, I couldn’t understand why anyone would destroy the trees that create oxygen for us to breathe.

Today, I find myself standing on the shores of Lake Huron amongst the algal blooms from industrial destruction that keep myself and my dog from frolicking in the waves and feeling much the same. It is beyond me why we are allowing industry to destroy what we need to survive for profit we do not benefit from. We should be demanding better as communities that depend on these Lakes to survive.

It also leaves me with the conclusion that destruction will continue until enough of us change our relationship with nature and care enough to stand up to industry and the political lie that willingly gives personhood to corporations.

And this is exactly what Rights of Nature laws do. They rebalance the equation by arming us with the awareness, understanding, and the tools to fight back against corporate personhood and all the destruction that comes with it.

Indigenous Knowledge and Right Relationship with Nature

One of the most important perspectives that Price gave during our podcast comes from Indigenous communities. From our native Indigenous cultures right here in the United States and others around the world, the idea that humans are part of the natural world is not a revolutionary one. It is simply their reality.

The Indigenous relationship with the environment is not defined by ownership, as it is in Western culture. It is defined by responsibility to our ecosystems. They do not separate their survival from Mother Earth.

Indigenous cultures do not need laws to enforce their relationship with nature. It is already embedded in their traditions, values, and teachings that they pass down through generations. The real challenge comes from whether Western societies are willing to undergo the cultural shift required to see the world the same way.

For the past 250 years, the culture built in the United States has rejected it—and to our own detriment. In fact, our country was built on the rejection of being one with nature. But Rights of Nature laws attempt to bring that “right relationship” with nature to the awareness and understanding of non-indigenous people.

As Price states, “We are our own worst enemies. We (Western culture) raise our children to be parasites on the Earth. We raise our children, in many ways, to be good little cancer cells for planet Earth. And, do we really want that?”

Sometimes, we must suffer greatly before we see what has always been right in front of us.

The Cultural Shift We Need

Though Rights of Nature are a set of laws, the framework requires a cultural shift, as mentioned above.

Since their foundation, Western societies have been taught to see nature as something separate, something to manage, regulate, and exploit. But ecosystems are not machines. In fact, we treat our machines better than we treat our ecosystems. When a machine breaks, we fix it. When nature breaks, far too many call it a “hoax,” and industry says let science figure it out while rejecting the science that does.

But here is the important thing to remember: ecosystems are living systems. And they work in ways we do not always understand. Human survival depends on their health and regeneration. The cultural shift required is both philosophical and practical. We humans must recognize that protecting our ecosystems is human progress. Because if they die, we die. There is no way around it.

Why This Matters for the Great Lakes

For those of us living in the Great Lakes Basin region—all 40 million of us—the stakes could not be higher. We are facing insurmountable threats.

The Great Lakes hold 21 percent of the world’s fresh surface water and upwards of 89 percent of North America’s fresh surface water. They are critical to the survival of all of us and an untold number of species. But this is where their health currently stands:

All five lakes are experiencing toxic algal blooms from industrial pollution, including agricultural runoff. Yes, even in Lake Superior. Climate change has warmed her up to the point where algal blooms can now thrive.

Industrial pollution is spilling into the Great Lakes. Over 22 million pounds of plastic are entering the Basin annually. This includes microplastics. Concentrations of it sometimes exceed that of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Legacy industrial contaminants such as PCBs, mercury, and other heavy metals are still detected in sediments. PFAS (forever chemicals) are also showing up. This leads to regular fish consumption advisories throughout the Great Lakes.

Pharmaceuticals, personal care products, and other unregulated chemicals are increasingly showing up in her waters.

We have 23 “Areas of Concern” within the Great Lakes Basin region. View the Remediation and Restoration Project Table for full details.

Blue Triton (formerly Nestlé’), and nearly 100 other companies siphon millions of gallons of groundwater from the Great Lakes Basin region annually and they are doing it for nearly free and with permission from the states of Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Ontario, Canada. It is a literal cash cow for them at our expense. Many low- and middle-class families pay more for home water use than the companies that siphon our water and sell it back to the public at huge markups (6,666 times more per gallon). In Michigan, these companies pay a measly $2,000 application fee and an annual administrative fee of just $200 to profit in the billions off of our water. Other states and Canada also require similar minimal fees.

The Great Lakes Compact prohibits most diversions of water out of the Basin, but it exempts small containers (less than 5.7 gallons), allowing these companies to bottle at source and sell the water outside the region. If eight states can come together to craft this legislation, they can come together to craft Rights of Nature legislation to actually protect the Great Lakes. The “unenforceable” argument becomes immediately moot.

We will talk more in upcoming episodes about emerging pressures from energy and data center infrastructure on the Great Lakes. These pressures are massive and cause a whole host of dangers to us humans and our ecosystems. They are going to get the attention they deserve.

With all of these mounting challenges that are producing an existential threat to our Great Lakes, the question begs: Are the regulations we are forced to rely on capable of protecting the ecosystems we depend on, or do we need an entirely new framework?

As evidenced above, the current state of the Great Lakes screams that we need an entirely new framework.

What You Should Take Away From This

During our podcast, I asked Tish O’Dell what listeners should take away from this discussion. Her answer:

We are not separate from nature. we are nature. we are part of the living ecosystems where we live.

This is so very important to internalize, as Indigenous peoples already have: The health of the ecosystems around us determines the health of our communities, our bodies, and our future.

Recognizing that truth is the first step toward building a culture that reflects that. And in doing so, our laws will evolve to do the same. Because in the end, whether we like it or not, nature will have the last word. Do not doubt that. Nature does not care about our feelings. She does not care about our profits. And even though we are a part of her, she is far more powerful than we humans can ever hope to be.

Read our Rights of the Lakes Blueprint in partnership with CELDF. Join our Email list. Get involved and organize where you live. The Great Lakes are ours to defend, or they are ours to lose. The choice is yours.

If you were moved by this, please support independent media free from corporate influence and fully defending the Great Lakes Basin region. Links below.

Watch our Podcast: Rights of the Lakes – Episode 1: Who Defends the Great Lakes? Be sure to Subscribe, Like, and Share to help us reach more people.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

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In this episode, we speak with Djuli (Julie) Lomboy about her prayer walk along the Columbia River (Imaɬ)

Djuli Lomboy is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde of Klickitat, Wasco, Chinookan, Molalla, Klamath, Filipino, German, French Canadian and Scandinavian descent. She walked nearly the whole length of the lower river, 300 miles from Astoria to Hanford, starting in June and finishing in July.

We discuss Djuli’s motivation for embarking on this walk, the difficulties she faced along the way, the nuclear contamination of the Hanford nuclear site, other threats facing the river and the riparian communities, the spiritual basis of cultural transformation, and the disconnection of modern society from the natural world.

The world’s greatest rivers are among the most degraded ecosystems. The Colorado River, sucked dry for agriculture in California and the Southwest, no longer reaches the ocean. The Mississippi is so toxified with agricultural chemicals that the Gulf of Mexico at its mouth is lifeless across 7,000 square miles. The Yangtze is now home to the world’s largest dam and not to the Chinese paddlefish and Yangtze river dolphin — both extinct.

And, of course, the Imaɬ (or Columbia). A being as vast as the Columbia is hard to kill. She is still alive. Yet she is dying. Year after year, her waters grow warmer and more difficult for native fish to survive in. Her salmon are dying, with fewer and fewer wild fish, the illusion of their persistence only maintained through a vast network of fish hatcheries, factory farms where eggs are raised into fish like cattle on a feedlot and released for anglers and commercial fishermen to gather into their nets. Her sturgeon, her steelhead, her freshwater mussels and lamprey and all of her inhabitants are dwindling. More than 60 large dams on her mainstem and tributaries shackle her. Her watershed has been deforested, urbanized, poisoned. The soils of her slopes, formerly nurturing wild ecologies, now erode under mechanized plows, carrying chemical fertilizers and pesticides into her waters. Millions of acres of her lands have been buried under concrete and asphalt, a veil of bitumen (tar sands). Wind turbines strike her ferruginous hawks and golden eagles out of the sky. Nuclear waste seeps into her waters at Hanford, [perhaps the most contaminated site in the world] where the plutonium that was used in the atomic bombings of Japan was enriched. Data centers take ever more of her flow, stealing the cold, life-sustaining waters that come from her mountains and necessary for her health and returning it superheated and toxified with chemicals. Up and down her length, industry has had its way.

She is in a cage, and the bars close in tighter and tighter every year.

Yet in those places where people make room for her to heal, she has done so, at least in part. Along the White Salmon, the removal of a dam led to salmon returning where none had been seen for decades. This is essential. But unless the destruction is stopped — not just stopped, but reversed — then there is only one end for her.

There are multiple new nuclear reactors being planned along the Columbia River, most financed by tech companies seeking power for additional data center construction. Fuel for these reactors, if they are built, would likely be sourced from uranium mines in the American southwest, which have left behind a toxic legacy (an estimated 15,000+ abandoned uranium mines in the southwest have never been cleaned up) and have disproportionately harmed the Diné, Hopi, and other regional tribes.

This conversation is an important reflection on personal action, prayer and internal change, the destruction of rivers — the veins of our planet — and more. We thank you for listening.

Links and Resources

• Hanford Challenge - leading watchdog of the Hanford cleanup

• List of dams in the Columbia River watershed

• Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde website

• Prayer Walk on The Imaɬ (Columbia River) - video recorded by Djuli in advance of the walk

• Past, Present, and Future Dead: The Nippon Dynawave industrial accident, Coffin Rock, and ecological collapse

• Impacts of noise pollution on wildlife

• Impacts of roads on wildlife

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

• Apple Podcasts

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• And anywhere else you get your podcasts (click here to find this podcast via your preferred app)

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

Curious to know more?

• Contact CELDF at https://celdf.org/contact/

• Visit CELDF at https://celdf.org/

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• Join the CELDF email list at https://secure.everyaction.com/TdVG-tdqbEW229YMqwOaYQ2

Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

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By Kai Huschke

In American culture, wetlands are akin to the “redheaded stepchild” of ecosystems. That antiquated and demeaning phrase reflects negative cultural attitudes, destructive behaviors, and harm-permitting legal structures regarding wetlands.

From the vantage of industrialists, wetlands are a nuisance which should be filled in for the sake of progress or destroyed when they are in an inappropriate location. These actions have resulted in the United States losing 50% of its original wetlands over the last 200 years.

On a global scale, planet Earth has lost 22% of its wetlands in just the last 50 years.

Why do wetlands matter? Wetlands are like the liver and kidneys for the planet. They store more carbon than any other ecosystem, filter and purify water, buffer against the impacts of flooding and wildfire, and host forty percent of all plants and animals by providing abundant food and lush habitats.

For the last five years, CELDF has been collaborating with an international coalition to advance legal rights of wetlands. As with other rights of nature efforts, this one is focused on changing our culture’s abusive relationship with wetlands to one based on right-relationship in order to halt wetland loss and restore those which have been destroyed.

Among a number of outcomes from this collaboration is a recent paper published in the peer-reviewed journal “Wetlands,” the journal of wetland science. The paper is titled “How Implementing the Rights of Wetlands Provides Benefits to People and Wetlands: Relationships, Rights, Responsibilities, Experiences, and Actions” and was authored by Gillian Davies, Ritesh Kumar, M. Siobhan Fennessy, Nick Davidson, Dave Pritchard, Matthew Simpson, Priyanie Amerasinghe, William R. Moomaw, Erin Okuno, Bethanie Walder, Chaturangi Wickramaratne, Rebecca Woodward, and myself, Kai Huschke.

The article discusses what rights for wetlands need to be recognized, the responsibilities of humans towards and with wetlands, the legal structures necessary to effectively implement and enforce wetland’s rights, and examples of the rights of wetlands in practice.

Here are two excerpts from the article:

“Existing approaches to conservation, restoration, and sustainable development have failed to shift the people-nature relationship or halt consumption-oriented human behaviour, which has led us to the brink of catastrophic climate destabilisation and brought on the 6th mass extinction (Cowie et al. 2022; Leakey and Lewin 1995). All of this is happening more rapidly than anticipated (Ceballos et al. 2015; IPCC 2023). We have little time left to change course and we must act now.”

“Upholding wetlands’ rights is more likely to occur when wetlands are understood as socio-ecological systems (Kumar et al. 2023), and when communities and individuals are engaged early in the process of planning and implementing wetland management strategies, as long-term success and sustainability are most likely when local communities are engaged and steward the wetland over time (McDonald and Gillespie 2024). As communities recognise themselves as members of the web of life and guardians of living nature, rather than owners of natural resources, they are empowered to become powerful defenders of wetlands’ legal rights (Reed et al. 2021).”

CELDF is proud to be involved in this work to protect the rights of wetlands and we hope it proves useful to communities, attorneys, activists, and lawmakers around the world who are working every day to defend their local wetlands from threats.

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For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. This op-ed was written by CELDF’s Tish O’Dell.

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As a community organizer and environmental “activist” for over 15 years, I have often used the metaphor that “we are spinning on a hamster wheel” when describing our environmental laws and policies as well as the bigger system of government that we have all been born into.

That phrase has gotten mixed reactions from people. Some nod in agreement without really knowing how true it is, and some have gotten angry, telling me to stop calling them lab rats. The truth is not always easy to hear, let alone accept – I understand that from my own experiences.

I got involved in the Community Rights and Rights of Nature movements when I learned that fracking for natural gas and oil was happening in my own community. Like many others back in 2009, I started researching what fracking was. What I found wasn’t good:

• Toxins being released into the air,

• Poisonous chemicals being injected underground,

• Water withdrawals that would drain local water sources,

• Farmland being bought or leased for mineral “rights” at unprecedented pace,

• Tax incentives and abatements subsidizing all these harms, and

• In the end, the community would not even benefit with lower energy costs!

The fracking boom was happening to communities all over Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Colorado — anywhere the fossil fuel industry sniffed out deposits for profits, and people were angry. My neighbors and I tried to use the tools we had been taught the people had at their disposal in our supposed great democracy “by and for” the people.

In a nutshell, we went to local and state electeds, we went to regulatory agencies and institutions like the EPA and Health Department, and we sought out environmental organizations to help us. After contacting the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), we even tried using the citizen initiative process to prohibit fracking. The people voted yes for the fracking ban and then two drilling companies (not from my community) sued to have our democratically enacted law overturned for violating their corporate “rights” to profit. The court agreed with them, overturned their law and also reminded us that the drillers had a legal permit to frack our community. Democracy and its people be damned..

Even after this all went down, I convinced myself that it was my/our failure for not getting more people clued into the harms of fracking, and that if more communities would take action like we had, the right kind of change would come. So, I started working and organizing in many other communities across Ohio and then in other states which found themselves in the same position... about to be royally fracked! The same cycle was repeated over and over. The people in the communities had no voice and no authority within the system to stop fracking and the harms it brought to both the people and the environment where they lived.

Some communities, like New York, touted “bans on fracking” and claimed success. However, they didn’t ban the use of fracked gas in the state, and so my community (along with many others) was sacrificed as a resource colony to make sure Times Square stayed lit 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. No offense to New Yorkers or Times Square, just pointing out a hard truth of the world we all find ourselves in. It is how the system is set up to work and we are all more deeply connected than we may realize.

Other communities turned to regulations. People convinced themselves that if they had further setbacks from schools and homes, somehow toxic water wouldn’t seep through the underground cracks that the fracking explosions caused and seep into natural water sources. And the air couldn’t possibly blow airborne chemicals and toxins from evaporating waste pits, from hundreds of trucks hauling chemicals and waste back and forth, or from hundreds of compressor stations pushing the fracked oil/gas through pipelines. Or that the volume of water needed to frack one well, anywhere between 1.5 and 16 million gallons depending on the geographic location, somehow wouldn’t totally deplete the aquifers, rivers and streams if we just had those “stricter regulations.” Talk about delusional thinking.

It became all too clear that we the people were indeed acting like hamsters spinning in a wheel. All the actions and tools which we grew up believing would protect us and our communities wouldn’t do so; they were just diversions to keep us occupied as the government and the fracking industry drilled well after well.

Now, it is 2026 and communities are up in arms again over an issue that causes many of the same harms fracking does: data centers. I get calls and emails every week from communities all over the country with people sharing issues they are upset about :

• Farmland is being purchased at unprecedented rates

• Massive water withdrawals from the community drinking water source

• Air pollution and toxins being emitted

• Astronomical energy usage and increasing rates for the community

• Chemicals being used and waste produced

• Tax abatements & subsidies given to these mega tech corporations

Some days all I can hear in my head is the Aerosmith song, Same Old Song and Dance. In case you don’t know the lyrics, the song is about how the “justice system” does not apply justice equally to all of us. They weren’t singing about fracking or data centers, but they may as well have been. Whether we use metaphors like spinning in a hamster wheel or cliches like “same old song and dance”, we can’t deny that this is how the system is set up to work. It is set up to protect industry, capitalism and the profits of a few and not the people and environment where the extractive projects occur. People fighting coal and mineral mining, mining waste disposal, big agriculture, industrial energy of any kind, clear cutting of forests, plastic pollution, etc. are all trapped in the same hamster wheel and yet we approach each of these individual issues the same way we did decades before.

We must jump out. This will take facing hard truths, like the fact that holding up signs in front of public meetings, writing letters, and giving testimony to regulatory agencies won’t protect you and your community. Once we can begin reckoning with these truths, maybe we can turn toward each other and turn away from the existing system. Maybe we can free our imaginations and creativity to experiment with new ideas. Maybe we can work together in community to build grassroots power, take direct action, disrupt unjust systems, and resist corporate encroachment rather than jumping back into the hamster wheel. Maybe we can start being effective.

My colleagues and I at CELDF have some ideas and would love to talk with you to share our experience and to listen to yours. If nothing else, we can be here to soften your landing when you finally decide to jump off that hamster wheel.

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Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. This week we bring you a special message from CELDF’s staff.

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Many notable revolutionaries in history have been lawyers. There is a simple reason for this: lawyers understand how the system works. We see the truth. And once seen, the illegitimacy of oppressive legal systems must be fought.

CELDF has more than three decades of experience in the unjust American legal system. We’ve seen it all: blatant corruption, the elevation of corporate rights, suppression of democracy, miscarriage of justice, and a system that protects the wealthy and powerful over people and nature.

None of this is an accident. If you understand the law as we do, you know that this is deliberate. It is built into our legal system.

We see this in the small Pennsylvania community of Grant Township, where we have been working for a decade to assist the people in fighting off toxic fracking waste. We won the battle — but the corporation at hand is still suing us to this day. Once again, we’ve been in court in recent months, and there’s a chance the fracking company could financially destroy us. The law is on the side of the polluters.

We see it in Arizona, where we continue to support folks resisting construction of the border wall which not only threatens human life, but is destroying watersheds, old-growth trees, and cutting off essential wildlife migration corridors. Dozens of laws — which were never very strong in the first place, yet which provided some protections — have been entirely waived to enable this: the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Elites can ignore the law when they choose to.

We see it in Ohio and New York and elsewhere where we are working with communities facing data centers and fighting for the rights of their community and the rights of nature. Many states have banned rights of nature entirely, outlawing democracy when it clashes with corporate power.

Several weeks ago, we interviewed historian Tad Stoermer who confirmed what CELDF staff already knew: this injustice is fundamental to the U.S. legal system and was deliberately incorporated since the founding of this nation. This is why revolution and various forms of disruption are not just justified, but essential.

We’re working to build the movement for this transformation, and we would like to extend a big thank you to everyone who made a donation during our mid-year 50/20 fundraising campaign. The “50” was for the $50,000 we targeted to raise and the “20” for the number of new donors to CELDF we were looking to welcome in. As the last day of the campaign faded away, we had raised under $40,000 and brought on a handful of new donors — far better than nothing, but frankly, we need more support.

Beyond the dollars needed to run CELDF, please keep tracking what is happening with the communities we are supporting, the content coming out here on the Truth + Reckoning Substack page, and the upcoming live trainings on resistance organizing, citizen assemblies, and the legal landscape for those engaging in direct action. If you haven’t checked it out yet, we’ve highlighted more of what we’ve been up to in the Declaring Disruption mid-year impact report.

Making a donation to CELDF can happen anytime, and provides us with the means to support frontline communities with organizing, legal, and educational services they can’t get anywhere else. Please send in a check for $100, include CELDF in your estate planning, or jump in online with a $15 a month donation.

Thank you very much.

Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

The Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government

by J. Allen Smith, 1930

“The attitude of the well-to-do classes toward local self-government was profoundly influenced by the extension of the suffrage…the removal of property qualifications tended to divest the old ruling class of its control in local affairs. Thereafter, property owners regarded with distrust local government, in which they were outnumbered by the newly enfranchised voters. The fact that they may have believed in a large measure of local self-government when there were suitable restrictions on the right to vote and to hold public office, did not prevent them from advocating an increase in state control after the adoption of manhood suffrage.”

Chapter IX

Centralization and Popular Control

The growth of centralized control in the United States has been rapid, especially since the Civil War. In less than a century and a half, a group of loosely organized communities have been welded into what is essentially a national state. This has been brought about largely through federal control of the constitution-interpreting power. …the early struggle between the advocates and opponents of centralization was over the right of the federal Supreme Court to act as the final interpreter of the Constitution of the United States. The acquisition of this power by the federal judiciary made the general government supreme. Thenceforth, it determined its own authority and that of the states as well. A foundation was thus laid for the assumption of powers by the federal government which might in time strip the local subdivisions of all authority and make the general government national in all but name. This process of centralization was retarded in the first half of the nineteenth century by the states’ rights sentiment; but since the Civil War there has been a marked acceleration in the growth of federal authority.

There are two ways in which the courts have contributed toward the centralization of political power in the hands of the general government. Both depend upon the right of the Supreme Court to act as the final interpreter of the federal Constitution. By the simple process of interpretation the Court has read into the Constitution a larger grant of power to the general government than was originally intended or previously recognized as properly belonging to it. In this way, there has come about a vast accession of federal authority. The other way in which the judiciary has aided in the growth of federal power at the expense of the state has been indirect and no doubt often unintended. The Constitution denies to the states certain powers, as in the provision concerning laws “impairing the obligation of contracts” and in the Fourteenth Amendment. Through the interpretation which the judicial branch of the federal government has placed upon these provisions, the power of the states as regulative and protective agencies has been seriously impaired. Moreover, by depriving the state governments of the power to enact much urgently needed legislation, the Court has compelled the people to look to the general government for relief. The immediate purpose of this limitation of state authority by judicial construction was probably in most instances to prevent the contemplated regulation; but the final result of this restriction on the powers of the states has been a compensating increase in the regulative authority of the federal government. The people, thwarted in their effort to secure adequate state regulation, have turned to the general government for protection, since its powers are not abridged by the Fourteenth Amendment or the constitutional provision concerning laws “impairing the obligation of contract.”

There is another aspect of the movement toward centralization, which has to do with the relation between state and local government. Just as the general government has in recent decades been rapidly extending its powers at the expense of the states, so have the various states themselves been taking more and more power away from the purely local governmental units.

Generally speaking, conservatives favor a centralized form of government while those who believe in popular control wish to keep political power largely in the hands of local authorities. This was true even at the beginning of our history under the Constitution. It was perfectly logical for Jefferson with his democratic viewpoint to desire a weak general, and strong local, government, as it was for Hamilton with his pronounced aristocratic bias to be the apostle of centralization.

The liberal political philosophy of the eighteenth century was fundamentally opposed to centralized control. The very essence of the philosophy---the doctrine of individual liberty---could be reconciled only with a decentralized form of government. The belief in self-determination for the individual was based on the assumption that he was better able to judge concerning his own interests and needs than was any external authority. The theory of individual liberty recognized that in any properly organized society self-determination was subject to certain limitations and restraints imposed in the interest of the general welfare. But in the choice of governmental agencies to protect the public against the abuse of individual liberty, the principle of self-determination required that political power should never be removed farther from those affected by its exercise than the extent of the interests involved made necessary. According to this principle, local government should have as much power and the central government as little as might be consistent with the safeguarding of the general public interests. Collective determination by governmental agencies would then be so exercised that the individual would have the largest possible influence in the imposition of necessary restraints on his liberty. To centralize political power would endanger individual liberty by placing all authority in those governmental organs farthest removed from effective control.

The opponents of popular control were not always in favor of centralized government. Intelligent conservatives at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth could, and many did, consistently believe in a large measure of decentralization. In fact, the main reason for conservative advocacy of centralization at the present time did not apply under the condidions which then existed. Local government was not then in the hands of the popular majority. The suffrage and officeholding qualifications of that time were a sufficient guaranty of the predominance of the property holding class in local affairs. And, inasmuch as the popular majority was effectively subordinated in local government, a centralized governmental organization was not necessary for the protection of property rights. Moreover, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the existence of slavery in the South made that section of the country pronounced in its support of state as opposed to central authority. The emphasis on state rights throughout the South during the pre-Civil War period was due, however, less to a belief in the theory of decentralized government than to the fear that federal authority might not be sufficiently representative of the slaveholding interests.

In the growth of governmental systems, the distribution of powers between central and local authorities is more likely to be determined by expediency than by the desire for logical consistency. Practice may be, and of course often is, determined by theory, but when the interests of the dominant class cannot be reconciled with generally accepted doctrines, theory is certain to yield to practical considerations.

The early liberal view which associated individual liberty and adequate popular restraint on political power with the decentralized type of political organization is no longer predominant. More and more, the people are coming to accept the point of view implied in centralization of political authority. A number of influences have combined to bring about this change of attitude, chief among which has been the desire of the more conservative classes to safeguard the country in so far as possible against the supposed dangers of democracy, by removing political affairs as far as possible from the danger of popular control.

The attitude of the well-to-do classes toward local self-government was profoundly influenced by the extension of the suffrage…the removal of property qualifications tended to divest the old ruling class of its control in local affairs. Thereafter, property owners regarded with distrust local government, in which they were outnumbered by the newly enfranchised voters. The fact that they may have believed in a large measure of local self-government when there were suitable restrictions on the right to vote and to hold public office, did not prevent them from advocating an increase in state control after the adoption of manhood suffrage.

American legalistic theory has from the beginning of our history as a nation reflected the view that the state legislature is the source of all legislative powers both state and local, and that all local powers are conferred by the legislature and may be withdrawn at will. Local government, according to this conception, is a creature of the state government and, except for such rights as a granted by the state constitution, owes its existence and its powers to the state legislature. This view of the powers of the state legislature was, of course, merely an application of the state government of the English theory of parliamentary supremacy. After the extension of the suffrage the influence of this theory on local government was supplemented by judicial fear of the consequences of local democracy. Not only was all legislative power centralized in the state government, but the effort to decentralize it by constitutional amendment was largely nullified by hostile judicial interpretation. Our state courts have, in fact, persistently opposed local autonomy. Even the so-called home rule provisions included in some or our state constitutions to ensure municipal self-government have been largely ineffective, owing to the judicial construction placed upon them.

The refusal of the courts to recognize local self-government as a right has compelled dependence upon, and developed a habit of looking to, the state government for the exercise of many powers that ought to be under strictly local control. That we should distinguish more clearly than we have in the past between matters of general and matters of purely local concern is obvious to anyone who has given much attention to the question of political organization. The rapid increase in governmental functions during recent decades, the constantly growing volume of public business, and the consequent inability of the state government to deal in a satisfactory manner with the great number and variety of interests, general and local, for which it is responsible under any scheme of centralized control, make it necessary to relieve the state government of such functions as a purely local in character. It is clearly in the interest of economy and efficiency to leave the decision of all questions of local policy to the community directly concerned, subject, of course, as every exercise of local authority always is and of necessity must be, to such general supervision as may be needed to ensure adequate protection of the larger general interests.

If local self-government is to have any real existence in the country, we must find some way of securing, at the hands of legislatures and courts, recognition of the fact that cities are local communities with distinctly local interests, and that, as such, they are making only a reasonable demand when they ask that they be allowed to control their local affairs in their own way. Just where the line should be drawn separating local affairs from those subject to state regulation is a question about which there is at present much difference of opinion. But although it may be difficult to determine in some cases whether state or local control is the proper policy, there are some important functions so clearly local in character that he propriety of leaving them in the hands of local authorities is obvious. In matters of this sort, the policy to be pursued should be determined by the city or community concerned, the state having only such supervisory power on appeal from local determination as may be necessary for the protection of public and private rights.

The status of local government in the United States, though largely due to legal theory as it has been developed and applied by the courts, may be regarded as in some measure the consequence of purely historical facts. In continental Europe many cities had an independent existence before the states of which they are now a part were formed. In the process of political evolution, consequently, the extension of central control over cities has not entirely obscured the fact that the city was an original political corporation, and as such possessed and exercised powers and functions suited to its needs. The tendency is to regard it as having, by virtue of its existence as a municipal corporation, and independently of any grant of powers by the central or state government, such authority as may be needed for the exercise of municipal functions. The question is not so much what powers have been denied to it by the central authority. In America, on the other hand, the state as a political corporation antedates the city. It is in some measure due to this fact that the city is regarded by the courts as legally the creature of the state legislature which has granted it incorporation; that it has no clearly defined sphere of activity in which the state government may not intrude; that such powers as it may be permitted to exercise are delegated by the state government; and that, in exercising these, it is in legal theory acting, not as a local political corporation with original powers of self-government, but as a mere agent of the state government.

In America the state is the only local unit having original powers of self-government. Nevertheless, the state is a purely arbitrary division, while the city, on the other hand, is a natural and organic unit with interests peculiarly its own. For this reason, self-government is a question of supreme importance to cities---more important for the adequate protection of their interests than is self-government for the state.

No state government is competent to determine questions of local policy. This is particularly true where the state legislature is so apportioned as to over represent rural at the expense of urban communities. As our state governments are now organized, it is not infrequently the case that cities have very inadequate representation in the state legislature and are, therefore, at a great disadvantage as compared with the rural sections of the state. [in the 21^st century, the balance has reversed, so that urban centers effectively set policy for rural communities. Keep this in mind while reading further on this point – Ben] This disproportionately small representation of urban population has not only facilitated the assumption of local functions by the state government, by depriving urban communities of the power to offer effective resistance to this extension of state authority, but it has also made the state legislature less competent to deal with local affairs. But a legislature even when properly apportioned is not, and can not be, representative of the various local interests of the state. It has a representative character in the true and democratic sense of that term only in so far as it deals with matters which concern the state as a whole. In all legislation relating to municipal affairs, rural members are politically responsible to no one. What interest, for example, do the people of a purely agricultural community have in legislation relating to municipal utilities? The people of such a community have no problem of this kind, it is not a matter which concerns them, and the part which their representative may take in the enactment of measures of this sort may not attract even so much as a passing notice. With respect to such legislation he can vote and as he pleases without the risk of incurring the criticism or displeasure of his constituents.

Centralization of power has not only made government irresponsible in so far as implied powers are exercised, but it tends to make popular control ineffective even in the exercise of functions which democratic theory clearly assigns. The development of present day social and economic life has so greatly increased the demand for governmental regulation that even under a decentralized form of political organization, the volume of business entrusted to governmental agencies is too large and too complex for the public to follow intelligently. To load a government down with a multitude of functions which it is not fitted to perform, tends to further confusion and renders it a less efficient instrument for the exercise of those functions which necessarily concern it.

The extension of the suffrage was followed, as we have seen, by a marked increase of state interference in local affairs. The underlying cause of this movement to centralize authority in the state government was the fear of municipal democracy. But the extension of the suffrage, so much dreaded by conservatives, did not after all make municipal government responsible in any effective way to the majority of the voters. Organized in many instances on the check and balance plan, like our state and federal governments, municipal government was a very unsatisfactory instrument of democracy. In response, however, to a popular demand for reform in the first and second decades of the twentieth century, cities were being reorganized in accordance with democratic principles. It is an interesting coincidence that just at this time a fresh impetus should have been given to the movement toward state control of local affairs. It was urged that local control of such matters as public utilities was inadequate and unsatisfactory. But the fact that this objection was not raised until after the movement to democratize local government had begun probably indicates to some extent, at least, both its true source and real purpose. Though ostensibly designed to give cities more effective protection against public utility abuses, it did not originate in any popular demand from urban communities. The initiative in this matter, however cleverly it may have assumed the guise of a popular movement, came largely from the interests which were opposed to effective regulation by either state or local authorities.

Satisfactory regulation is not, as seems to be implied in much of the discussion favoring the substitution of state for local control, merely a question of placing this function in the hands of that governmental agency which has most power and prestige behind it. The power to exercise a particular function is of little consequence, unless there is an adequate guaranty that such power will be exercised in the interest of the local public for whose protection it is designed. It may be regarded as a well established principle of political science that to ensure a satisfactory and efficient exercise of a given power, it should be lodged in some governmental agency directly responsible to the constituency affected. Here we find the weak point in the policy of centralizing control in the state government. A state agency, theoretically responsible to the entire state, may be safely entrusted with powers which concern the state as a whole; but when a state government assumes powers that are essentially local, it is not responsible in the sense that it is when it exercises powers in which the state as a whole is directly and vitally interested. The community or communities affected by its exercise of local authority lack the power to control it. It is for this reason that the extension of state control over local affairs fails to meet the requirements of democracy.

The assumption of local powers by the state government has greatly increased the opportunity for corruption in American politics. Advocates of centralization, however, have entirely ignored this aspect of the question. As a matter of fact, they have even defended the extension of state control over local affairs on the ground that it tends to remove the main sources of corruption in municipal politics. This argument was advanced in support of the recent public service commission movement by which cities have throughout the United States been largely deprived of the power to regulate local utilities. The contention that such a transfer of power would eliminate certain sources of corruption in local politics may be admitted, without conceding that it would be beneficial either to the local public or to the state at large. It is obvious that interests seeking privileges at the expense of the people would not be tempted to corrupt a local government which had power to grant them. Instead of doing away with corruption, however, it would merely transfer that corruption to a larger political arena. And when a state government as such assumes and exercises purely local functions, it is much more liable to corruption than is a local government directly responsible to the local public. This is, no doubt, one important reason why public utility interests favor state control.

Democracy, in any true sense of the term, is possible only when there is the largest practicable measure of local self-government. This is evident from the fact that the problem of establishing and maintaining government responsible to the people is least difficult in the small local subdivisions. The difficulties in the way of effective popular control increase with the size of the governmental unit. Not only is the citizen’s vote more effective in a local that in a state or national election, but the officials are more directly under his influence. Nor is his influence in the case of local government confined to election day. The town or city hall is near at hand and local officials may be easily reached by such as wish to voice approval or disapproval of official conduct. By reason of this proximity of the officials to the public they represent, local government is more likely to be influenced by the opinion of all important classes in the population, the poor as well as the rich, than is either state or federal government. The poor are, of course, always at a disadvantage as compared with the rich in making their influence felt, even in the case of local government. But the farther those entrusted with political power are removed from the people they are supposed to represent, the more likely they are to fall under the influence of organized wealth. So-called representative government is most considerate of those interests which keep constantly in touch with it through an effective organization. The large business interests have long recognized the fact that their profits are directly affected by governmental policies, and have consequently used the power of such organization to obtain desired legislation or to defeat measures to which they are opposed.

The farmers of the country, though representing more votes and more wealth employed in production than all other capital owning groups combined [no longer – Ben], have failed to exercise their due share of political influence through lack of effective cooperation for this purpose. This situation is due in part, no doubt, to the difficulty of securing united effort where large numbers of people are involved. […and the crushing of the Populist Movement by capital in the 1870-80s – Ben] Moreover, from the nature of their occupation, farmers are more individualistic than either business men or wage earners.

The influence of the average individual upon governmental policies may be regarded as negligible inasmuch as his interest in pending legislation is slight. He may think of a proposed measure as beneficial or harmful, but in either case the effects which he anticipates are not likely to be of sufficient importance to him to urge him to political activity. Generally speaking, the effort which he is disposed to make depends more largely upon the way in which he conceives his individual interests to be affected, than upon any consideration of what may be called the general welfare. The laboring man and the person of small means are as individuals unable to exert any appreciable influence over a government as far removed from the people generally as our federal government is. Only by organization and cooperation is it possible for them to protect their interests, and this is very difficult to bring about excepts where much in the way of personal or property rights is believed to be at stake. This probably explains why wage earners in many industries have been more effectively organized than have farmers. Their personal rights have been so clearly endangered by organized capital that the organization of labor was seen to be necessary for defensive purposes. The farmer was slower to respond to this tendency, not only because of his more pronounced individualism, but also because his need of organization was less urgent. [sic]

The preponderance of political influence exercised by capitalistic groups is only in part due to the superior capacity of business men for effective cooperation; it is in large measure due to the highly centralized economic control which has become the rule in capitalistic industries. To some extent, large scale organization may indicate cooperative ability, but the highly centralized control which now prevails in so many industries is no more the fruit of economic cooperation than the highly centralized state is the expression of political democracy. Indeed, cooperation and centralization are inherently opposed, inasmuch as the former implies diffusion of power and would secure the necessary unification of effort without resort to compulsion.

The public interests are likely to receive less consideration at the hands of our national legislature than important special interests receive, for the simple reason that there is no adequate, continuing, active, popular support for the former, while the latter are always represented by an active and aggressive lobby. The purely financial interest of the people as a whole in a proposed measure may be and usually is much greater than that of the particular group that is seeking to have it enacted at the expense of the public; but because the former is a widely diffused interest it is usually unrepresented, while the latter, because it is highly concentrated and more intense, exerts an influence out of all proportion to its real economic and social importance. In industries where ownership and control is highly centralized, the interest of business on politics is certain to be greatest. In fact, it is the desire for power that has been one of the most important factors in bringing about centralized control of industry. This has not only greatly increased business influence in the field of politics, but has strengthened its power to dictate terms to labor and prices to the consumer.

To make centralization of economic power acceptable to the public, it has been represented as a means of achieving efficiency and economy in production. It has, moreover, always been assumed by the defenders of centralized industry that such benefits as are thereby achieved accrue in large measure to the general public. As a matter of fact, however, the concentration of economic control was no more designed to augment the wealth and income of the masses than the centralization of political power was designed to increase popular control.

An intelligent democrat [here the author refers not to political party but to orientation towards self-determination] might be inclined to wonder how anyone could believe that centralization of economic and political power would tend to bring about a diffusion of economic and political well-being. But many who have a sentimental attachment to democracy have no adequate comprehension of the political philosophy upon which government by the people is based. If any considerable portion of the general public had all along possessed this intelligence, the sophistry and misrepresentation which have always had so large a place in the discussion and literature of politics would have been much less effective in misleading public opinion.

A highly centralized economic system is inherently opposed to decentralization in the government. If those who control industry are to be free to use this power for their own purposes, they must control the state, since political democracy would definitely subordinate economic power to restraints imposed for the protection of the public. Moreover, large scale industry, engaged as it is in enterprises that are national and even international in scope, is impatient of the diversity in laws and policies which is inevitable under any system of local regulation.

Today, the U.S. government is using the 250th anniversary as an opportunity to peddle propaganda in service of nationalistic fascism. As a law firm which has been educating communities about the truth of U.S. “freedom” for thirty years, we’re here to set the record straight.

Welcome to CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective. In this episode, we speak with historian and author Tad Stoermer.

Tad is author of the just-released book “A Resistance History of the United States.” He joined CELDF’s Education Director Ben Price and Consulting Director Tish O’Dell in a conversation about what resistance is and needs to be in this 21^st century revolutionary moment.

We discuss how the American system of government isn’t broken, but rather its been fixed to work as it does from the beginning. We talk honestly about how protest does not equal resistance, and how institutional mechanisms and cultural forces routinely interrupt real resistance before it gets started.

We talk about the importance of debunking nationalist mythology about the nation’s founding. We asked Tad Stoermer “What exactly did Americans gain by waging a war against British oppression, and was it really a revolution?” You may be surprised by Tad’s answer.

For folks who are intrigued by CELDF’s America 250 series, Tad Stoermer is the public historian for you. He is the author of A Resistance History of the United States, just released on June 2, 2026, and A Public History of the American Revolution, scheduled for publication in 2027.

Tad is one of the most widely followed public historians in the world, reaching millions each month with his YouTube Resistance History Updates, Morning Reports, Constitutional Myths, Public History Practice, America 250 and Resistance History playlists, to name a few.

Links and Resources

• Tad’s Substack

• Tad on YouTube: Is Violence Part of Resistance?: No River, No Flood

• To buy Tad’s book, visit Penguin Random House online or contact your favorite independent bookseller.

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocketcasts

• YouTube (video and audio)

• And anywhere else you get your podcasts (click here to find this podcast via your preferred app)

This episode can be viewed on YouTube here:

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

Curious to know more?

• Contact CELDF at https://celdf.org/contact/

• Visit CELDF at https://celdf.org/

• Support CELDF at https://celdf.org/donate/

• Join the CELDF email list at https://secure.everyaction.com/TdVG-tdqbEW229YMqwOaYQ2

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For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

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Radical Visions: Reconnecting Academia and Nature, held in March, was CELDF’s second truth, reckoning, and right-relationship convergence (TRRR).

The two-day gathering was aimed at advancing community resistance and resilience by digging into the deeper systems that shape how we learn, how we teach, how we act, and who our education ultimately serves.

An intentionally intergenerational, transdisciplinary and immersive experience., students and faculty from several educational institutions in the greater Cleveland area gave powerful testimony on how the current system is set up to prepare them for corporate labor needs rather than for critical thinking, creativity or civic power.

Through testimony, art and roundtable conversations on topics about connections to local food systems and technology and AI and the harms to not just the environment, but to the physical and mental harms to the students of the future it became clear that no one on the university campuses were talking about these issues, let alone connecting them to the larger system.

What Radical Visions revealed is that the current environment, culture, and business of academia has led to profound student alienation, disengagement and anxiety. The framework of educational nurturing no longer supports deeply intertwined connections with nature, place and humanity, but has been supplanted with “information management”, replaceable “skills” and superficial “credentials”.

This convergence was not just an academic or climate event, but it was a reckoning with the structures that disconnect us from each other, from our histories and from the natural world.

Radical Visions was a direct offshoot from the first CELDF truth, reckoning, and right-relationship with the Great Lakes held in 2023/2024. CELDF’s consulting director began meeting with a few students in July of 2025 to conceive of, plan for, and create this convergence.

And to help expose many others to the TRRR framework, CELDF is working on a TRRR Guidebook as a resource for communities to use as a model for community building, in spite of the single issues and labels that have divided us for too long. What both these gatherings highlighted was that intentional divisions through politics, cultural labels and even educational institutions, were keeping people in place-based communities fragmented when in reality there are a lot of common frustrations and shared values.

The TRRR model is a way to help people figure out ways to connect and re-establish community to work together on creating resilient, healthy communities into the future.

So much of what CELDF does is about relationships. Through those relationships, connections are made and actions ensue. Besides funding needed to develop the TRRR Guidebook into a powerful tool, CELDF also needs your dollars to keep reaching out, making new connections, and nurturing relationships.

The video of this event can also be found on YouTube:

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocketcasts

• YouTube (video and audio)

• And anywhere else you get your podcasts (click here to find this podcast via your preferred app)

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

Curious to know more?

• Contact CELDF at https://celdf.org/contact/

• Visit CELDF at https://celdf.org/

• Support CELDF at https://celdf.org/donate/

• Join the CELDF email list at https://secure.everyaction.com/TdVG-tdqbEW229YMqwOaYQ2

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“America 250,” the official government celebration of the semiquincentennial of the United States, is brought to you by the following corporate sponsors.

That’s not a joke.

It’s the reality of corporate power in the USA.

America250, the official national organization created by Congress to celebrate and commemorate the founding of the United States, is sponsored by Alaska Airlines, Amazon, Anheuser-Busch, Boeing, BP, Chick-fil-A, Citi, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Coinbase, Comcast NBCUniversal, Cummins, FedEx, General Mills, Goldman Sachs, John Deere, Johnson & Johson, JPMorganChase, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, New York Stock Exchange, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, Proctor & Gamble, ScottsMiracle-Gro, Starbucks, T-Mobile, Target, UFC, Walmart, and many others.

From a revolution supposedly built on throwing off distant elite rulers — including corporations like the British East India Company whose tea was famously thrown into Boston Harbor — to a nation dominated by homegrown elites and a celebration of “freedom” brought to you by weapons manufacturers, genocide peddlers, global warming criminals, agribusiness and fake food giants, and surveillance corporations — the irony knows no bounds.

July 4th, 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Contrary to the official story, it was not a foregone conclusion that independence from Britain would organically evolve, thirteen years later, to the formation of the United States of America.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, with its condemnation of top-down governance, inspired people in the colonies to join in the revolt. For a time, between 1776 and 1789, common people — those who were not slaves, Native Americans, or women — were supported in their belief that liberty from the empire would lead to equality and justice in an alliance of thirteen independent nations. What was born instead was an apartheid nation with aspirations to empire guided by men of wealth instead of men with aristocratic titles. And while people have struggled mightily over the intervening centuries for equality under the law, we find ourselves 250 years in, facing another counter-revolution of the opulent against the majority.

It is in this context that the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, CELDF, has organized its own historical truth-telling program in response to the reactionary ancestor-worshiping propaganda being celebrated by the federal government and its corporate partners.

Called “America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective,” CELDF’s program incorporates essays, live streaming events, podcasts, and videos, all aimed at providing a surprising and historically-accurate counterpoint to the lies that pass for American history.

“This series lets us understand that the sum total of all the legends about the men who established the USA amount to false memories created by 250 years of repeated whitewashing,” says Ben Price, CELDF’s Director of Education, who has studied and taught the real history of the American Revolution for decades.

The series has been running since January. Podcasts include lively conversations about institutionalized sexism, racism, classism, and materialism such as our discussion with journalist and filmmaker Keala Kelly (Kanaka Maoli / Hawaiian) and author and professor Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes descendant) entitled “What Revolution? Systemic Racism, Sexism, and Genocide from America’s Beginning.” Activist Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright joined us in a discussion on systemic racism in BLACK OUT, a podcast you’d be sorry to miss.

Short videos like What is America 250? : A Revolutionary Perspective, Best Sellers and Best Sellouts, No Flag No Country, and The US Constitution Betrayed the Revolution will get you prepped and eager to dive in deeper to essays such as “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered” — The Battered Spirit of ‘76 and truths and Lies About The Declaration of Independence, which makes the case that the 27 justifications for revolt against England listed in the original Declaration remain strikingly relevant today.

“Two-hundred and fifty years later,” says Ben Price in a forthcoming piece for the series, “the grievances listed against the British Empire in the Declaration of Independence have yet to be resolved by the American empire under the U.S. constitution.”

The America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective series will be ongoing through July 4th, with more written pieces, recorded conversations, and videos to come. Written pieces and interviews in the series can be viewed on Substack, with additional content available on YouTube.

Ben Price is available for interviews.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in what is now the United States. With it came the launch of an armed revolution against distant fascist leaders and a struggle between reformers and reactionaries who would ultimately lead the budding nation further down the path of imperialism, slavery, land theft, and elite domination.

Today, the U.S. government is using the 250th anniversary as an opportunity to peddle facile propaganda in service of nationalistic fascism. As a law firm which has been educating communities about the truth of U.S. “freedoms” for thirty years, we’re here to set the record straight.

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

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Today, the U.S. government is using the 250th anniversary as an opportunity to peddle facile propaganda in service of nationalistic fascism. As a law firm which has been educating communities about the truth of U.S. “freedoms” for thirty years, we’re here to set the record straight.

Welcome to CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective: an ongoing series this year.

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

In this episode

Continuing CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective series, CELDF’s Executive Director Kai Huschke and Education Director Ben Price discuss the disconnect between the aspirations of revolutionary American colonists who demanded freedom from top-down governance and what they did to try to realize those goals before the Federalist counter-revolution.

Hushke and Price find close comparisons between Declaration’s grievances justifying secession from the British empire and today’s failures of governance. 250 years ago, the British policies toward its colonies gave deference to privileged persons, living and corporate, over settler subjects of the empire. The anti-corporate stance of the American rebels will seem very familiar to Americans living now, 250 years later.

Links and Resources

• A250 series

• CELDF YouTube channel

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocketcasts

• YouTube (video and audio)

• And anywhere else you get your podcasts (click here to find this podcast via your preferred app)

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

Share

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

We’ve just launched our 2026 Mid-Year Impact Report, an annual publication examining the last 6 months of work and charting our course for the remainder of the year.

It’s also our opportunity to ask for your support. All of our work is only possible because people like you donate to make it possible. We’re not a massive organization and we waste no money on offices or big salaries. We offer all of our legal, training, educational, and organizing services to communities for free.

But organizing costs money. If you can’t be on the front lines of these fights with us, stand behind us. If you have the capacity, please donate to support this work. Our mid-year goal is to raise $50,000 and welcome 20 new donors to support CELDF.

Donate

Excerpts from the mid-year report:

ARIZONA: Tear Down This Wall

Along the Arizona-Mexico border in the San Rafael Valley community members continue to resist the breakneck construction of the racist and ecologically-catastrophic border wall through critical jaguar and ocelot habitat. The undeterred resisters have held multiple protest camps and rallies, and allies in Texas successfully halted a plan to build a wall through Big Bend National Park.

CELDF is serving as a communication link and on-the-ground resource to the Arizona border wall resisters through publicity support and strategic and tactical consultation. After CELDF’s Executive Director Kai Huschke visited the wall construction site to participate in a rally and work with local organizers late last year, CELDF released an interview with local organizers and syndicated an op-ed in multiple media outlets. Unfortunately, since that visit in November miles worth of wall has gone up and continues to advance. The need to resist is still very much mission critical.

Reconnection Academia and Nature

Radical Visions: Reconnecting Academia and Nature, held in March, was CELDF’s second truth, reckoning, and right-relationship convergence (TRRR). The two-day gathering was aimed at advancing community resistance and resilience by digging into the deeper systems that shape how we learn, how we teach, how we act, and who our education ultimately serves.

An intentionally intergenerational, transdisciplinary and immersive experience., students and faculty from several educational institutions in the greater Cleveland area gave powerful testimony on how the current system is set up to prepare them for corporate labor needs rather than for critical thinking, creativity or civic power.

Truth and Reckoning

Over the first half of the year, CELDF’s Truth and Reckoning Substack has featured 25 analytical essays, in-depth conversations with grassroots organizers, and breaking news regarding our work.

Among the best were our recent exposé on corporate money flooding into opposing Lane County’s watershed rights initiative, 9 frontline communities CELDF is supporting, a conversation with Truckers Movement for Justice, and a discussion around slowing down, energy use, and alternative transportation with Jeff McFadden who drives a donkey cart instead of a car.

Other highlights:

• In January, CELDF’s Consultation Director Tish O’Dell interviewed three community organizers in Virginia who, inspired and informed by CELDF’s May 2025 interview with a biologist regarding threats to Terrapin habitat in their area, launched a protest movement and pro se lawsuit, which CELDF has been lending support to.

• CELDF’s Community Resistance and Resilience Co-Director Max Wilbert interviewed powerful and outspoken voices Tlingit elder and matriarch Wanda Culp and forest defense activist Joshua Wright regarding an attempt to privatize over 115,000 acres of National Forest in southeast Alaska.

• Sometimes simple is best. Several months ago, CELDF’s Education Director Ben Price helped us publish a piece titled “What are the Rights of Nature? A movement to protect, respect, and revere Earth’s biosphere as the source and sustainer of all life” which has been one of our most popular of the year.

Launching and operating Truth and Reckoning is like running a newspaper and a radio station simultaneously. It takes a lot of effort to pull together the truthtellers we do. We need your donations so we can continue to offer this valuable platform!

Read the full mid-year report here.

Legacy giving

At a time when many donors are rethinking where their support can have the greatest impact, legacy giving offers a powerful way to extend that impact well beyond a single moment.

For those nearing or planning for retirement, it is an especially practical time to consider the opportunity afforded by planned giving. CELDF offers numerous options for extending your long-term support well into the future through bequests, beneficiary designations, stock gifts, qualified charitable distributions, real estate contributions, and charitable trusts and annuities.

CELDF is built for sustained, long-term work, and legacy giving is one way to ensure your support continues alongside it.

Contact us to discuss these options.

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From all of us at CELDF — thank you for all of your support!

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

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This is a guest post from , author of . Ahmad is a Palestinian immigrant, first-generation student, and soon to be lawyer trying to use his words to free his people, all people, and get back home.

We read this piece when Ahmad published it last month, and it resonated with our perspectives on the legal system, the genocide in Gaza, and the systems of power we live under. CELDF’s Legal Director Terry Lodge recommended we ask Ahmad for permission to republish this piece, which he graciously granted. This is essential reading, especially for law students and others working within the legal system.

Shaban al-Dalou scored 97.9 percent on his university qualifying exam, memorized the Quran by heart, and began studying software engineering at Al-Azhar University in Gaza in September 2023. Two months after he started, Israel bombed the university. His family was displaced five times across central Gaza before they ended up in a tent he built with his own hands in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, which Israel had already bombed several times before it bombed it again on October 14, 2024, while Shaban was inside connected to an IV drip, recovering from injuries he had sustained in an earlier strike on a mosque. The fire reached him before anyone could pull him free. His mother burned beside him. When they searched the wreckage for their bodies, they could not tell which charred remains were hers until they found the gold necklace she always wore. They buried them in one grave. He was nineteen years old and had been accepted to universities in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Qatar.

I graduated from law school this past week and I am not sure what that is supposed to mean, or if it means anything at all when I think about Shaban and the tens of thousands like him.

For three years I learned how a society decides what counts as a wrong and what counts as a remedy, how to argue both sides of anything, how to find the statute and read the case and locate the exception within the exception. I learned the language of a system that presents itself as the last civilized alternative to chaos, and I learned it while every university in Gaza was being bombed into rubble, all twelve of them, gone, while I sat in Ann Arbor taking notes on jurisdiction or “free speech”, and while I was being trained to believe in the law, the law was conducting its own education on Gaza, and the lesson it delivered there was nothing that appears in any casebook I have read.

Legal education teaches you the meaning side of law without ever honestly reckoning with its power side, the way every interpretation, every judgment, every holding eventually resolves into a body with a gun at its base. We are given the great cases, the landmark decisions, the slow arc of justice bending toward something better, and we are taught to see the law as a set of principles floating above the world, neutral and aspiring, when what legal interpretation has always done is take place in the shadow of the violence that enforces it, serving power as one of its most sophisticated instruments, giving domination the appearance of reason and making dispossession look like administration. Europeans did not simply conquer; they arrived with deeds and treaties and surveyor’s maps, declared indigenous existence a legal problem to be managed, and built courts to process the theft. The law was always also the weapon, and the weapon always wore the law’s face.

Palestinians have known this for nearly eighty years. The legal weaponry of Palestinian elimination runs from the British Mandate through the partition plan through military orders that classify Palestinian rainwater as Israeli state property, through the permit system that makes Palestinian farming on Palestinian land conditional on Israeli approval, through the administrative detention regime that holds people for years without charge inside a court system with a conviction rate exceeding ninety-nine percent, each individual act of dispossession presented as a bureaucratic procedure, the cumulative logic of those procedures being the destruction of a people. I spent three years learning the methods of a system that has spent eighty years making that destruction legible as something other than what it is.

What international law has revealed about itself since October 2023 is not a failure in any ordinary sense, because failure implies a standard that was almost met, a principle that fell short of its own aspirations. What we have watched is the system functioning as it was designed to function, by the powers that designed it, in the service of the interests those powers have always protected. The International Criminal Court was built to prosecute individuals and deliberately denied jurisdiction over the states that created it, so that when a state issues the orders, funds the weapons, and provides the political cover for a genocide, the court can at most reach the general who carried them out while the system that produced him continues undisturbed.

When the court finally moved on Netanyahu, the United States threatened the judges with sanctions and the judges paused their work, which tells you more about how that system actually operates than any of its founding documents ever will. The International Court of Justice found in 2007 that Serbia bore legal responsibility for failing to prevent the genocide at Srebrenica, and in response it awarded Bosnia a declaratory judgment, not reparations or accountability in any material sense, but a formal declaration that a wrong had occurred, issued a decade after the mass graves had been filled, which satisfied the procedural requirements of international law while delivering nothing to the people whose families were buried in those graves.

The scholars who study these institutions most carefully have stopped calling this an impunity gap and started calling it planned impunity, because the selectivity follows racial and colonial lines with too much consistency to be explained any other way.

The specific intent standard for genocide, the requirement that genocidal purpose be the only reasonable inference from the totality of the evidence, is demanding enough that in Bosnia, where the killing was massive and documented and named and the graves existed, only Srebrenica crossed the legal threshold. Israeli officials have announced their intent on camera, in parliament, in the public statements of cabinet ministers who bragged about rolling out a Gaza Nakba. Israeli citizens, over 75%, continue supporting the genocide. Israeli occupation forces are caught, on tap they filmed themselves, violating every tenant of International law. The UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference from the evidence. And still the system processes this through years of provisional measures and jurisdictional thresholds and evidentiary standards and procedural delays, delays that have allowed a “yellow line” to swallow over 60% of Gaza, while the killing continues and the rubble accumulates and the children who survived two years of bombardment still wake up every morning Palestinian, still teach themselves from whatever remains of what their schools used to be, the law’s timelines long because long timelines serve the people who write the law, its definitions narrow because narrow definitions protect the people who commit the crimes the definitions were supposedly written to name.

What does it mean to graduate into this? What does it mean to carry a credential from institutions I do not trust, inside a profession whose central instrument has been used against my people more reliably than it has been used for them? I have thought about this longer than I have thought about almost anything, and what I keep arriving at is that the law’s insufficiency and its necessity exist together and have always existed together, and the people who have done the most for Palestinian rights inside legal institutions have understood this without being paralyzed by it. The law was not built for Palestine. It was built by the colonial powers whose violence it now struggles to name, and its definitions are drawn to exclude the crimes of those powers while criminalizing the resistance of their victims. To use it anyway, to bring the genocide case to the Hague knowing the Hague moves in decades, to build the legal record knowing the record will outlive the moment and become what the archive holds when the killing is finally over, is to use the vocabulary the world has agreed to use for crimes against the interests of those who wrote that vocabulary, knowing they will resist it and slow it and may ultimately refuse it, and doing it anyway because the record matters and the naming matters and the evidence assembled in the language of international law is a form of witness that the bombs cannot reach.

There is a question I have not been able to answer since I started law school, which is whether belief in the law is a prerequisite for using it or whether using it is something you can do in full knowledge of what it is, the way you use a language you did not choose and did not invent and that has been used to say things you find unconscionable, because it is still the only language the room understands. I think it is the second thing. I think you can hold the law in contempt and still file the motion, because contempt is not the same as abandonment and abandonment helps no one. Shaban al-Dalou built the tent that became his grave and never got to use a single one of his university acceptances. I got to use mine, in a country that armed the people who killed him, inside institutions that buried the scholarship that named what they did. I am going to carry that into every room this degree opens, as the kind of knowledge that makes it impossible to practice law as though the law were innocent and in service of all the lives the law stole.

Subscribe to Ahmad’s Substack, .

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For Immediate Release — June 3rd, 2026

After 20 years of controversial and challenging work, the “rights of nature” movement, which aims to extend legal protections to the natural world, finds itself on shaky ground, facing counterattacks, outright bans, corruption, co-optation, and — in a few inspiring cases — victories.

A new report called the State of Rights of Nature explores these issues in detail based on the expertise of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), the organization responsible for the first modern “rights of nature” law in the world which passed in 2006.

For thirty years, CELDF has worked with hundreds of communities across the U.S. and internationally on rights of nature, participated in numerous coalitions and conferences, and watched a spark turn into a global movement. But the growing popularity of rights of nature has also fueled a backlash which, in some cases, has led powerful forces to co-opt movement language and advocates to water down their rights of nature initiatives to the point of near irrelevance.

States like Ohio, Florida, Idaho, and Utah have enacted state legislation banning rights of nature, and more and more efforts using “rights of nature” language doesn’t achieve the fundamental goal of the movement: expanding legal protections.

“Over the past decade we’ve seen more and more cases of co-optation that, if left unchallenged, will work to dilute, neutralize, and defeat the goals this movement was founded on,” says Kai Huschke, Executive Director at CELDF. “Our report aims to combat this to ensure the integrity of our efforts.”

Besides critiquing co-optation, the State of Rights of Nature report details the history of the rights of nature movement, explains the most important legislation and court rulings of the past decade, and lays out principles to help advocates distinguish between rights of nature initiatives which have been corrupted and those which have not.

Crucially, it also focuses on the issue of power — a topic often ignored in this era of global climate destabilization, biodiversity collapse, and brutal neo-colonial inequality.

“Enforcing rights of nature laws threatens the most powerful people and institutions in the world,” the report states. “They will oppose any threat to their power. Those with power will not sit back and let rights of nature advocates use governmental and legal structures – structures they have largely designed and control – to threaten their power.”

According to Will Falk, a CELDF Staff Attorney who has worked on rights of nature for more than a decade and who authored the report, now is a critical time to intervene on these issues.

“As rights of nature gains momentum around the world, it is important that advocates guard against co-optation and the pressure that powerful opponents are already putting on our movement to render it ineffective,” Falk writes. “It’s also critical that we stay on guard against impulses which often arise inside our movements when, facing setbacks and extreme challenges, some activists wish to render our measures toothless in return for greater public acceptance.”

This is the inaugural edition of the State of Rights of Nature Report, which CELDF will release annually in the future. Join the CELDF email list to be notified of future reports.

The report is available now, for free, on the CELDF website (https://celdf.org/2026/05/celdf-publication-state-of-rights-of-nature-report/) and as the most authoritative and truth-telling resource on the rights of nature movement, it is an essential resource for attorneys, community organizers, law students, and members of the judiciary.

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This is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

On May 19th, voters in Lane County, Oregon failed to pass Measure 20-373, the Lane County Watershed Bill of Rights, a CELDF-drafted “rights of nature” law that would have established legal rights for local watersheds and recognized residents’ rights to clean water throughout this part of Western Oregon.

Organizers blamed the failure primarily on the flood of “dark money” spent by corporations, writing:

“Large corporate polluters and industrial interests flexed their financial power to win the election, dramatically outspending the all-volunteer grassroots campaign in support of the measure. Supporters raised roughly $35,000, while opponents raised over $434,000. Opponents included large timber interests, industrial agriculture, the oil and gas lobby, the chemical lobby, and even the Koch brothers, represented by Koch Government Affairs.

‘Opponents outspent us at least 12 to 1, and waged a campaign of misinformation unlike anything that our team had ever seen or expected,’ said Rob Dickinson, one of the organizers on the campaign. ‘Opposition messaging was on TV, radio, social media, and in numerous full- size mailers that blanketed the county. They were spreading really egregious false claims about the measure and its impacts on the County. We did our best to counter the fear-mongering, but ultimately, the disinformation campaign carried the day.’

Michelle Holman, friend of CELDF and one of the main organizers for Measure 20-373, wrote in a letter to the editor:

Measure 20-373 didn’t lose — it was overwhelmed by a well-funded disinformation campaign financed by corporate interests that profit from the degradation and pollution of our environment.

We agree. When Community Rights Lane County (CRLC) says they didn’t lose the election, but rather that it was bought, they are right. Everyone understands that the wealthy elite and corporate forces shape our lives in many different ways, including via the ability to fashion politics and therefore the law itself to their liking.

Research supports this idea, showing that regular people have basically no political power in our supposed democracy.

The Watershed Bill of Rights for Lane County, if it had been adopted, would’ve recognized legal rights for the rivers, wetlands, and other water bodies in the county such that practices like clearcutting and toxic chemical spraying by industrial timber corporations would’ve been rightfully targeted. However, when a truly grassroots group, despite having broad public support, comes up against those who benefit from the current system (because it has been designed to benefit them), they will pull out all the stops.

That’s where half a million dollars comes into play.

The powerbrokers do this not because they fear that the law — in this case advancing rights for watersheds — would actually have survived a legal challenge; they do it to save money and undermine democracy.

First, it is cheaper to wage a political campaign to stop a law like this from being adopted than it would be to litigate it. Going up to the appellate level and possibly the state supreme court level would mean attorney’s fees perhaps double what they spent on their propaganda campaign. And propaganda isn’t bound by the same ethics and rules as a legal case. In fact, they can outright lie, which they did, and not be held to account. The few investigations that do examine legal and ethical violations around political campaigns rarely result in serious penalties, and if a ruling is handed down it comes 18 months or so after an election is over. The corporate gang understands that.

The second reason is one we all need to understand: powerful elites and corporations attack efforts to restrict their power and privilege because they understand that any advancements in democracy, equity, and justice is a direct assault on their near monopoly hold of power.

That power is sacrosanct and efforts like this one from Lane County are seen as uprisings that need to be put down immediately, swiftly, and as brutally as possible. A sister effort in Lincoln County, Oregon to ban aerial spray of pesticides not only brought out a similar disparity in campaign spending between the citizen’s group and corporate timber/big ag/industrial chemical companies, but it also triggered a multimillion dollar propaganda push prior to the vote as a means to snuff out what they called “brushfires” by the firm who was hired by an industry group called CropLife America (made up of all the big chemical companies).

Despite this, the measure in Lincoln County did pass, which then triggered a multi-year legal case. The dollar tally between the propaganda work, the dirty anti-rights campaign, and the legal case (which they won against the people and ecosystems) most likely cost those corporations over $3 million dollars. As satisfying as it might be to have them have to shell out that kind of money, they have plenty more, and their destructive timber practices have not stopped.

Keeping democracy off the ballot

The stifling of democracy is darker than “dark money.” In Lane County’s case it came in the form of repeated ballot-access legal cases over a ten year period; whenever Community Rights Lane County qualified to put a measure on the ballot, corporate opposition took legal action to keep the greater democracy and challenges to their privilege off the ballot. For a decade, it worked.

In states like Ohio where CELDF has worked with numerous communities over the years on similar ballot measure campaigns, legal actions were also taken to stop innovations in law that would favor rights and protections for people and nature over corporate exploitation. Those came in the form of challenges from boards of elections, with cases going to the state supreme court and the eventual decisions sometimes falling in favor of the citizens and other times the corporations.

It happened so many times that CELDF published a book entitled Death by Democracy to document these constant challenges to direct democracy and the lengths to which corporate power will go to hang on to their power.

In states like Washington and Colorado where CELDF has also assisted numerous communities, actions were taken through the courts and legislative bodies to make it virtual impossible for the people to use the citizen initiative process. Corporate power is fully aware that if real democracy were to actually emerge, grow, and take hold they would no longer be in charge and in most cases they would no longer exist. To them these efforts, like what just transpired in Lane County, are not isolated, limited to a specific corporation, or something they could adapt to; they are genuinely in a war room situation were the threats aren’t just being monitored but the weapons of money, political power, lawmaking influence, and physical force are dispatched without prejudice.

What comes next?

Physical force is a topic worth discussing. In a place like Lane County, where members of Community Rights Lane County spent decades trying to stop all kinds of harmful corporate practices through conventional means, and now the last 14 years doing to in unorthodox ways that are nonetheless still linked to the system of law — what is left but to pursue resistance work? When the system smacks you down, what is left but to say “to hell with your rules, we are taking over the game”?

For years CELDF has said the system is not broken, it is fixed. This isn’t our discovery; many have noted that our system of law, therefore the governance and economics shaped by those laws, is designed to function to advantage property and commerce over that of health, safety, and welfare. CELDF’s partner-advisor Camila Vergara wrote a book on this called Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic.

What must break is our allegiance to these fixed systems. Their time has passed. Our indoctrination must end. The question is how we go about creating the fracture points necessary to dismantle this system.

Community Rights Lane County, the people of Lane County, and communities everywhere face a choice: continue to show up inside the venues owned by a corrupt system, or tear that corrupt system down.

Kai Huschke is the Executive Director of CELDF, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Max Wilbert is CELDF’s Director of Community Resistance and Resilience.

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Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

The Fertile Crescent, what we know today as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, is considered the birthplace of agriculture. Flood enriched soil from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers’ made for exceptional farming. Today, 500 miles from where the two rivers empty into the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz is under a blockade, impacting farming in the United States.

A stalemate between the United States and Israel and that of Iran, the blockade is affecting the global movement of fossil fuels. Posturing, threats, and deadly actions continue between the three nations, putting more lives at risk and stressing out economies. In the US gas prices have risen dramatically and the industrialized soil of America’s big-ag heartland is threatened because of the blockade.

According to The American Prospect, Nebraska farmers are being gouged by the cost of anhydrous ammonia, a synthetic chemical fertilizer made from natural gas sourced from Iran. Prices have spiked by 39 percent. So the conversations at diners in Nebraska, agricultural conferences, and state capitals are about fossil fuels - how to weather the current situation and ramp up production so synthetic fertilizers like anhydrous ammonia might be made from American gas.

Not being discussed is that places like Nebraska, where fossil fuels have been growing commodity foods, the soil is so compromised it relies upon artificial, synthetic inputs to function. Corporate food production depends on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, massive tractors and harvesters, mechanized factory farming of animals, global transportation, manufacturing processed foods from largely inorganic ingredients, and pumping out produce even when out of season. The fossil fuel-driven system of corporatized agriculture has even, in turn, forced farmers into dependence on the corporations, reducing them to the level of indebted sharecroppers.

The Green Revolution which was propagandized by the chemical industry soon after World War II ushered in global ecosystem collapse, cancer clusters, soil loss and degradation, desertification, food insecurity, obesity, diabetes, water pollution, high rates of farmer suicide, and massive economic debt despite self-congratulatory virtue signaling for feeding the world.

There is even more irony to go around. Those Nebraska farmers, the ones waiting for the Strait of Hormuz to open and wondering how their chemical dependent farming season will turn out are occupying land that was once some of the most productive soil on the planet — like the Fertile Crescent used to be.

The ancient prairie provided abundant perennial foods sustaining people and large mammals like the American Bison. In the 1800’s the US government decimated the bison population as a means of genocidal warfare against Native Americans and then ushered in white settler-colonists who literally uprooted the prairie ecosystem to farm monocrops which eventually contributed to the massive catastrophe that we know as the Dust Bowl.

Today, the only thing that keeps these tired soils producing is endless inputs of fossil fuel chemicals. A recent report from Food and Water Watch shows parts of Nebraska and Iowa as cancer hot spots, the result of exposure to industrial agricultural chemicals like glyphosate, known for decades to be cancer causing.

It’s all about making connections and it shouldn’t take one long to see the connection between recent actions of the US — the seizure of Maduro in Venezuela, the war with Iran, and the announcements of more oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and California coast. It’s all about fossil fuels. The blockade is just one piece of the US fossil fuel industry’s foreign and domestic policy that’s being carried out by the United States government, paid for by our tax dollars.

And despite the crystal clear links between climate change and the burning of fossil fuels, the world’s fossil fuel addiction has largely gone unchallenged. Our century plus long collective addiction has resulted in the enslavement and destruction of the environment, including the soil needed to grow real, healthy food.

There is an opportunity amidst the metacrisis. What if we treated the earth we walk on with the respect it deserves? There is an opportunity to value soil, grow food and support human communities in a way that gives more than it takes. How we respond is up to us. But so long as we remain hooked on fossil fuels, nothing will change.

Kai Huschke is the Executive Director of CELDF and has been a principal member of the organization since 2009. His experience as a seasoned community organizer and movement specialist is guiding CELDF into its next 30 years. He teaches, presents, and writes extensively on movement building, community rights, rights of nature, and the intersection of culture and law.

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In this episode, we speak with Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright

Anthony is a son of Sierra Leone, an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, a writer and a policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their cats, “Evil” Ernie and MalaChai the Mischievous. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the North South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.

On the day that we had a chance to sit down with Anthony, he was at an international conference focused on stopping global fossil fuel use in Colombia, a nation where 30% of the population is of African descent, and, as he explains during this conversation, the voices of black people were being silenced.

That sad truth of racism in Columbia is historically linked to racism in the United States, and this conversation focuses on the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, Reconstruction, the non-profit industrial complex, and pro sports as it effects, impacts, relates to, and ultimately shapes life for black people, the society at large, and the questions of whether we can fully reconcile with the institution of slavery and the ongoing colonization of people and planet.

CELDF’s Executive Director Kai Huschke and Anthony delve into personal experiences relating to the Declaration of Independence, the constructs keeping racism alive in the US, the social dynamics and racism, and the bright spots that emerging in breaking the structure of racism in what many would find to be unlikely places.

This interview is the second installment on systemic racism and sexism as part of CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective. It follows the live discussion with Colville Confederated Tribes descent Dina Gilio-Whitaker and Kānaka Maoli Anne Keala Kelly entitled “What Revolution? Systemic Racism, Sexism, and Genocide from America’s Beginning.”

Anthony’s insights echo the need for structural transformation rooted in history, truth, and collective courage. Get ready to confront the lies, embrace the struggle, and harness the power of collective disobedience to forge a new path toward justice.

Links and Resources

• Anthony’s radio show on the WPFW network

• Anthony’s articles on Black Agenda Report

• Big Green + Big Tech = Bigger Environmental Racism: How Certain “Environmental” Groups are Selling out Frontline Communities by Greenwashing Data Centers

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

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About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

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