On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability: The Community Rights Movement in the United States by The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

Author:The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund [Fund, The Community Environmental Legal Defense]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Environmental Conservation & Protection, Political Science, Political Process, Nature, Politics, General
ISBN: 9781629631264
Google: LBjPCQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 27178636
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2015-07-01T11:46:11+00:00

FOUR

Driving the Local into the State

Building a national movement based on community disobedience to the existing structure of law requires a continuous stream of people within communities focused on structural change. Without that continuous stream, communities working toward municipal lawmaking will not produce a strong enough united front necessary to force changes to state and federal constitutions.

To be relevant around a variety of issues, replication must occur by issue area and by geographic proximity. As an example, CELDF drafted a Sustainable Food Systems Ordinance for the residents of several municipalities, which is now being used by groups working on sustainable food issues across the country.36 Thus, the ordinance became a means of transforming the work of issue-focused groups toward advancing a rights-based framework of organizing. Similarly, after the first CELDF-drafted corporate farming ordinance was adopted in Wells Township in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, it was then replicated in other municipalities across Fulton County, and then in municipalities across that region of the state.

Creating state constitutional change requires large segments of the population of a state advocating for that change. This organizing must therefore be done in both rural and urban communities, and must find relevancy to issues in large cities as well as small municipalities.

In 2007, CELDF began working in Spokane, Washington, assisting in the creation of Envision Spokane, a coalition of twenty-four labor union locals, community nonprofit organizations, and neighborhood associations, to place a Community Bill of Rights onto the 2009 election ballot as a citizens’ initiative. The Bill of Rights sought to decentralize decision-making power over certain development projects, while recognizing rights to affordable housing, preventive healthcare, and rights in the workplace. Lacking a single cohesive issue or assault, the work in Spokane was focused purely on constructing a rights framework that would enable neighborhood, labor, and other organizations to achieve goals that had been previously unattainable due to structural constraints. Although the measure failed to pass in 2009, the coalition qualified a shorter version in 2011, which narrowly missed adoption by a swing of only five hundred votes.37

In November of 2010, the City of Pittsburgh became the first major metropolitan area to adopt a CELDF-drafted ordinance. Created to confront natural gas drilling proposed within the city, the ordinance contains a bill of rights for city residents, recognizes the rights of nature, and challenges corporate-claimed constitutional “rights” within the municipality. In alignment with other municipalities, the central theme of the city’s ordinance is to recognize expanded civil rights and then secure those rights by prohibiting activities, such as commercial gas extraction, that would violate those rights.

At the time of this writing, close to two hundred municipalities in ten states have adopted similar laws, backed by citizen organizing that seeks not only to adopt local laws but also to enforce them.

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