Community Rights
CELDF works with communities to establish Community Rights – such that communities are empowered to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their residents and the natural environment, and establish environmental and economic sustainability.
For over a decade, we have worked at the local, municipal level to establish Community Rights. Today, we are building on our grassroots organizing to drive change to the state level, bringing together communities from across states in which we’ve been organizing to build State Community Rights Networks.
Community Rights is a paradigm shift, a move away from unsustainable projects and practices at the cost of communities and nature, and toward community decision-making, while recognizing and protecting our interdependence with nature.
Today, communities across the country are finding that they don’t have the right to make critical decisions for themselves – such as the right to say “no” to fracking or factory farming, and the right to say “yes” to sustainable energy and food systems.
They’re finding that there is a structure of state and federal law in place that pre-empts local decision making, and that forces harmful activities such as fracking and factory farming into communities – despite community opposition and harm to the public health and environment.
And further, that our structure of law elevates corporate decision making over community decision making. Thus, corporations have court-conferred constitutional “rights,” which they are able to wield against communities to eliminate local efforts that may interfere with industry plans to expand their operations, no matter the impact on communities and nature.
For example, residents of Tamaqua Borough, PA, were faced with the dumping of toxic sewage sludge in abandoned mining pits, and were told they had no right to say “no” to sludging.
Communities in Oregon’s fertile Willamette Valley and timberlands of Josephine County are facing contamination of their farmland by genetically modified (GM) seeds and poisoning of their forests and waterways from pesticides. They are finding their own state government protecting these harmful practices, and pre-empting communties' efforts to say "no" and to codify sustainability.
Faced with these and a wide range of threats, communities across the country are reaching out to CELDF for help. Through grassroots organizing and public education, CELDF is assisting communities to establish Community Bills of Rights that assert the right to local self-governance, such that communities are able to say “no” to threats and “yes” to sustainability.
In addition, recognizing that communities want to do more than just say “no” to harmful activities, and in fact wish to put in place their vision for healthy, thriving communities, CELDF works with them to develop Community Bills of Rights that establish the right to clean air and water, sustainable energy, sustainable food systems, and the rights of nature.
To protect these rights, the Community Bills of Rights prohibit activities that would violate those rights, such as fracking and GM seeds. Harmful corporate activities that directly impact a community are banned as Community Rights are elevated above corporate “rights.”
CELDF has assisted more than 150 communities across the country to establish Community Rights ordinances that today are protecting communities from a range of harmful practices, from shale gas drilling and fracking to the land application of sewage sludge. Click here to learn more about where we work and the kinds of threats our communities are facing, and how you and your community can get involved -- or email us at info@celdf.org.
