On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability

The Community Rights Movement in the United States

Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781629631424
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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

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

This short primer from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund explores and describes the philosophy and underpinnings of the community rights movement that has emerged in the United States­—a movement of nonviolent civil disobedience based on municipal lawmaking.

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.

FOMENTING STATE CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE THROUGH COLLECTIVE MUNICIPAL LEGISLATIVE CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Once a critical mass of municipalities within each state adopts laws that feature common lawmaking elements, those municipalities must then stitch themselves together to begin moving toward state constitutional change that will protect those local laws while constitution-alizing the common elements of them.

In early 2010, in Pennsylvania—the first state in which a critical mass of municipalities emerged that are engaged in this new lawmaking—municipal representatives gathered to discuss collectively codifying those legal frameworks into their state constitutions. The initial result of that collaboration was the approval of the “Chambersburg Declaration” and the establishment of a statewide organization—the Pennsylvania Community Rights Network (PACRN).

The Declaration of the PACRN reads:

THE CHAMBERSBURG DECLARATION

BY THE UNDERSIGNED IN CHAMBERSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA, ON SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20TH, 2010

We declare:

• That the political, legal, and economic systems of the United States allow, in each generation, an elite few to impose policy and governing decisions that threaten the very survival of human and natural communities;
• That the goal of those decisions is to concentrate wealth and greater governing power through the exploitation of human and natural communities, while promoting the belief that such exploitation is necessary for the common good;
• That the survival of our communities depends on replacing this system of governance by the privileged with new community-based democratic decision-making systems;
• That environmental and economic sustainability can be achieved only when the people affected by governing decisions are the ones who make them;
• That, for the past two centuries, people have been unable to secure economic and environmental sustainability primarily through the existing minority-rule system, laboring under the myth that we live in a democracy;
• That most reformers and activists have not focused on replacing the current system of elite decision-making with a democratic one, but have concentrated merely on lobbying the factions in power to make better decisions; and
• That reformers and activists have not halted the destruction of our human or natural communities because they have viewed economic and environmental ills as isolated problems, rather than as symptoms produced by the absence of democracy.

Therefore, let it be resolved:

• That a people’s movement must be created with a goal of revoking the authority of the corporate minority to impose political, legal, and economic systems that endanger our human and natural communities;
• That such a movement shall begin in the municipal communities of Pennsylvania;
• That we, the people, must transform our individual community struggles into new frameworks of law that dismantle the existing undemocratic systems while codifying new, sustainable systems;
• That such a movement must grow and accelerate through the work of people in all municipalities to raise the profile of this work at state and national levels;
• That when corporate and governmental decision-makers challenge the people’s right to assert local, community self-governance through passage of municipal law, the people, through their municipal governments, must openly and frontally defy those legal and political doctrines that subordinate the rights of the people to the privileges of a few;
• That those doctrines include preemption, subordination of municipal governments, bestowal of constitutional rights upon corporations, and relegating ecosystems to the status of property;
• That those communities in defiance of rights-denying law must join with other communities in our state and across the nation to envision and build new state and federal constitutional structures that codify new, rights-asserting systems of governance;
• That Pennsylvania communities have worked for more than a decade to advance those new systems and, therefore, have the responsibility to become the first communities to call for a new state constitutional structure; and
• That now, this 20th day of February, 2010, the undersigned pledge to begin that work, which will drive the right to local, community self-government into the Pennsylvania Constitution, thus liberating Pennsylvania communities from the legal and political doctrines that prevent them from building economically and environmentally sustainable communities.

That a Call Issues from this Gathering:

• To create a network of people committed to securing the right to local, community self-government, the reversal of political, legal, and cultural doctrines that interfere with that right, and the creation of a new system and doctrines that support that right;
• To call upon the people and elected officials across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to convene a larger gathering of delegates representing their municipal communities, who will propose constitutional changes to secure the right of local, community self-government; and
• To create the people’s movement that will result in these changes to the Pennsylvania Constitution.

In 2012, communities in New Mexico and Washington State gathered to produce their own declarations. In New Mexico, the communities created the New Mexico Coalition for Community Rights, and in Washington State, the communities created the Washington Community Rights Network. The New Mexico Declaration reads:

THE MORA COUNTY [NEW MEXICO] DECLARATION

We, the undersigned residents of New Mexico and the communities in which we live, hereby declare the following:

Whereas, our communities are under siege from oil and gas, agribusiness, energy, and other corporations;

Whereas, our communities are under siege from a structure of law that has bestowed greater rights on those corporations than the communities in which they operate, and it is that system of law that enables the corporations to do what they do;

Whereas, we recognize that such a system grants a corporate minority the legal authority to override our community majorities;

Whereas, we recognize that economic and environmental sustainability have been rendered illegal under this system of law, and that this system is not democratic;

Whereas, given the control by those corporations over our elected representatives, we have given up hope that either our state government or the federal government will help protect us from these corporations;

Whereas, we declare that if democracy means “majority rule” and “consent of the governed,” that a democracy does not exist in our communities, or in the State of New Mexico, and that we must now create democracy in our municipalities and within the State; and

Whereas, we now call on communities across the State of New Mexico to do the following:

• Adopt local laws that recognize community rights for residents of New Mexico municipalities and the natural environment;
• Include in those local laws direct challenges to the legal doctrines that currently mandate that corporations have greater rights than residents of our communities;
• Join together with other communities across the State to create a statewide movement focused on rewriting the State Constitution to recognize a right to local self-government which eliminates these legal doctrines at the State level, to protect the local laws adopted within our municipalities; and
• Join together with other statewide movements to rewrite the federal Constitution to elevate the rights of people and communities above the claimed rights of corporations.

The Washington Community Rights Network Declaration reads:

THE SPOKANE DECLARATION

We, the residents of Washington State and of our communities, gathering in Spokane, Washington, this 28th day of July, 2012, declare:

Where...