Can local laws have a real effect on the power of giant corporations?

by Allen D. Kanner

Mt. Shasta, a small northern California town of 3,500 residents nestled in the foothills of magnificent Mount Shasta, is taking on corporate power through an unusual process—democracy.

The citizens of Mt. Shasta have developed an extraordinary ordinance, set to be voted on in the next special or general election, that would prohibit corporations such as Nestle and Coca-Cola from extracting water from the local aquifer. But this is only the beginning. The ordinance would also ban energy giant PG&E, and any other corporation, from regional cloud seeding, a process that disrupts weather patterns through the use of toxic chemicals such as silver iodide. More generally, it would refuse to recognize corporate personhood, explicitly place the rights of community and local government above the economic interests of multinational corporations, and recognize the rights of nature to exist, flourish, and evolve.

Mt. Shasta is not alone. Rather, it is part of a (so far) quiet municipal movement making its way across the United States in which communities are directly defying corporate rule and affirming the sovereignty of local government.

Since 1998, more than 125 municipalities have passed ordinances that explicitly put their citizens’ rights ahead of corporate interests, despite the existence of state and federal laws to the contrary. These communities have banned corporations from dumping toxic sludge, building factory farms, mining, and extracting water for bottling. Many have explicitly refused to recognize corporate personhood. Over a dozen townships in Pennsylvania, Maine, and New Hampshire have recognized the right of nature to exist and flourish (as Ecuador just did in its new national constitution). Four municipalities, including Halifax in Virginia, and Mahoney, Shrewsbury, and Packer in Pennsylvania, have passed laws imposing penalties on corporations for chemical trespass, the involuntary introduction of toxic chemicals into the human body.

These communities are beginning to band together. When the attorney general of Pennsylvania threatened to sue Packer Township this year for banning sewage sludge within its boundaries, six other Pennsylvania towns adopted similar ordinances and twenty-three others passed resolutions in support of their neighboring community. Many people were outraged when the attorney general proclaimed, “there is no inalienable right to local self-government.”

Bigger cities are joining the fray. In November, Pittsburg’s city council voted to ban corporations in the city from drilling for natural gas as a result of local concern about an environmentally devastating practice known as “fracking.” As city councilman Doug Shields stated in a press release, “Many people think that this is only about gas drilling. It’s not—it’s about our authority as a municipal community to say ‘no’ to corporations that will cause damage to our community. It’s about our right to community, [to] local self-government.”

What has driven these communities to such radical action? The typical story involves a handful of local citizens deciding to oppose a corporate practice, such as toxic sludge dumping, which has taken a huge toll on the health, economy, and natural surroundings of their town. After years of fighting for regulatory change, these citizens discover a bitter truth: the U.S. environmental regulatory system consists of a set of interlocking state and federal laws designed by industry to serve corporate interests. With the deck utterly stacked against them, communities are powerless to prevent corporations from destroying the local environment for the sake of profit.

Enter the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit public interest law firm that champions a different approach. The firm helps communities draft local ordinances that place the rights of municipalities to govern themselves above corporate rights. Through its Democracy School, which offers seminars across the United States, it provides a detailed analysis of the history of corporate law and environmental regulation that shows a need for a complete overhaul of the system. Armed with this knowledge and with their well-crafted ordinances, citizens are able to return to their communities to begin organizing for the passage of laws such as Mt. Shasta’s proposed ordinance.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is collaborating with Global Exchange, an international environmental and workers’ rights organization, to help supporters of the Mt. Shasta ordinance organize. In an interview for this article, I asked Shannon Biggs, who directs Global Exchange’s Community Rights Program, if she expected ordinances of this type to be upheld in court. Biggs was dubious about judges “seeing the error of their ways” and reversing a centuries-oldtrend in which courts grant corporations increased power. Rather, she sees these ordinances as powerful educational and organizing tools that can lead to the major changes necessary to reduce corporate power, put decision-making back in the hands of real people rather than corporate “persons,” and open up whole new areas of rights, such as those of ecosystems and natural communities. Biggs connects the current municipal defiance of existing state and federal law to a long tradition of civil disobedience in the United States, harkening back to Susan B. Anthony illegally casting her ballot, the Underground Railroad flouting slave laws, and civil rights protesters purposely breaking segregation laws.

But the nascent municipal rights movement offers something new in the way of political action. These communities are adopting laws that, taken together, are forming an alternative structure to the global corporate economy. The principles behind these laws can be applied broadly to any area where corporate rights override local self-government or the well-being of the local ecology. The best place to start, I would suggest, is with banning corporations from making campaign contributions to local elections.

The municipal movement could provide one of the most effective routes to building nationwide support for an Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the movement is already expanding. In Pennsylvania, people are now organizing on the state level and similar stirrings have been reported in New Hampshire.

What about your community?

Interested?

• Pittsburgh Bans Natural Gas Drilling
  A historic new ordinance bans natural gas drilling while elevating community decision making and the rights of nature over the “rights” associated with corporate personhood.
• Real People vs. Corporate People: The Fight is On
  The Supreme Court says corporations can spend as much money as they want on political advertising. Millions of Americans say they’ve had it.
• Corporations Ain’t People
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]]> http://sierravoices.com/2011/02/allen-kanner-corporate-control-not-in-these-communities/feed/ 0 http://sierravoices.com/2010/11/fracking-wars-pittsburgh-bans-natural-gas-drilling/ http://sierravoices.com/2010/11/fracking-wars-pittsburgh-bans-natural-gas-drilling/#comments Sun, 21 Nov 2010 00:47:53 +0000 depelton http://sierravoices.com/?p=6445 [Editor's note: If you want to find the still guttering flame of democracy in America, look in the heartland, in small towns such as Barnstead, New Hampshire and Blaine Township, Pennsylvania, and now in Pittsburgh, where town councils are voting to deny corporations the rights of personhood. This is the frontline in a war between the personhood rights of corporations and the rights of natural-born citizens and their communities.]

Published in Yes! November 16, 2010. Reprinted with permission.

A historic new ordinance bans natural gas drilling while elevating community decision making and the rights of nature over the “rights” associated with corporate personhood.

by Mari Margil, Ben Price

In a historic vote, the City of Pittsburgh today adopted a first-in-the-nation ordinance banning corporations from natural gas drilling in the city.

Faced with the potential for drilling—and the controversial new practice known as “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing—within city limits, the Pittsburgh City Council unanimously said “no.” Fracking means injecting water laced with sand and toxic chemicals underground to create deep ground explosions that release the gas. It’s a technique first tried in Texas, and which is now being used in Pennsylvania, where the Marcellus Shale geological formation, a source of natural gas, is buried over a mile down. The Marcellus Shale stretches from New York, through Pennsylvania, into Ohio and West Virginia.

Fracking has been demonstrated to be a threat to surface and groundwater, and has been blamed for fatal explosions, the contamination of drinking water, rivers, and streams. Because it disturbs rock that’s laced not only with methane, but with carcinogens like benzene and radioactive ores like uranium, forcing the mix to the surface adds to the dangers.

Pittsburgh sits atop the Marcellus Shale and corporations have already purchased leases to drill there, including under area parks and cemeteries.

The ordinance sponsor, Pittsburgh Councilman Doug Shields, led the charge to ban drilling, and was later joined by five co-sponsors. During the months leading up to today’s vote, Shields passionately advocated for the ordinance, saying that the city is “not a colony of the state and will not sit quietly by as our city gets drilled.” He sees this fight as about far more than drilling, saying “It’s about our authority as a community to decide, not corporations deciding for us.”

Drafted by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), Pittsburgh’s ordinance elevates the rights of people, the community, and nature over corporate “rights” and challenges the authority of the state to pre-empt community decision-making.

As natural gas drilling expands across Pennsylvania, there’s been a debate among opponents offracking over the best course to take. Some are arguing for “responsible drilling” and severance taxes; others want to “zone out” drilling from residential areas or around schools.

Advocates and communities are finding, however, that calling on corporations to be more accountable, without changing the powers and authorities corporations have been given by state and federal government, means asking them to take voluntary steps. Even communities that adopt zoning restrictions requiring drilling pads to be located away from homes or schools find that because the drilling is horizontal, its impact still reaches into those places they are trying to protect.

Meanwhile, hopes that the state—either the legislature or the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection—will help, have been similarly dashed. The state was recently found to be paying thousands of dollars to a private contractor to investigate citizens advocating against drilling. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of industry dollars went to candidates in the recent elections. Those monies helped elect candidates who will ensure that drilling proceeds without interference from citizens across the region. Further, the state continues to issue permits to corporations to drill despite growing community opposition.

Corporations, empowered with constitutional privileges conferred upon them by the courts, have long worked hand-in-hand with elected officials and government agencies at the state and federal level to pave the way for drilling. They’ve been successful in exempting natural gas drilling andfracking from federal regulations and they’ve put in place state laws pre-empting municipalities from taking any steps to reign in the industry.

Communities like Pittsburgh are coming to the conclusion that it’s up to them to stop practices they disagree with. Their efforts are not just about stopping the drilling, but about who gets to make decisions for the community—corporations empowered by the state, or people and their communities.

As Councilman Shields stated after the vote, “This ordinance recognizes and secures expanded civil rights for the people of Pittsburgh, and it prohibits activities which would violate those rights. It protects the authority of the people of Pittsburgh to pass this ordinance by undoing corporate privileges that place the rights of the people of Pittsburgh at the mercy of gas corporations.”

Provisions in the ordinance eliminate corporate “personhood” rights within the city for corporations seeking to drill, and remove the ability of corporations to wield the Commerce and Contracts Clauses of the U.S. Constitution to override community decision-making.

In addition, with adoption of the ordinance, Pittsburgh became the first city in the U.S. to recognize legally binding rights of nature.

By recognizing the rights of nature, Pittsburgh is effectively protecting ecosystems and natural communities within the city from efforts by corporations to drill there—and by other levels of government to authorize that drilling. Residents of Pittsburgh are empowered by the ordinance to enforce those rights on behalf of threatened ecosystems.

The ordinance now goes to Mayor Luke Ravenstahl for signature. Representatives of drilling companies have indicated they may challenge the ban in court.

The Pittsburgh City Council is now reaching out to other communities facing drilling, encouraging them to take similar steps including adoption of local laws that challenge state and corporate disregard for the consent of the governed, and join in the fight for community rights.

—————————————————————–

Mari Margil and Ben Price wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Mari is the associate director and Ben is projects director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit, public interest law firm providing legal services to communities facing threats to their local environment, agriculture, economy, and quality of life.

Interested?

• Video: Drafting Nature’s Constitution: Simply regulating pollution will never really stop it. Mari Margil of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund discusses why we need a fundamental change in the way we use law to protect nature.
• After the Campaign Cash, the Backlash: The 2010 midterm elections—the first since Citizens United opened the floodgates to corporate campaign cash—were the most expensive in history. So what happens next?
• Citizens Take Power: Communities across the country are declaring citizens’ right and duty to protect their water, land, local economy, and way of life, even if it means taking on the enormous power of corporations. Here are some of the peaceful revolutionaries who have stepped up.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Licking, Pennsylvania defies state law by banning corporations from dumping fracking wastewater.

by Mari Margil, Ben Price

In Pennsylvania—a central target for natural gas drilling and the controversial drilling practice known as horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”—local communities don’t have the legal authority to keep unwanted drilling from happening.

As fracking’s impacts on water safety make headlines and public resistance to drilling grows, some towns have tried to use land use zoning to keep drilling companies out—but they can’t use zoning laws to stop an activity the state has declared legal. (At best, they can zone where the corporations site their drill pads. But since drilling is not vertical but horizontal, there’s no way to contain its impact on a community’s water and environment.)

Taking local control

One small community in western Pennsylvania wanted more say over what happens within its borders. Licking Township, population 500, chose to defy state law with its own local ordinance, banning corporations from dumping fracking wastewater within its borders. Licking sits atop the Marcellus Shale, a geological formation that contains large and mostly untapped natural gas reserves. On Oct. 12, 2010, the Licking Township Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to ban corporations from dumping fracking wastewater within the township.

“When it comes to land use issues and the preservation of important resources, the local community is best suited to set priorities as they feel impacts most acutely,” said Mik Robertson, chairman of the Licking Township Supervisors.

Pennsylvania’s preferential laws for drilling companies are not unique. For years, the drilling industry has worked closely with government to pave the way for widespread drilling, eliminating regulatory barriers that may stand in its way. The so-called “Halliburton Loophole” was inserted into the federal Safe Drinking Water Act to exempt companies drilling for natural gas, including those drilling in the Marcellus Shale (which extends from New York to West Virginia) from having to comply. Corporations have also been exempted from a host of other laws and regulations, and states have enacted laws pre-empting municipalities from taking steps to reign in the industry.

The residents of Licking felt that they should be the ones to decide what happens in their township. “People have the right to determine what is suitable for their community, as they are most directly affected by intended or unintended consequences of resource extraction,” said Robertson.

The dangers of fracking

The residents of Licking aren’t alone in their concerns about fracking. Across the Appalachian highlands, residents worried about the health effects of fracking have been calling on their elected officials to protect them. In New York, a citizen movement convinced the state Senate to place a 9-month moratorium on the practice while its safety is evaluated. However, the moratorium is only temporary and has not been voted into state law.

Fracking involves pumping water laced with sand and a cocktail of chemicals underground to fracture the shale rock and release the natural gas. In the process, thousands of gallons of toxic wastewater are produced and can contaminate waterways and drinking water.  Natural gas wells are often driven through aquifers.

The impacts from drilling can include exploding wells, groundwater contamination, and fish kills. Recently, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture quarantined cattle believed to have drunk from a frack wastewater spill.  Their milk was no longer considered safe to drink.

A new study by researchers at the University of Buffalo found that fracking also releases uranium trapped in the rock, raising additional health concerns.

Collateral damage includes lost property value, drying up of mortgage loans for prospective home buyers, and the threatened loss of organic certification for farmers. And it’s not only rural communities feeling the pressure. In Pittsburgh and Buffalo (both of which straddle the Marcellus), gas extraction corporations have quietly signed leases with landowners to drill under the surface.

A new direction

Drafted with the help of Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), the “Licking Township Community Water Rights and Self-Government Ordinance” is the first of its kind in the nation.

The City of Pittsburgh is also considering a CELDF-drafted ordinance, which is scheduled for a vote on November 16. With an expected veto-proof majority of City Council members in favor, that ordinance would impose an outright ban on gas drilling by corporations within city limits. Communities across the Marcellus Shale region, including Lehman Township in eastern Pennsylvania, are also considering CELDF ordinances that would ban corporations from drilling or from extracting water to use in drilling.

In addition to banning corporate disposal of frack wastewater, Licking Township’s ordinance asserts the right to local self-government and the community’s right to a healthy environment and to clean water. In adopting the ordinance, Licking joins more than a dozen other communities in legally recognizing the rights of nature and subordinating corporate constitutional rights to the rights of human and natural communities.

By recognizing the rights of nature, Licking is effectively protecting ecosystems and natural communities within the township from efforts by corporations to drill there—or by higher levels of governments to authorize that drilling. Residents of the community are empowered by the ordinance to enforce those rights on behalf of threatened ecosystems.

By prohibiting the introduction of frack wastewater into the Township’s environment, Licking’s new law effectively blocks hydro-fracturing. Critics of the ordinance claim that, by denying corporations that violate its prohibitions the civil rights protections conferred on them by the courts, the ordinance goes too far.

Robertson responds to these charges, saying, “People have rights, like the gifts of nature. People have rights to property. Property does not have rights. Corporations are property.”

Corporations may sue to overturn the ordinance, with the argument that it violates their corporate constitutional rights. Such a lawsuit would finally raise imperative questions about whose rights trump whose: Do the court-endowed privileges of corporations override the inalienable rights of the people and ecosystems of Licking Township, nullifying their claim to have a legal right to their health, safety, and welfare? Or does the community have the right to make critical decisions to protect its well-being—and that of the ecosystems upon which it depends?

Interested?

• The Fight Against Fracking
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• How Felton, Calif., Achieved Water Independence: A tiny Californian town took back its water supply—and your town can too.
• Communities Take Power: Communities across the country are declaring citizens’ right and duty to protect their water, land, local economy, and way of life, even if it means taking on the enormous power of corporations.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Why controlling your water supply is so important

by Tara Lohan

Click to enlarge

In 2008, weeks after communities all over the United States celebrated the Fourth of July, the tiny town of Felton, Calif., marked its own holiday: Water Independence Day. With barbecue, music, and dancing, residents marked the end of Felton’s six-year battle to gain control of its water system. The fight, like the festivities, was a grassroots effort. For when a large, private corporation bought Felton’s water utility and immediately raised rates, residents organized, leading what was ultimately a successful campaign for public ownership and inspiring other communities nationwide.

Like many other communities with a privately controlled water system, Felton quickly experienced some of the drawbacks: skyrocketing rates, and little public recourse. But officials of some cash-strapped towns seek privatization because they believe a corporation will help lift their burden. Across the country, public water systems require massive repairs to deteriorating infrastructure, at an estimated annual cost of about $17 billion over the next 20 years. Our aging water mains result in some 240,000 breaks a year, and more than a trillion gallons of wastewater spill into our waterways annually. Federal funds typically help communities pay the repair bills, but escalating costs have prompted many cities to look for alternatives.

Some local leaders, eager for financial help, have turned to private companies to buy their utilities or lease them—arrangements known as public-private partnerships. Companies promise system improvements, greater efficiency, and money up front, but increasing evidence suggests that cities are getting the raw end of such deals: Privatization jeopardizes public supply and access to water and drives up costs for citizens.

“Providing clean, accessible, affordable water is not only the most basic of all government services, but throughout history, control of water has defined the power structure of societies,” Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, filmmakers who documented the effort of Stockton, Calif., to fight privatization, wrote in the book Water Consciousness. “If we lose control of our water, what do we as citizens really control through our votes, and what does democracy mean?”

Communities Fight Back

A former logging town in the redwood hills above Santa Cruz, Calif., Felton had a privately run water system, a holdout since privatization fell out of favor in the late 19th century. It hadn’t been much of an issue until 2002, when Citizen Utilities, the small company that ran the water system, was acquired by American Water Works Co. Its subsidiary, California-American Water (Cal-Am), took over Felton’s water utility. American Water was acquired shortly afterward by London-based Thames Water.

In November 2002, Cal-Am proposed a 74 percent rate increase over three years, subject to approval by the California Public Utilities Commission. Felton residents formed Friends of Locally Owned Water (FLOW), and with legal help from Santa Cruz County, fought the rate increase, which the utilities commission knocked down to 44 percent. But the threat of escalating costs loomed, so FLOW began working on a plan to buy the water system and turn it over to the nearby San Lorenzo Valley Water District (SLVWD), a public utility. By 2005, FLOW had enlisted the help of Food & Water Watch and was working on a ballot initiative to raise the estimated $11 million to buy the system from Cal-Am/RWE.

Jim Graham of FLOW said the group sent volunteers door to door three times throughout the community to educate residents about privatization and the public ownership campaign. That meant urging voters to accept a property-tax increase of up to $600 a year for 30 years.

Their efforts were successful, and the ballot initiative won with nearly 75 percent of the vote. SLVWD then proposed to buy the water system for $7.6 million, but Cal-Am/RWE refused to sell. So SLVWD pursued eminent domain to force a buyout. Just before the case was to go to jury trial, the company settled with SLVWD. Today, with Felton’s water back in the hands of a public utility, the average resident’s bill has dropped by at least 50 percent. FLOW has calculated that even with the tax increase, most residents are already saving as much as $400 per year.

A Private Matter

In recent decades, the government’s role in water service has changed. Three years before Reagan took office, 78 percent of money for new water projects came from the federal government. Nearly 30 years later, the proportion has fallen to 3 percent. Then the Clinton administration made several tax-law changes that made it easier for cities to privatize local water and sewer systems and for foreign companies to enter the market, explained Emily Wurth, water program manager for Food & Water Watch.

Food

Water Watch has studied the effects of water-system privatization and has helped Felton and other communities turn—or return—to public control. In a 2009 report that examined nearly 5,000 water utilities and 1,900 sewer utilities, the organization found that the private entities—which have a fiduciary obligation to shareholders—charge up to 80 percent more for water and 100 percent more for sewer services. Privately owned utilities cost more to operate, too: They typically have to pay income and property taxes, while public utilities are exempt. In all, according to Food & Water Watch, operation and maintenance costs of privatized water systems can spike 20 to 30 percent, when dividends, taxes, and profits are factored in. It follows that corporations make more money if more water is used; conservation and repairs, then, can fall off the priority list. When Stockton, Calif., privatized its wastewater system, higher-than-promised rate hikes, poor maintenance, and sewage overflows followed. When 8 million gallons discharged into the San Joaquin River, the spill went unnoticed for 10 hours and unreported to the public for three days.

According to a 2002 Century Foundation survey of 245 municipalities, 73 percent of them ended private water contracts because of poor service. In Lee County, Fla., officials realized that after five years of control by Severn Trent Services, a British multinational corporation, the county needed $8 million to repair improperly maintained systems, which could have jeopardized environmental and public health. The county lost money on the deal and didn’t renew the five-year contract once it ended. Other cities that privatized sewer systems—including Woonsocket, R.I., and Wilmington, Del.—have discovered chronic pollution problems.

Meanwhile, some cities turn to water-system leases. But under a lease, the city retains control of the infrastructure, so the corporation has even less incentive to perform proper maintenance. If spills or overflows result in environmental damage, it is often the municipality that has to pick up the tab on any fines.

In 2008, the city of Milwaukee was looking for solutions to an impending $100 million shortfall when the city’s comptroller recommended a lease of the Milwaukee Water Works. He hoped a private company would pay the city $500 million for the right to lease the utility for 99 years. “The driving reason wasn’t that our water system was falling apart or in need of maintenance,” said Deputy Comptroller Mike Daun. “We wanted a public-private partnership that would result in a very large transfer of funds to the city up front, which we’d use to create an endowment and address the deficit.”

But not everyone shared that vision. Research by Food & Water Watch revealed that for every dollar the city received from the lease, residents would end up paying $1.60 to $5.40.The organization aided a grassroots effort in Milwaukee that helped defeat the privatization plan, at least for now.

Cities such as Chicago continue to contemplate privatization, while many others are reverting to public control or fighting privatization at the outset.

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, says that her organization advises communities to focus on who is able to stop the privatization threat, usually the city council or water board. That means ­doorbelling, working with the media, releasing reports that challenge the company’s claims, and working closely with labor groups and community groups. If cities need to make improvements to ailing systems, municipal bonds are usually a cheaper option than private financing, and they can seek public-public partnerships (PUPs), an alternative to public-private

partnerships. PUPs, according to the Transnational Institute, are “a collaboration between two or more public authorities or organizations based on solidarity to improve the capacity and effectiveness of one partner in providing public water or sanitation services.” Essentially those communities with well-run systems offer their expertise to managers of utilities in need of some help.

But for many, the issue of water privatization isn’t just about money. Felton FLOW member Barbara Sprenger said she was motivated to act primarily “because it was water.” Private ownership, she said, meant extra costs without the necessary monitoring and transparency.

“The people on our water board manage our water as part of a watershed,” she said. “They care, and they are local—we see them at the grocery store. You really have to have local control over something so vital.”

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Tara Lohan wrote this article for  Water Solutions , the Summer 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Tara is senior editor at AlterNet and editor of Water Consciousness.

Interested?

• Protecting Our Commons: Keeping the air, the water, the Internet and other commons out of corporate hands and in our own. A YES! Magazine interactive graphic.
• How to Get Local Control: Taught by people who’ve done it.

We won. The tiny town of Conway, Wash., will not have a cell tower looming over its one street.  Thanks to hours of work and thousands of dollars, we won. But it shouldn’t have been that hard.

The 150-foot tower was to have been located behind the post office, where it would have dwarfed even the feed-mill elevator that rises to the east of the Burlington Northern railroad track.

Conway, close to the mouth of the Skagit River, has one main street two blocks long, with a post office at one end and a volunteer fire hall at the other.  In between there’s a tavern, a few small shops and one large antique store.  The rest of Main Street is lined with houses built between 1910 and 1920.

Many residents protested that a cell tower — even one disguised as the world’s tallest plastic Christmas tree — would never blend into our community. We shared research about cell towers’ effects on wildlife, with some suggesting that the tower’s signals would confuse migrating birds. The “tree” would be within one mile of a migratory bird refuge. This information seemed relevant to us; to the planners, it was not.

As for the tower’s effect on public health, we learned that the wireless phone industry had long since lobbied successfully for a federal law stipulating that any possible impact of cell towers on human health could not serve as a legal basis for objecting to them.

We submitted studies that demonstrated the obvious effect of cell towers on property values in residential areas. Verizon countered with a study of its own, and the county planner apparently found it — rather than the information we contributed — persuasive.

We presented a petition that 85 percent of the community signed. We understood the NIMBY impulse fit us to a T, but we also thought community sentiment mattered. We were wrong about that, too.

Fortunately, the avid researchers in our family, my wife and our son, came upon county code language about setback requirements. That gave us some hope.  The rear of the commercial building adjacent to the tower site has been used as a residence for more than 25 years.  That meant the tower’s setback had to be equal to its height, not the 15 feet that commercial zoning requires.  We told the county planner, who tried to make the problem disappear. We weren’t convinced by her verbal jujitsu, so we hired a lawyer and appealed.

A year later, the appeal was heard, and the hearing examiner agreed that a residence was – not surprisingly – a place where someone lives.  We prevailed!

I ought to feel better about it all, I suppose. Verizon has apparently chosen not to appeal the examiner’s decision.  But winning in a case like this leaves behind a load of regret.

I’m sorry to have deprived a neighbor of the income he would have received from Verizon, and I’m sorry he now seems displeased to see me.  I’m sad I saw another man I’ve known for years testify that the tower was needed for public safety reasons after telling me privately he just wanted better wireless service for his wife’s home computer.  I cannot help it; I now look at him differently.

The personal things are hard, but even harder are the public issues this tussle highlighted.  Had we not lived within 500 feet of the site, we probably would never have known of the proposal.  Who regularly reads the legal announcements in the back of the newspaper? Fortunately, because part of our back yard is within that magic circle, the announcement was mailed to us, and we bothered to read it.

There’s also the investment of time and money that opposition requires. Had my family not created a petition, knocked on doors, gathered signatures, talked to neighbors, taken photographs, researched the history of cell-tower siting, pored over the county code, printed, copied and delivered hundreds of pages to the county planner, there would now be a cell tower where the rules clearly say one shouldn’t be. That seems too many “ifs” between right and wrong.

People should not have to spend one-third of their year’s Social Security checks to question a county decision — which is why there’s a larger issue at stake here than the placement of one cell tower in one small community that didn’t want it.

Money talks, while its absence gives the average citizen no voice. Who is likely to be the victor in local land-use wars? I’m sorry to say that it rarely is the people.

Ken Winkes

Ken Winkes is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a retired teacher who lives in Conway, Washington.

First published in High County News, May 11, 2010
Reprinted with the permission of Writer’s on the Range Op-Ed Syndication Service of High Country News

Simply regulating pollution will never really stop it. Mari Margil of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund discusses why we need a fundamental change in the way we use law to protect nature.

The environmental movement, with its army of professional advocates, lawyers, grassroots campaigners, and dedicated funders, has been around for decades. Yet nearly every biological indicator shows a planet in crisis—and poised to unravel faster as climate change disrupts already-shaky ecosystem functions.

Mari Margil, associate director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) believes it’s time for different tactics. The nonprofit agency used to work within the body of existing environmental law—helping impacted residents file lawsuits or appeal corporate permits—to protect communities from environmental damage. But a series of blocked efforts, often made worse by the very agencies meant to protect the environment, convinced the group that more fundamental changes were necessary.

“Our system of environmental laws and regulations don’t actually protect the environment,” says CELDF’s Mari Margil. “At best, they merely slow the rate of its destruction … We weren’t helping anyone protect anything.”

The organization has since changed its goals, working with citizens from all over North and South America to literally rewrite local laws in ways that allow people to speak up for their communities, watersheds, forests, and air.

According to Margil, anemic environmental laws spring from the fact that nature has no constitutional rights. CELDF has taken a local approach to reversing this structural blind spot, drafting ordinances for townships from New England to Pennsylvania to Washington State that:

• Give communities legal authority to say “No” to unwanted corporate activities;
• Recognize the rights of nature;
• Strip corporations of their constitutional rights.

In one landmark victory, the town of Barnstead, New Hampshire, voted 135 to 1 to ban the privatization of their freshwater by encroaching corporate interests—the first community in the nation to do so. Other towns have followed, stripping corporations of the rights of personhood and recognizing the rights of communities to self-govern. In 2008, with legal advice from CELDF, Ecuador recognized the right of nature to exist and persist in its national constitution.

Mari Margil Addresses Bioneers Conference

This video was produced by Bioneers, a nonprofit organization that provides a forum and hub for social and scientific innovators.

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Communities Take on Corporate Power
People across the country are taking our founding documents at their word, declaring citizens’ right and duty to protect nature and community.

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The tool they’re using to fight Consol Energy is something called “democracy.” They have the quaint idea that they can prohibit a mining technology that would destroy their town. But — as the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v FEC illustrates — there are very few government entities of any kind left in our country that have the power to stand up successfully to large corporations.

Indeed, Blaine (represented by CELDF) has now been sued by Consol, and the case is working its way through the courts.

Rural, small-town America is the frontline battleground for the most important political struggle now taking place in our country, the struggle for local-control, local democracy. This is where the promise of the Founders will survive or perish once and for all. This is the common ground where liberals and conservatives can all meet and join hands.

Does this sound extreme?

Watch this 10-minute movie (below) by Jeremy Kagan (director of The Big Fix and Natty Gann, among other successful films) and decide for yourself.

This movie was shown at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival Workshop, “The Revolution for Local Control.”

While waiting outside the council chamber in the Nevada City Hall for the first workshop to begin, we checked out the various displays by environmental organizations. We also chatted with the good people of  Wildlife Rehabilitation & Release, where we picked up a flyer about their next training session in March.

Once inside, we chatted with Anna Haynes, who had just listened to the presentation by Colin Beavan (“No Impact Man”). Anna’s thoughts on that talk are here.

The first workshop we attended was “Get Your Film Out to the World,” a panel discussion by veterans of the independent and environmental documentary field, such as IndieGoGo. This session was sponsored and hosted by The Video Project.

The most interesting stories were about aspiring filmmakers who finally contracted with recognized distributors, only to find their films poorly targeted by those distributors to the wrong audience. The panel had lots of advice about how to promote environmental documentaries in novel and effective ways. Much of this advice centered on the Internet and social networking.  This workshop was of interest to us as documentary filmmaker wannabes.

The next workshop we attended was called “The Revolution for Local Control,” presented by Global Exchange. Several people spoke, including Shannon Biggs, Chad Nicholson and Kevin Danaher. The presentation included a short film about the struggle of Blaine Township in Western Pennsylvania  – working with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) — to prevent the Consol Energy Company from engaging in the landscape-ravaging practice of longwall mining.

The creator of the short Blaine documentary is Jeremy Kagan, the director of The Big Fix and The Journey of Natty Gann, among other successful films. I sent Kagan email last evening asking whether the Blaine documentary is available on the Internet, and he replied with an offer to send it to me. (Late update: After I wrote back again and suggested that he upload it to YouTube, he replied that he’d do that in the next 24 hours).

Here’s how longwall mining is described in Be The Change, a book about the work of CELDF:

“The procedure for longwall coal mining goes something like this: six to eight hundred feet below the earth’s surface, depending on the seam, a machine moves across the face of the coal, grinding it up at tremendous speed. After the machines come through and remove the coal, the earth drops three to six feet above the seam. This is called subsidence. The damage caused by subsidence has caused the practice of longwall mining to be banned in Germany — the country where it originated.”

Eventually, the Blaine town council passed two ordinances, one to ban longwall mining in their township, and another to strip corporations of the right to be considered persons in their township. In its Democracy School workshops, CELDF refers to this strategy as “rights-based” organizing.

This rights-based strategy is a slow-moving wildfire, threatening to reform our dysfunctional political system starting at the grass-roots. According to Shannon Biggs, there are now some 125 communities in the United States who have passed similar ordinances, essentially sending the message, “We decide.”

The stories coming out of these communities are thrilling and inspiring. If democracy has a chance in the United States, this is it.

The most entertaining speaker at this workshop was Kevin Danaher, who spoke of this movement toward democracy with phrases such as these:

“Our biggest enemy is the cult of powerlessness.”

“The Titanic of corporate power has run into the iceberg of unsustainability.”

“The lesson of Copenhagen is that the solution will not come from the top.”

“Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking”

“Organize!”

Another speaker, Chad Nicholson, talked about his work in Spokane on another rights-based initiative, Envision Spokane.

“Rights-based organizing.”

Get used to that phrase.

It’s the long wave of the future, and it will reach us here in Nevada County eventually.