Inform
Welcome to WACRN! This is the place to dip your toes in the water and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor). As one community rights activist has put it, we don’t just have an environmental problem, we have a democracy problem. Meaningful social and economic lawmaking is highly problematic in the current system. Meaningful environmental protection has been rendered illegal. To understand how on earth that’s possible, read on….
Intro to Community Rights
Why is our focus on the local/community level? There are many reasons, but for starters this is where true democracy should be practiced yet simultaneously it is the level of government in the US that is the most disempowered. Through legal structures like the doctrine of Preemption, local decision-making is subjected to state authority, which in turn is subject to federal authority. And yet it is individual communities and ecosystems that are being despoiled by pollution and rampant development, and we’ve been locked out of being our own advocates. Our local environment is also where we as humans can connect, identify, and be in relationship with the more-than-human world.
Intro to Rights of Nature
It’s when we recognize our inherent connection to the natural world that recognizing the inherent rights of Nature to exist, flourish, and regenerate begins to make sense. Contrary to modern “conservation” that sees Nature as an object, a resource to, at best, to be cultivated and preserved for the benefit of humankind, rights of nature means that we acknowledge our relationship to, with, and as Nature.
As deep ecologists, Bill Evans and George Sessions, put it, “…the work we call cultivating ecological consciousness… involves becoming more aware of the actuality of rocks, wolves, trees, and rivers–the cultivation of the insight that everything is connected.”
But bringing that kind of consciousness into a system of laws created to enshrine dominion over the natural world is challenging to say the least. A first step involves transforming Nature from a legal object into a legal subject, with ‘standing’ to bring its own grievances in court and seek redress for a violation of its rights–just as activists once did for slaves in the Abolitionist movement and for women in the Suffragist movement. And while it may seem outlandish, surely if a corporation, which only exists on a piece of paper, can be a legal person and be represented in court, then so can a river, a forest, or a herd of elk.
How it’s all Connected
It’s not just environmental degradation and community disempowerment that go hand-in-hand. Almost every major issue our nation faces–from affordable housing to the vanishing middle class to systemic racism–stems from the same underlying issue: our system of government wasn’t created to protect those things. It was designed to ensure the wealth and power of a few at the expense of the many–and the natural world. There is a reason why the meme the 99% resonated across the country and the political spectrum.
Focusing on single issue activism obscures the interconnected root cause of the realities we face. A rights-based, community-based approach focuses instead on the systemic problems that give rise to all of the issues people care passionately about across the country and political spectrum. In that sense, community organizing doesn’t just mean working at the local level, it means bringing a plurality of voices together to transform our laws to make them work for all our communities (even the more-than-human ones).
