A Letter from Executive Director Thomas Linzey

Dear CELDF Supporter,

    What a year it’s been.

    I’m writing this note at 30,000 feet over southern Oregon on my way to speak at the annual Bioneers Conference in southern California, which draws over 3,000 attendees each year.  Before departing, I was on the phone with an individual organizing an Envision Seattle group (organized along the lines of our Envision Spokane project in eastern Washington), talking about driving a local Bill of Rights into the Seattle City Charter. And that call came on the heels of finishing an appellate legal brief defending one of our communities’ qualification of a ballot initiative banning natural gas hydrofracking in their community.

    Whew. Multiply that by all of our community organizers, and you’ll get an idea of how busy we’ve all become. Hundreds of communities and municipal governments have contacted our organization over the past year alone, and we’re now getting calls for assistance from as far away as Kenya, Israel, and even rebel-occupied Libya.

    2011 got off to an ambitious start – with the Legal Defense Fund’s role in 2010 to help form the international organization Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. Tapped to assist national, state, and local governments to draft constitutional and other legal provisions recognizing enforceable rights for ecosystems and natural communities, we’ve drafted local laws for Australian and South African communities. Those laws follow on the heels of the ratification of the Ecuadorian rights of nature constitutional provisions, which we helped to draft several years ago.

    Later in 2011, we focused closer to home – hosting the first conference in the country aimed at helping communities to ban natural gas hydrofracking within their municipalities. That effort built on our success in late 2010 with the unanimous adoption by the City of Pittsburgh of a Legal Defense Fund-drafted ordinance which created a Community Bill of Rights banning fracking within the City, while recognizing the rights of ecosystems and removing the claimed rights of natural gas corporations. With the help of the Legal Defense Fund, several other municipalities in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York have now adopted similar laws.

    And several months ago, the Legal Defense Fund successfully fought off a flurry of lawsuits filed against groups working with our organization. Those lawsuits attempted to stop our groups from putting Community Bills of Rights onto their municipal ballots through the referendum process. Judges in two county courts and one state court have now ruled in favor of the Legal Defense Fund – establishing precedent that groups can use the ballot box to drive fracking bans forward that frontally challenge the authority of natural gas corporations over communities.

    As I look out the window of the plane at the vast expanse of the Cascade Mountains, I’m reminded of why our staff works overtime – it’s because without the Legal Defense Fund, there is no one else to stand with communities as they do this difficult work of building the foundation for a people’s movement which recognizes the rights of nature, strips corporations of those claimed “rights” that elevates them over community rights, and which promises to create real local community self-government focused on sustainability.

    As a supporter, our victories and accomplishments are also yours. Without your help, we couldn’t continue. If you’ve been a supporter, thank-you; and if you’re not, please consider becoming one today. This organization, our communities, and our rapidly vanishing ecosystems need you.