This past January 24th the Santa Monica City Council unanimously approved a progressive sustainability bill of rights, building on the Santa Monica City Sustainability Plan first established back in 1994. The resolution calls on the city to “recognize the rights of people, natural communities, and ecosystems to exist, regenerate and flourish”....The movement around recognizing rights of nature – that nature in all its life forms has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles – has been growing. A dozen townships in Pennsylvania, Maine, and New Hampshire have recognized rights of nature. And internationally, Ecuador and Bolivia granted legal rights of nature ordinances in their respective national constitutions.

The City of Santa Monica recently passed an ordinance, directing the City to “recognize the rights of people, natural communities, and ecosystems to exist, regenerate and flourish,” joining a rapidly growing international "Nature Rights" movement. "Nature Rights" recognizes that healthy ecosystems and biodiversity are critical to all life on the planet, including humans, and human priorities do not automatically take precedence over natural habitat and ecosystem health.

CITY HALL — A dual measure before the City Council Tuesday to support legal protections for the environment and end corporate personhood got a split response from elected officials who enthusiastically supported a healthy environment but watered down the call to restrict rights to living beings. Council members unanimously passed a resolution backing a bill of rights for the environment, which would give legal standing to city officials to protect the environment within Santa Monica's borders if passed as a law in the future.

In the near future, Santa Monica residents might find that the city's goals such as those aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption are legally mandated. With overwhelming support from high school clubs, neighborhood and grass-roots organizations, and environmental activists, the City Council voted Tuesday night to look into giving teeth to a voluntary "sustainable-city plan." It approved a resolution declaring that in conjunction with revising its six-year-old sustainability plan, it would draft this year policies that would allow residents and the city to sue to protect local, natural resources threatened by corporations. The resolution is also the first step toward enacting a "Sustainability Bill of Rights," written and approved in June by the Task Force on the Environment.

Santa Monica's City Council voted on Tuesday to recognize the rights of natural communities to exist. The resolution, drafted by the Task Force on the Environment, calls for Santa Monica to “recognize the rights of people, natural communities, and ecosystems to exist, regenerate and flourish,” according to City Staff. Dean Kubani, director of the Office of Sustainability and the Environment, said that the declaration acknowledges “the rights of Santa Monica residents to clean water, clean air” and other aspects of a clean environment. The resolution, which passed unanimously, would be the first step toward establishing legislation in the City that supports the goals it outlines.

Santa Monica might jump aboard the anti-corporate personhood bandwagon Tuesday night....It will weigh moving forward on whether to adopt a "Sustainability Bill of Rights" for Santa Monica....The first local law recognizing the rights of nature was adopted in 2006 in Tamaqua Borough, PN [sic]. In December 2010, Pittsburgh became the first major city in the United States to adopt a community bill of rights that bans corporations from drilling natural gas within its city limits, putting the rights of people, the community, and nature over corporations.

If a Santa Monica advisory task force gets its way, the city will join a growing panoply of municipalities on the forefront of a movement to cement the rights of its citizens to enjoy a clean environment. The ordinance, called the Sustainability Bill of Rights, would for the first time declare that Santa Monica residents, natural communities and ecosystems within city limits have a right to a healthy environment and conscious practices.

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.

With an anticipated Sept. 10 hearing in Yreka Superior Court, both sides in the Measure A water ordinance battle have filed deposition and writs supporting their positions on the argument. Measure A was pulled off the ballot by county clerk Colleen Setzer after it garnered the required number of signatures and the Mount Shasta City Council voted several times to let the voters decide.

Mount Shasta’s Measure A, removed from November’s ballot earlier this month, has generated an appeal of that decision by proponents and a response from the county – and the Siskiyou County Superior Court is now tasked with discerning whether the measure’s proponents followed elections procedure, whether or not County Clerk Colleen Setzer was the elections official for the city of Mount Shasta, and whether or not the court believes that the measure is constitutional.

On Friday, August 20, the Mt. Shasta Community Rights Project filed an elections complaint to restore Measure A to the 2010 general election ballot. Siskiyou County Clerk Colleen Setzer is denying Mt. Shasta voters the right to vote on “Measure A”, which was stripped from the city’s ballot earlier this week. The Measure, which would prohibit outside corporations from bulk water extraction and corporate cloud seeding, is the first ordinance of its kind in California because it is designed to assert the rights of residents over the rights of corporations.

Proponents of the Mt. Shasta ordinance say that it has far-reaching implications, both in protecting water and in empowering citizens; in the words of one resident testifying before the City Council on May 24, "this ordinance is the embryo of change for our state." Commenting on the potential of the ordinance to unite diverse interests, resident Molly Brown said, "People, regardless of their political or environmental inclinations, can agree that we should decide what happens where we live."

An ordinance outlawing water bottling plants and cloud seeding in Mount Shasta will be on the November ballot. The Mount Shasta City Council voted 5-0 Monday night to put the proposed ordinance to public vote. The only other option would have been to enact it into law. “This is about our right to water,” said Ami Marcus with the Mount Shasta Community Rights Project.

Mount Shasta officials are considering whether to outlaw water bottling plants in the city and cloud seeding over its watersheds.

In partnership with Global Exchange and Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, proponents of the Mt. Shasta City Community Water Rights & Self-Government Ordinance are working to pass an ordinance that will prohibit corporations from withdrawing water from the municipal aquifer and will also prohibit weather manipulation from cloud seeding in the Mount Shasta keystone bioregion.

Mount Shasta city staff is busy working on a special report regarding the proposed Mt. Shasta Community Water Rights Ordinance, which was ordered by council on April 26. The report will be presented to the council on Monday, May 24, said city manager Kevin Plett.

The council heard dozens of passionate appeals during public comments, then voted unanimously to order a special report on the Mt. Shasta Community Water Rights and Self Governance Ordinance, which will appear on the November election ballot. The Ordinance was brought to council after 700 certified voter signatures were gathered from residents.

The Mount Shasta City Council voted unanimously Monday evening to order a special report on the Mt. Shasta Community Water Rights and Self Governance Ordinance, which would prevent corporations from cloud seeding and bulk water extraction within Mount Shasta city limits.

Why won't City Council members pass such an ordinance without public pressure? They face a state law that forbids towns from regulating pesticides. That law allowed the CDFA to force its 2007 spraying on Santa Cruz. So, it takes courage for council members to defy state law, but they have precedent and constitutional language on their side.