“Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth: left to itself, it sweeps in like the tide.” — Fay Weldon
Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a project of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, or CELDF. We’re launching this newsletter as we celebrate our 30 year anniversary in 2025. For three decades, we’ve been organizing for resistance + resilience in collaboration with people across the United States, working to protect natural ecosystems and human communities from the impacts of corporate greed.
In 2006, we helped a small rural community in SE Pennsylvania, Tamaqua Borough, pass the first rights of nature law in the world. Since then, CELDF has collaborated with hundreds of communities working for rights of nature and community rights at the local, municipal, county, city, and state levels. We’ve also collaborated with Indigenous nations and worked internationally, including in Ecuador, where CELDF assisted the government in recognizing rights of nature in their constitution.
Truth, Reckoning, and Right Relationship
We began by utilizing the existing rules, and expanded to assisting communities in creating their own. Now, our work is increasingly moving outside the boundaries of the system itself. In this time, we've learned that change is a process of understanding truths, reckoning with their implications, and modifying actions based on what is learned. Those actions are part of a process of moving towards right relationship with the world. CELDF calls this all Truth, Reckoning, and Right Relationship, and it is both a pillar of our new organizational strategy and the namesake of this publication.
Truth begins with the curiosity to ask questions. Questions like: what is the state of our world? How did we get here? Why can’t we say “no” to harmful projects in our communities? What would real community empowerment look like? What is our role in the current crisis? What is sustainable, and what is greenwashing? How do institutions and elites shape our understanding of environmental issues, and how do everyday people like me and you contribute?
After questions, truth requires honesty: the willingness to follow information wherever it may lead.
George Orwell wrote, “The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” This is true in some instances. But today, in addition to hate, truth tellers are met with indifference. Grappling with the truth requires action. It requires hard work. It requires endurance, community, and support. It’s a collective effort. The truth is often uncomfortable, and sometimes even dangerous — when it involves confronting the powerful. This is reckoning — the process of integrating the truth, grappling with its implications, and working to change our lives and communities as a result.
We live in a time of profound crisis. The principles of democracy and self-government have been under sustained attack for centuries in the United States, all in service to a brutal and exploitative corporate machine which is shoving communities aside to bulldoze through the natural heritage of this land. The profound disconnect between the way we live and what the land can support is not something of the past. It is here and now. It is all around us, embedded in our culture, our economy, and our psyche. We need right relationship — not simply reconciliation. An end to the harm comes before reconciliation, and this is not easy.
Truth and reckoning is a process to shift our thinking, bring place-based communities together, and relink ourselves to nature and ourselves as a community and something bigger. That is what this publication is devoted to. We plan to publish guides, interviews, and written material here to assist in this process.
If you would like to follow, you can subscribe for free. Or, if you’d like to pledge monetary support to these efforts, please either donate to CELDF or sign up for a paid subscription (details coming soon). Thank you.
