Today, the U.S. government is using the 250th anniversary as an opportunity to peddle propaganda in service of nationalistic fascism. As a law firm which has been educating communities about the truth of U.S. “freedom” for thirty years, we’re here to set the record straight.

Welcome to CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective. In this episode, we speak with historian and author Tad Stoermer.

Tad is author of the just-released book “A Resistance History of the United States.” He joined CELDF’s Education Director Ben Price and Consulting Director Tish O’Dell in a conversation about what resistance is and needs to be in this 21^st century revolutionary moment.

We discuss how the American system of government isn’t broken, but rather its been fixed to work as it does from the beginning. We talk honestly about how protest does not equal resistance, and how institutional mechanisms and cultural forces routinely interrupt real resistance before it gets started.

We talk about the importance of debunking nationalist mythology about the nation’s founding. We asked Tad Stoermer “What exactly did Americans gain by waging a war against British oppression, and was it really a revolution?” You may be surprised by Tad’s answer.

For folks who are intrigued by CELDF’s America 250 series, Tad Stoermer is the public historian for you. He is the author of A Resistance History of the United States, just released on June 2, 2026, and A Public History of the American Revolution, scheduled for publication in 2027.

Tad is one of the most widely followed public historians in the world, reaching millions each month with his YouTube Resistance History Updates, Morning Reports, Constitutional Myths, Public History Practice, America 250 and Resistance History playlists, to name a few.

Links and Resources

• Tad’s Substack

• Tad on YouTube: Is Violence Part of Resistance?: No River, No Flood

• To buy Tad’s book, visit Penguin Random House online or contact your favorite independent bookseller.

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocketcasts

• YouTube (video and audio)

• And anywhere else you get your podcasts (click here to find this podcast via your preferred app)

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

Curious to know more?

• Contact CELDF at https://celdf.org/contact/

• Visit CELDF at https://celdf.org/

• Support CELDF at https://celdf.org/donate/

• Join the CELDF email list at https://secure.everyaction.com/TdVG-tdqbEW229YMqwOaYQ2

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For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

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Radical Visions: Reconnecting Academia and Nature, held in March, was CELDF’s second truth, reckoning, and right-relationship convergence (TRRR).

The two-day gathering was aimed at advancing community resistance and resilience by digging into the deeper systems that shape how we learn, how we teach, how we act, and who our education ultimately serves.

An intentionally intergenerational, transdisciplinary and immersive experience., students and faculty from several educational institutions in the greater Cleveland area gave powerful testimony on how the current system is set up to prepare them for corporate labor needs rather than for critical thinking, creativity or civic power.

Through testimony, art and roundtable conversations on topics about connections to local food systems and technology and AI and the harms to not just the environment, but to the physical and mental harms to the students of the future it became clear that no one on the university campuses were talking about these issues, let alone connecting them to the larger system.

What Radical Visions revealed is that the current environment, culture, and business of academia has led to profound student alienation, disengagement and anxiety. The framework of educational nurturing no longer supports deeply intertwined connections with nature, place and humanity, but has been supplanted with “information management”, replaceable “skills” and superficial “credentials”.

This convergence was not just an academic or climate event, but it was a reckoning with the structures that disconnect us from each other, from our histories and from the natural world.

Radical Visions was a direct offshoot from the first CELDF truth, reckoning, and right-relationship with the Great Lakes held in 2023/2024. CELDF’s consulting director began meeting with a few students in July of 2025 to conceive of, plan for, and create this convergence.

And to help expose many others to the TRRR framework, CELDF is working on a TRRR Guidebook as a resource for communities to use as a model for community building, in spite of the single issues and labels that have divided us for too long. What both these gatherings highlighted was that intentional divisions through politics, cultural labels and even educational institutions, were keeping people in place-based communities fragmented when in reality there are a lot of common frustrations and shared values.

The TRRR model is a way to help people figure out ways to connect and re-establish community to work together on creating resilient, healthy communities into the future.

So much of what CELDF does is about relationships. Through those relationships, connections are made and actions ensue. Besides funding needed to develop the TRRR Guidebook into a powerful tool, CELDF also needs your dollars to keep reaching out, making new connections, and nurturing relationships.

The video of this event can also be found on YouTube:

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocketcasts

• YouTube (video and audio)

• And anywhere else you get your podcasts (click here to find this podcast via your preferred app)

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

Curious to know more?

• Contact CELDF at https://celdf.org/contact/

• Visit CELDF at https://celdf.org/

• Support CELDF at https://celdf.org/donate/

• Join the CELDF email list at https://secure.everyaction.com/TdVG-tdqbEW229YMqwOaYQ2

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“America 250,” the official government celebration of the semiquincentennial of the United States, is brought to you by the following corporate sponsors.

That’s not a joke.

It’s the reality of corporate power in the USA.

America250, the official national organization created by Congress to celebrate and commemorate the founding of the United States, is sponsored by Alaska Airlines, Amazon, Anheuser-Busch, Boeing, BP, Chick-fil-A, Citi, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Coinbase, Comcast NBCUniversal, Cummins, FedEx, General Mills, Goldman Sachs, John Deere, Johnson & Johson, JPMorganChase, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, New York Stock Exchange, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, Proctor & Gamble, ScottsMiracle-Gro, Starbucks, T-Mobile, Target, UFC, Walmart, and many others.

From a revolution supposedly built on throwing off distant elite rulers — including corporations like the British East India Company whose tea was famously thrown into Boston Harbor — to a nation dominated by homegrown elites and a celebration of “freedom” brought to you by weapons manufacturers, genocide peddlers, global warming criminals, agribusiness and fake food giants, and surveillance corporations — the irony knows no bounds.

July 4th, 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Contrary to the official story, it was not a foregone conclusion that independence from Britain would organically evolve, thirteen years later, to the formation of the United States of America.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, with its condemnation of top-down governance, inspired people in the colonies to join in the revolt. For a time, between 1776 and 1789, common people — those who were not slaves, Native Americans, or women — were supported in their belief that liberty from the empire would lead to equality and justice in an alliance of thirteen independent nations. What was born instead was an apartheid nation with aspirations to empire guided by men of wealth instead of men with aristocratic titles. And while people have struggled mightily over the intervening centuries for equality under the law, we find ourselves 250 years in, facing another counter-revolution of the opulent against the majority.

It is in this context that the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, CELDF, has organized its own historical truth-telling program in response to the reactionary ancestor-worshiping propaganda being celebrated by the federal government and its corporate partners.

Called “America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective,” CELDF’s program incorporates essays, live streaming events, podcasts, and videos, all aimed at providing a surprising and historically-accurate counterpoint to the lies that pass for American history.

“This series lets us understand that the sum total of all the legends about the men who established the USA amount to false memories created by 250 years of repeated whitewashing,” says Ben Price, CELDF’s Director of Education, who has studied and taught the real history of the American Revolution for decades.

The series has been running since January. Podcasts include lively conversations about institutionalized sexism, racism, classism, and materialism such as our discussion with journalist and filmmaker Keala Kelly (Kanaka Maoli / Hawaiian) and author and professor Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes descendant) entitled “What Revolution? Systemic Racism, Sexism, and Genocide from America’s Beginning.” Activist Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright joined us in a discussion on systemic racism in BLACK OUT, a podcast you’d be sorry to miss.

Short videos like What is America 250? : A Revolutionary Perspective, Best Sellers and Best Sellouts, No Flag No Country, and The US Constitution Betrayed the Revolution will get you prepped and eager to dive in deeper to essays such as “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered” — The Battered Spirit of ‘76 and truths and Lies About The Declaration of Independence, which makes the case that the 27 justifications for revolt against England listed in the original Declaration remain strikingly relevant today.

“Two-hundred and fifty years later,” says Ben Price in a forthcoming piece for the series, “the grievances listed against the British Empire in the Declaration of Independence have yet to be resolved by the American empire under the U.S. constitution.”

The America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective series will be ongoing through July 4th, with more written pieces, recorded conversations, and videos to come. Written pieces and interviews in the series can be viewed on Substack, with additional content available on YouTube.

Ben Price is available for interviews.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in what is now the United States. With it came the launch of an armed revolution against distant fascist leaders and a struggle between reformers and reactionaries who would ultimately lead the budding nation further down the path of imperialism, slavery, land theft, and elite domination.

Today, the U.S. government is using the 250th anniversary as an opportunity to peddle facile propaganda in service of nationalistic fascism. As a law firm which has been educating communities about the truth of U.S. “freedoms” for thirty years, we’re here to set the record straight.

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

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Today, the U.S. government is using the 250th anniversary as an opportunity to peddle facile propaganda in service of nationalistic fascism. As a law firm which has been educating communities about the truth of U.S. “freedoms” for thirty years, we’re here to set the record straight.

Welcome to CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective: an ongoing series this year.

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

In this episode

Continuing CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective series, CELDF’s Executive Director Kai Huschke and Education Director Ben Price discuss the disconnect between the aspirations of revolutionary American colonists who demanded freedom from top-down governance and what they did to try to realize those goals before the Federalist counter-revolution.

Hushke and Price find close comparisons between Declaration’s grievances justifying secession from the British empire and today’s failures of governance. 250 years ago, the British policies toward its colonies gave deference to privileged persons, living and corporate, over settler subjects of the empire. The anti-corporate stance of the American rebels will seem very familiar to Americans living now, 250 years later.

Links and Resources

• A250 series

• CELDF YouTube channel

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocketcasts

• YouTube (video and audio)

• And anywhere else you get your podcasts (click here to find this podcast via your preferred app)

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

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For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

We’ve just launched our 2026 Mid-Year Impact Report, an annual publication examining the last 6 months of work and charting our course for the remainder of the year.

It’s also our opportunity to ask for your support. All of our work is only possible because people like you donate to make it possible. We’re not a massive organization and we waste no money on offices or big salaries. We offer all of our legal, training, educational, and organizing services to communities for free.

But organizing costs money. If you can’t be on the front lines of these fights with us, stand behind us. If you have the capacity, please donate to support this work. Our mid-year goal is to raise $50,000 and welcome 20 new donors to support CELDF.

Donate

Excerpts from the mid-year report:

ARIZONA: Tear Down This Wall

Along the Arizona-Mexico border in the San Rafael Valley community members continue to resist the breakneck construction of the racist and ecologically-catastrophic border wall through critical jaguar and ocelot habitat. The undeterred resisters have held multiple protest camps and rallies, and allies in Texas successfully halted a plan to build a wall through Big Bend National Park.

CELDF is serving as a communication link and on-the-ground resource to the Arizona border wall resisters through publicity support and strategic and tactical consultation. After CELDF’s Executive Director Kai Huschke visited the wall construction site to participate in a rally and work with local organizers late last year, CELDF released an interview with local organizers and syndicated an op-ed in multiple media outlets. Unfortunately, since that visit in November miles worth of wall has gone up and continues to advance. The need to resist is still very much mission critical.

Reconnection Academia and Nature

Radical Visions: Reconnecting Academia and Nature, held in March, was CELDF’s second truth, reckoning, and right-relationship convergence (TRRR). The two-day gathering was aimed at advancing community resistance and resilience by digging into the deeper systems that shape how we learn, how we teach, how we act, and who our education ultimately serves.

An intentionally intergenerational, transdisciplinary and immersive experience., students and faculty from several educational institutions in the greater Cleveland area gave powerful testimony on how the current system is set up to prepare them for corporate labor needs rather than for critical thinking, creativity or civic power.

Truth and Reckoning

Over the first half of the year, CELDF’s Truth and Reckoning Substack has featured 25 analytical essays, in-depth conversations with grassroots organizers, and breaking news regarding our work.

Among the best were our recent exposé on corporate money flooding into opposing Lane County’s watershed rights initiative, 9 frontline communities CELDF is supporting, a conversation with Truckers Movement for Justice, and a discussion around slowing down, energy use, and alternative transportation with Jeff McFadden who drives a donkey cart instead of a car.

Other highlights:

• In January, CELDF’s Consultation Director Tish O’Dell interviewed three community organizers in Virginia who, inspired and informed by CELDF’s May 2025 interview with a biologist regarding threats to Terrapin habitat in their area, launched a protest movement and pro se lawsuit, which CELDF has been lending support to.

• CELDF’s Community Resistance and Resilience Co-Director Max Wilbert interviewed powerful and outspoken voices Tlingit elder and matriarch Wanda Culp and forest defense activist Joshua Wright regarding an attempt to privatize over 115,000 acres of National Forest in southeast Alaska.

• Sometimes simple is best. Several months ago, CELDF’s Education Director Ben Price helped us publish a piece titled “What are the Rights of Nature? A movement to protect, respect, and revere Earth’s biosphere as the source and sustainer of all life” which has been one of our most popular of the year.

Launching and operating Truth and Reckoning is like running a newspaper and a radio station simultaneously. It takes a lot of effort to pull together the truthtellers we do. We need your donations so we can continue to offer this valuable platform!

Read the full mid-year report here.

Legacy giving

At a time when many donors are rethinking where their support can have the greatest impact, legacy giving offers a powerful way to extend that impact well beyond a single moment.

For those nearing or planning for retirement, it is an especially practical time to consider the opportunity afforded by planned giving. CELDF offers numerous options for extending your long-term support well into the future through bequests, beneficiary designations, stock gifts, qualified charitable distributions, real estate contributions, and charitable trusts and annuities.

CELDF is built for sustained, long-term work, and legacy giving is one way to ensure your support continues alongside it.

Contact us to discuss these options.

Donate Now

From all of us at CELDF — thank you for all of your support!

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

This is a guest post from , author of . Ahmad is a Palestinian immigrant, first-generation student, and soon to be lawyer trying to use his words to free his people, all people, and get back home.

We read this piece when Ahmad published it last month, and it resonated with our perspectives on the legal system, the genocide in Gaza, and the systems of power we live under. CELDF’s Legal Director Terry Lodge recommended we ask Ahmad for permission to republish this piece, which he graciously granted. This is essential reading, especially for law students and others working within the legal system.

Shaban al-Dalou scored 97.9 percent on his university qualifying exam, memorized the Quran by heart, and began studying software engineering at Al-Azhar University in Gaza in September 2023. Two months after he started, Israel bombed the university. His family was displaced five times across central Gaza before they ended up in a tent he built with his own hands in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, which Israel had already bombed several times before it bombed it again on October 14, 2024, while Shaban was inside connected to an IV drip, recovering from injuries he had sustained in an earlier strike on a mosque. The fire reached him before anyone could pull him free. His mother burned beside him. When they searched the wreckage for their bodies, they could not tell which charred remains were hers until they found the gold necklace she always wore. They buried them in one grave. He was nineteen years old and had been accepted to universities in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Qatar.

I graduated from law school this past week and I am not sure what that is supposed to mean, or if it means anything at all when I think about Shaban and the tens of thousands like him.

For three years I learned how a society decides what counts as a wrong and what counts as a remedy, how to argue both sides of anything, how to find the statute and read the case and locate the exception within the exception. I learned the language of a system that presents itself as the last civilized alternative to chaos, and I learned it while every university in Gaza was being bombed into rubble, all twelve of them, gone, while I sat in Ann Arbor taking notes on jurisdiction or “free speech”, and while I was being trained to believe in the law, the law was conducting its own education on Gaza, and the lesson it delivered there was nothing that appears in any casebook I have read.

Legal education teaches you the meaning side of law without ever honestly reckoning with its power side, the way every interpretation, every judgment, every holding eventually resolves into a body with a gun at its base. We are given the great cases, the landmark decisions, the slow arc of justice bending toward something better, and we are taught to see the law as a set of principles floating above the world, neutral and aspiring, when what legal interpretation has always done is take place in the shadow of the violence that enforces it, serving power as one of its most sophisticated instruments, giving domination the appearance of reason and making dispossession look like administration. Europeans did not simply conquer; they arrived with deeds and treaties and surveyor’s maps, declared indigenous existence a legal problem to be managed, and built courts to process the theft. The law was always also the weapon, and the weapon always wore the law’s face.

Palestinians have known this for nearly eighty years. The legal weaponry of Palestinian elimination runs from the British Mandate through the partition plan through military orders that classify Palestinian rainwater as Israeli state property, through the permit system that makes Palestinian farming on Palestinian land conditional on Israeli approval, through the administrative detention regime that holds people for years without charge inside a court system with a conviction rate exceeding ninety-nine percent, each individual act of dispossession presented as a bureaucratic procedure, the cumulative logic of those procedures being the destruction of a people. I spent three years learning the methods of a system that has spent eighty years making that destruction legible as something other than what it is.

What international law has revealed about itself since October 2023 is not a failure in any ordinary sense, because failure implies a standard that was almost met, a principle that fell short of its own aspirations. What we have watched is the system functioning as it was designed to function, by the powers that designed it, in the service of the interests those powers have always protected. The International Criminal Court was built to prosecute individuals and deliberately denied jurisdiction over the states that created it, so that when a state issues the orders, funds the weapons, and provides the political cover for a genocide, the court can at most reach the general who carried them out while the system that produced him continues undisturbed.

When the court finally moved on Netanyahu, the United States threatened the judges with sanctions and the judges paused their work, which tells you more about how that system actually operates than any of its founding documents ever will. The International Court of Justice found in 2007 that Serbia bore legal responsibility for failing to prevent the genocide at Srebrenica, and in response it awarded Bosnia a declaratory judgment, not reparations or accountability in any material sense, but a formal declaration that a wrong had occurred, issued a decade after the mass graves had been filled, which satisfied the procedural requirements of international law while delivering nothing to the people whose families were buried in those graves.

The scholars who study these institutions most carefully have stopped calling this an impunity gap and started calling it planned impunity, because the selectivity follows racial and colonial lines with too much consistency to be explained any other way.

The specific intent standard for genocide, the requirement that genocidal purpose be the only reasonable inference from the totality of the evidence, is demanding enough that in Bosnia, where the killing was massive and documented and named and the graves existed, only Srebrenica crossed the legal threshold. Israeli officials have announced their intent on camera, in parliament, in the public statements of cabinet ministers who bragged about rolling out a Gaza Nakba. Israeli citizens, over 75%, continue supporting the genocide. Israeli occupation forces are caught, on tap they filmed themselves, violating every tenant of International law. The UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference from the evidence. And still the system processes this through years of provisional measures and jurisdictional thresholds and evidentiary standards and procedural delays, delays that have allowed a “yellow line” to swallow over 60% of Gaza, while the killing continues and the rubble accumulates and the children who survived two years of bombardment still wake up every morning Palestinian, still teach themselves from whatever remains of what their schools used to be, the law’s timelines long because long timelines serve the people who write the law, its definitions narrow because narrow definitions protect the people who commit the crimes the definitions were supposedly written to name.

What does it mean to graduate into this? What does it mean to carry a credential from institutions I do not trust, inside a profession whose central instrument has been used against my people more reliably than it has been used for them? I have thought about this longer than I have thought about almost anything, and what I keep arriving at is that the law’s insufficiency and its necessity exist together and have always existed together, and the people who have done the most for Palestinian rights inside legal institutions have understood this without being paralyzed by it. The law was not built for Palestine. It was built by the colonial powers whose violence it now struggles to name, and its definitions are drawn to exclude the crimes of those powers while criminalizing the resistance of their victims. To use it anyway, to bring the genocide case to the Hague knowing the Hague moves in decades, to build the legal record knowing the record will outlive the moment and become what the archive holds when the killing is finally over, is to use the vocabulary the world has agreed to use for crimes against the interests of those who wrote that vocabulary, knowing they will resist it and slow it and may ultimately refuse it, and doing it anyway because the record matters and the naming matters and the evidence assembled in the language of international law is a form of witness that the bombs cannot reach.

There is a question I have not been able to answer since I started law school, which is whether belief in the law is a prerequisite for using it or whether using it is something you can do in full knowledge of what it is, the way you use a language you did not choose and did not invent and that has been used to say things you find unconscionable, because it is still the only language the room understands. I think it is the second thing. I think you can hold the law in contempt and still file the motion, because contempt is not the same as abandonment and abandonment helps no one. Shaban al-Dalou built the tent that became his grave and never got to use a single one of his university acceptances. I got to use mine, in a country that armed the people who killed him, inside institutions that buried the scholarship that named what they did. I am going to carry that into every room this degree opens, as the kind of knowledge that makes it impossible to practice law as though the law were innocent and in service of all the lives the law stole.

Subscribe to Ahmad’s Substack, .

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For Immediate Release — June 3rd, 2026

After 20 years of controversial and challenging work, the “rights of nature” movement, which aims to extend legal protections to the natural world, finds itself on shaky ground, facing counterattacks, outright bans, corruption, co-optation, and — in a few inspiring cases — victories.

A new report called the State of Rights of Nature explores these issues in detail based on the expertise of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), the organization responsible for the first modern “rights of nature” law in the world which passed in 2006.

For thirty years, CELDF has worked with hundreds of communities across the U.S. and internationally on rights of nature, participated in numerous coalitions and conferences, and watched a spark turn into a global movement. But the growing popularity of rights of nature has also fueled a backlash which, in some cases, has led powerful forces to co-opt movement language and advocates to water down their rights of nature initiatives to the point of near irrelevance.

States like Ohio, Florida, Idaho, and Utah have enacted state legislation banning rights of nature, and more and more efforts using “rights of nature” language doesn’t achieve the fundamental goal of the movement: expanding legal protections.

“Over the past decade we’ve seen more and more cases of co-optation that, if left unchallenged, will work to dilute, neutralize, and defeat the goals this movement was founded on,” says Kai Huschke, Executive Director at CELDF. “Our report aims to combat this to ensure the integrity of our efforts.”

Besides critiquing co-optation, the State of Rights of Nature report details the history of the rights of nature movement, explains the most important legislation and court rulings of the past decade, and lays out principles to help advocates distinguish between rights of nature initiatives which have been corrupted and those which have not.

Crucially, it also focuses on the issue of power — a topic often ignored in this era of global climate destabilization, biodiversity collapse, and brutal neo-colonial inequality.

“Enforcing rights of nature laws threatens the most powerful people and institutions in the world,” the report states. “They will oppose any threat to their power. Those with power will not sit back and let rights of nature advocates use governmental and legal structures – structures they have largely designed and control – to threaten their power.”

According to Will Falk, a CELDF Staff Attorney who has worked on rights of nature for more than a decade and who authored the report, now is a critical time to intervene on these issues.

“As rights of nature gains momentum around the world, it is important that advocates guard against co-optation and the pressure that powerful opponents are already putting on our movement to render it ineffective,” Falk writes. “It’s also critical that we stay on guard against impulses which often arise inside our movements when, facing setbacks and extreme challenges, some activists wish to render our measures toothless in return for greater public acceptance.”

This is the inaugural edition of the State of Rights of Nature Report, which CELDF will release annually in the future. Join the CELDF email list to be notified of future reports.

The report is available now, for free, on the CELDF website (https://celdf.org/2026/05/celdf-publication-state-of-rights-of-nature-report/) and as the most authoritative and truth-telling resource on the rights of nature movement, it is an essential resource for attorneys, community organizers, law students, and members of the judiciary.

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This is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

On May 19th, voters in Lane County, Oregon failed to pass Measure 20-373, the Lane County Watershed Bill of Rights, a CELDF-drafted “rights of nature” law that would have established legal rights for local watersheds and recognized residents’ rights to clean water throughout this part of Western Oregon.

Organizers blamed the failure primarily on the flood of “dark money” spent by corporations, writing:

“Large corporate polluters and industrial interests flexed their financial power to win the election, dramatically outspending the all-volunteer grassroots campaign in support of the measure. Supporters raised roughly $35,000, while opponents raised over $434,000. Opponents included large timber interests, industrial agriculture, the oil and gas lobby, the chemical lobby, and even the Koch brothers, represented by Koch Government Affairs.

‘Opponents outspent us at least 12 to 1, and waged a campaign of misinformation unlike anything that our team had ever seen or expected,’ said Rob Dickinson, one of the organizers on the campaign. ‘Opposition messaging was on TV, radio, social media, and in numerous full- size mailers that blanketed the county. They were spreading really egregious false claims about the measure and its impacts on the County. We did our best to counter the fear-mongering, but ultimately, the disinformation campaign carried the day.’

Michelle Holman, friend of CELDF and one of the main organizers for Measure 20-373, wrote in a letter to the editor:

Measure 20-373 didn’t lose — it was overwhelmed by a well-funded disinformation campaign financed by corporate interests that profit from the degradation and pollution of our environment.

We agree. When Community Rights Lane County (CRLC) says they didn’t lose the election, but rather that it was bought, they are right. Everyone understands that the wealthy elite and corporate forces shape our lives in many different ways, including via the ability to fashion politics and therefore the law itself to their liking.

Research supports this idea, showing that regular people have basically no political power in our supposed democracy.

The Watershed Bill of Rights for Lane County, if it had been adopted, would’ve recognized legal rights for the rivers, wetlands, and other water bodies in the county such that practices like clearcutting and toxic chemical spraying by industrial timber corporations would’ve been rightfully targeted. However, when a truly grassroots group, despite having broad public support, comes up against those who benefit from the current system (because it has been designed to benefit them), they will pull out all the stops.

That’s where half a million dollars comes into play.

The powerbrokers do this not because they fear that the law — in this case advancing rights for watersheds — would actually have survived a legal challenge; they do it to save money and undermine democracy.

First, it is cheaper to wage a political campaign to stop a law like this from being adopted than it would be to litigate it. Going up to the appellate level and possibly the state supreme court level would mean attorney’s fees perhaps double what they spent on their propaganda campaign. And propaganda isn’t bound by the same ethics and rules as a legal case. In fact, they can outright lie, which they did, and not be held to account. The few investigations that do examine legal and ethical violations around political campaigns rarely result in serious penalties, and if a ruling is handed down it comes 18 months or so after an election is over. The corporate gang understands that.

The second reason is one we all need to understand: powerful elites and corporations attack efforts to restrict their power and privilege because they understand that any advancements in democracy, equity, and justice is a direct assault on their near monopoly hold of power.

That power is sacrosanct and efforts like this one from Lane County are seen as uprisings that need to be put down immediately, swiftly, and as brutally as possible. A sister effort in Lincoln County, Oregon to ban aerial spray of pesticides not only brought out a similar disparity in campaign spending between the citizen’s group and corporate timber/big ag/industrial chemical companies, but it also triggered a multimillion dollar propaganda push prior to the vote as a means to snuff out what they called “brushfires” by the firm who was hired by an industry group called CropLife America (made up of all the big chemical companies).

Despite this, the measure in Lincoln County did pass, which then triggered a multi-year legal case. The dollar tally between the propaganda work, the dirty anti-rights campaign, and the legal case (which they won against the people and ecosystems) most likely cost those corporations over $3 million dollars. As satisfying as it might be to have them have to shell out that kind of money, they have plenty more, and their destructive timber practices have not stopped.

Keeping democracy off the ballot

The stifling of democracy is darker than “dark money.” In Lane County’s case it came in the form of repeated ballot-access legal cases over a ten year period; whenever Community Rights Lane County qualified to put a measure on the ballot, corporate opposition took legal action to keep the greater democracy and challenges to their privilege off the ballot. For a decade, it worked.

In states like Ohio where CELDF has worked with numerous communities over the years on similar ballot measure campaigns, legal actions were also taken to stop innovations in law that would favor rights and protections for people and nature over corporate exploitation. Those came in the form of challenges from boards of elections, with cases going to the state supreme court and the eventual decisions sometimes falling in favor of the citizens and other times the corporations.

It happened so many times that CELDF published a book entitled Death by Democracy to document these constant challenges to direct democracy and the lengths to which corporate power will go to hang on to their power.

In states like Washington and Colorado where CELDF has also assisted numerous communities, actions were taken through the courts and legislative bodies to make it virtual impossible for the people to use the citizen initiative process. Corporate power is fully aware that if real democracy were to actually emerge, grow, and take hold they would no longer be in charge and in most cases they would no longer exist. To them these efforts, like what just transpired in Lane County, are not isolated, limited to a specific corporation, or something they could adapt to; they are genuinely in a war room situation were the threats aren’t just being monitored but the weapons of money, political power, lawmaking influence, and physical force are dispatched without prejudice.

What comes next?

Physical force is a topic worth discussing. In a place like Lane County, where members of Community Rights Lane County spent decades trying to stop all kinds of harmful corporate practices through conventional means, and now the last 14 years doing to in unorthodox ways that are nonetheless still linked to the system of law — what is left but to pursue resistance work? When the system smacks you down, what is left but to say “to hell with your rules, we are taking over the game”?

For years CELDF has said the system is not broken, it is fixed. This isn’t our discovery; many have noted that our system of law, therefore the governance and economics shaped by those laws, is designed to function to advantage property and commerce over that of health, safety, and welfare. CELDF’s partner-advisor Camila Vergara wrote a book on this called Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic.

What must break is our allegiance to these fixed systems. Their time has passed. Our indoctrination must end. The question is how we go about creating the fracture points necessary to dismantle this system.

Community Rights Lane County, the people of Lane County, and communities everywhere face a choice: continue to show up inside the venues owned by a corrupt system, or tear that corrupt system down.

Kai Huschke is the Executive Director of CELDF, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Max Wilbert is CELDF’s Director of Community Resistance and Resilience.

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Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

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The Fertile Crescent, what we know today as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, is considered the birthplace of agriculture. Flood enriched soil from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers’ made for exceptional farming. Today, 500 miles from where the two rivers empty into the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz is under a blockade, impacting farming in the United States.

A stalemate between the United States and Israel and that of Iran, the blockade is affecting the global movement of fossil fuels. Posturing, threats, and deadly actions continue between the three nations, putting more lives at risk and stressing out economies. In the US gas prices have risen dramatically and the industrialized soil of America’s big-ag heartland is threatened because of the blockade.

According to The American Prospect, Nebraska farmers are being gouged by the cost of anhydrous ammonia, a synthetic chemical fertilizer made from natural gas sourced from Iran. Prices have spiked by 39 percent. So the conversations at diners in Nebraska, agricultural conferences, and state capitals are about fossil fuels - how to weather the current situation and ramp up production so synthetic fertilizers like anhydrous ammonia might be made from American gas.

Not being discussed is that places like Nebraska, where fossil fuels have been growing commodity foods, the soil is so compromised it relies upon artificial, synthetic inputs to function. Corporate food production depends on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, massive tractors and harvesters, mechanized factory farming of animals, global transportation, manufacturing processed foods from largely inorganic ingredients, and pumping out produce even when out of season. The fossil fuel-driven system of corporatized agriculture has even, in turn, forced farmers into dependence on the corporations, reducing them to the level of indebted sharecroppers.

The Green Revolution which was propagandized by the chemical industry soon after World War II ushered in global ecosystem collapse, cancer clusters, soil loss and degradation, desertification, food insecurity, obesity, diabetes, water pollution, high rates of farmer suicide, and massive economic debt despite self-congratulatory virtue signaling for feeding the world.

There is even more irony to go around. Those Nebraska farmers, the ones waiting for the Strait of Hormuz to open and wondering how their chemical dependent farming season will turn out are occupying land that was once some of the most productive soil on the planet — like the Fertile Crescent used to be.

The ancient prairie provided abundant perennial foods sustaining people and large mammals like the American Bison. In the 1800’s the US government decimated the bison population as a means of genocidal warfare against Native Americans and then ushered in white settler-colonists who literally uprooted the prairie ecosystem to farm monocrops which eventually contributed to the massive catastrophe that we know as the Dust Bowl.

Today, the only thing that keeps these tired soils producing is endless inputs of fossil fuel chemicals. A recent report from Food and Water Watch shows parts of Nebraska and Iowa as cancer hot spots, the result of exposure to industrial agricultural chemicals like glyphosate, known for decades to be cancer causing.

It’s all about making connections and it shouldn’t take one long to see the connection between recent actions of the US — the seizure of Maduro in Venezuela, the war with Iran, and the announcements of more oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and California coast. It’s all about fossil fuels. The blockade is just one piece of the US fossil fuel industry’s foreign and domestic policy that’s being carried out by the United States government, paid for by our tax dollars.

And despite the crystal clear links between climate change and the burning of fossil fuels, the world’s fossil fuel addiction has largely gone unchallenged. Our century plus long collective addiction has resulted in the enslavement and destruction of the environment, including the soil needed to grow real, healthy food.

There is an opportunity amidst the metacrisis. What if we treated the earth we walk on with the respect it deserves? There is an opportunity to value soil, grow food and support human communities in a way that gives more than it takes. How we respond is up to us. But so long as we remain hooked on fossil fuels, nothing will change.

Kai Huschke is the Executive Director of CELDF and has been a principal member of the organization since 2009. His experience as a seasoned community organizer and movement specialist is guiding CELDF into its next 30 years. He teaches, presents, and writes extensively on movement building, community rights, rights of nature, and the intersection of culture and law.

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In this episode, we speak with Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright

Anthony is a son of Sierra Leone, an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, a writer and a policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their cats, “Evil” Ernie and MalaChai the Mischievous. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the North South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.

On the day that we had a chance to sit down with Anthony, he was at an international conference focused on stopping global fossil fuel use in Colombia, a nation where 30% of the population is of African descent, and, as he explains during this conversation, the voices of black people were being silenced.

That sad truth of racism in Columbia is historically linked to racism in the United States, and this conversation focuses on the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, Reconstruction, the non-profit industrial complex, and pro sports as it effects, impacts, relates to, and ultimately shapes life for black people, the society at large, and the questions of whether we can fully reconcile with the institution of slavery and the ongoing colonization of people and planet.

CELDF’s Executive Director Kai Huschke and Anthony delve into personal experiences relating to the Declaration of Independence, the constructs keeping racism alive in the US, the social dynamics and racism, and the bright spots that emerging in breaking the structure of racism in what many would find to be unlikely places.

This interview is the second installment on systemic racism and sexism as part of CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective. It follows the live discussion with Colville Confederated Tribes descent Dina Gilio-Whitaker and Kānaka Maoli Anne Keala Kelly entitled “What Revolution? Systemic Racism, Sexism, and Genocide from America’s Beginning.”

Anthony’s insights echo the need for structural transformation rooted in history, truth, and collective courage. Get ready to confront the lies, embrace the struggle, and harness the power of collective disobedience to forge a new path toward justice.

Links and Resources

• Anthony’s radio show on the WPFW network

• Anthony’s articles on Black Agenda Report

• Big Green + Big Tech = Bigger Environmental Racism: How Certain “Environmental” Groups are Selling out Frontline Communities by Greenwashing Data Centers

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocketcasts

• YouTube (video and audio)

• And anywhere else you get your podcasts (click here to find this podcast via your preferred app)

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

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If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth. For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

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Border Wall Resistance

Direct Action Training

Register now to join. This will be an accessible learning experience for beginners and seasoned veterans.

Time: Wednesday, May 20th 7:00pm to 9:00 pm ET

Lina Blount is an organizer and writer working on environmental justice campaigns in the Philadelphia area since 2011. Lina currently works as the Director of Strategy and Partnerships for the Earth Quaker Action Team, a grassroots group including Quakers and people of diverse beliefs who use nonviolent direct action to work towards a just and sustainable economy by targeting corporate power. Lina’s view of people power is most shaped by her experiences in the streets, in actions, in meetings, and in multi-year campaigns with everyday people fighting to make a better world for themselves and their communities.

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This is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth. For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

Subscribe now

As the Federal government celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, nationalistic propaganda based in American exceptionalism and lies about the real history of the USA are proliferating.

Did you know that the Declaration of Independence argued that secession was justified on the basis that the British had “endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”? Or that the Union’s first president, George Washington, was given the name ‘Town Destroyer’ by members of the Iroquois confederacy?

This conversation between Anne Keala Kelly (Kānaka Maoli (Hawaiian) / Irish), Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes descendant), CELDF’s Education Director Ben Price, and CELDF’s Community Resistance and Resilience Program Director Max Wilbert discusses the the real founding of the United States and the colonial violence that hidden behind rhetoric of “freedom” and ideas such as “all men are created equal.”

We discuss:

• The roots of systemic racism, colonialism, and genocide in US culture

• The Doctrine of Discovery as founding myth and animating force for the ongoing colonial process

• Racial and patriarchal hierarchies as pillars of US government and society

• Strategies for resistance, decolonization, and spiritual renewal

Here’s a clip from the discussion:

About Our Speakers

Anne Keala Kelly (Kānaka Maoli (Hawaiian) / Irish) is an award-winning filmmaker, journalist, writer, editor, podcaster, and activist whose work analyzes and advances Indigenous peoples’ rights, cultural, environmental, and political resistance and representation in media. Her print journalism and commentary have appeared in Indian Country Today Media Network, The Nation, Honolulu Weekly, YES! Magazine, Native Americas, Honolulu Civil Beat and other publications. And her essays can be found in cultural and academic journals, such as ʻŌiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal, and American Indian Quarterly. Her broadcast reporting has aired on Al Jazeera English, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the Pacifica Network’s Free Speech Radio News, Independent Native News, and more.

Keala has produced and hosted her own podcast and Substack column (The Native Truth), was a regular contributor and occasional host on the internationally syndicated First Voices Radio show, and most recently had the honor to edit the catalog for Wasco / Yakama artist Lillian Pitt’s upcoming exhibition at The Museum At Warm Springs. Keala is the author of the short book, “Our Rights to Self-Determination: A Hawaiian Manifesto” (2022). Her documentary, “Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai’i,” has received international film festival awards, and is widely taught in courses focusing on Indigenous Peoples, colonization, Hawaiian sovereignty, and militarism.

• Keala’s website

• The Native Truth Substack

• Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai’i

• “Our Rights to Self-Determination: a Hawaiian Manifesto”

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes descendant) is a renowned scholar, educator, journalist, and author in American Indian studies. She co-authored along with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz the popular book “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans (Beacon Press, 2016), and is Assistant Director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center at California State University San Marcos. As the former Policy Director and Senior Research Associate at the Center for World Indigenous Studies, Dina has worked with Indigenous governments in the U.S. and beyond for many years helping them to formulate policy strategies and work cooperatively with federal and state governments and in other collaborative organizational partnerships.

In her second book As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock (Beacon Press, 2019), Dina applies her expertise in environmental justice to create a foundation for thinking through what environmental justice policy means in Indian country. The only book of its kind, it stands as a primer for governments and organizations of all kinds who are engaging in environmental justice work with Indigenous peoples. Most recently, she authored “Who Gets to be Indian? Ethnic Fraud and Other Difficult Conversations about Native American Identity” (2025).

Dina is regularly invited to speak on topics related to American Indians (including environmental justice) at universities, conferences, and gatherings of all sorts all over the country.

• Dina’s website

• “All the Real Indians Died Off, And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans”

• As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

• “Who Gets to Be Indian? Ethnic Fraud, Disenrollment, and Other Difficult Conversations About Native American Identity”

Ben Price is a pioneer in the Rights of Nature Movement. In 2006 he organized the first community on Earth to recognize legal rights for Nature, Tamaqua, Pennsylvania. In the decades that followed, Ben continued organizing scores of communities to enact community rights and rights of nature local legislation. In 2010, Ben was called into Pittsburgh, PA, where he organized in the City’s nine districts and lobbied their respective City Council representatives to draft and enact a ban on hydraulic fracking and that also recognized the rights of local ecosystems to exist, flourish, and evolve. The law was enacted by unanimous vote of the City Council. Ben’s book “How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property” was published in 2019 and his novel, “OGDEN: A Tale for the End of Time” was published in 2023. Ben’s collection of essays Wouldn’t You Say? was published by CELDF in early 2025.

Max Wilbert is co-director of Community Resistance and Resilience with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). He is also a community organizer, wilderness guide, and co-founder of the anti-mining group Protect Thacker Pass. He has been active in grassroots political movements for 25 years. Max is a MA candidate in Degrowth at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where his research focuses on sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance movements. He is co-author of the book Bright Green Lies: How The Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, author of an essay series titled We Choose to Speak, and writes a newsletter called Biocentric. His work has been featured in CNN, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, Dark Mountain, Earth Island Journal, and elsewhere.

This is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. Subscribe to learn about rights of nature, environmental movement strategy, and stay updated on our work.

Subscribe now

CELDF invites you to join us for a conversation with Keala Kelly (Kānaka Maoli) and Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) as part of our “America 250” series.

As the Federal government celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are exploring true history. Did you know that the Declaration of Independence asserted that the king “has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”? Or that the Union’s first president, George Washington, was given the name ‘Town Destroyer’ by members of the Iroquois confederacy?

About Our Speakers

Keala Kelly is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, writer and activist living on Hawai‘i Island. Her works address the critical links between cultural, environmental and spiritual survival in the movement for Hawaiian self-determination, and for territorial and political autonomy. Keala is the author of “Our Rights to Self-Determination: A Hawaiian Manifesto” (2022). Her documentary, “Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai’i,” has received international film festival awards, and is widely taught in courses focusing on Indigenous Peoples, colonization, Hawaiian sovereignty, and militarism.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker is Assistant Director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center at California State University San Marcos. She teaches on environmentalism & American Indians, traditional ecological knowledge, religion & philosophy, Native women’s activism, & decolonization. Dina is co-author with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of “All the Real Indians Died Off: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans” (2016), “As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock” (2019), & “Who Gets to be Indian? Ethnic Fraud and Other Difficult Conversations about Native American Identity” (2025).

How to Watch

The stream will be available here on Substack, as well as on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We hope you will join us on May 7th at 4pm EST!

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This is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. Subscribe to learn about rights of nature, environmental movement strategy, and stay updated on our work.

Subscribe now

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Measure 20-373, “The Lane County Watersheds Bill of Rights,” which is on the ballot for the May 19th election in western Oregon, would enshrine “rights of nature” for water and watersheds in Lane County.

If their spending is any indicator, corporate interests find this incredibly threatening.

Records show that as of April 25th, $188,825 in donations have been made to a group formed in February to oppose Measure 20-373. [Editors note: an additional $89,500 in donations have since been received as of 4/28, for a total of $278,325].

According to Kunu Bearchum (Northern Cheyenne, Ho-Chunk Nation), one of the chief petitioners behind the Watersheds Bill of Rights, the opposition group “Protect Our County” is what is known as an “astroturf group” — an organization pretending to represent grassroots people but in reality funded by powerful business interests.

State records show that Protect Our County has received more than $100,000 from logging companies, real-estate developers, chemical industry groups, construction and development companies, and mining interests.

That includes $30,000 from Oregon Realtors, $25,000 from an industry front group called Oregonians for Food & Shelter, $20,000 from the Northwest Pulp & Paper Association, $10,000 from LIFT Lane (the PAC formed by the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce), another $10,000 from construction company CPM Development Corporation ($10,000), and $5,000 from Delta Sand & Gravel Company.

The group has also received $85,000 from a Political Action Committee called Oregon Business & Industry Issues PAC (OBI) which was flooded with corporate cash following Measure 20-373 qualifying for the ballot late last summer, and which, judging from records, can be assumed to have redirected most of this money to Protect Our County (by far the largest expense OBI logged during the same period was a series of four donations to Protect Our County totaling $85,000).

Donations OBI received during that period include:

• $25,000 from Koch Government Affairs

• $25,000 from Oregon Forest & Industries Council

• $12,000 from Sierra Pacific Industries

• $10,000 from Guistina Tree Farm LCC

• $10,000 from Western States Petroleum Association

• $10,000 from Wildish Land Company

• $10,000 from Oregon Farm Bureau Federation

• $7,000 from Milling company Swanson Group

• $2,500 from Oregon Wheat Growers League

• $2,000 from Weyerhaeuser

• $1,500 from Eugene Chamber of Commerce

Many of these funders are highly controversial.

The Koch network is well known for opposing limits to toxic chemical pollution, lobbying against rail safety and public transit, funding vast climate denialism campaigns and think tanks, and pro-oil propaganda, and securing vast federal subsidies and tax breaks for their dirty business. One report called the Koch companies the “kingpin of climate denial.”

The Oregon Forest & Industries Council, which represents some 50 logging companies, including Boise Cascade, Green Diamond Resource Company, Georgia Pacific, Interfor, International Paper, Roseburg, and Weyerhaeuser, was implicated in a 2020 report from ProPublica and OPB in the creation of a publicly-funded state agency to promote logging industry propaganda.

Sierra Pacific, the second largest logging company in the United States, has been implicated in serious violations of the Clean Water Act, abuses of worker rights, including blatant wage-theft, settled a negligence case related to the Moonlight fire brought against them by the Federal Government for $122.5 million, and is knowingly causing harm to 8 species of threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead throughout northern California.

The Western States Petroleum Association is a California-based lobbying organization for oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Valero, and many others. It is known for lobbying and filing lawsuits to oppose pollution controls and for funding astroturf groups to oppose climate change policies.

Oregonians for Food and Shelter is a group created in 1980 to “do battle with activists seeking an initiative to ban the aerial application of forest herbicides,” according to an archived page of its website. While the name implies a grassroots social justice organization, its members include chemical giants Bayer and Syngenta, various agribusiness groups, and some of the largest logging interests in the state, including Weyerhaeuser, Roseburg Forest Products, and — there are many interconnections among these groups — the Oregon Forest & Industries Council.

The Guistina family is well known for a 2010 corruption case involving the transfer of 621 acres of old-growth forest owned by the State of Oregon to Guistina Resources, which clearcut the ancient forest and shipped the logs overseas.

Many of the same groups are, according to a recent story in the Eugene Weekly, flooding money into conservative candidates in the Lane County commissioners elections.

All of these industries rely on harming water and watersheds to generate their immense wealth. Logging and milling companies destroy and fragment wildlife habitat, discharge significant amounts of toxic pollution, degrade salmon and steelhead streams, and since they have cut nearly all mature forests on their lands, rely on unnatural and ecologically degraded tree plantations for timber production.

Oregon’s largest contributor to global warming is the timber industry, which is responsible for 35% of the state’s carbon emissions. Clearcut landscapes create a “flood and drought” cycle which causes erosion and further decreases water quality and quantity, and private forestlands across the state are regularly treatedU by aerial spray of pesticides which have been linked to cancer, reproductive health issues, and other serious illness.

Driven by warming, Lane County is expecting soaring water temperatures and declines in flow of more than 50% in most rivers and streams by the 2040s. These changes will threaten remaining salmon populations, many of which are endangered, as well as steelhead and other wildlife, forests, and water supplies for agriculture and drinking. It will also threaten outdoor recreation, an industry which supports 192,000 jobs and $20.6 billion in total economic output across the state, and drive up costs. Already, extreme heat is costing the average Lane County household nearly $9,000 per year in lower wages, decreased productivity, and increased costs.

Oregon and federal lawmakers have chartered these corporations, licensed them to engage in their Earth destroying activities, and issued permits giving them legal immunity from the harms they cause. This failure of government is why proponents of Measure 20-373 have decided to take matters into their own hands.

“Outside forces and corporate eco-terrorists are pouring dark money into this election because they are scared,” says Eron King, another Lane County resident and one of the organizers behind Protect Lane County Watersheds, the community group advancing Measure 20-373. “They’re scared that the people might actually gain some traction and stop their exploitation of nature.”

“We’re sick and tired of a system in which a few wealthy corporations have the legal right to pollute our water, poison our communities, and destroy the climate,” says chief petitioner Michelle Holman, a resident of Lane County who is also part of the watersheds group. “We’re pushing back. We’re ready for the fight.”

This isn’t the first time industry has poured in money in an attempt to defeat a similar measure. Neighboring Lincoln County along the Oregon coast voted in a measure banning the aerial spray of pesticides in 2017. As The Intercept reported the following year, this effort was fiercely opposed by pesticide manufacturers and industry groups, which reported spending $475,000 to oppose the measure, 22 times more than was raised by proponents. The Intercept reports there may have been millions in unreported spending, and noted that “While [a] national industry group [called CropLife America] paid for all this, its name never appeared on the materials or was referenced in the local fight, which was instead framed as being led by local farmers.”

Following a lawsuit filed immediately after the vote in Lincoln County, Circuit Judge Sheryl Bachart ruled in 2019 that the county ordinance was pre-empted by a state law that permits aerial spraying of pesticides and prevents local governments from regulating pesticide use.

“Big money and corporate power won in Lincoln County, but that doesn’t mean the same will happen here” says Holman, who lives in western Lane County and miscarried multiple children after being exposed to aerial spray of pesticides in neighboring clearcuts. “We learned from the past and we’re ready to fight these poisoners, liars, and corrupt industries.”

Protect Lane County Watersheds is requesting that supporters volunteer their time to help spread the word about Measure 20-373 by putting out yard signs supporting the measure, go door-to-door with literature, and share content online. They are providing a series of training sessions for advocates to plug in, details of which can be found on their website. They also encourage grassroots donors to support their effort. Holman says that they’ve raised about $25,000, entirely from small individual donations.

“We don’t have the money our opponents do, so we need people power,” Bearchum says.

Mail-in ballots will be sent to Lane County voters on April 29th.

###

Background on the Lane County Watersheds Bill of Rights

Measure 20-373, “the Lane County Watersheds Bill of Rights,” will be on the ballot for the May 19th election. More than 14,000 county residents signed a petition to qualify for a popular vote. The law, which is part of a broader global push for legal “rights of nature,” would have three main effects.

First, it would recognize and protect the rights of rivers, streams, wetlands, and aquifers to exist, flourish, and naturally regenerate along with people’s right to access healthy drinking water. Second, it would provide for more direct means for people and the government to legally defend these rights. And third, it would expand local democracy related to the watersheds by allowing the county and city governments to set additional greater protections than currently exist in state or federal law.

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide organization of activists, lawyers, and allies who work to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with Earth. For over 30 years we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation through understanding the false democratic promises of the regulatory model and asserting rights to local self-governance grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

Today, CELDF advocates for the rights of nature through legislation like the Great Lakes Bill of Rights, introduced into the New York State Assembly by Patrick Burke, and a number of pending local bills, through educational and cultural programs, and by frontline support for community resistance and resilience. More information about CELDF, including photos pre-approved for media use, can be found in our press kit.

This is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. Subscribe to learn about rights of nature, environmental movement strategy, and stay updated on our work.

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Here are 9 ways that communities are working to resist the destruction of the planet, build self-determination around principles of ecology and grassroots democracy, and build a new culture to support these efforts.

1. Water Protectors in Lane County, Oregon

Community Rights Lane County and the Oregon Community Rights Network are organizing now to support Measure 20-373, the “Lane County Watershed Bill of Rights,” which goes to voters next month. CELDF is providing legal and media support for the incredible organizers on the ground who are spearheading this campaign.

2. Supporting Border Wall Opposition in Arizona

Brave land defenders on the US-Mexico border have been fighting for years to protect these fragile desert ecosystems from industrialization and habitat fragmentation of border militarization. As the current US regime pushes forward with border wall construction through sacred sites and critical wildlife habitat, we’re working to support as much as possible from afar through strategic consulting and publicity assistance. CELDF Executive Director Kai Huschke traveled to the area to work with local organizers last year.

3. Advancing State-Level Rights of Nature in New York

CELDF has provided legal assistance to local advocates, community groups, and lawmakers around Assembly Bill AO5156A, the Great Lakes and State Waters Bill of Rights. The bill was originally authored with CELDF’s assistance and introduced to the legislature in 2022. After undergoing a round of revisions to incorporate constructive feedback from the community, the bill was reintroduced last year.

4. Forest Defense Across the Pacific Northwest

Last May, we helped break news of a forest defense treesit established in Washington State to defend a mature forest on state lands from imminent logging. We supported that campaign to its eventual victory, spread the word about an ongoing forest defense campaign in western Canada, then early this year helped raise awareness of a threat to old-growth forests in southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. We continue to organize behind the scenes in support of forest defense efforts across the region.

5. Unschooling Students in Cleveland

Last month, CELDF and local partners organized a gathering in Cleveland, OH focused on the topic of education, miseducation, the problems in the school system, and paths forward. This was part of our ongoing “Truth, Reckoning, and Right Relationship” cultural and educational series of events and community-building activities. Here’s a teaser - full video coming soon.

6. Supporting Communities Protecting Wetlands in Virginia

Nearly a year ago, we helped break the story of a greenwashed “restoration” project in Virginia Beach destroying a large patch of native forest and habitat for terrapins (freshwater turtles) by bringing you the voice of a conservation biologist blacklisted and ignored by local environmental groups. That report galvanized local community members and led to the formation of a protest movement and opponents of the project filing a pro hac vice lawsuit. CELDF has provided pro-bono legal information to the litigators as they fight for the terrapins and the trees.

7. Amicus Brief for FDR Park

Community members in Philadelphia, PA are fighting to protect the urban sanctuary FDR Park from a plan which would replace vegetation with wide swaths of toxic plastic astroturf. CELDF has been asked to assist and is preparing an Amicus Brief which will be filed in the ongoing litigation. We’ve been asked to intervene in several cases in recent years in this way and whenever possible have worked to provide assistance.

8. Grant Township

CELDF has been working for more than a decade to support Grant Township, PA. The community rallied originally to stop a fracking injection well in their community because they were worried that it would break and leak. With CELDF’s assistance, they passed a law banning fracking injection wells. The well had already been drilled, and while legal battles continued, the company hid that the well had broken and leaked — exactly what the community was afraid of.

Now, despite the community and CELDF successfully getting the well shut down and capped, the company is suing the township and CELDF for having the audacity to regulate environmental harms within their town limits. They’re asking for sanctions against our lawyers for daring to pursue the “trivial” matter of community defense and self-determination. CELDF was already forced to pay more than $60,000 related to this case, and has provided ongoing legal representation and organizing support pro-bono to the Grant Township community. Stay tuned here. They’ll be more news on this situation soon.

9. Fighting for Local Democracy in Ohio

The Columbus, OH community has tried four times to get a charter amendment recognizing the rights of nature on the ballot. Their latest effort, which is ongoing, is a direct challenge to the State doctrine of “preemption.” CELDF is providing legal information and consultation to these organizers.

Here’s What’s Next:

This list isn’t comprehensive. CELDF is supporting many other communities across the country, from folks fighting data centers to those considering bringing rights of nature to their local area to communities pushing back against the military-industrial complex. We’re also always engaged in educational events and programs, working with academics and journalists, and coordinating with other activist groups.

Here are three upcoming events we want to share with readers:

MAY 7TH: What Revolution? Systemic Racism, Sexism, and Genocide from America’s Beginning

CELDF invites you to join us for a conversation with Keala Kelley (Kānaka Maoli) and Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) as part of our “America 250” series!

As the Federal government celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are exploring true history. Did you know that the Declaration of Independence asserted that the king “has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”? Or that the Union’s first president, George Washington, was given the name ‘Town Destroyer’ by members of the Iroquois confederacy?

Keala Kelley is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, writer and activist living on Hawai‘i Island. She is the author of “Our Rights to Self-Determination: A Hawaiian Manifesto” (2022). Her documentary, “Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai’i,” has received international film festival awards, and is widely taught in courses focusing on Indigenous Peoples, colonization, Hawaiian sovereignty, and militarism.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker is Assistant Director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center at California State University San Marcos. Dina is co-author with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of “All the Real Indians Died Off: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans” (2016), “As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock” (2019), and “Who Gets to be Indian? Ethnic Fraud and Other Difficult Conversations about Native American Identity” (2025).

Join us on May 7th at 4pm EST. This event will be live streaming on the following platforms:

• YouTube event

• Facebook event

• LinkedIn event

• Instagram and Substack live streams will be available when the event begins

MAY 9TH: Panel Discussion on Forest Protection

CELDF’s Executive Director Kai Huschke will be speaking as part of a panel on forest defense at the Global Earth Repair Conference in Port Townsend, Washington alongside Paul Lynn, James Jewell, and others TBA. The panel will take place on Saturday, May 9th from 10:30am - 12pm.

More information and registration here: https://www.globalearthrepairconvergence.com/

MAY 20TH: Learning Nonviolent Direct Action Skills with Lina Blount

Register now, and join CELDF’s live presentation, featuring Lina Blount. This will be an accessible learning experience for beginners and seasoned veterans.

When: Wednesday, May 20^th 7:00pm to 9:00 pm eastern

This virtual training session is designed to equip you with the essential tools and strategies of powerful nonviolent direct action. Whether you consider yourself new to taking action or a seasoned action taker with expertise to share, this webinar will deepen your understanding and sharpen your skills. We will discuss applications relevant to specific campaigns, but the lessons from this training will be applicable far and wide.

Why take direct action? In the work for climate stewardship and other campaigns for dignity, connection, and human rights, non-violent direct action has played an important historical role, and is called for again today. In this webinar, we will explore how to identify key decision-makers and understand the crucial role of rebels within a movement ecosystem. We’ll dismantle the conventional understanding of power and discover how to leverage consent and influence for change.

About our Presenter

Lina Blount is an organizer and writer working on environmental justice campaigns in the Philadelphia area since 2011. Lina currently works as the Director of Strategy and Partnerships for the Earth Quaker Action Team, a grassroots group including Quakers and people of diverse beliefs who use nonviolent direct action to work towards a just and sustainable economy by targeting corporate power. Lina’s view of people power is most shaped by her experiences in the streets, in actions, in meetings, and in multi-year campaigns with everyday people fighting to make a better world for themselves and their communities.

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This piece was published in CELDF’s book “Can You Handle the Truth” in 2025.

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. Subscribe to learn about rights of nature, environmental movement strategy, and stay updated on our work.

Subscribe now

Shonto Pete. Otto Zehm. Scott Creach. It’s very likely these names mean nothing to you. Pete, Zehm, and Creach were all victims of police violence in Spokane, Washington in the last 10 years. Shonto Pete was shot in the back of the head by an off-duty police officer. Pete survived and the officer was found not guilty.

Otto Zehm, a developmentally disabled man, was beaten to death at a convenience store by the Spokane police. Seven officers were involved but only one was found guilty. One of the non-guilty officers shot and killed a homeless man a year later. He was again found not guilty.

Scott Creach, a pastor and local businessman, was shot and killed by a Spokane county sheriff on the property of his nursery business. That officer was found not guilty and is still on the force.

The stories of Shonto Pete, Otto Zehm, and Scott Creach are stories I know. I live in Spokane, Washington. The abuse and termination of their lives by official fiat wasn’t deemed newsworthy by the national media.

Nationally speaking, however, the story of Michael Brown may ring a bell. In 2014, Brown, an 18 year-old, unarmed black man, was shot by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri. That incident sparked massive protests demanding justice (the officer was eventually found not guilty) and a whole lot of promises around police accountability. It also propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into world view.

After the media spectacle created around Michael Brown’s unavenged murder, the cameras turned their gaze to Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in North Charleston, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore. There have been countless victims of state-sanctioned and protected police violence pre- and post-Michael Brown, with the vast majority of those human stories never captivating the cable news networks’ attention or making it to the front page of national newspapers – let alone local ones. The media is fickle about what it considers sensational enough to bookend its ubiquitous commercial advertising.

Cop Warfare Against the Poor

Spottiness of coverage doesn’t diminish the ongoing gang warfare waged by the cops against the poor. Shonto Pete is Native American. Otto Zehm and Scott Creach were white. The city of Spokane and the surrounding county is over 90% white. These facts and the demographics of greater Spokane don’t alter the hard and cruel fact that people of color and the developmentally disabled are far more often the victims of police brutality and police killings than whites. And though the racial component reveals a great deal about the distribution of power and social advantage under the ongoing moral apartheid of the U.S., what we are facing in Spokane and across the country is more broadly a problem of power.

The police state was instituted largely to protect and serve the powerful elite, not the people.

The war of the cops against the poor is a systemic problem that is bolstered by racism. It’s even camouflaged by the progressive media as only a matter of racism. But that allows the power behind the badge — (mostly white) wealthy privilege — to skate blamelessly away from public scrutiny while the official violence proceeds in the manner it was programmed to do, regardless of the racial heritage of the underclass victims. The police state was instituted largely to protect and serve the powerful elite, not the people. All the media hand-wringing and commercial punditry about “the problem” is disingenuous because there’s no intention to actually change anything. It’s all about taking time to “notice,” as though stooping to sniff an unusual flower in our political garden.

An Unholy Alliance

There is an unholy alliance at the service of the power elite: state-sanctioned police violence against the underclass combined with a court system where the murderers and thugs in uniform elude justice. This alliance leaves its victims and our communities with no legal and peaceful means of remedy.

Legalized control of society’s underprivileged through violence is not an invention of the last few years. It has deep roots. Today, it is institutionalized in a system modeled on military occupation of combatant territory. Police forces across the country have been an operationalized instrument of the system for 150 years now, originally formed to insulate and protect the ruling corporate class from the rabble — immigrants and workers. We see and experience police violence against lone individuals targeted because of the color of their skin as well as against crowds of protesters railing against government or corporate abuse.

Law and Order

This abuse of power by the police-state is condoned, protected, and goes without punishment in order to maintain the power dynamic ironically referred to as **“law and order.”** It is a fear-based system of mass manipulation used to quell uprisings, dissent, and outcries for justice and democracy by people of all colors against the oppressive policies of the small minority that we sometimes call **“the haves.”**

This standing threat of sanctioned uniformed violence against random victims is programmed to keep institutional fear alive within our communities from generation to generation. Very little has changed regarding justice, human rights, and ultimately who holds power, despite generations of efforts to make a difference. The message from the top, trickling down through the batons and mace spray and bullets, is that all is well and the cops are just doing their jobs, so long as we aren’t coming after the perpetrators of this tyranny.

The Illusion of Change: Spokane

In Spokane, there were other instances spanning the same decade as Pete, Zehm, and Creach where others victimized by the police were provided with a media spotlight that sparked an outcry from the community. One outcome was an investigation conducted by the Spokane police of their own behavior, looking into nearly 500 instances of excessive force by police officers over a four-year period. Their findings? Police officers were in the wrong a whopping zero times.

Combine the police non-investigation of themselves with the lack of convictions of officers by the courts, another report claiming officer actions are not driven by racist tendencies, a revolving door of police chiefs, zero enforcement powers of the ombudsman, and scandals involving the police department and the mayor’s office, and it’s not surprising that a recent headline in the paper was, “Spokane police oversight still a concern in new round of law enforcement bargaining.”

It has been ten years since Otto Zehm had the life beaten out of him by uniformed men paid to do it. And, despite the community outcry for change, neither the power dynamic, the behavior and culture of the police, nor the mechanisms to hold them accountable when they’ve clearly committed a legal and moral crime, has changed in Spokane. The investigations, imposed officer trainings, several police department leadership shake-ups, and a largely ceremonial ombudsman program have produced only the illusion of change.

What remains is an uneasy feeling in the community, like a volcano due to erupt. Spokane waits for that next instance of police violence to shock our consciences.

The Illusion of Change: The Nation

The police-state, in service of the corporate-state, reacts predictably when events like the police murders of Michael Brown or Otto Zehm or Tamir Rice occur. Investigations will be conducted, blue ribbon panels will be created, task forces made up of powerful people with credentials will be appointed, the public will be invited to participate. Pronouncements are made, money is spent, experts called in, personnel shuffled, and officers trained. Yet in the end the system is unshaken. It’s business as usual. No real change emerges. When tragedies given higher profiles happen, the system likes to “marshal resources” (i.e. make a show of concern) while making a show of compassion for the families, and making a commitment to solve neighborhood issues. But these rituals, once performed, come to a close without anyone’s prayers being answered.

It is a rare moment when an officer or officers are found guilty of actions that we would all clearly deem to be criminal, unjust, and immoral. But there is always hope that justice can be had from the courts, and when that next tragedy strikes, we expect that it is at least possible that the court will be compelled to rule against the bad cop. But why do we anticipate the judiciary will behave differently this time? The laws they are working from are the same set of laws that place more value on protecting property and commercial interests over fundamental human rights.

Without a doubt the predictability of injustice is frustrating for communities seeking police justice. But one thing we can’t be is disappointed. Disappointment only happens because there is an expectation, a knowing that a particular outcome is pending, but in the end the opposite happens. By now we must be over our callow belief in the justice of “the system.”

Rethinking our Activism

The system, as it is currently constructed, will surely not disappoint itself for our want of justice, accountability, safety, livability, and greater democracy. Perhaps what we should find disappointing is our own inaction to change the system.

Nearly all the activating, influencing, and lobbying we do lands on the doorsteps of the system itself. We keep asking, sometimes begging, the system that holds power over us to change its behavior. Whether it’s our police departments, our elected officials, or our courts, we have operated on the premise that as long as we have the facts, the truth is on our side. We believe this alone will lead to justice, and the abuses of power will stop. We believe that our friends, family, and fellow citizens will stop dying or being abused and belittled at the hands of those supposedly tasked with protecting and serving us.

Groups of people in different communities, in different states, lobby for toothless police ombudsman programs, ask police departments to do more to police themselves, and pressure politicians to put the clamps on the toxic behaviors of police departments.

We have convinced ourselves that it’s a waste of time to ask for more than what we think the system will give us.

We have convinced ourselves that small, incremental change is how we will reform the system.

We have convinced ourselves that reforming the system is all that is needed, as if the system somehow lost its way, turned on us.

We have yet to ask ourselves what it is that we really want and then take it, because we have a right to it.

The creation story of the US Constitution has been so powerful a legend that questioning it can put you on the receiving end of some pretty colorful language.

We have yet to say reform is not an option; that the system needs to be turned on its head.

We have yet to say the table is ours and we, the people, will say who gets a seat.

We’ve done our activism with earnestness, blood, sweat, and tears, all along carrying the memories of loved ones lost, the truth, and a high sense of justice on our side. But this tragic dance has been going on for decades now with no real success.

Many people like to sign off on their emails with the words of Frederick Douglass that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” Yet we never dream of holding real power and then fighting for that power.

We seem to have forgotten that oppressive systems must be broken, not kowtowed to.

When will we face the fact that government itself, which includes police departments, are highly toxic institutions? When will we recognize that the likelihood of systemic change — including creating police accountability to the communities they are supposed to serve — is zero if we keep expecting the system itself to change its ways?

Once we recognize this, we also recognize that the force to secure the justice we seek must come from us. We surely can leverage the existing system, but ultimately we should be using the existing system to break itself in order to achieve the necessary change. The force of change must come from the people in the places where they live. It must come from the people who are abused by power. And it must come from those who benefit from that power and recognize it as unjust.

Building a What-We-Want Activist Platform

Achieving deep, systemic change requires ditching organizing built on the near-sighted, ineffective, “what we can get” platform. It requires building our organizing on a foundation of rights, focused on justice and empowered by community. We need to build a “what we want” platform.

To do this means being prepared to both challenge the existing system at its deepest core and to ignore the barriers that have been deliberately constructed to deny us what should rightfully be in the hands of the people.

Whether that is tossing aside justice-eluding police bargaining laws, restrictive state preemption, oppressive federal laws, or the hammer of corporate “rights,” we need to recognize that those laws and rules are just words on paper, and that we can no longer obey them as legitimate, because they intentionally perpetuate injustice. We can no longer obey illegitimate laws, because they intentionally perpetuate injustice.

We then need to put forward, adopt, enforce, and defend a rule of law — our words on paper — built on the rights of the community, the right to live free of fear, and to be afforded true health, welfare, and safety. That may mean demanding not just residents’ input when there are instances of excessive police force, but residents’ control over the treatment of those instances of official abuse. And that may mean completely transforming police departments or even deciding whether they are needed at all.

That may mean proposing an entirely different kind of justice system, from top to bottom.

And that may mean adopting laws that say if you are acting in defense of the community’s rights, rights that government and the courts have failed to uphold, then you should not be arrested or prosecuted for any crime.

Dismantling the Police State

In the end, the police state needs to be dismantled, because it is a system that places greater value on things vs. people. We must believe it is possible to live without armed enforcers of the status quo among us. We must be inspired by hope and driven by determination, rather than hiding in fear. Then perhaps a new systemic structure, a new kind of government, can emerge that protects and serves the people of the community from abuse by the corporate-state and its economic co-conspirators and enforcement officers.

Postscript

9 minutes and 29 seconds

On May 22, 2020 Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin put a knee to the neck of George Floyd for over nine minutes, ultimately killing him. Floyd was being detained for reportedly using a counterfeit $20 bill. As George Floyd’s life left his body, facedown on the sidewalk at the intersection of Chicago Avenue and 38th Street, fellow officers J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane helped to restrain Floyd and kept horrified bystanders at bay.

The murder of George Floyd sparked riots, protests, mutual aid programs, and legislative proposals for reforms. A smattering of state and city-level legislative changes came in the way of calls for addressing excessive force, investigation of officers with histories of citations, and even defunding the police. But despite this and the convictions of officers Chauvin, Kueng, and Lane, Elie Mystal, in his article in The Nation “The Cops Killed More People in 2023 Than They Had in Years,” wrote this stinging line: “And so, three-and-a-half years after the summer of ‘no justice, no peace,’ we are back to the quiet acceptance of systemic injustice.” At the start of that article Mystal noted that the organization Mapping Police Violence reported that in 2023 the police killed 1,232 people, the most in a year since they started tracking figures in 2013.

As for Spokane, Mapping Police Violence ranked the Spokane Police Department in 2024 number two in the nation for the highest number of police killings by population. It appears that we all still have a ways to go to fully realize that well-known police motto, “to protect and to serve.”

Kai Huschke has been a principal member of CELDF since 2009. After spending 13 years organizing for CELDF in the Northwest and Hawaii, Kai took over as Executive Director. Kai has served as a national lecturer for CELDF’s Democracy School and as a board member of the Oregon Community Rights Network and Washington Community Rights Network. He teaches, presents, and writes extensively on movement building, community rights, rights of nature, and the intersection of culture and law.

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For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. Subscribe to learn about rights of nature, environmental movement strategy, and stay updated on our work.

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In this episode of the Truth and Reckoning podcast, we speak with Jeff McFadden

Jeff is a small farmer engaged in land restoration work in southeastern Missouri. He’s well-known in his area for driving to town in a cart pulled by one or two of his donkeys. Jeff’s political analysis is rooted in the concept of slowing down to reduce ecological impact and improve human life.

As Jeff wrote in a recent piece:

“I see a massive slowing of everything as inevitable. Speed is kinetic energy. If a mass moves, energy moves it. The faster it moves the more energy it takes.

We’ve gotten so used to talking of things in abstract terms that we tend to think that the way things are is the way they have to be. All the cars, all the noise, all the dirt, all the stuff in all the stores, all the goods and services competing for our attention and our money, that’s just the way things are. We ignore the energy. We are oblivious to the universal energy flow underlying our entire global economy and social system, what one might call our civilization. A vast flow of kinetic energy pours without ceasing across Earth, and without it none of things we take for granted would happen or appear.

An inconceivable amount of mass is moving around Earth’s land surface, water surface, low atmosphere, and close orbital space. All of that motion, all of that kinetic energy, was released from petroleum molecules by burning. That which we call civilization burns over 100 million barrels of petroleum a day. Over half of that, some fifty-five million barrels a day, goes to industry, including industrial agriculture. Over half of what’s left goes to transportation. The biggest single portion of that is ocean vessels which burn the heaviest diesel oil in the word, and that’s with over 100,000 jets taking flight every day.

There’s no place in that system where you can take out one of every five gallons and not notice it. If we lose half of it we’ll be in deep shit.

The current economy is what it is as a result of unimaginable amounts of energy being unbound from molecules and released into the wild, into the ecosystem, into Earth, Water, and Air. Added to that, and exceeding it, excess solar energy gets caught by all the extra carbon we’ve put into the air. It’s massively not working. Everybody’s crazy.”

This is a fascinating conversation that touches on eco-collapse, overshoot, Jevon’s Paradox, restoration, social change vs. individual change, and more.

Links and Resources

• Jeff’s YouTube Channel

• Jeff’s Substack newsletter

This episode can also be watched on YouTube.

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

You can find the show on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocketcasts

• YouTube (video and audio)

• And anywhere else you get your podcasts (click here to find this podcast via your preferred app)

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

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Through the 4th of July CELDF will be challenging dishonest narratives about America’s past and how those lies distort our lives in the present. This essay is the last installment in a four-part series of reflections on the Declaration of Independence from CELDF’s staff.

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By Max Wilbert

The destruction of our planet isn’t a mistake or an accident. It’s driven by deliberate policies designed to maximize extraction of resources from the natural world and labor from workers for the benefit of the wealthy.

The same is true for resurgent fascism and white supremacism, mass extinction of wildlife, ecological collapse, the climate crisis, and social polarization. In each case, these are either policy instruments of the ruling class (aka the Epstein class) or what they see as acceptable costs.

George Kennan, former State Department Director of Policy Planning and at the time one of the most influential men in government, wrote in a 1948 memo that “[The United States has] about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity...”

Kennan is telling the truth that is often obscured: the primary goal of US government policy is not to raise the global standard of living, spread democracy, education, or health, but to maintain disproportionate wealth. Whatever scraps are provided to the working class in this country are mostly aimed at keeping us too content, distracted, and addicted to muster an effective rebellion.

The United States of today is far, far more unequal than in 1948. This country has more than twice as many billionaires as the second-ranked country (China), despite having less than 25% of China’s population. And the power these wealthy people wield is totalitarian. Research which examined 1,800 policy proposals in the United States and compared the level of public support vs. likelihood of a proposal becoming law found that ordinary people have a “non-significant, near-zero level” of influence over government decisions. Meanwhile, the results showed that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy”.

In other words, our votes, public comments, and activism are exerting “near-zero” influence on government policy; the wealthy control the government entirely.

We live in an oligarchy — a society ruled by the rich. Political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called this system, defined by the ongoing presence of supposedly democratic processes concealing a government which is functionally ruled by an unelected elite, inverted totalitarianism. The population has either been propagandized into believing we’re free, bribed into a state of what Wolin calls “civic demobilization,” or beaten into compliance with violence and surveillance.

The Declaration of Independence, written 250 years ago, opens with the words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Words are cheap.

I’m reminded of the words of James Baldwin who, writing in The Nation in 1966 about police brutality towards black children, said “I can’t believe what you say… because I see what you do.” By 1776, Europeans had already been engaged in a genocidal project of profit-driven settler colonialism on this continent for centuries, and a system of elite domination was firmly entrenched.

The Declaration of Independence goes on to state that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness… when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government.”

This, I agree with.

We are already living in a time of civil war. The United States government and the elites that run it are waging war against the people and the planet. They are killing people in the streets, abducting families, conducting illegal wars and genocide, strengthening a system of police state surveillance, and enriching the already wealthy to ever-more-obscene levels via systems of patronage and legalized corruption.

Meanwhile, the climate descends into chaos, pollution proliferates, cancer and disease multiply, the planet is destroyed further every single day, and more and more people die deaths of hopelessness from addiction and poverty. Those killed by factory discharges, a lifetime of toxic industrial food, climate chaos, lack of basic healthcare and societal decency, and afflictions of despair are just as much casualties of the class war.

It’s not just the current administration. The same has been true for my entire life, with different factions of the ruling class engaging in the push-pull cycles of minor reform and counter-revolution that make inverted totalitarianism such a resilient, effective, and convincing system of oppression.

The civil war is already here. The question for us is, do we still believe in the mythology of the benevolent US government enough to be pacified, or are we prepared to throw off these rulers who have shown themselves time and time again to be leaders of a death cult?

Max Wilbert is Co-Coordinator of Community Resistance & Resilience and Publicist for CELDF. He is the author of two books, writes the newsletter on Substack, and has been part of grassroots political movements for 25 years.

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. Subscribe to learn about rights of nature, environmental movement strategy, and stay updated on our work.

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Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. Subscribe to learn about rights of nature, environmental movement strategy, and stay updated on our work.

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Through the 4th of July CELDF will be challenging dishonest narratives about America’s past and how those lies distort our lives in the present. This essay is part of a four-part series of reflections on the Declaration of Independence from CELDF’s staff.

By Christine Schoenberger

The crumbling of the American Dream is radicalizing the people to whom it was once promised. They are not activists or people who think of themselves in terms of left or right, but mostly people who have avoided politics altogether and assumed the system basically worked, even if imperfectly.

But something interesting is happening in online discussions. You don’t have to look long before the patterns emerge: people, especially younger adults, describing unemployment or wages that don’t cover rent, having to work two jobs and still needing roommates well into adulthood, or medical debt that will never realistically be paid off. It’s not unusual to hear of people encountering ads for jobs requiring graduate degrees for entry-level work, or sending hundreds of resumes and receiving only silence. You may be surprised at the number of people in their forties who have quietly accepted they will never retire and doubt Social Security will exist when they need it. Parents describe how their entire paycheck disappears to cover childcare, but they can’t stay home with the kids because the family will lose health insurance if they don’t work.

Commenters from other countries respond in disbelief that this is life in the United States. But something is shifting among people who once rolled their eyes at politics. They’re using words like “systemic,” “billionaire class,” and even “revolution” that they would have avoided even five years ago. And it’s not for dramatic effect; they’ve arrived at this conclusion on their own.

It reminds me of this line from the Declaration of Independence:

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations [comes from the government]…it is [the people’s] right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…”

We tend to treat that sentence as sacred or an artifact from an earlier time, but today it reads more like a directive. The Declaration did not simply announce independence from Britain. It said that when power consistently harms the people it governs, it loses the right to exist. This idea was explosive in 1776 and remains so now.

Did the Declaration’s aspirations come to fruition? Politically, the Revolution succeeded in that a new nation was born. But economically and socially, power reorganized itself. The British pointed out the hypocrisy of claiming liberty while maintaining slavery. So-called “liberty” coexisted with property requirements for political participation, exclusion of women, and dispossession of Indigenous nations. Poverty, as always, remained concentrated among those already denied power.

For generations, instability could be framed as someone else’s problem. The American Dream functioned as proof that the system worked, if not for everyone, at least for some. Even partial access kept the larger promise intact.

But what happens when supposedly secure Americans begin to feel the same precarity long familiar to marginalized communities? What happens when the gap between the fairytale and the lived experience becomes impossible to ignore?

What made the Declaration dangerous wasn’t that it asked for too much, but that it normalized resistance. It treated revolt as a rational response to sustained harm and even a duty, an idea that does not fade simply because a new government takes power.

For a long time, calling something “radical” was enough to shut people up. Insults like “commie,” “extremist,” “terrorist” carried fear and stigma, warning others to stay quiet.

But fear starts to lose its grip when experience becomes collective. There is only so long you can get away with these labels before they lose their impact.

If we are willing to look honestly at our history, revolution is not outside of the American story, but one of its central chapters. The Revolution was ordinary people deciding that the system had broken its contract with them.

Maybe the Declaration didn’t fall short because it was unrealistic, but because it was always uncomfortable for those with wealth and power. Once you tell people they have the right to resist sustained harm, that idea does not stay contained in one century. Revolution isn’t an interruption in our history; it is one of its foundations. And maybe what unsettles some people now is not the word itself, but how appropriate it is beginning to sound.

Christine Shoenberger is a grant writer for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). She holds a Master of Health Science degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and resides in Maryland with her family.

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Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. Subscribe to learn about rights of nature, environmental movement strategy, and stay updated on our work.

Subscribe now

Through the 4th of July CELDF will be challenging dishonest narratives about America’s past and how those lies distort our lives in the present. This essay is part of a four-part series of reflections on the Declaration of Independence from CELDF’s staff.

By Will Falk

The Declaration of Independence is a dangerous document – though probably not in the way you’re thinking. When Americans think of the Declaration, they often think of it as the shot across the British bow that announced the brave underdog patriots’ defiance of those powder-wigged, lordly stiffs who dared tax Americans without representation. Today, the Declaration of Independence is fetishized in the United States as key to what it means to be an American. It is clung to by Americans who need to soothe their guilty consciences for the history of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and colonial violence that has made, and continues to make, the United States possible.

The British, at the time the Declaration was made, didn’t think much of it. Much of the British commentary on the Declaration chided the American rebels as petulant children. “Petulant children” might be too nice of a term for men like Thomas Jefferson who, while declaring that “all men are created equal” enslaved hundreds of men (and women and children) during his lifetime; who raped at least one of those slaves; who defined his children, born by the woman he raped, as property; and who engaged in illegal land speculation, buying claims to land that Native peoples had not ceded. “Petulant children” similarly might be too nice of a term for men like George Washington who, like Jefferson, enslaved hundreds of men (and women and children); who similarly engaged in illegal speculation of land that Native peoples had not ceded; and who treated Native Americans with such brutality that the Iroquois nicknamed him “Town Destroyer” for his practice of ordering troops to destroy whole villages.

Of course, there’s nothing unique about Jefferson and Washington amongst the United States’ so-called “founding fathers.” One of the primary motivators for the American movement for independence was the Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains (land that Jefferson, Washington, and others were hoping to make a fortune selling through speculation markets). I can hear readers demanding: “How dare the King tell Americans where they can settle?” The thing is, the land west of the Appalachian Mountains was already home to Native American First Nations. No, the British didn’t really care about protecting Native folks. But, they were sick of spending money on troops to protect American colonists (and speculators) who were illegally violating treaties made with those First Nations.

Another one of the primary motivators for the so-called “Patriots” was an alliance that enslaved folks made with the royal governor in Virginia beginning in 1774. This alliance resulted in Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, which offered freedom to any enslaved person or indentured servant owned by a rebel who escaped and joined the British Army. Americans feared free African populations so much that Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation pushed many Americans to the rebel cause. And, of course, this fear found its bloodiest expression 90 years later during the Civil War, when hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to protect the institution of slavery.

“Yes, yes,” I hear some readers muttering. “But, some of the Patriots really did aspire to the ideals described in the Declaration.” Did they, though? Because I think people who truly aspired to the ideals described in the Declaration would have joined with Native Americans and enslaved Africans – those whose life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness were most clearly threatened in 1776 – and fought directly to protect them.

And, this is why the Declaration of Independence is such a dangerous document. It was propaganda used in 1776 by the most powerful American rebels (enslavers, land speculators, purveyors of genocide) to convince the working class folks that the most powerful American rebels needed to do their dirty work to protect their interests against the British. The Declaration of Independence is similarly used as propaganda in 2026 by the most powerful Americans to convince working class folks to do the dirty work of protecting the most powerful Americans’ interests in Venezuela, Iran, Gaza, and the streets of cities like Minneapolis.

There’s nothing wrong with the ideals described in the Declaration. But, the United States has never existed to defend Americans’ life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. If it did, slavery would have been outlawed on July 4, 1776. If it did, Native Americans would still govern their land. If it did, the United States would not be one of the prime drivers of total ecological collapse. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, after all, are not possible on a dead planet.

So, no, I do not care about sweet sounding ideals. I care about protecting the most vulnerable amongst us, those whose life and liberty are most directly threatened. We have countless other histories to look to than the history of the reactionary American rebels who fought for independence so they could steal more land and enslave more people. We could look to people like Tecumseh, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and John Brown – people who knew just how dangerous the Declaration of Independence really is.

About the Author

Will is a writer, lawyer, and environmental activist. The natural world speaks and Will’s work is how he listens. He believes the ongoing destruction of the natural world is the most pressing issue confronting us today. For Will, writing is a tool to be used in resistance.

Will graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School and practiced as a public defender in Kenosha, WI. He left the public defender office to pursue frontline environmental activism. So far, activism has taken him to the Unist’ot’en Camp – an indigenous cultural center and pipeline blockade on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory in so-called British Columbia, Canada, to a construction blockade on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i, to endangered pinyon-juniper forests in the Great Basin, and to Thacker Pass in northern Nevada.

Will’s first book How Dams Fall describes his relationship with the Colorado River in the context of the first-ever American federal lawsuit seeking rights for a major ecosystem, that he helped to file, was published in August 2019. His second book When I Set the Sweetgrass Down, a full-length collection of poetry was published in 2023. You can follow Will’s work at willfalk.org.