Declaring Disruption: Mid-Year Impact Report 2026
Reflecting on the last 6 months of our collective work and launching CELDF's 50/20 Campaign
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.
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.
Excerpts from the mid-year report:
OREGON: Water Wars
For decades western Oregon watersheds have been under assault by the cruel razing of forests, toxic pesticide spraying, and the local economic destabilization caused by wall street focused corporatization of timber. Corporate friendly water and timber laws authorize unsustainable and harmful behavior despite the evidence demonstrating the disconnect between law and reality.
Undeterred by entrenched law, economics and politics, Community Rights Lane County (CRLC) has not backed down in the fight for democracy and the health of the natural environment. It has taken fourteen years for CRLC to even get a fair shot at the ballot box due to deliberate corporate inference. Sadly though, on May 19th Lane County voters rejected a rights of watershed law (drafted with assistance from CELDF) thanks to the $500,000 spent by Weyerhauser and The Koch Brothers to spread lies and misinformation about the measure.
“More people than ever before in our county, support legal protections for the natural world. We will not turn our backs on the very real needs of the watersheds…We won’t/don’t give up.” - Michelle Holman, Community Rights Lane County, commenting on the vote
CELDF has been there from the beginning back in 2012 and will continue to be there for those warriors in Oregon.
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.
CONSULTATION: How Can We Help?
For over 30 years CELDF has fielded calls for assistance from frontline communities under assault from the corporate state. CELDF continues to receive inquiries on a weekly basis from people in the United States and internationally. Their questions, concerns and requests vary with resistance against data centers and assistance with rights of nature being the most requested topics of late for CELDF expertise and experience. Besides assistance requests from frontline communities, CELDF is also hearing from academics, journalists, and other NGOs also keen on absorbing the vast experience and know-how of CELDF.
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.
