Resistance and Resilience: We Need Both

Announcing the launch of CELDF's Community Resistance and Resilience Program, dedicated to supporting, networking, and facilitating the success of grassroots initiatives, actions, and campaigns

The environmental movement is failing. By virtually every measure — greenhouse gases, species extinctions, chemical pollution, urban sprawl, habitat destruction, and so on — the planet’s health is worse than ever in human history.

The environmental movement is failing, in large part, because the vast majority of the world’s legal systems make sustainability illegal. In the United States, for example, true sustainability is illegal because nature is defined as property that only exists for consumption by humans. It’s legal to clearcut forests, overpump groundwater, manufacture plastic, and burn oil. It is legal to release cancer-causing pollution and to bulldoze wild places. In addition, the rights of the corporations most responsible for destroying nature are protected over the rights of human communities to defend nature. The rights of nature, meanwhile, are completely disregarded. Nature has no standing in U.S. courts.

There can be no environmental movement without the emancipation of nature. That’s why, for the past 30 years, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has worked in partnership with hundreds of communities to change the way the U.S. legal system defines nature as property and the shield-and-sword manner that U.S. courts protect corporate rights over the rights of nature and human beings.

Most communities that want to defend their natural environment and non-human neighbors start out believing that current environmental laws work to protect nature. That’s why one of our first tasks is disabusing people of this notion by educating them about how U.S. law provides almost no effective methods and tools for challenging destructive corporate projects.

This doesn’t mean that nothing can be done. But it does mean that if we want to take effective action, we have to be prepared to go beyond voting, lobbying government officials, and filing lawsuits. We have to actually confront unjust systems, just like social movements throughout history have done, by breaking the law.

CELDF has helped to assist, guide, and support communities who refuse to give up upon learning of the limitations of traditional legal practice and instead choose to take the path of bravery, self-determination, and disobedience. Instead of using regulatory law, which at best slows projects down, CELDF has encouraged these communities to instead write and enact bold and unapologetic local laws stripping corporations of rights they never should have been granted, along with uplifting and honoring the rights of nature instead.

CELDF's work in Toledo, OH to help Toledo residents pass the Lake Erie Bill of Rights is a prime example of this community rights organizing. In August 2014, the hottest time of the year, nearly half a million people in northwest Ohio were told not to use tap water for drinking, cooking, or bathing for three days because a harmful algae bloom poisoned Lake Erie and affected water intake. Harmful algae blooms, which are caused by a combination of global warming and agricultural pollution from industrial farms, have become a regular phenomenon in Lake Erie. They produce toxins that are extremely harmful to humans and other creatures. Three days is the average for how long humans can go without drinking water. Countless other-than-human creatures in the Lake Erie ecosystem similarly depend on clean water for survival.

In response to the legal system's failure to stop Lake Erie's harmful algae blooms, CELDF helped Toledo residents draft the Lake Erie Bill of Rights which would have established "irrevocable rights for the Lake Erie Ecosystem to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve, a right to a healthy environment for the residents of Toledo" and which would have elevated "the rights of the community and its natural environment over powers claimed by certain corporations." CELDF then helped Toledo residents take the locally drafted Lake Erie Bill of Rights through Ohio's citizen initiative process, a means of direct democracy that puts voters in the position of enacting law directly.

The Lake Erie Bill of Rights passed with the support of 61% of Toledoans who voted. In other words, the people of Toledo, in a landslide, democratically declared that they wanted Lake Erie to have rights. But, mere hours after the City of Toledo certified the election results, the City was sued by a corporation, and joined by the State of Ohio, over the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. A year later, a federal court struck down the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. In face of overwhelming support for the rights of nature, the state sided with corporations.

Unfortunately, under American law, laws stripping corporations of rights and granting rights of nature like the Lake Erie Bill of Rights are unconstitutional and illegal. Virtually every one of these laws passed by local communities has been struck down, invalidated, or otherwise rendered toothless by federal and state courts. To make matters worse, in the last couple of years, state governments including in Ohio, Utah, and Florida have passed legislation making the very introduction of rights of nature laws illegal within their jurisdiction. As CELDF attorney Terry Lodge has written, "courts follow history; they rarely lead it."

This was not a surprise to us, or to the communities we have worked with. It’s important to note that the communities behind these efforts did so as means to demonstrate what true self-determination should look like and to expose the legal system for what it is with the objective of generating mobilization and action to fundamentally change how the legal system treats communities and nature and to challenge the system of corporate rule.

Despite the heavy fist of the legal system and the lack of a mass movement to defend the rights of nature, CELDF isn't quitting. Neither should you.

CELDF does not view court rulings against laws like the Lake Erie Bill of Rights as failures. Instead, they are proof of how the legal system actually operates. Rather than despairing, these unjust decisions are signposts, levers, and burning signals in the night. They are a message that will drive more and more people toward the inevitability and necessity of confrontations between our communities and the dominant structure of law.

Much like using single matches to illuminate a painting in a dark room, enough matches need to be struck simultaneously (and burn long enough) so that the painting can be viewed in its entirety. Each municipality is a match, and each instance of a law being overturned is an opportunity for people to see how the structure of law actually functions. This does the necessary work of penetrating the denial, piercing the illusion of democracy, and removing the blinders that prevent a large majority of people from seeing the reality on the ground. Seeing reality clearly and contrasting this reality with myths of American democracy, equality, and fairness under the law, will help to spark cultural change.

When we began this work, we knew that the popular conception of U.S. democracy – with its so-called commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – was a myth covering up something far more disturbing. We need to face the truth. The legal system inside the United States was deliberately built to privilege the rich, facilitate resource extraction, exploit free labor through slavery and promote genocide against sustainable communities like those sustainable Native American communities encountered and subjugated by European settlers. The structure of law is the same today as it was then. This bears repeating: the fundamental structure of law is the same today as it was then. Lawsuits, judges, and our elected representatives will not protect us, because they are beholden to this system of law and are not obligated to defend democracy and justice in the way we are often taught or innately feel should be the case.

It’s time we learned how to protect ourselves.

To protect ourselves, we must build communities of resistance which are prepared, trained, organized, and committed to resist the forces destroying the planet. These cultures of resistance both create fertile conditions for, and tend to emerge from, communities of resilience which are actively building alternatives to the industrial capitalist way of life.

With this in mind, CELDF is proud to announce the launch of its Community Resistance & Resilience program. Resilient communities resist. And, no true resiliency can be achieved without resistance. CELDF’s Community Resistance & Resilience program will provide resources and support for communities ready to move beyond traditional legal tactics to more confrontational tactics, will offer community organizing know-how, media help, coalition and network building, skill-sharing, direct action training and coordination, and legal aid when the system inevitably retaliates, among other things. Simultaneously, we will work to support, interlink, and uplift community resilience efforts rooted in deep understandings of sustainability, a critique of greenwashing, biocentrism, and the necessity of working for justice and human rights in the face of rising fascism, the breakdown of established systems, and ecological collapse.

These two sides — resistance and resilience — are often separated and siloed. But our resistance must be sustained, and the type of concerted effort we need means we must increasingly disengage from the mainstream economic and sustenance systems in order to build flexibility and model transitions to enable pathways towards transformation. Meanwhile, our resilience can't fall into the trap of creating islands of sanity amidst a burning world. These projects must be oppositional and self-consciously political, both to be relevant in these times, and to avoid sleepwalking into dystopian futures without mounting substantial resistance.

We can’t do this alone. To be effective, we will need support of all kinds from our community and these efforts will have to be intensely collaborative. So, we invite you to please reach out to us to offer assistance, to collaborate, to offer financial or other material aid, and to share information and resources.

Thank you.