This article by Thomas Linzey was originally published at Occupy.com on July 1, 2013. Thomas is the Executive Director of Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
A little over 10 years ago, a small, rural township in central Pennsylvania banned corporate factory hog farms from their community. A couple of years later, several New Hampshire and Maine towns banned Nestle and other corporations from extracting water for bottling operations. In November 2010, the City of Pittsburgh adopted a law which prohibited fracking for shale gas within its boundaries. And just two months ago, at the start of May, Mora County, New Mexico, banned all drilling for oil and gas within the county.
While on their face these issues may appear to be different – ranging from corporate agribusiness to energy extraction – the communities on the receiving end of things all have at least one thing in common: they’ve given up hope that their state or federal government will act to protect them.
And so, they’ve stopped waiting – for new laws that will protect them, or for newly elected officials to act differently than ones who have been in office for decades. They’ve stopped waiting because they don’t believe that the state or federal government is their own anymore, or that those governments will ever act against the economic forces that put them there. …
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