On April 29, 2018, an extraordinary celebration place on the shores of the North Oconee River in Athens, Georgia. It was organized by the North Oconee River Project, a team of artists and scientists working towards some very lofty goals.
Much earlier, in the Spring of 2017, University of Georgia grad student Carla Cao had reached out to our Director Paul Cienfuegos, excited to learn more about the Community Rights movement in this country, and how our movement’s Rights of Nature work could be most powerfully exercised in service to the heavily contaminated North Oconee River that flows through the university town of Athens, Georgia.
Carla and her university student associates then invited Paul to lead a Community Rights workshop in Athens that took place in October of 2017. From there, she gathered around her a larger body of students who began working with Paul to draft what became the “Athens-Clarke County Community Bill of Rights and Rights of Nature Ordinance”. And simultaneously, they were organizing the Arts on the River Celebration.
You can discover their extraordinary work, their participants, their celebratory event, and their draft local ordinance here – North Oconee Rvr Proj Arts Celebration 4-2018 – as they “foster new, cross-disciplinary modes of thinking, working, and sharing.”