Residents in Columbus and Toledo are being told they don’t have the authority to vote to protect their drinking water this November.

This article by Simon Davis-Cohen appeared in The Progressive, September 25, 2018.

Markie Miller, an organizer from Toledo, Ohio, has been working for more than two years to pass a Lake Erie Bill of Rights amendment to the city’s charter. If passed, the law would recognize legal rights for the 9,900 square-mile body of water.

“We all live and work here and it’s where we want to raise our kids,” Miller tells The Progressive. “Of course we are going to defend living here and what that looks like. We have everything to lose.”

But Ohioans, like most Americans, are told they cannot challenge corporate personhood and are “preempted” by their state legislature from taking a slew of proactive actions.

“We want to revoke that idea of corporate personhood,” Miller says. “So if it comes down to the rights of an industry to pollute and the rights of the ecosystem to exist and flourish and evolve naturally, we would like people to see that the ecosystem’s rights should take priority above a company or industry’s right to operate—especially if what they’re doing is directly harming people and ecosystems.”

The charter amendment is a direct challenge to the supremacy of corporate personhood, says Miller, an organizer with the group Toledoans for Safe Water and the statewide Ohio Community Rights Network, which pushes similar laws across the state.

The Lake Erie Bill of Rights proposes a mechanism whereby local residents could sue corporate polluters on behalf of the law. It gives “residents of Toledo legal standing to sue on behalf of Lake Erie, it makes them trustees of the lake,” Miller explains. If passed, the law could feasibly be used by residents to protect the lake from new pipelines, water privatization, and polluting companies. The lake has recently suffered from large, toxic algae blooms, which are exacerbated by industrial farming practices and climate change.

The transformative law proposed by Toledoans for Safe Water was slated to appear on Toledo’s 2018 November municipal ballot. Petitioners gathered more than enough valid signatures and in early August began campaigning to get residents to vote “YES.” However, on August 28, at a special meeting of the Lucas County Board of Elections, things changed. MORE…