This press release appeared on the New Hampshire Community Rights Network’s website, December 28th, 2018.
Good news: Newmarket’s Town Council Water Rights Subcommittee members are recommending Newmarket’s Town Council seriously consider future resident-proposed Rights-based Ordinances (RBOs). Bad news: They’re not recommending adoption of the current resident-proposed RBO, the Newmarket Freedom From Chemical Trespass Rights-based Ordinance that seeks to protect Newmarket’s people and its Lamprey River & Great Bay Estuary watershed. Here are responses to the committee members’ assertions made during their final meeting considering the RBO.
“The RBO is an exciting, progressive approach to change.”
True, but because RBOs are based on rights affirmed in NH’s Bill of Rights, they’re also conservatively unifying—a phenomenon covered in UNH sociologist Cliff Brown’s 2016 “Water Concerns Unite Citizen Activists: A Community Rights Movement Transcends Party, Age, and Gender.”
“We don’t know what unintended consequences RBOs will cause.”
True, but 15 RBOs adopted by 11 NH towns haven’t had any, whereas the CDC reported in July 2018 the unintended consequences of water contamination: NH has the country’s highest rate of pediatric cancers, including state and federally recognized clusters of rare cancers in Seacoast areas contaminated by PFAS, PFOS/PFOAS, and PFCs. MORE…