“Our right to a healthy climate is an unalienable right. Any new energy infrastructure in our town must align with that right.”
This article by Andrea Germanos appeared on Common Dreams on, March 13th, 2019.
Voters in Exeter, New Hampshire, fearing the impact on their community from a planned pipeline project, declared Tuesday that their town’s right to a safe and healthy climate trumps corporate profits.
“Our right to a healthy climate is an unalienable right,” said Maura Fay, co-founder of the community group Citizen Action for Exeter’s Environment (CAEE), in a statement. “Any new energy infrastructure in our town must align with that right. We live here, and what we envision for our community comes before what any project developer and state government envision if it threatens our rights.”
Voters passed Article 30, the Right to a Healthy Climate Ordinance, by a vote of 1,176 to 1,007
The ordinance states, in part:
It is our legislative determination that certain corporate activities are detrimental to our rights, health, safety, and welfare. These activities include but are not limited to: the runoff from commercial use of fertilizers, the intentional or unintentional dumping of toxic waste, and the physical deposition, emission, leakage, disposal, or placement of toxins into the land, air or waterways from extraction, transportation, processing, storage, conveyance, and depositing of waste from fossil fuel exploration and development.
As we are purportedly constrained by state and federal law, which courts interpret to require us to accept such harmful corporate activity, we the people of Exeter are unable under our current system of local government to secure human rights and ecosystem rights by banning said activity.
Therefore, we deem it necessary to alter our system of local government, and we do so by adopting this Right to a Healthy Climate Ordinance.
Read the rest of article HERE…