Reflections on Community Rights from Rural America is a monthly column by CR activist and organizer Curt Hubatch. Curt is an unschooling father of two young children and one young adult. Currently he works as a substitute rural letter carrier for the USPS. He lives in a cordwood house that he built with his wife, family, and friends in Northwestern Wisconsin.

The other day a friend of mine did a tabling event at the Duluth Harvest Fest. Our local Community Rights group, the Washburn County Community Rights Alliance, had a table at the event. The day after the event she was telling me how someone stopped by and was inquiring about Community Rights. She kindly offered him the basic information about the Right to Local Community, Self-Government.

In a nutshell here’s the present law. If the state and federal levels of government constitutionally recognized this Right to Local Self-Government, then a community could enact and enforce laws that protect their health, safety, and welfare. For example, the community could pass an ordinance that bans the practice of factory farming, and it could be enforced in a court of law. In other words, the community could lawfully and democratically say ‘no’ to the proposed corporate project.

Right now, a community does not have this right. The state and federal levels of government can overrule and overturn their ban on factory farming. In fact, the state government, by law, can write your municipal government out of existence (see Dillon’s Rule). Under present law your local governing body is a child of the state. It is not a rights-bearing entity.

This makes sustainability illegal in the United States but that’s a conversation for another time.

After my friend got done laying out the basics of Community Rights and our group’s vision and mission to the man who stopped by our table, with no time to spare, he offered up a challenge. He held up his smartphone and said giving communities actual governing authority would never work. He pointed out that we need corporations to extract rare earth minerals, and if communities have the right to say “no” to the extraction of rare earth minerals then sooner or later cell phones will go away. In other words, we can’t have both.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this expressed, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Once communities legally have the right to say “no” to pipelines, electrical transmission lines, fracking wells, factory farms, frac sand and rare earth mineral mining, etc. it will be much harder to expand, and even maintain, the highly centralized-technologic-industrial infrastructure we currently have become accustomed to. Most people who I know do not want these projects in their communities. They think they’re ugly. It’s been shown time and again that they have unintended consequences – climate change, cancer, distress over breakdown – to name a few. There is more than enough information out there that proves this once we look.

I now sit here and wonder if I would’ve said what I just wrote above to the guy holding the smartphone if I had been there.

Probably not. I’ve noticed conversations don’t go far when we start talking about giving up things. Giving up the comforts and elegancies we’ve become accustomed and attached to as modern humans has never been easy for us.

Daniel Quinn, who had a few things to say about saving the world and changing our mind about our unsustainable way of life, had this to say about giving up things:

“I’ve been surprised by how many of you actually seem to believe that what you have is perfection. It took me awhile to realize that this results from the strange understanding you have of human history and of evolution. A great many of you consciously or unconsciously think of evolution as a process of inexorable improvement. You imagine that humans began as a completely miserable lot but under the influence of evolution very gradually got better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better until one day they became YOU, complete with frost-free refrigerators, microwave ovens, air-conditioning, minivans, and satellite television with six hundred channels. Because of this, giving up ANYTHING would necessarily represent a step backward in human development. So Mother Culture formulates the problem this way: ‘Saving the world means GIVING UP THINGS and giving up things means reverting to misery.” (Pg. 182, My Ishmael)

Is this strange understanding we have of human history and of evolution standing in the way of a more sane and sustainable life in the mind of the man holding up his cell phone? Maybe it’s not so much about the physical phone and all it can do, but rather the unexamined idea of perfection and the imagined misery he’ll face if he lets go of it.

And to turn away from the man at the table and towards you and I, what is it that you and I think we couldn’t live without? We’ve got our backs against the wall, don’t we? If that’s a fact, then that would make it high time to challenge our own assumptions about giving stuff up, about perfection, and about what misery and happiness are made of.

I think reflecting and engaging in conversations about this is a piece of the puzzle as we move Community Rights and Communitarianism principles step by step into mainstream culture.