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.

A few weeks back I was invited to speak at the Democratic Party of Washburn County annual chili feed. I accepted and put in a leave slip at the Post Office. Saturday events are always difficult for me as a substitute mail carrier. That’s the day all the full-timers want off, and there is always a shortage of part time workers like me. That said it all worked out.

Like usual I worried and didn’t sleep well before my talk. Throughout my life if asked to identify my biggest fear, speaking in front of people is always at the top of the list. The usual worries again turned out again to be nothing. Like Mark Twain said, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

I gave a six-and-a-half minute talk on Community Rights and the Right to a Healthy Climate ordinance we’re looking to pass in the Town of Chicog (posted below). It ended with the crowd clapping. I met and listened to a lot of interesting people. I enjoy hearing what’s on other people’s minds over good food and drink. For instance, I got to meet and hear my state assemblyman speak for the first time that day. I ended up giving him a copy of On Community Civil Disobedience, In The Name of Sustainability and other writings on the Community Rights Movement.

Attending these local political events goes a lot like sitting meditation does for me every morning. I don’t really want to do it, can think of many reasons not to do it, and afterwards I never regret it. I’m energized. If more people just showed up to these things we’d be living in much different political times. You don’t have to say a word . . . be a stone and just listen. Like James Hillman once said, this is what we used to do as Americans. Instead of showing up to this or that support group organizing around this or that symptom, we showed up to our local political meetings and found camaraderie there.

I was telling Annie on the way to the event that I was thinking about stepping away from Facebook and the internet in general to focus my energy on having face to face conversations and listening to people. The screens we sit in front can be isolating. Most of what we say to each other on here we’d never say to someone’s face. Yet, here I am reporting what happened and what I had to say to my cosmic community. Go figure! As Walt Whitman sad “we contain multitudes.” Yes, there is more to all of us than meets the eye.

First of all, thank you for inviting me to this event. I simply enjoy talking about Community Rights.

I’m Curt Hubatch. I’m the founder and member of the Washburn County Community Rights Alliance. We have been meeting since the election of Donald Trump. I’ve learned in my short and limited experience as a community organizer that if you ever want to see people get politically active elect someone with the worldview and character of our current President.

Right now our group is working on passing a Community Rights ordinance in the Town of Chicog, located just west of Minong. My friend and colleague here that will speak next, lives in the Township.

This is not your business as usual ordinance. The title of our ordinance is a Right to a Healthy Climate ordinance, and it challenges settled law, and more specifically four legal doctrines. Legal doctrines that corporations proposing projects in our communities use to defeat outraged citizens and local democratic majorities. In a nutshell here are the four legal doctrines: State Preemption, Corporate so-called “constitutional rights,” Dillon’s Rule, and the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution. To get into these would be another and much longer presentation. I am willing to talk about them afterwards if any of you are interested.

Our CR group is looking for support in our efforts from the local town board, and from citizens who live in and beyond the Township. There has never been a Community Rights ordinance passed in the State of Wisconsin as far as I know, but there have been over 200 communities across the United States that have passed rights-based ordinances. They are communities saying “no” to the corporate state. They are instituting Community Rights over corporate “rights” in the places they live. These actions have come to be known as the Community Rights movement in the United States.

Community Rights is about a revolution. And that starts out with a revolution in our thinking. The wealthy men and women who hide behind the shield of big corporations – Exxon, Enbridge, Monsanto, and Wal-Mart to name a few – run the governing institutions of our country. They have 24/7 access to our politicians through their lobbying arms. They have institutionalized the laws which, we, plus 200 communities in the CR movement are challenging. Because we see a scary fact: We do not live in a democracy but an oligarchy.

Nowhere is this more apparent when a corporation proposes a project in a community. The locals, growing up with the myth that we live in the greatest democracy on earth with the best system of environmental protection in place, learn the chilling fact that we do not. When a majority of citizens in the community say “no” to the project, the system works predictably, efficiently, and effectively to thwart our efforts. Our only legal options are protest and to engage with the regulatory system of law at regulatory hearings where the microphones may or may not be plugged in, and the people may or may not be half asleep.

And why not? The corporations have literally written the enforcement rules for agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, and therefore the EPA staff by continuing to work at the EPA have already fallen into allegiance with the representatives and machinery of the corporate state.

All of this, of course, is in the name of progress. The myth that is never mentioned overtly but is subscribed to by all the people in the room. The idea that we can have it all – unlimited technological progress and unchecked human population growth to name a few – and still have a livable planet if we just get more control of our regulatory agencies and ourselves. Or to say it another way, we can have it all and still go on with business as usual.

Those days are done. Things are far worse environmentally than they were before the regulatory system of law and agencies were put into place over fifty years ago. Fifty percent of wildlife has disappeared in the past 50 years, the insect population is crashing, bird populations are crashing, glaciers are melting, and you can fill in the blank.

So the Community Rights movement is looking to break the grip settled law has on our life, yours and mine. We use our municipal corporations – also know as local governing bodies – to create a system of environmental protection establishing the Right to Local, Community Self-Government and extending to Rights to Nature. Rights of Nature still doesn’t roll off our tongues, but rights of slaves and women didn’t either, and we still managed to change the laws designating slaves and women as property! Now it’s our ecosystems’ turn to gain personhood. Our ordinance asserting our right to a healthy climate also aims to speak to the Rights of Nature.

Corporations have personhood status even though they are not real persons. Someone speaks on their behalf. Who will speak for the trees? Community Rights has and will. It will eventually lead to rewriting the United States Constitution. Writing it away from its emphasis on protecting property and more towards protecting actual living, breathing beings. Something the environmental movement used to be about in the United States, but now is protecting the very system that is trashing and killing the planet.

That’s where we’re at, folks. We are in a revolutionary moment in our Western World. Put your seat belts on and prepare for a rocky ride. But it’s not hopeless. We have done this before. We can do it again. You too can turn to your neighbors, talk to them about your local landscapes, get clear on what you value in life, and join me and the CR movement to write those values into law and enforce them at the local level. Sobering as it may be, but exciting too: We are the people we’ve been waiting for.

We The People, The Sovereign, must exercise our inalienable Right to Self-Government or witness obediently as corporate forces fill any and every power void. The choice is ours.

Thank you. I’ll be available afterwards to share resources, hear your concerns, and answer any questions.