This article by Jennifer Yachnin was published on E&E News’s website on March 31st, 2014.
On a local level, the work of Ben Price and his colleagues shows up under names like the Youngstown Community Bill of Rights or the Lafayette Community Rights Act.
There was also the slightly clunkier Mora County Community Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance.
But Price, the national organizing director for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, suggests a catchall for the group’s efforts: “nonviolent civil disobedience through local lawmaking.”
The Pennsylvania-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, or CELDF, has offered up free legal assistance since 1995 — when it first worked to help communities fend off industrial projects via local permitting processes — but in recent years, its work has gained attention as its efforts have turned to fighting against the development of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
In particular, the nonprofit law clinic, working in tandem with local activist groups, has drawn attention for its creative strategy in cutting off access to oil and gas developers.
“This is an organizing strategy. We use law — that’s what’s different. That’s what’s unusual about this strategy. We’re actually using local lawmaking to advance the rights of people in their communities,” said Price, who makes several comparisons to the civil rights movement of the 1960s in an hourlong conservation.
(To read the rest of this article at its original source please click HERE.)