This one hour video interview was posted on the National Community Rights Network (NCRN) website, January 29th, 2018. Tom Groover has an INCREDIBLE conversation with grassroots activists Markie Miller and Will Falk about recognizing and protecting the Rights of Nature through local law-making as a legal solution to a fixed governmental/corporate state system. This fixed system places [...]
CELDF’s Executive Director Thomas Linzey, Esq. and attorney Daniel E. Brannen, Jr, Esq. co-author, published A Phoenix from the Ashes: Resurrecting a Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government in the Name of Environmental Sustainability in the Arizona Journal of Environmental Law and Policy, January 2018. This article began as a series of legal briefs filed in [...]
Why environmentalists are working to grant rivers and mountains legal status. This article by Dayton Martindale appeared in In These Times, January 24, 2018. rights • of • na•ture noun 1. The ethical principle that the living world—individual organisms as well as the ecology and geography that shelters and sustains them—has inherent worth 2. Legal [...]
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. A Blog Posting by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, from January 21, 2018. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in 1995 In the 1990’s, CELDF was a conventional environmental law firm. We believed that if only there were more [...]
This article by Simon Davis-Cohen appeared on Desmog, January 17, 2018. In early January, a federal judge ordered the nonprofit law firm Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) to pay $52,000 to an oil and gas exploration company for defending a rural Pennsylvania township’s ban on underground injections of frack waste. This sanction comes at the [...]
Why was an environmental law firm sanctioned for helping to block a toxic fracking wastewater project? This article by Justin Nobel appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine, January 10, 2018. Last Friday, a federal judge in western Pennsylvania issued sanctions on two lawyers from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a law firm that for 15 years has [...]
The sacred mountain in the North Island is the third geographic feature in the country to be granted a ‘legal personality’ This article by Eleanor Ainge Roy appeared in The Guardian, December 22nd, 2017. Mount Taranaki in New Zealand is to be granted the same legal rights as a person, becoming the third geographic feature [...]
Private landowner on Kaua’i legally recognizes nature’s rights through conservation easement A Press Release from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, from December 20, 2017. For the first time, ecosystems and natural communities on eight acres of land on the island of Kaua’i possess legal rights to exist, thrive, regenerate, and evolve. This is the first [...]
This article by Sandy Kurtz appears in The Pulse, December 13, 2017. How weakening of water protections affect us all, here and abroad The recent weakening of water protection in Chattanooga’s stormwater ordinance favors homebuilders over water quality despite numerous citizen objections based on engineering and scientific knowledge. The process allowed homebuilder profit at the [...]
This article by Will Falk appeared in the San Diego Free Press, December 8, 2017. Our first-in-the-nation lawsuit seeking personhood for the Colorado River was dismissed. After the Colorado Attorney General filed a motion to dismiss and threatened sanctions against attorney Jason Flores-Williams for the unforgivable act of requesting rights for nature, Flores-Williams withdrew our case. [...]
