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Archive for Rights of Nature laws

Free Webinar! Global governance and environmental law: Wednesday May 22

Cormac Cullinan - SAB Environmentalist of the Year 2012On Wednesday, May 22nd at 3PM UTC/GMT, Earth Charter International and the EC Center for Education for Sustainable Development will be hosting a one and half hour webinar on international and environmental law and global governance with experts Peter Brown and Cormac Cullinan. These two leaders in their respective fields will put their work into context as well as relate the importance of the Earth Charter to their fields. Attendance is free for all and participation will be available through the chat function on our platform.

This webinar is a prelude to the executive programme called: International Law, Global Governance and the Earth Charter Principles. This programme is organized by the Earth Charter Center for Education for Sustainable Development, in collaboration with IUCN Commission on Environmental Law and IUCN Academy of Environmental Law.

You can access the webinar at 3PM UTC/GMT  on May 22 through the following link (Please remember to check your local time):

http://earthcharter.wiziq.com/online-class/1247192-free-webinar-on-environmental-law-and-global-governance

And for more information, read here.

Please, pass this on to your friends, colleagues, and contacts and we hope to see you there!

Earth Charter International

Cormac Cullinan

Cormac Cullinan is a senior environmental lawyer and adviser on institutional, policy and regulatory reform in the fields of environment and natural resource management. His work in pioneering a legal philosophy that restores an ecological perspective to governance systems (Earth jurisprudence) is internationally recognised and in 2008 led to his inclusion in “Planet Savers: 301 Extraordinary Environmentalists”. He was admitted as an attorney in March 1989 and has specialised in environmental law since 1992 when he completed a Masters degree in environmental law at the University of London. With talents that include strong creative communication, writing, drafting and leadership skills, Cormac is known for developing practical and innovative approaches. He is an expert on international and South African environmental law and policy and acts for a wide range of public sector, private sector and NGO clients. Cormac is also a director of EnAct International, an honorary research associate of the Universtity of Cape Town, and a member of the IUCN Environmental Law Commission. Wide-ranging experience in policy formulation has given Cormac particular expertise in drafting legislation and international treaties as well as in designing and strengthening governance systems (including laws, policies and institutions). He has worked on these issues in more than 20 countries, including 10 in sub-Saharan Africa. In the academic field he has lectured and written widely on governance issues related to human interactions with the environment and is the author of Wild Law as well as of several works commissioned and published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.  He led the drafting of the 2010 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.

Peter Brown

Peter BrownProfessor Brown’s teaching, research, and service are concerned with ethics, governance, and the protection of the environment.  His appointments at McGill are in the School of Environment, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Natural Resource Sciences. Before coming to McGill he was Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland’s graduate School of Public Affairs.  While at the University of Maryland he founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, as well as the School of Public Policy itself.  Professor Brown established the School’s Environmental Policy Programs to operate not only at the University’s College Park campus, but also at Maryland’s Department of the Environment, and at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. He has held numerous administrative positions within the University of Maryland System.  He has taught at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at the University of Washington, and at St. John’s College in Annapolis.   In the early 1970s, he was Visiting Fellow at Battelle Seattle Research Center and Assistant Vice President for Research Operations at The Urban Institute.  He is currently a Research Scholar at the Center for Humans and Nature. Professor Brown is the author of Restoring the Public Trust: A Fresh Vision for Progressive Government in America (Beacon Press, 1994), and Ethics, Economics, and International Relations: Transparent Sovereignty in the Commonwealth of Life (Edinburgh University Press, 2000); re-published in Canada by Black Rose Press (2001) as The Commonwealth of Life: A Treatise on Stewardship Economics. He is currently working on three new books.  One is tentatively entitled Reverence for Life: A Philosophy for Civilization which is intended as a sequel to Albert Schweitzer’s Philosophy of Civilization published  in the 1920s. He is also a co-author of a book on macro-economics entitled Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy. With Jeremy Schmidt he is co-editing and authoring sections of a volume tentatively entitled Water Ethics: The Moral Foundations of Natural Resource Policy.

First County in U.S. Bans Oil and Gas Extraction

In a press release by Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Thomas Linzey, Esq. announces that Mora County, NM has become the first county in the US to ban oil and gas extraction via an “ordinance that calls for a State Constitutional Amendment to elevate the Rights of Communities above Corporate ‘Rights’ … and establishes a local Bill of Rights – including a right to clean air and water, a right to a healthy environment, and the rights of nature – while prohibiting activities which would interfere with those rights, including oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking,’ for shale gas.”

Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund CELDF.org

First County in U.S. Bans Oil and Gas Extraction
Mora County, NM, Ordinance Includes Ban on Fracking

Ordinance calls for a State Constitutional Amendment to
Elevate the Rights of Communities Above Corporate “Rights”

Media Release:  April 29, 2013

Contact:
Thomas Linzey, Esq.
(978) 282-0110
tal@pa.net
www.CELDF.org

Mora County, NM: Earlier today, the County Commission of Mora County, located in Northeastern New Mexico, became the first county in the United States to pass an ordinance banning all oil and gas extraction.

Drafted with assistance from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), the Mora County Community Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance establishes a local Bill of Rights – including a right to clean air and water, a right to a healthy environment, and the rights of nature – while prohibiting activities which would interfere with those rights, including oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” for shale gas.

Communities across the country are facing drilling and fracking. Fracking brings significant  environmental impacts including the production of millions of gallons of toxic wastewater, which can affect drinking water and waterways. Studies have also found that fracking is a major global warming contributor, and have linked the underground disposal of frack wastewater to earthquakes.

CELDF Executive Director Thomas Linzey, Esq., explained, “Existing state and federal oil and gas laws force fracking and other extraction activities into communities, overriding concerns of residents. Today’s vote in Mora County is a clear rejection of this structure of law which elevates corporate rights over community rights, which protects industry over people and the natural environment.”

He stated further that, “This vote is a clear expression of the rights guaranteed in the New Mexico Constitution which declares that all governing authority is derived from the people. With this vote,  Mora is joining a growing people’s movement for community and nature’s rights.”

Printable PDF copy of:  First County in U.S. Bans Oil and Gas Extraction

Stepping stones – Tom Brenan reviews Exploring Wild Law

From Ecologist, by Tom Brenan

Tom Brenan discovers a wide range of voices from Earth law proponents around the world……

“In his preface to this collection of short articles, the editor Peter Burdon, says that the book is intended to be one step towards fulfilling Thomas Berry’s call for the Great Work ‘to carry out a transition from a period of human devastation of Earth to a time when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner’. While it is focused on law it also aims to appeal to those engaged in science, philosophy, religion and cultural studies.”

…”it is … a very important summary of Earth Jurisprudence’s evolution. Maybe the steps needed aren’t so big after all.”

Read Tom Brenan’s full review at TheEcologist, Stepping Stones

More about Exploring Wild Law from Wakefield Press:
Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence, Peter Burdon (ed.), Wakefield Press, 2011, ISBN 9781862549463
Exploring Wild Law The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence

Wild Law is a groundbreaking approach to law that stresses human dependence on nature. For the first time, this volume brings together voices from the leading proponents of wild law around the world.
Exploring Wild Law, The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence introduces readers to the idea of wild law and considers its relationship to environmental law, the rights of nature, science, religion, property law and international governance.

Compiled and edited by Peter Burdon, Exploring Wild Law is a collection of essays written by leaders in the field of Earth Jurisprudence! Among the authors are Thomas Berry, Ng’ang’a Thiong’o, Peter Burdon, Cormac Cullinan, Klaus Bosselmann, Linda Sheehan, Mari Margil, Judith E. Koons and many others.

Santa Monica Recognizes Legal Standing for Ecosystems

Legalizing Sustainability? Santa Monica Recognizes Rights of Nature

11th April, 2013 – Posted by Shannon Biggs
Reprinted from Global Exchange Media Release

First-in-California law seeks to make sustainability legal

On April 9, the City Council of Santa Monica voted 7-0 to adopt the state’s first ever Bill of Rights for Sustainability, directing the city to “recognize the rights of people, natural communities and ecosystems to exist, regenerate and flourish.” Santa Monica joins dozens of U.S. communities, the nations of Ecuador, Bolivia, and New Zealand in the fast-growing movement for Nature’s Rights.

With the passage of this ordinance, Santa Monica challenges the legal status of nature as merely property, and empowers the City or residents to bring suit on behalf of local ecosystems. While not eliminating property ownership, these new laws seek to eliminate the authority of a property owner to destroy entire ecosystems that exist and depend upon that property. The ordinance also mandates the City to follow the Sustainable City Plan as a guide for decision-making to maximize environmental benefits and reduce or eliminate negative environmental impacts.

“As a city with very little green space or fresh local water, becoming a model for sustainability and moving toward self-reliance is important for our community’s long term well-being,” says Cris Guttierez, organizer for Santa Monica Neighbors Unite!, a group that organized and mobilized residents to support the law. “We’re proud to be on the cutting edge of environmental protection.”

The idea came about from conversations between Mark Gold, the 20-year Chair of Santa Monica’s Task Force on the Environment, and Linda Sheehan, who now directs the nonprofit Earth Law Center. “Linda and I had been pretty successful over the years in the water quality arena,” says Gold. “But we realized that despite all our good work protecting public health and environmental resources, we were still as a society going backwards in the big picture. It was time to shake things up, recognize the existing environmental laws just weren’t doing the job and that sustainability wasn’t actually possible as long as we treat nature as a thing to be exploited.”

Sheehan, also an environmental attorney, brought in California-basedGlobal Exchange and Pennsylvania law group, theCommunity Environmental Legal Defense Fund(CELDF), organizations specializing in assisting communities to write new laws to place the rights of communities and ecosystems above corporate profits, to hold a 3-day “Democracy School” training in Santa Monica.

Sheehan and Global Exchange’s Community Rights program director, Shannon Biggs then presented draft ordinances to the Task Force on The Environment. As Shannon Biggs, Community Rights Director for Global Exchange told the Task Force, “Recognizing rights for nature does not stop development; rather it stops the kind of development that interferes with the existence and vitality of those ecosystems.”

The process took about three years in total, and the ordinance went through several changes during the course of numerous Task Force and other public meetings.  The ordinance was eventually submitted to the city council in 2012.  At that time, before a packed chamber, dozens of residents spoke in support of the ordinance, spurring the council to pass a resolution in support of its Rights of Nature provisions.

Then, in a surprise move, Santa Monica’s City Attorney, Marsha Jones Moutrie, met with Sheehan and Gold to talk about the ordinance and its framework of rights, and ended up drafting a new version — ultimately becoming the ordinance that passed by unanimous vote of the Council this year. “The final ordinance is not as strong as the original, notes Global Exchange’s Biggs, citing a few examples, “it doesn’t strip Constitutional protections like corporate personhood or the Commerce Clause that enable corporations to override community concerns, and it doesn’t strictly prohibit any activities, which means it is up to the community to keep the pressure on the city to enforce it when something comes up. But it’s a step forward for brand new environmental protections.”

Gold and Guttierez don’t believe holding the City’s feet to the fire will be a problem, and the ordinance does mandate regular public reviews of the Sustainability City Plan and forces the city to take action if goals aren’t being met. As Guttierez notes, “Working to educate people about rights of nature and the ordinance was a challenge, but now our work really begins. Many goals we could not lay out in the ordinance, but at the same time, that’s what we should be driving for, practical measurable goals. Turning it into an educational tool is exciting. Sustainability is now our legal commitment.”

Pennsylvania farmer protects Rights of Nature through Conservation Easement

In November 2012, Stephen Cleghorn, PhD, a Pennsylvania organic farmer, became the first landowner in the United States to use a conservation easement to recognize the rights of water, forest, and wild ecosystems. The easement bans activities, like shale gas hydrofracking, which would violate those rights, and elevates the rights of nature above the power claimed by extractive energy corporations to despoil the environment.

View the Conservation Easement at The Dr. Lucinda Hart-Gonzalez Conservation Easement

Press Release – November 14, 2012
Paradise Community, Henderson Township, Jefferson County, PA

J. Stephen Cleghorn, PhD, a Pennsylvania organic farmer, has become the first landowner in the United States to use a conservation easement (a kind of deed restriction) to recognize, create and protect the Rights of Nature. The easement then bans activities like hydro-fracking for shale gas which would violate those rights, and elevates the Rights of Nature above the power claimed by extractive energy corporations to despoil the environment.

Cleghorn is the owner of Paradise Gardens and Farm– a fifty acre organic farm that sits above the Marcellus Shale formation in Henderson Township, Jefferson County, Pennsylvania.

Cleghorn established the easement in memory of his late wife, Dr. Lucinda Hart-González who died of lung cancer on November 14, 2011. On May 10 of this year Ms. Hart-González’s ashes were scattered on the property and the farm was declared forever inviolate and off-limits to shale gas fracking. The easement is dated as of the first anniversary of her death.

Over the last six months, Cleghorn has worked with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a nonprofit, Pennsylvania-based law firm, to create an easement which secures the Rights of Nature legally on this property. The Legal Defense Fund has assisted over three dozen municipal governments in eight states to create local laws that recognize the Rights of Nature, and assisted in the drafting of the declaration of rights in the new Ecuadorian Constitution, through which Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize the Rights of Nature.

Although warned by his lawyer that the easement might reduce his property’s value, Cleghorn states: “It’s not really my property. Nature had it first. Human laws that carve it up into market commodities that can be traded and sold matter less to me than the first rights of Nature. Besides, a recent study showed that shale gas drilling reduces the property value by 24% when that property depends on private water wells as mine does. For me this easement preserves this land for organic farming and protects it from an extreme form of fossil fuel extraction. I know plenty of potential buyers who would go along with those conditions. In the long run as we try to save this planet from us, I think I’ll be just fine on property value.”

Thomas Linzey, the Executive Director of CELDF, applauded Cleghorn’s actions, stating that “the time has come for the corporate ’right’ to destroy the earth be subordinated to the rights of our communities and nature. Stephen’s actions, in honor of his late wife, represent an expansion of the resistance against gas corporations in the State.”

Both Cleghorn and Linzey called on other landowners across the state, in addition to municipal governments, to take action to recognize the rights of communities and nature through both easements and local laws. A new Pennsylvania-based organization, the Terra Conservancy, is being established by CELDF to receive and enforce rights of nature easements.

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Grafton, New Hampshire Adopts Community Bill of Rights

Bans Land Acquisition for Unsustainable Energy Systems

Massive wind turbines installed by an Iberdrola project tower over ridges in Grafton County, New Hampshire and have had a devastating impact on the environment and this rural community.  Iberdrola is Spain’s largest energy group and a global leader in wind energy.  Grafton, NH residents learned that Iberdrola was proposing another large industrial wind project that would install wind turbines along other ridgelines in their County.  They turned to CELDF for assistance in defining a plan of action and drafting a Community Bill of Rights.

On Tuesday March 12, 2013, at a Town Meeting residents of Grafton voted to adopt an ordinance that establishes a community Bill of Rights and prohibits corporations from engaging “in land acquisition necessary for the siting or construction of  unsustainable energy systems”.

The ordinance recognizes rights to pure water, clean air, a sustainable energy future  as a “fundamental and inalienable right to protect and preserve the scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the town,” and that the people of Grafton at all times enjoy and retain “an inalienable and indefeasible right to self-governance in the community where they reside.” The ordinance also recognizes natural communities and ecosystems have “inalienable and fundamental rights to exist and flourish within the Town,” and that “residents of the town shall possess legal standing to enforce those rights on behalf of those natural communities and ecosystems.”

Read more at Grafton, New Hampshire Adopts Community Bill of Rights That Bans Land Acquisition for Unsustainable Energy Systems

 

CA Communities Rise Against Fracking

Who decides if fracking happens in a community where YOU live?  With California facing new fracking proposals, communities around the state are rising up.  Global Exchange helps communities to organize,  write laws to protect their communities, and  assert their rights as community.

The Community Rights program led by Director Shannon Biggs of Global Exchange has just released the short video CA Communities Rise Against Fracking to address the questions:

  • What is fracking?
  • What are the dangers of fracking?
  • What can your community do to stop it?

Learn more about the work of Global Exchange and the Community Rights movement at http://www.globalexchange.org/programs/communityrights

Evolving Earth Law and Voices for the Earth Workshops

Findhorn, Scotland – 24 – 26 May  2013 Wholistic Law Center

For our Europe colleagues especially, the International Centre for Wholistic Law, based in the Findhorn Foundation Community in Scotland announces inaugural events taking place on Fri/Sat 24/25 and Sun 26 May 2013:

Evolving Earth Law: Co-creating a New Legal Paradigm

Wholistic law approaches law-making, legal practice and dispute resolution from a paradigm of healing, restoration and reparation, in alignment with the natural universal principles that govern the inter-existence of all life.

In this two-day workshop we will use tools derived from whole-systems enquiry to explore our legal paradigm, which is based on an outdated worldview that is no longer meeting humanity’s needs. Is there potential for a more life-affirming approach to law – in service to the whole Earth community – and how can we facilitate its emergence?

We are at a time of rapid change and immense potential. Our legal system is a reflection of our collective consciousness – as our consciousness evolves so will our systems. Drawing on recent innovations in systemic constellation work, deep-systems healing and dialogue processes, we will get to the heart of the dynamics and inner structures that keep our legal system entrenched in its current paradigm. We will transform deeply held patterns, beliefs and assumptions that prevent us from experiencing our full potential, enabling the co-creation of a new legal paradigm.

This work can stimulate radical innovation capacity and inner-leadership potential, empowering each of us to be the change that we wish to see in our respective environments.

Whether you are a legal professional or not, if you are interested in the potential for change in our justice system, please join us for this innovative event.

Voices for the Earth: A Workshop in Community Eco-stewardship

Everywhere eco-systems are being damaged by extractive industries, toxic waste dumping, inappropriate building work and careless manufacturing.

Thoughtful communities are taking action and stepping forward to be stewards of their eco-systems. How could they be more effective at communicating? What tools are at their disposal to strengthen their voice and their case? What might they learn from each other?

Growing out of the movement for an international law of Ecocide initiated by Polly Higgins, the Voices for the Earth workshop is a new offering designed to help local communities take effective and skillful action.
We show how a local community can frame its own narrative for self-empowerment through asset mapping, Environmental Impact reporting and the Community Bills of Rights gaining ground in the U.S. Role-play and effective listening and communicating processes will be used, to examine an issue from different perspectives and work towards shared values.

Voices for the Earth follows on from the two day Evolving Earth Law workshop, which is taking place in Findhorn on 24th and 25th May. Although both workshops can be attended as stand-alone events, participants will gain maximum benefit by attending all three days.

Although both workshops can be attended as stand-alone events, participants will gain maximum benefit by attending all three days. To reserve your place please e-mail info@wholistic-law.org or call 0845 053 7625. An early bird discount of £30 is applicable for reservations received before 17 April.

For information on how to get to Findhorn and bed and breakfast accommodation within The Park (the location of the Findhorn Foundation Community) please see http://www.findhorn.org/visit/getting-here/#.UVLKgxfwnj4 and http://www.findhorn.org/visit/b-and-b/#.UVLN-hfwnj4 respectively.