* Can private property rights be misused?
* Naomi Klein "On Precaution"
* Photos: Ellsberg and Rowley arrested in protest at White House
* "Economic needs" not helped by shale gas drilling (Barth & Arrindell)
* Community Rights: CEDC and CELDF represent two approaches
Protesters face up to Gov. Corbett in Harrisburg
Nearly 200 Pennsylvanians made their way through harsh winter weather from all over the region to protest the inauguration of gas industry-financed new Governor, Tom Corbett, calling for a statewide. moratorium on shale gas drilling. "Tom Corporate -- no way, no fracking in Pa.," one activist shouted through a bullhorn. Corbett has vowed not to allow a severance tax that could help pay for robust regulation and he has appointed a team of regulators at DEP who are former gas industry lobbyists.
LETTER
Can private property rights be misused?
by Doug Rogers, Long Eddy, NY
I've noticed a misuse of the concept of "private property rights" in the ongoing debate on gas drilling in our area of upper New York state. To claim those rights as a rationale for unfettered drilling is wrong simply because the water table cannot be divided along the same property lines as the land above. If a hypothetical fence could be sunk that could keep any chemical contamination neatly on an owner's land, then property owners would have a right to uphold. But since such contamination is impossible to contain, the private property rights of the surrounding neighbors who are not drilling are violated.
The current debate isn't about private property so much as it is about power. In America, money is power. If you have a little money you get to make little decisions, and if you have more money you get to make bigger decisions. Maybe that's the way it should be. But the really big decisions that affect the way we live, the shape of our landscapes and the direction of our country are being made by huge conglomerations of financial power that dwarf the power of any individual living in our community, rich or poor.
This imbalance of power is clearly on display in the struggle along the Delaware River, as it is in other parts of the country. No individual land owner, whether signing a drilling contract or not, can have any impact compared to the gas industry and the Wall Street money that backs them. They're calling the shots. This loss of control over the direction of our own lives and communities ought to be alarming to all of us, no matter which side of the debate we are on. Indeed we have to fight for cohesion in our communities if we hope to hold our own against the onslaught of this outside corporate power which has its own agenda, different from ours.
So I hope that those people who believe strongly in private property rights will understand why your neighbors are upset. Because what you do on your property is going to affect all of us. The sudden windfall of money doesn't relieve you of the obligation to respect the rights of others. Nor does it release you from your responsibility to your own community to stand with them against outside forces that would decide how we are going to live.
(This appeared as a letter to the editor in the Sullivan County Democrat on 12-28-10.)
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PUBLIC ADDRESS
On Precaution
Naomi Klein, author of the renowned world economic analysis 'The Shock Doctrine,' recently gave a speech at TEDWomen Conference in Wash. DC, in Dec 2010. Photo by James Duncan Davidson.
Given the stakes, the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the Precautionary Principle, the principle that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk, and when the potential damage is irreversible, we cannot afford to wait for perfect scientific certainty. Better to err on the side of caution. Moreover the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the public that could be harmed, but rather on the industry that stands to profit.
Yet climate policy in the wealthy world—to the extent that such a thing exists—is not made based on precaution but rather on cost-benefit analysis: finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on GDP. So rather than asking, as precaution would demand: “How can we act as quickly as possible to avert catastrophe,” we ask bizarre questions like: What is the latest possible moment we can wait before we begin seriously lowering emissions? 2020? 2050? Or, how much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive? 2 degrees Celsius? 3? 4—what we are heading for right now?
And this last question is interesting because the assumption that we can safely control the Earth’s awesomely complex climate system as if it had a thermostat—making the planet not too hot and not too cold but just right, Goldilocks style—is pure fantasy. And it isn’t coming from climate scientists, it’s coming from economists imposing their mechanistic thinking on the science. The fact is that we simply don’t know when the warming we create will be utterly overwhelmed by feedback loops.
So, once again: why do we take these crazy risks? A range of explanations probably pop to mind. Like greed. Or perhaps hubris. And greed and hubris are intimately intertwined when it comes to recklessness. Because if you happen to be a 35 year old banker taking home a hundred times more than a brain surgeon, then you need a narrative, a story that makes that disparity okay.
And you don’t have a lot of options: either you’re an outrageously good scammer, and you are getting away with it. Or you are some kind of boy-genius the likes of which the world has never seen. Both options are going to make you vastly over-confident, and therefore prone to taking riskier gambles in the future.
By the way, Tony Hayward, former CEO of BP, had a plaque on his desk engraved with the following inspirational slogan: “If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?”
Now, a lot of people have that plaque. So I want to stress that pushing fear of failure out of your mind can be a very good thing if you are training for a triathlon, say, or writing a TED talk. But personally, I think the men with the power to detonate our economy and ravage our ecology would do better having a picture of Icarus hanging on the wall.
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PHOTOS OF THE SEASON
Ellsberg and Rowley arrested
Former CIA analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers which helped to set in motion the end of the Vietnam War, was arrested in civil disobedience at White House protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with FBI whistleblower and 2002 Time 'Person of the Year' Coleen Rowley and 130 others Dec 16, 2010. Rowley's protest sign said, "The wars are a lie." Photos by Collin David Anderson.
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Daniel Ellsberg arrested and being led away, protesting all the way. |
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Protester making "snow angel" before being arrested. |
BULLETIN 11-23-10
“Economic needs” will not be helped by shale gas drilling
James Barth and DCS take apart a key gas industry talking point
A consortium of voices in defense of the Delaware River watershed issued a powerful letter to federal DRBC representative Brigadier Gen Peter A. DeLuca on Nov 20, 2010, brimming with facts that blow out of the water DeLuca’s implied assertion of positive economic effects of shale gas drilling in the affected shale play region. This letter, issued by Damascus Citizens for Sustainability (led by Barbara Arrindell and James Barth, with Mr. Barth's research and writing constituting the heart of the letter) was jointly signed by Iris Marie Bloom of Protecting Our Waters (Philadelphia) and many others. The letter sprang from an earlier letter exchange with DeLuca by NY House Rep. Maurice Hinchey (featured in a story on PC on 9-30-10). Hinchey challenged DeLuca's view of his DRBC role which DeLuca had put this way:
“The federal family of agencies that I represent on the commission are collectively charged with a requirement to support the economic needs of the region and our nation’s need to secure energy reserves while protecting the environment.” [emphasis ours]
The question of supporting the nation's "need to secure energy" is a second non sequitur in DeLuca's letter which was soundly trounced by Hinchey but we focus here on the first extraneous notion regarding supposed "economic benefits" of shale gas drilling which DeLuca also suggested was part of the DRBC’s mandate. Mr. Hinchey dispelled the latter by patiently walking Gen DeLuca through the DRBC Compact.
That was in late September 2010 and so far no reply from DeLuca so far as we know. And so far as we know the DRBC, including Commissioner DeLuca and the four governors, seem bent upon finalizing rulemaking and issuing permits to allow shale gas fracking to commence in the watershed without waiting for in-depth cumulative environmental impact studies. The DRBC is on a “fast-track” called for by DeLuca representing President Obama and by Gov Christie and others. Why the fast-track?
We venture to guess the fast-track, which benefits the gas industry first and foremost, was set in motion primarily because of political pressure to move ahead without delay to cash in on all the jobs and other economic benefits of shale gas drilling promised on the basis of such evidence as the Penn State jobs study financed by Range Resources. The fast-track into the mythos of jobs also politically benefits the four governors and the White House who oversee the Delaware River Basin supposedly as a public trust.
The "clean energy" tale about shale gas extraction/production (which emits staggering amounts of greenhouse gases making it nearly as dirty as coal if not far worse) and the quest for "energy independence" have been factors in promoting shale gas development. But far and away -- for the general public -- the prospect of “economic needs," especially jobs, being met by gas drilling has been the tail wagging the dog of the entire boom.
Meanwhile, a few dedicated souls in a DCS-led joint consortium were busy in the back room with pencils, focusing on the “economic” implications of the DeLuca letter to see if they hold water. They don't.
Despite the "economic needs" rationale being non sequitur to the DRBC Compact, that is, outside the DRBC’s duty to protect the watershed (shown conclusively by Hinchey’s 9-30-10 letter), rebuttal of the DeLuca insinuation about shale gas exploration and production benefiting social “economic needs” is crucial because it is a misunderstanding held by the broader spectrum of citizenry and political leaders within and outside the region, indeed across America, engendered by the shale gas industry PR machine to convince all parties that shale gas drilling is a good thing for society (see Chesapeake Energy's "Shale Country" and their new propaganda film "Shale Gas and America's Future") and should be accepted even if we have doubts or concerns about safety of our drinking water, the environment and human health. These two propaganda creations are centerpieces of a sophisticated public relations effort by industry leader Chesapeake and others to insinuate that shale gas development is the veritable Second Coming of economic revival.
The Siren Song of “jobs” and the prospect of a rising economic tide for all people and businesses in the region via increased property values and cash in the pockets of lease-holder farmers due to the shale boom has never been rebutted – and badly needs to be. This 11-20-10 letter does so in spades. Indeed President Obama should read it and learn something and perhaps revise his remarks about pushing development of shale gas.
Thus the environmentalists and economists led by DCS have performed a profound public service in the movement not only to ban shale gas fracking in the Delaware River Basin but across the United States by taking the wind out of the sails of the gas industry’s #1 propaganda talking point about its supposed economic benefits, showing us instead how injurious shale gas drilling will be in hidden and unexamined costs not only to the environment and human health but also to the economy.
Read the DCS consortium letter here. http://www.damascuscitizens.org/Letter_to_General_DeLuca.pdf
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COMMUNITY RIGHTS: TWO APPROACHES
Public Comment posted a memo from CEDC (Community Environmental Defense Council) on 12-22-10 from David Slottje, Esq., in which he discussed the legal strategy of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) in assisting local communities to assert their rights. The latter group, CELDF, has responded with a memo submitted by Projects Director Ben Price. Both memos are posted here below for readers to study, first from CEDC on 12-22-10, followed by CELDF on 1-3-11.
MEMO FROM COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE COUNCIL 12-22-10
CEDC's view
Community Environmental Defense Council’s concern with Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s legal approach to banning fracking in local municipalities. A memo from senior attorney at CEDC, David Slottje, Esq.
Residents of many villages, towns, and cities are increasingly focused on the possibility of legally prohibiting within their municipal boundaries industrial activities such as gas drilling via slick water, high volume hydrofracking. We at Community Environmental Defense Council, Inc. (CEDC) believe that under current New York statutory and decisional law, it is legal for New York municipalities to pass municipal land use ordinances prohibiting industrial activities within their boundaries, and that those ordinances can be crafted in a manner that will withstand legal challenges. Chief among such challenges are allegations that the ordinances are invalid or that the (valid) ordinances constitute a ‘taking’ requiring the payment of compensation.
Recently, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a Pennsylvania-based public interest law firm, has been publicizing its efforts in assisting the City of Pittsburgh to pass an ordinance “banning corporations from conducting natural gas drilling in the city.” A number of individuals and groups have asked us at CEDC whether we believe that the legal approach recommended by CELDF in Pittsburgh is advisable for New York state municipalities.
We do not.
We believe that the CELDF approach in Pittsburgh is not appropriate to the extent that New York municipalities are interested in passing legally enforceable local ordinances intended first and foremost to prohibit within their boundaries industrial activities such as gas drilling via slick water, high volume hydrofracking (‘fracking”). CELDF’s approach, based on corporate personhood, while laudable as an ideal, is unlikely to survive legal challenge and thus the primary objective of municipalities to ban fracking is likely to fail.
Some quick background: Despite the similar-sounding acronyms, CELDF and CEDC are very different organizations, with very different goals. CEDC, based in Ithaca, New York, is focused solely on the environment, and at present devotes the entirety of its resources to defending the upstate New York region against the prospect of industrialization of our communities and landscapes posed by activities such as fracking. It would be presumptuous for those of us at CEDC to describe CELDF’s goals and motivations, and for education along those lines the reader is referred to CELDF’s website.
That said, it does appear from CELDF’s website, and from conversations that the writer of this memo has had with Ben Price, Executive Director of CELDF, and from statements that the writer of this memo has heard Mr. Price make at various presentations, that banning of industrial activities (such as fracking) might not be the primary goal of CELDF’s activities; as Mr. Price likes to tell his audiences: ‘You don’t have a fracking problem – you have a democracy problem!’ The latter appears to be a reference to corporate personhood undermining our democracy. However, this is not a legal approach so much as a stance of laudable idealism that is unlikely to succeed in gaining a legally enforceable ban on shale gas drilling in local townships.
New York municipalities interested in accepting CELDF’s offer of assistance would be well advised, prior to accepting any such assistance, to inquire of Mr. Price as to whether CELDF’s lawyers (rather than Mr. Price or any non-lawyer member of CELDF’s staff) are of the (formal legal) opinion that the CELDF-recommended ordinance will or should in fact withstand legal challenge under present New York law. We recommend that Mr. Price be asked directly whether his organization’s primary intention in offering to assist the municipality is to attempt to craft a presently enforceable ban of industrial activities such as fracking, or whether, instead, CELDF is more interested in creating a platform for the corporate personhood debate.
We at CEDC agree that ‘corporate personhood’ is an important issue, indeed one of the most important long-term issues facing our society. And we respect CELDF’s commitment to that cause. But fixing that problem will require changing existing laws, and changing existing laws takes time. At CEDC, we believe that existing statutory and decisional law in New York state provides a mechanism for New York municipalities to pass local land use ordinances prohibiting industrial activities within their boundaries, and that those ordinances can be crafted – now – in a manner that will withstand legal challenges under the present legal regime.
In summary, CEDC’s concern with using the CELDF approach in New York state is two-fold: First, based on statements made by people within the CELDF organization, they appear to believe that the (Pittsburgh-type) ordinances they draft and support are not likely to withstand challenge under current law. Accordingly, to the extent that CELDF’s client municipalities in fact intended to attempt to create a presently enforceable ban – as opposed to making a corporate personhood statement -- their expectations will have been defeated, and they will have lost substantial time attempting to pass an unenforceable ban.
Second, because of the high likelihood that the Pittsburgh‐type ordinance will fail legally, it is likely that it will fail quickly, primarily on “corporate personhood” constitutional grounds. We are concerned that such a quick loss (on corporate personhood grounds) could create ‘bad law’ in the area of local land use prohibitions that we believe would otherwise be available to municipalities.
We wish CELDF only the best, organizationally and with respect to the corporate personhood quest. But we do not wish to see their long-term struggle against corporate personhood get in the way of what we believe New York state municipalities can do to protect themselves from the threat of industrial activities such as fracking.
Anyone wishing to discuss this matter in additional detail should feel free to contact the writer, David Slottje, Executive Director and Senior Attorney at CEDC (dslottje @twcny.rr.com) or Helen Holden Slottje, Managing Attorney at CEDC (holden.slottje @gmail.com).
Very truly yours,
David F. Slottje
Executive Director and Senior Attorney
Community Environmental Defense Council (CEDC)
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THE DISCUSSION CONTINUES: 1-3-10
Response to CEDC from CELDF
From the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
On December 22, 2010, the Community Environmental Defense Council (a New York organization) distributed a memo published on the Public Comment blog (http://pubcomm.blogspot.com/), and perhaps elsewhere, titled “CEDC and CELDF: Two Approaches.” In it, the organization’s Executive Director questioned whether the legal strategy used by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in other States should be applied to New York municipalities. The letter was prompted by the unanimous adoption of a CELDF-drafted ordinance by the Pittsburgh City Council, and by the Legal Defense Fund’s work with the City of Buffalo and other New York communities to replicate that ordinance.
What the Pittsburgh Ordinance Does
The Pittsburgh ordinance establishes a local Bill of Rights and prohibits those activities within the City which would violate those rights. In doing so, the City follows in the footsteps of over a hundred other municipalities which are redefining the role of municipalities from being merely appendages of State government to being governments acting to secure and protect civil, environmental, and cultural rights. The Pittsburgh City Council recognized that natural gas extraction would violate the civil and environmental rights established by the ordinance, and thus banned that extraction from occurring within City limits. Understanding that the ban on gas extraction runs afoul of State law (which allows the drilling) and legal protections afforded to gas drilling corporations, the City Council also declared void any State-issued permits that would violate the rights established by the ordinance, and declared that incompatible corporate “rights” would not be recognized within the City.
CEDC’s Strategy for Combatting Fracking Through Land Use Regulation
The Community Environmental Defense Council (not to be confused with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund), drafted and circulated its memo of 12-22-10 airing concerns that CELDF’s ordinances should not be adopted in New York, because CEDC wants to pioneer an approach which uses “land use ordinances to prohibit industrial activities” at the municipal level. That approach would require municipal governments to use land use tools to declare themselves “rural,” and then proceed to prohibit those activities which are incompatible with the rural character of the municipality. CEDC claims that their strategy is “legally defensible”, while CELDF’s is not.
Using zoning and other land use tools to prohibit a use that is permitted by the State (as proposed by CEDC, assuming that the temporary statewide moratorium on fracking expires as anticipated), however, can be challenged in a myriad of ways.
First, if a State regulatory program has been established (like State-level oil and gas permitting laws), prohibiting certain activities allowed by those regulations automatically runs afoul of that State-level authority, and the land use law will be overturned because it conflicts with State law. Secondly, because corporations have certain legal rights and protections under current law, any prohibition of a State-permitted legal use at the municipal level inevitably runs afoul of those corporate “rights”, giving rise to lawsuits against the municipality for violating the corporations’ rights against having property “taken” without compensation (in violation of corporate constitutional “rights” under the 5th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution), and, because gas extraction is inevitably a commercial activity, running afoul of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which guarantees that only the federal government, and not local governments, can regulate or control those activities which can be characterized as “interstate commerce.”
CEDC’s strategy is nothing new. People and communities have sought to use land use and zoning tools since the 1960’s to prohibit certain activities within their municipalities, to no avail. The reason for that failure is logical: it’s because those land use tools were never intended to enable municipal communities to prohibit legal uses, but were instead intended narrowly to enable municipalities to separate out incompatible land uses – commercial from industrial, industrial from residential, for example. When those tools are used to prohibit a State-designated legal or permitted use, the result is a lawsuit brought by the corporation affected against the municipality – seeking not only to overturn the zoning rule as a violation of the corporation’s legal and constitutional rights - and the corporation’s “right” to carry out the activity under State regulatory law - but also to hold the municipality liable for damages caused to the corporation from the municipality’s “takings” of corporate property.
Our Predictable Activism
It’s a system that has been carefully constructed over the past hundred years to guarantee that communities cannot say “no” to things that they don’t want, and thus, cannot say “yes” to the things that they do want. And it’s not just fracking, of course: the same rules apply to communities that want to ban big-box stores, clear-cutting, hog factory farms, toxic waste incinerators, or hazardous waste landfills. It’s the same structure of law that communities run into on a thousand different issues.
That structure of law – carefully engineered to divest us of governing authority within our own communities - means that we’re at the mercy of big-box retailing corporations, agribusiness corporations, and now, gas corporations. Not being able to say “no” to a Wal-Mart corporation coming into the community automatically means not being able to say “yes” to a viable, healthy downtown; not being able to say “no” to fracking corporations means automatically not being able to say “yes” to clean water, local economies based on desirable businesses, and rural quality of life.
In short, the tools that we’re allowed to use under this system (which we’ve allowed to utterly define our activism over the past couple of decades), are not capable of delivering the kind of local, community control that we need to build sustainable communities simply because they were never intended to serve that role. Thus, we arrive at a crossroads of sorts – we can continue to attempt to use tactics and strategies that have been engineered by a corporate minority specifically to keep us busy while they prepare to play the trump-cards up their sleeves; or we can begin to write our own rules – ones that don’t accept having to play with the stacked deck of regulations that “permit” corporate harm to our communities, and corporate “rights” that let them nullify local self-government.
Playing Outside of the Box – Communities Rising
Over a hundred communities in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine have recognized what CEDC hasn’t – that so long as activists continue to use strategies and tactics written by others (whose motives are to use communities for their own purposes), sustainability will forever remain a lofty, unachievable dream. They’ve recognized that only a new community script – written by those affected by the activities that must be prohibited – will be able to elevate the right to local, community self-government above the claimed rights of corporations, which are underwritten by the State.
That new community script represents a community-based civil rights movement which is beginning to expand across the country to communities in Ohio, California, and Washington. It’s not moving into different communities because of silver-tongued CELDF orators – but because those communities are rapidly arriving at the same conclusions that CELDF has, and they have grown tired of “experts” and lawyers explaining to them that they have no choice but to suffer the ills of these new projects.
That new script is now codified into ordinances which recognize expanded Bills of Rights at the municipal level, and which prohibit activities which would violate that civil rights matrix. The ordinances thus drive the stake of local bans directly into the heart of illegitimate corporate privileges and powers that thwart the most sacred right echoed throughout American history – that of the right of self-government advanced to secure and protect the rights of people and communities.
Directly Challenging Corporate “Rights” to Protect Local Lawmaking
Anticipating corporate challenges to the ordinances, the local laws decline to accord those legal rights and powers to corporations within the municipality, while declaring that State-issued permits that violate the rights-matrix established by the Bill of Rights’ section of the ordinances are invalid within the municipality.
In short, the ordinances reject the notion that free people may only use those administrative tools which have been carefully constructed for us by a corporate minority in an attempt to perpetuate the myth that we enjoy community, democratic self-government. Instead, the ordinances create a new framework which challenges the court-concocted and legislatively navigated law of the land, by building a new rights-based framework which gives birth to economic and environmental sustainability at the community level.
It’s not complicated. The ordinances seek to turn what we thought we had into something that we actually have.
Will lawsuits be filed against municipalities using the Legal Defense Fund’s approach or CEDC’s approach? Both approaches are subject to legal challenge. But the difference is this – any strategy based on CEDC’s preferred land use tools validates the system that delivered those land use tools in the first place. It pretends that we live in a system that we don’t; and continues to reassure communities that the structure provides them a remedy which it does not. The strategy is thus not commensurate with reality, and continues a mode of organizing that props up the myth that we have an operating democracy.
Thus, a lawsuit overturning a land use law that bans fracking is the end of the story – a discouraged community is then fracked, and the underlying premise that State sponsored corporate denials of community rights goes unchallenged again. The Legal Defense Fund’s strategy engages community residents as partners, not as lawyers from above – telling them the truth about how the system actually operates, and assisting them to rise above that system to envision a new one that actually turns the myth of local self-government into reality. The “losing” lawsuits then serve as confirmations of how the system actually operates – and leverage communities into deeper degrees of disobedience to a legal system which is fundamentally illegitimate and unjust, and which will only change when enough communities demand that change.
Those deeper degrees of disobedience are already occurring in places like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire – where communities have begun to stitch themselves together to envision what State constitutional change would look like – change which codifies at the State level what these communities have been adopting at the local level. And many communities have begun to recognize that, since corporate constitutional “rights” are federally recognized, that changes to the federal Constitution are necessary as well.
Local Lawmaking as a Beginning, not the End Goal
Thus, the Legal Defense Fund’s organizing ups the ante, in which the adoption of the ordinance is recognized as the beginning of a movement to liberate local, community self-government, rather than an organizing dead-end. It’s a simple recognition that if the structure itself is not changed, that we will always be defensively fighting the next “big thing” that comes down the road. This year, it’s fracking. Next year, it will be something different; and as everyone knows who plays strategic games like chess, if you’re always on the defensive, it’s a guarantee that you’ll lose the game.
Winning what we need – the authority at the municipal level to decide what happens in our own communities – means challenging imminent harms through a frontal challenge to the structure of law that enables those harms to occur.
CEDC thus misses the mark completely when it attempts to paint the Legal Defense Fund as driving some kind of agenda separate from the banning of fracking. Assistance provided by the Legal Defense Fund is aimed at creating a structure of law that not only enables communities to ban fracking, but which enables the community to ban a range of activities that are economically and environmentally unsustainable. When CEDC declares that “changing existing laws takes time” and thus, CELDF ordinances are premature, one is reminded of the echoes of those who attempted to stop movements to free the slaves or drive equal rights for women – the refrain at that time being that it was “too much, too soon.”
CEDC seems to recognize that “fixing the problem will require changing existing laws.” Frederick Douglass once declared that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” For “existing laws” to change, there must be a demand for local, self-governing authority that isn’t anchored in what the existing structure hopes that we’ll settle for. That type of change doesn’t come from begging and pleading elected and regulatory officials to deliver for the community; it only comes from refusing to live under a structure of law that constantly screws you.
With the fracking boom in full swing, and with our communities becoming resource extraction colonies for a variety of corporations, if the time isn’t now, then when is it? If our communities are not the ones to lead the way, then who will? How long will we continue to allow corporate directors to govern our communities?
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