On Community Civil Disobedience In The Name Of Sustainability: The Community Rights Movement in the United States

Description

Right now, several hundred communities across the United States aren't waiting for the power brokers to fix the broken political system that has brought humanity to the brink of economic and environmental collapse. They're doing it themselves by seizing political authority within their own municipalities and making binding laws to transform this system into a sustainable one. In doing so, they are taking on the basic operating system of America and changing it into one which recognises a right to local, community self-government that corporations cannot override.

Created in 1995, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has assisted over five hundred municipal governments and community organizations to draft and adopt new local laws that assert the right of the people of those communities to stop corporate factory farms, waste dumping, corporate water withdrawals, and fracking. As part of its legal defense of those laws, the Legal Defense Fund asserts that the right of local, community self-government is a constitutional right woven into the fabric of American law, and that legal doctrines, such as corporate constitutional "rights" must yield to the doctrine.