Robert MacNeil Christie, Author

Thomas Linzey won a lot of lawsuits over corporations impinging on local communities with giant projects that would destroy local ecosystems and make life miserable for residents. He discovered that the corporations would simply re-apply for zoning permits, countering the factors Linzey used to win the lawsuits.

Linzey began to realize that his efforts as an environmental lawyer were no more than delaying tactics because, in the end, the corporations won. By design, most permitting processes heavily favor corporate applicants – just work through the formalities and you get your permit. Linzey turned to a deeper level of resistance – local assertion of community rights.

We need to heed the principles of the burgeoning community rights movement articulated by Thomas Linzey. See his book, written with Anneke Campbell, We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States (Oakland: PM Press, 2016). His public talks such as “Reclaiming Democracy: How Communities are Saying “NO” to Corporate Rights and Recognizing the Rights of Nature” (DVD: WWW.peakmoment.tv) are inspiring. They air occasionally on LinkTV and Free Speech TV.

Numerous other examples of local community action to regain democracy, also give us hope. Such examples include diverse community actions reported in Sarah van Gelden, The Revolution Where You Live, the “50 Solutions” described in the 20th-anniversary edition of Yes! Magazine, the movements for economic justice described by Gar Alperovitz in What Then Must We Do? and the mutual community-interest grounded left-right political coalitions Ralph Nader describes and advocates in Unstoppable.

The necessity for conscious consumers to constrain their purchases to products that have a minimal carbon footprint indicates the importance of the old maxim, “think globally, act locally.” The problems caused by global warming are global. Yet, most of the actions we can take are local. Even more importantly, the ecosystems we must protect and those we must restore are mostly local. Despite the consumer bubble in which we live, we all depend on the ecosystems dying around us.

We must think locally about our ecosystem. Merely recycling the waste from profligate consumption is, for too many, a distraction from changing the culture of waste itself – what Phillip Slater a long time ago called “the toilet assumption.” We must constrict the endless-growth economy and replace it with viable local ecological economies. That will entail purchasing only those things we really need, are durable, and don’t damage the biosphere. We must fully exploit the technical knowledge we have to help us shrink the destructive technosphere and reassert the Rights of Nature. Otherwise, we will not be able to restore the biosphere or our proper place in it.

For more on defending Nature (and us) from the technosphere and establishing ecological communities, see other posts at www.TheHopefulRealist.com.