GRASSROOTS ORGANIZING AND PUBLIC EDUCATION FOR RIGHTS OF NATURE
CELDF (Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund) is helping build a movement upward from grassroots to state, federal, and international levels
“A new movement is growing around the Rights of Nature, arguing that rivers, lakes, and forests should have legal rights for themselves, not for their value to human beings. Life on earth depends on the integrity of these ecosystems.”
--Tish O’Dell Consulting Director for the Community Environmental Defense Fund
Interview with Tish O’Dell
By Suzanne Forcese
WT: Great to connect with you again Tish! Since WATERTODAY first spoke with you regarding the Lake Erie Bill of Rights in 2019, a lot has been happening at CELDF.
Can you give us a summary of CELDF’s accomplishments to date.
O’Dell: Today, through grassroots organizing, public education and outreach, and legal assistance, nearly 200 municipalities across the U.S. have advanced CELDF-drafted laws to establish rights for ecosystems, human rights to water, a liveable climate and to live in public, as well as to ban practices including fracking, factory farming, sewage sludging of farmland, and water privatization.
WT: Has public awareness of ‘Rights of Nature’ increased?
O’Dell: Public awareness of state and corporate interference in local democracy has exploded. The issue of “state preemption” and unilateral state interference in local democracy has reached new audiences. As this movement continues to grow, we will continue to push for the structural change in the system of government needed to win communities the basic power to heighten protections for civil, human and ecosystem rights.
We work for state constitutional change and assist local law-making efforts to protect essential human and ecosystem rights while challenging barriers to the recognition and enjoyment of those rights and to local self-determination and sustainability. We have assisted the first communities in the U.S. to eliminate corporate “rights” when they interfere with basic human and ecosystem rights.
Further, CELDF has worked with the first U.S. communities on settler-controlled land and are the first country to establish the Rights of Nature in law – recognizing the rights of ecosystems and natural communities to exist and thrive and empowering people and their governments to defend and enforce these rights.
WT: CELDF staff have been featured, presented or will be presenting on three different continents and in more than half a dozen US cities. Can you give us a few highlights of your outreach please.
O’Dell: Lake Superior, Michigan: Protect the Porcupine Mountains and Lake Superior – On July 30, CELDF’s Education Director, Ben Price delivered a presentation titled “Is it Time for a Great Lakes Bill of Rights”, explaining how this Rights of Nature approach could be used to protect Lake Superior, the mountains and the entire ecosystem, including the humans living within these ecosystems in this virtual presentation.
WT: Any significant outcomes from this presentation?
O’Dell: There is a copper mine being proposed in upper Michigan very close to Lake Superior and the Porcupine Mountains and Forest. The local community group, Protect the Porkies, was only challenging this using the current regulatory system, but because of our connections to the North American Hub of the Global Alliance for Rights of Nature (GARN), the group was made aware of Representative Patrick Burke’s bill, the Great Lakes Bill of Rights (GLBOR), which CELDF helped draft. Because of GLBOR, the group became interested in learning more about the Rights of Nature and that is what led to Ben’s presentation. This shows how ideas started in one community or bioregion can start influencing communities somewhere else but connected through nature.
WT: CELDF has been working with tribal nations – any recent interactions or presentations?
O’Dell: In Cherokee, North Carolina this past August, Rights of Nature was at the center of a 3+ hour conversation related to tribal nations at the Protecting Mother Earth Conference.
CELDF's Executive Director, Kai Huschke was there protecting the integrity and potential of rights of nature as the movement continues to evolve by continuing to have open dialog and sharing of ideas.
This was a 4-day conference, the 18th Protecting Mother Earth Conference with the Indigenous Environmental Network. Round table discussions were quite popular, with topics such as Principles of Engagement: Indigenous Movement with Black, POC and Social Movement-building Power and Rights of Nature/Rights of Mother Earth: Inherent Relationship Jurisprudence
WT: And in September your team members travelled to the Amazon in Sarayaku, Ecuador?
O’Dell: The Sarayaku people of the Amazon hosted 35 attendees from around the world for a four-day conference in October focused on connections with the more than human. The conference was put together by the MOTH Project of NYU Law School. CELDF was an attendee along with partnering with wetlands scientist Gillian Davies from the BSC Group in discussions with the Sarayaku people regarding a multi-country right of wetlands project CELDF has been supporting since 2020.
Your viewers can learn more here: https://cobracollective.org/news/rights-of-wetlands-at-the-more-than-human-life-moth-gathering-in-sarayaku-ecuador.php
WT: Closer to home this October you were involved in a panel discussion after the showing of What We Do To Nature We Do To Ourselves, a documentary .
O’Dell: Andrea Bowers documentary on big agriculture's harmful impacts in northwest Ohio, was screened at the beginning of October to kick off Case Western Reserve University’s Climate Month of activities. A panel discussion after the showing with myself, and local agriculture advocates discussed how we can move to Right Relationship with our food, nature, and each other.
Also in October, Niagara Falls and Buffalo, New York: at the Peace and Justice Studies Annual Conference— I led a workshop on how our cultural values reflected in our laws keep us separated and unable to protect nature and how Rights of Nature can be a step in the direction to correct.
I was also on a panel in September at Niagara U and combined that with a meeting and conversation with Assemblyman Patrick Burke in Buffalo regarding the reintroduction of the Great Lakes Bill of Rights and also got a tour of the Tonawanda Seneca Reservation, the Big Woods and the protected areas surrounding them including the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge.
WT: And in November... what’s next?
O’Dell: We are off to France. The Institut d'études avancées de Nantes hosts TheRights of Nature Turn event - CELDF will be a featured presenter alongside others from Columbia, Ecuador, and New Zealand on Rights of Nature and culture.
I will be highlighting the work that has been done over the years to protect the rights of the Great Lakes and Kai Huschke will spotlight the rights of wetlands.
WT: These are very ambitious and impressive outreach accomplishments creating awareness. CELDF has certainly demonstrated the power of a grassroots movement.
What is the vision moving forward?
O’Dell: This Rights of Nature movement has blossomed and today enjoys tremendous public support and enthusiasm.
We are now in the middle of what can be understood as the second of three phases in this movement. The first was the novelty of the idea: can we imagine ecosystems having rights?
The second is this new popular demand for ecosystem rights and the grappling with concepts and working out the legal mechanisms for how the new paradigm works.
The third phase, which we have not yet gotten to, will be a confrontation between ecosystem rights and corporate constitutional rights, and whether we will all have to pay corporations to stop exploiting and destroying the earth.
The second phase that we are now entering will decide whether Rights of Nature will be a true paradigm shift in our legal systems.
CELDF is committed to making Rights of Nature law genuinely protect ecosystems and uphold human rights, Indigenous rights, and self-determination in the process.
Related from the WT Archives:
LAKE ERIE GRANTED LEGAL RIGHTS : A FIRST IN U.S. HISTORY
A DAVID AND GOLIATH BATTLE OVER LAKE ERIE BILL OF RIGHTS
Tish O’Dell Community Organizer - Portrait of a water guardian
Unmuting Rights of Nature
Ohio’s CELDF aims to restore Rights of Nature after lawmakers’ pushback
Rights of Nature -Raising Awareness Through Art
CHIEFS SEEK RIGHTS OF NATURE FOR LAKE WINNIPEG
