There is a movement growing across the country to establish the legal personhood of a river as a way to check the power of corporate personhood. If a river has legal standing to sue its polluters, a town or county could, for example, stop fracking in their community, or halt a pipeline the people living there didn’t want.
A few weeks ago, the country of Ecuador used their version of such a law to stop a mining project in the forest. And there are scores of towns and cities organizing to establish the legal rights of their own economic bioregion all across the country.
The movement is guided by the Community Legal Defense Fund and Ben Price. Price’s book details the history of how the law in America came to serve the wealthy and give more rights to corporations and capital than to communities.
The issue of putting a check on unbridled corporate power is one of things we explore at Neighborhood Economics.
One of the amazing facts I discovered in researching this issue is that a city cannot stop pollution within its boundaries if that pollution is approved by the state. The courts have said repeatedly that corporate rights trump the rights of a local community to stop the transport of toxic chemicals through town.
Giving a river legal rights would give a town the right to sue in order to create a healthy community, rolling back the unchecked power of corporate personhood in that municipality.
Like the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s legal battles for women’s rights, Thurgood Marshall’s fight for civil rights, and Roberta Kaplan’s on lgbtq rights, Price sees a series of small local wins in cities and towns across the country gradually shifting the landscape and building support.
The river personhood movement is led by environmentalists wanting to create a healthy local ecosystem; economic justice is not a motivating factor in the movement at this point.
For that focus, you need to look at a group like the River Network, where activists like Teresa Davis, of Houston, work on climate justice in their local communities. Their Flow Fund uses trust-based philanthropy (rather than intrusive and restrictive program grants) to let local communities fund local projects and decide funding priorities to create climate health.
The tools being created by environmentalists, in working steadily toward giving a local river, pond or ecosystem legal standing, just the same as corporations have, has potentially high applicability in climate justice. I’m talking to both groups, and I hope that our Neighborhood Economics conference can create a bridge to connect the legal tools with those working on climate justice. This is one of the ways our conferences help strangers discover each other’s value and learn to become unlikely allies.