Presentation
Santa Fe, Taos and Las Vegas, New Mexico
Saturday, Monday, Tued
“In the Name of Sustainability: A New Community
Rights Movement”
Speaker:
Thomas Alan Linzey, Esq.
Thomas Linzey, an attorney and the
Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund – a
nonprofit law firm which has assisted over three hundred community groups and
municipal governments across the country – will speak about a new community
rights movement which is emerging across the United States.
That movement
consists of local communities which are beginning to use municipal lawmaking
power to transition towards economic and environmental sustainability. Linzey
will talk about how those communities – in eight states across the country –
are beginning to not only use the law to move towards sustainability, but are
also working to elevate the rights of people, communities, and nature above
powers claimed by corporations and other governments.
To illustrate, Linzey
will tell the stories of Mora County, New Mexico (the first county in the
country to protect their land from oil and gas drilling); Barnstead, New
Hampshire (the first municipality to protect their water supplies from corporate
water bottling operations); and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (the first major
municipality to adopt a local bill of rights protecting residents from fracking
for natural gas).
Linzey will also talk about the international work of the
Legal Defense Fund – now occurring in Nepal, Australia, Italy, and India – to
create legal structures which recognize the rights of ecosystems and nature;
and his work to assist in the drafting and ratification of the Ecuadorian
constitution, the first in the world to incorporate rights-based protections
for nature. Linzey will finish his presentation with a summary of how people in
New Mexico can begin this work by using local lawmaking and home rule charters
to expand the authority of residents within communities to use their self-governing
authority to determine the future of their own communities.
