Community-&Amp;-Nature-Rights

An interview with Kai Huschke, CELDF / Read the Dirt Editor’s Note: We speak with Kai Huschke, the NW and Hawai’i Organizer for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund—working to pass Community Bills of Rights that elevate local law and rights above corporate rights. Local initiatives he advised have recently received state-level push-backs. The backlash in Washington State, for example, overturned over 100 years of Washington State legal precedent. Simon Davis-Cohen: Over a hundred years of Washington State legal precedent has recently been overturned in response to local citizen initiatives you have played an advising role on. Never before had laws in Washington been subject to judicial review before they became law. Using this new tactic, opponents of Bellingham’s, and more recently Spokane’s, Community Bill of Rights have successfully blocked initiatives from appearing on local ballots. Why aren’t you surprised? Kai Huschke: It is in these kinds of moments you see the system for what it is in full force, that it has been designed to protect commerce and property interests over rights. In the Bellingham and Spokane cases, the courts said that it is more important to defend corporate interests’ speculative claims of damages rather than uphold the right of the people to vote. ...

Our planet is under serious threat from industrial civilization. Yet environmentalists have not considered strategies that might actually prevent the looming biotic collapse the Earth is facing. Until, Earth at Risk. EARTH AT RISK was a conference convened by acclaimed author Derrick Jensen, featuring seven thinkers and activists who are willing to ask the hardest questions about the seriousness of our situation. Each of the speakers presents an impassioned critique of the dominant culture. Together they build an unassailable case that we need to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor, and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. They offer their ideas on what can be done to build a real resistance movement - one that can actually match the scale of the problem. ...

By Kristin Bricker / CIP Americas Program The first night of my homestay during the Zapatista Little School, my guardian and her husband asked if their students had any questions. My classmate and I both had experience working with the Zapatistas, so we politely limited ourselves to the safe questions that are generally acceptable when visiting rebel territory: questions about livestock, crops, local swimming holes, and anything else that doesn’t touch on sensitive information about the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). ...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyKeOFE6NqE&w=640&h=360] A new short film showing the richness of tribal peoples’ lives has been released as part of the Proud Not Primitive campaign in India. The 30-second short aims to challenge prevailing preconceptions that tribal peoples are poor, ‘backwards’ or ‘primitive’, which are deeply engrained amongst representatives of the government, industry and the media. The film’s provocative message ‘No poverty, no bombs, no pollution, no corruption, no prisons, no caste system – and people call them primitive?’ shows tribal peoples who have every reason to be proud of their ways of life. ...