CLASS 8: CLIMATE CHANGE, RESOURCE DEPLETION & GLOBAL POLLUTION 
Regulatory Capture, Energy Ownership, Overconsumption
Solutions: Rights of Nature,  Promote Ecological responsibility

Purpose: To show the systemic dysfunction of the corporate-run political and economic systems that degrade the environment and present solutions so communities can protect themselves from corporate environmental devastation.

Material

Readings: Justice Rising, Summer, 2007, Corporate Destruction of Nature & Grassroots Solutions to Save the Planet; Summer 2008, Corporate Energy or Grassroots Power

Handouts: Questions, Article Rankings, and Talking Points

Paradigm: The free market narrative is that (1) The environment will take care of itself, (2) The health of natural systems is not important and (3) The resources of the planet will go on forever. The reality is that these fallacious assumptions of classical economic theory are depleting the vital resources of the planet and destroying the environment as well as the natural systems pivotal to our survival.

Context: Visions of Earth from space began a great alteration of human consciousness. Every astronaut came back a changed person. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences that melds scientific understanding with our awareness that we are all part of nature, living on a small planet in the vastness of the universe.

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The major point of this class is that the challenges we experience because of climate change, resource depletion, and global pollution are not due to a few rogue actors who clear cut the trees or pollute the rivers or dump carbon into the atmosphere, but to the inherent incentives and operational principles of our economic and political systems that grant rights to corporations that supersede our rights as citizens to protect our environment.

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Most people take this course because they are concerned about the future of our planetary environment. The primary strategies for creating a vibrant environmental future are to assert community rights to protect the air, water, and soil, and give rights to nature. This, coupled with correcting the systemic dysfunctions of our economic and political systems, will build a long-term, sustainable future for all life on earth.  

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There are many incidents of horrific corporate activity that damage our air, water, or soil, or deplete resources. Your area probably has closed industrial sites harboring toxic wastes that cause cancer or other serious health damage.

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Natural resource extraction operations or other corporate projects regularly destroy the land and create horrific environmental devastation. They are driven by systemic factors like maximizing production and minimizing costs. It is the system that makes corporate managers implement destructive policies. The best solutions, therefore, also have to be systemic, like mandating social and environmental responsibility, which are now often absent from corporate thinking.

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I worked for years on a mill-site clean-up project in Fort Bragg, California. We dealt with the corporation, the regulators, and the community. Our experience was that the corporation glossed over the problem. We had to solicit information from former employees to present the regulators with the true story. Regulators, however, are often subject to extreme political pressure from their superiors to back off of making corporations clean up the environmental messes they make, or desist from devastating the existing environment.

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Local elected officials, in turn, have to hold regulators accountable for making sure that toxics are cleaned up and that the environment is as strong and healthy as possible. To make sure this happens  Citizens have to hold their public officials accountable for building a vibrant environmental future with plentiful renewable resources.

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I have also been involved with the people of Junin, Ecuador who have fought the construction of a copper mine for 20 years. In addition to burning down the mining camp twice and facing down armed corporate thugs, they have been tracking the pollution created by mining activities and are actively building sustainable enterprises to give the local people an economic alternative to working for the mine. They are a great example of strong community action.

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There are also positive public policies communities can utilize to protect their environment. One of the best strategies for protecting the local environment from corporate destruction is community rights organizing. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) pioneered community rights public policies when they helped small towns in central Pennsylvania stop corporate hog farms from poisoning their communities. Since then, they have spread their approach around the world, helping towns establish community bills of rights that protect people from corporations poisoning their air, water, and soil. They have developed a particular legal wording that institutes a community bill of rights and denies corporations constitutional rights. In order to challenge these ordinances in courts, corporations have to argue that they have superior rights to pollute a community’s air water and soil, which they no doubt do not want to do. This has proved to be an effective deterrent from legal challenges and always creates what CELDF’s founder, Tom Linzey, calls a teachable moment.

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CELDF will also come to your community and hold a Democracy School.  “Democracy School explores the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and offers a model that helps citizens confront the usurpation of the rights of communities, people, and earth by corporations. Lectures cover the history of people’s movements and corporate power, and the dramatic organizing over the last decade in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon by communities confronting agribusiness, the oil and gas industry, corporate hegemony over worker rights, etc.”

Activities: Concentrate on local examples of corporate environmental destruction that people can relate to personally. Invite people who are working on these local environmental problems to talk to the class. People in the class could also take on a local environmental problem and address it as a class project.

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Here  is a list of videos that cover these topics. One of them is a documentary on Javier Ramirez, the leader of the community effort in Junin, Ecuador to stop the construction of a copper mine that would decimate their community.

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Explore initiating a community rights ordinance in your town. Check out the website of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, celdf.org Talk about their chemical trespass ordinance with information at https://celdf.org/rights/issues/chemical-trespass/ and their push to create rights for nature. Here are some CELDF videos that you can show to familiarize people with CELDF’s work.

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Show Naomi Klein’s movie This Changes Everything about capitalism, our climate, and the global movement that is rising to save the Earth, as we know it. We have a copy you could borrow.

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Take a break at a mid-class point and move on to the questions and responses to those questions for the last part of the class. Also hand out this list of books on Climate Change, Resource Depletion and Global Pollution. Do not forget to pass out the questions, article rankings and talking points for the next class on The Commons.

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The day after the class, email the questions and rankings for the next class to everyone and include a current article on corporate environmental destruction.

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The day before the next class, send a reminder email that the class is coming up and again attach the questions and ranking and maybe another piece on The Commons.