![]() “This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’ – those who are holding rights at the time.” As Jon Greendeer, the executive director of Heritage Preservation with the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin pointed out to Rolling Stone in 2017: “What the rights of nature does is translate our beliefs from an indigenous perspective into modern legislation.” Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” “The fact is, that each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new ‘entity,’ the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable,” wrote Stone. The rights-of-nature idea comes from a paper by law professor Christopher D. According to their charter, injection wells are illegal - and nature has rights. In the course of the fight, Grant adopted an ordinance that established its right to local self-government, and later a home-rule charter, made possible by a 1972 state act that sought to give more power to municipal governments. “By taking a stand and winning, they’ve set a new precedent worldwide on what the rights of nature can accomplish.”Īt play in Grant Township was whether a corporation had the right to inject fracking waste in a resistant community, or whether the community - and its streams, soils, and species - had the right to block the corporation from depositing its waste. “Grant Township has proven against all odds that a community is capable of stronger protections for the environment than state or federal governments,” says the film’s co-director Joshua Pribanic. Grant Township’s story, first covered by Rolling Stone in 2017, will also be featured in Invisible Hand, a documentary on “rights of nature” produced by Oscar-nominated actor Mark Ruffalo, slated to premiere at the 2020 Columbus International Film Festival in Ohio. Fights like ours should mushroom all around Pennsylvania.” “I am hopeful that the haters and naysayers will take note, and that communities will be inspired with what’s just happened and run with it. “This decision is soooooo delicious,” says Stacy Long, a graphic designer and township supervisor who together with her mother, Judy Wanchisn, a retired elementary-school teacher, helped lead the charge to stop the well. ![]() Using a novel strategy - seeking legal rights for nature itself - the rural western Pennsylvania community of Grant Township has been battling for seven years to stop the permit for the injection well, which would have brought a 24/7 parade of trucks carrying brine, a toxic byproduct of oil-and-gas drilling that would be shot down the well and into a rock layer deep beneath the farms and woods in the area.Įarlier this month, in a stunning reversal, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which in 2017 sued Grant Township for interfering with the agency’s authority to administer state oil-and-gas policy, revoked the permit for the injection well. Goliath battle to keep an injection well out of their community have notched an important victory in their fight. An unlikely crew of environmentalists who took on the powerful Pennsylvania fracking industry in a David vs. ![]()
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