Democratic Rights

CDER works to expand and strengthen democratic rights.

This includes partnering with people and communities to exercise their right to direct democracy – by which people are able to propose and vote on an issue (often called a ballot measure or “citizens” initiative), particularly when their elected representatives refuse to take action.

Further, CDER partners with communities, grassroots groups, state networks, and coalitions to build campaigns to protect and assert democratic rights. Those rights include the legal authority of the community to determine what the community will look like in the future.

Our work also includes providing training and other resources on democracy and democratic rights – including our workshop Community Rights 101 – to examine what rights we have, and what rights we don’t currently have, to exercise decision-making in our own community or state, and how we can advance change by exercising those rights.

We’ve also created, with Tree Media, a series of short videos on the key barriers to democratic rights, including how state governments, and the federal government, routinely override community rights, and how corporations have more rights than the communities in which they operate.

What are Democratic Rights?

Democratic rights include, of course, the right to vote. People throughout history have struggled to not only have their voices heard through voting but to be able to take part in critical decision-making.

Democratic rights, however, mean more than having the right to cast a ballot. It means having unfettered access to voting as well. That is, having free and full access to voting. In the United States, there are constant efforts to limit how, when, and where people vote – including limiting ballot drop off sites, limiting the number and hours of voting sites, disenfranchising voters who may have moved or not voted in recent elections through the purging of voter rolls, and on and on. These constitute direct efforts to restrict the right to vote.

Further, possessing democratic rights means having the right to be able to vote on what and who your community needs and wants. Campaign finance laws and court rulings make corporate and big money interests able to influence and control what and who we vote for, and whether we can vote at all.

This often occurs when powerful interests seek to prevent “we the people” from making decisions to, for example, protect a river or our drinking water. Having democratic rights includes having the freedom to vote on these and other issues important to our communities even when a city council, state legislature, or other government and elected officials (and their corporate friends) don’t want us to.

In parts of the U.S. and many other countries, communities currently have the authority to vote on certain issues, including the minimum wage, campaign finance, and other issues involving social, economic, and environmental justice. However, this right is increasingly being narrowed. CDER works not only to guarantee that issues can make it to the ballot, but that the community’s vote actually counts and can be enforced.

Democratic Rights: Building a Movement for Community Rights

On September 13, 1999, CDER’s co-founder, Thomas Linzey, assisted the Wells Township, Pennsylvania, Board of Supervisors to adopt the first “community rights” law in the U.S. That local law recognized that the community had the right to ban corporate factory farms within the Township, even if the corporations proposing those factory farms held permits from the state or federal government to site them.

Since then, the co-founders of CDER have worked with hundreds of municipal governments and community organizations to advance laws within cities, villages, towns, and counties across the U.S. which recognize the power of communities to expand civil and political rights for the residents of those communities. Those new and expanded civil rights include:

The right to clean water;
The right to sustainable agriculture;
The right to be free from chemical trespass;
The right to a livable climate;
The right to sustainable waste management;
The right to a sustainable energy future;
The right to neighborhood control over large-scale development;
The right to constitutional protections in the workplace; and
The right to be free from pollution.

These new and expanded civil rights, once adopted into law, can then be leveraged to prohibit activities or projects which violate those rights. For example, a community recognizing a right to sustainable agriculture can then use the recognition of that right to ban the application of synthetic pesticides or the use of genetically modified seeds.

These community rights laws, of course, inherently interfere with the prerogatives of some of the largest agribusiness, waste, and energy corporations. Those corporations, by wielding their influence over state legislatures, have attempted – over the past 200 years – to keep our communities from having the power to pass these kinds of laws. They have mostly succeeded, by using legislatures and the courts to maintain tight controls over what laws our municipal governments can and cannot pass.

Community rights laws, however, are not linked to the lawmaking power of municipalities but are anchored instead on the individual civil rights of residents to govern their own communities. When exercised collectively, that individual right of local self-governance is a power exercised separate and apart from the powers given to municipalities by state governments. It is a power that we are born with, and that we exercise as “we the people” joining together to adopt laws, either through our elected municipal officials or through direct lawmaking via ballot initiatives.

Democratic Rights: The Right to Local Self-Governance in the U.S.

This right of local, community self-government is embedded in the American system of governance, from the Declaration of Independence to our state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution.

A 2017 published law review article authored by CDER co-founder Thomas Linzey and attorney Dan Brannen continues to serve as the seminal piece on the constitutional basis of community rights and local self-governance. Linzey and Brannen, A Phoenix from the Ashes: Resurrecting a Constitutional Right of Local, Community Self-Government in the Name of Environmental Sustainability, Ariz. J.Envt’l L & Policy (2017).

Given that courts have generally been hostile to community rights laws, there has been an effort across the U.S. to advance amendments to state constitutions that would recognize these rights. Originally drafted by Linzey, these amendments would recognize the authority of people, acting through their local governments, to adopt laws at the local level which expand civil rights for people, as well as the rights of nature and ecosystems within them. Those constitutional amendments have been introduced in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, and Colorado. Work is currently underway by CDER to advance amendments through ballot initiatives in other states.

Examining Barriers to Democratic Rights

CDER assists people and individuals to understand our structure of law and how it currently operates to stop community rights laws from being adopted and enforced. Partnering with CDER, Tree Media (filmmaker of “The 11th Hour” and “Ice on Fire” with Leonardo DiCaprio, “We the People 2.0” and Urban Roots, among others) has produced a series of short “Democracy in the United States” films for their N2K channel, which explain different corporate legal doctrines which override democratic control.

New Constitution Project

In addition, CDER has also partnered with Tree Media to create the New Constitution Project – the first attempt to crowdsource a new, national constitution that would include local self-governance rights in the name of sustainability, as well as embedding the rights of nature and ecosystems into that new constitution.

You can participate in the New Constitution Project, by clicking here.

As part of its 2021-2025 Strategic Plan, CDER will continue to:

expand community organizing across the U.S. to draft and advance community rights laws;
provide legal support to enforce and defend those laws in court;
educate the public about the structural hurdles to democratic decision-making at the local level; and
envision, draft, and advance state and federal constitutional changes that liberate local democratic decision-making toward the goal of environmental sustainability.

To learn more, we invite you to explore the resources on our website, participate in a training, and watch our videos. If you want to explore what a community rights campaign may look like in your community, contact us at info@centerforenvironmentalrights.org.