Attorney Thomas Linzey helps communities across the country successfully challenge corporate dominance in the public policy arena by asserting a basic democratic principle: the right to self-determination. “We’re reframing the issue away from the regulatory and land use and zoning controls that we’ve been taught as activists we have to use,” Linzey said recently by phone.

He said it all boils down to a simple question: “Does the community have the right to govern itself?”

Linzey is the executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, based in Chambersburg, Pa. He’ll be in Indianapolis Saturday, May 31 to network with Central Indiana activists and offer a public talk about CELDF’s work. Steve Bonney, a sustainable agriculture advocate and an independent candidate for Indiana governor, invited Linzey to visit the Hoosier state. “We haven’t had much success in stopping unwanted development like CAFOs, landfills and highways, so we need another approach that will be more successful,” Bonney said. “CELDF seems to have developed a strategy that works.”

Linzey describes the country’s current system of economic development and land use as a century-old structure of law and culture that has enshrined corporate “rights” in a way that effectively trumps the public interest. “Under our current system of law, economic development is considered mostly a private decision and most municipalities spend loads of dollars and other resources, including tax breaks, to bring in corporations to do job development,” he said. “People have been cut out of that decision-making process.”

Linzey asserted that majorities within communities don’t make economic development decisions. “Instead, there’s a definition of economic development that is thrust upon them by the very small number of people who make decisions on behalf of the larger corporations. For the community to govern itself, it has to reach into a lawmaking capacity for those aspects of the operation that have previously been put off-limits as private rather than public decision-making,” he said.

According to our existing system, Linzey said, corporations are treated as persons entitled to constitutional protections under the Bill of Rights. CELDF serves as legal counsel to 100 different municipalities — some of which have actually passed laws at the local level, refusing to recognize that corporations have constitutional rights.

“When we attempt to move outside of the box that has been defined for us to make decisions about, for example, what agriculture is going to look like in a community, we run up right against agribusiness’ constitutional rights, which are then used to swat down the vision that the community has codified into a local law,” he said.

Linzey expressed dismay that agribusinesses and other corporate entities can use the U.S. Constitution to contest laws that have been passed to promote sustainable agriculture or to protect small, locally-owned businesses from the depredations of big-box retailers. “We’ve given up using the law and the governmental structure to impose our values and interests on what sustainable agriculture should actually be in a particular area,” he said. “We can never build the types of economically or environmentally sustainable communities that we need to build as long as we acquiesce to working only in that regulatory system.”

Linzey said he’s had enough legal experience within the regulatory framework to see that it is not working. “We don’t pooh-pooh environmentalists — we’re environmentalists ourselves and we’ve been through this process. I can honestly say the only thing that environmental regulations regulate are environmentalists.

“Things would be a lot worse today than they are except for the courageous people who have stood on the front lines fighting regulatory battles for 10 to 15 years,” he said. “But things are getting worse, and any objective observer can look back at our history and say we’ve dumped millions of dollars into appealing millions of permits but we seem to be no closer to community self-determination than we were before, and we’re certainly no closer to environmental protection than we were before.

“The question is, when are we going to stop playing the regulatory game and stop operating under rules that we didn’t script, and actually begin to write a new script?” he asked. “We’ve been waiting long enough. We’ve not been able to bring the world that we want to see into being because we’ve agreed to play under these other rules.”

Linzey said CELDF staff has worked with New England communities to ban corporations from excessive water withdrawals and in rural Pennsylvania to help residents pass laws that ban corporations from farming and mining within their communities. “In essence, we’re helping them seize control from the board of directors of companies 2,000 miles away, and reinstating or claiming that control locally for the community, which has a much different vision from the one the corporation is attempting to inflict,” Linzey said.

This is not just the work of liberals. “A lot of people assume that the communities we work in are liberal, progressive communities, and they’re not,” Linzey notes. “In fact, most of the communities we started work in were in western Pennsylvania, which are 80 percent rural, Republican, conservative folks. So this work crosses political lines because it’s about local control.”

It’s not just rural work, either. Linzey spoke with NUVO from Spokane, Wash., where he is advising the Envision Spokane Project. “In Envision Spokane, we have 18 organizations, including labor unions, local community groups and neighborhood councils, that are joining together for the first time to actually drive a bill of rights into the charter for the City of Spokane. It would create enforceable legal rights for people here, such as the right to a healthy environment, the right to certain types of labor organizing and the rights of neighborhoods to control their destiny by making legally binding decisions of their own,” he said.

Linzey said the question is how to liberate this democratic energy and enable people to take back their decision-making power. “If we remain unable to make these decisions we will not be able to control what our communities will look like in 20, 40 or 60 years,” he said. “We’re not going to wait for somebody else to do it. We’re going to do it ourselves.”

What: Rebuilding Democracy With Thomas Linzey
When: Saturday, May 31, 7:30 p.m.
Where: St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, 3535 Kessler Blvd., North Drive
(three blocks south of West 38th Street on Kessler Boulevard, North Drive)

* Event is FREE!

For more info, call 765-463-9366 or 317-525-1856.
For more info about CELDF: www.celdf.org.