The Outsider

Thomas Linzey is that outsider you may have been hearing about.

You know, some lawyer from back East who is using Spokane as a guinea pig about giving legal rights to Nature, which has people saying things like this to the City Council:

“From what I hear, trees have more rights than people now in Ecuador.”

Linzey is the (pick one: Marxist, socialist, communist) who helped Ecuador write a new, eco-friendly Constitution last year, prompting even cute Spokane 5-year-olds to hold up protest signs outside City Hall reading: “Don’t give your rights to the birds.”

Yes, Linzey is that outsider, the lawyer from a Pennsylvania environmental law firm who has been helping Envision Spokane craft the Community Bill of Rights, which offers more authority for neighborhoods in planning and development, offers labor and wage provisions and — yes — rights for ecosystems.

He is the 40-year-old son of two Virginia-based biologists/college professors, so his upbringing was full of environmental awareness, but Linzey didn’t bolt out of bed one morning answering the call of Dr. Seuss’s the Lorax. (“I speak for the trees!”)

There was nothing Seussian about his switch from aspiring to be a marine biologist, working with dolphins and whales, to championing environmental law — even though his law school dean took a dim view, Linzey says, of one of his students going forth to offer free advice to poor country folk.

Linzey says seeking ways to assign rights to the natural world is creating a social justice tool to fight exploitation of resources by corporations. It is an attempt to balance the constitutional rights granted to corporations — considered “persons” under the law — by the U.S. Supreme Court in the era of the Robber Barons of the late 1800s.

“One-hundred and eighty million acres was transferred by the federal government to railroads and timber companies,” Linzey says.

Big-City Sludge
Linzey and two others, in 1995, founded the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit, public interest law firm in Chambersville, Penn., “to do free legal work, because community groups rarely have lawyers.”

The firm started out along traditional lines, he says, fighting for better environmental regulation and appealing permits.
Then two boys, Tony Behun and Danny Pennock, died in 1995 after exposure to big-city sewage sludge spread on area farm fields as fertilizer said to be safe. Behun was riding an all-terrain vehicle. Pennock was hunting.

“I’ll tell you something right now: If anyone would have seen the way my son suffered and died, they would not even get near this stuff,” Danny’s father, Russell Pennock, said at the time.

The Environmental Protection Agency linked the deaths to a pathogen in the sludge, and the tragic episodes exposed two important lessons for Linzey.

First, duplicity: Even though regulatory agencies had labeled the sludge as “safe,” loads leaving the plant, it was later revealed, were only tested every three months. Further, they were only tested for e-coli and heavy metals.

Second, corporate power: Townships and boroughs attempted to write tougher ordinances for sewer sludge — and for the siting of 10,000-head industrial hog farms and liquid manure lagoons — only to have the state, with weaker regulations favorable to industry, write laws preempting local control.

“I was always taught since kindergarten that we live in a democracy and that a community majority should have the legally binding authority to decide what the community is going to look like in 20, 40, 60 years. Not four people from Texas or four people from Arkansas sitting on the board of a corporation telling us that,” Linzey says. “So it morphed into a democracy thing.

“People,” and Linzey stresses the word, “fought and bled and died to drive those rights into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and somehow corporations were given power that shields them from majority control at the local level. That situation has been the main genesis of a bunch of this work with communities.”

Regs Vs. Rights
And so the work shifted away from trying to write regulation-based ordinances.

“In a regulation-based system, all you can do is appeal the permit. For example, take the Nutrient Management Act in Pennsylvania, which deals with liquid manure. If you appeal that, all you can talk about is liquid manure. You can’t talk about suicide rates among farmers or all the other issues … and we lose most of the time,” Linzey says.

Instead, he and other CELDF attorneys worked with community groups to draft and pass rights-based ordinances that, in some cases, go as far as refusing to recognize corporate rights within municipal boundaries.

“Twelve municipalities have done that to date. It’s very revolutionary stuff,” he says.

A dozen local governments may seem to be no more than a small ripple of change. But these towns, and 40 to 50 others where citizens have pushed through Bill of Rights-style ordinances, do catch attention.

The law firm’s work is spreading from Pennsylvania to Virginia and north to Maine.

Ecuador noticed and asked if CELDF would help draft its new Constitution with provisions to protect natural resources from exploitation.

Oil is the big issue in Ecuador. The country proposes leaving 20 percent of its oil reserves untouched to protect the Yasuni National Park, and indigenous peoples who live in this remote Amazon region.

Water is the issue in Maine, where Nestlé Water North America was proposing to bottle and sell the municipal water supplies of Shapleigh and Newfield. With no announcement, the company in 2006 sank 23 test wells in a wildlife reserve adjacent to the towns and then sought approval for a pumping station.

Citizens found out almost by accident, says Shelly Gobielle, a business owner in Shapleigh who became one of the leaders of POWWR (Protect Our Water and Wildlife Resources). The grass-roots group fought tenaciously for a counter ordinance to ban Nestlé’s mining of the local water supply. They fought their own Board of Selectmen, which refused to place the ordinance on the ballot. POWWR found a rarely used provision in Maine law that allows citizens in some cases to bypass unwilling local government, called a special meeting on a Saturday and passed the ordinance 114-66. Then they took on rafts of Nestlé executives, attorneys and PR efforts.

Last Friday, “At 3:22 in the afternoon,” Gobielle says, Nestlé pulled its pipes out of the ground and went away.

“If we had a regulation-based ordinance instead of a rights-based ordinance, Nestlé would be pumping today. I’m sure of it,” she says.

Spokane: The Test Case
So, at last, what of Spokane?

There are no industrial hog farms or strip mines or oil reserves. “Which is why, when people from Spokane contacted us, I said I had no idea if we can help,” Linzey says.

The particular issue, he says, was the frustration faced by neighborhood groups losing fight after fight with developers seeking to change local planning and zoning guidelines.

It is more dispersed than dealing with an agribusiness giant, but “it is the same corporate constitutional rights issues. The law is on the development corporation’s side. Lift the rug and it’s everywhere,” Linzey says.

So for the last two years he has advised Envision Spokane members as they built their coalition of neighborhood activists, labor unions and conservationists to piece together the Community Bill of Rights, gathered nearly twice the signatures they needed, and had it placed on the fall ballot by a hostile City Council.

Spokane is a test case. “This has never been done in a city this size before,” Linzey says.

“We want to reprioritize what government is and what it does. Is government for a small number of people to use for what they want to get out of it? Or is it for the majority of the people to claim as their own?

“This is big stuff. The conversation over the next three months will flesh that out,” he says.

In the course of the last two years, Linzey has moved into a house in West Central. “I have Washington license plates. I am registered to vote here.”

He’s been called an outsider everywhere he goes, he says. Perhaps he’s intending to come in.