Water - Global Exchange

Mendocino County Becomes First in California to pass a Community Bill of Rights

At 8:00 pm on Election Night 2014, residents of picturesque Mendocino County concerned about the availability and quality of local water waited anxiously for the first results on Measure “S”, the Community Bill of Rights Ordinance that bans fracking, dumping of frack waste and protects their water from being used for fracking anywhere in the state. Global Exchange and our partners and allies were proud to support the Community Rights Network of Mendocino County (CRNMC), the group behind this initiative.

Just after midnight it was clear they had made California history, passing Measure S by a whopping 67% of the county vote. It was not the only measure in the state to ban fracking—San Benito, CA voters passed Measure J despite the heavy influx of Big Oil funding to defeat it, while Santa Barbara’s anti-fracking measure succumbed to corporate money influence.

But residents of Mendocino county did far more than ban fracking this election.

With the passage of Measure S, residents in Mendocino County made history as the first California community to adopt a Community Bill of Rights, placing their rights above corporate interests. Residents see enactment of this ordinance as the first step in asserting their right to local self-government, and a rejection of the idea that their community will be a sacrifice zone for corporate profits. This is a huge milestone for the community rights movement in California—joining with over 180 communities across the country who have also changed the structure of law by passing rights-based legislation.

The Mendocino County Community Bill of Rights Fracking and Water Use Initiative, (Measure S) establishes the rights of the people of Mendocino County to a healthy environment, including clean air and water, and the rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish. The measure also secures the rights of residents to local self-governance. Fracking is banned as a violation of those rights, and directly challenges constitutional so-called “rights” of corporations to frack in their County. The extraction or sale of local water for use in fracking anywhere in the state is also banned, along with the dumping of toxic frack waste. Further, the measure bans the transfer of offshore fracking oil or waste through the County.

Jamie Lee, a community-based farmer in the Anderson Valley of Mendocino attended the very first Democracy School, a weekend rights-based training, in California in 2006, hosted by Global Exchange and CELDF. “Who knew back then that we would be celebrating this victory today.” Over the years Jamie Lee brought Global Exchange’s Shannon Biggs to Mendocino many times to meet with groups and residents, hold public lectures, along with other practicioners and educators of the Community Rights framework, including long time advocate Paul Cienfuegos.

So by the time Peter Norris of Willits reached out to Global Exchange in 2013, there was already a strong sense of community self-governance throughout the far-flung county. A county wide Democracy School was held with 50 people, followed by steady flow of rights-based organizing support from Global Exchange, and the encouragement of the anti-fracking movement of California. David Braun, part of the coalition Californians Against Fracking was a regular visitor to Mendocino throughout the election cycle, “Starting today, in Mendocino, community rights trump those of big money and corporations, but they also ensure that fracking doesn’t destroy precious and irreplaceable water air soil and biodiversity. Big congratulations are in order to the people of Mendocino for their hard won battle against big oil. Now we need to double down and make sure all the people of California and around the country are protected from fracking. There is a lot to build on for all of us – and we will.”

Resident members of CRNMC turning in signatures for the ballot in June, 2014

But it was the community that came together to put this into law. A core group of 30 and countless volunteers worked tirelessly throughout 2014 to collect the signatures for the ballot, host public events, write letters to the editor, paint lawn signs and go door-to-door with the message that decisions about water protection in Mendocino belong to residents and residents alone. As key CRNMC member Kelly Larson said, “Measure S was organized around a network model, rather than the old hierarchical top-down leadership, thereby modeling the ‘community’ in community rights.”

CELDF’s Ben Price offered congratulations to the people of Mendocino County, and to the organizers of the effort, stating, “With this vote, the people of Mendocino are challenging a legal structure that protects a corporate “right” to frack above the rights of communities to not be fracked.”

As resident Carrie Durkee proclaimed, “The passage of Measure S looks like a milestone to me. I’m filled with appreciation, admiration, and gratitude to all for the creation of the Community Bill of Rights.”

Kelly Larson added, “Measure S is an important challenge to corporate constitutional rights, and the oil and gas industry. We’re grateful that the voters of Mendocino County so strongly support community rights…Local people deciding for local control and decision making. Democracy won here today!” Jamie Lee echoed this, saying, “this is only the beginning of local self-governance for us up here in Mendocino, the first step of many toward changing the rules about ‘who decides’ what happens here. WE do.”

Increasingly, communities throughout California are facing the dangers of hydro-fracturing (fracking). Despite the severe drought plaguing farmers, farming communities in the Central Valley and throughout the state are being siphoned for water for fracking operations, or being used as a dumping ground for the toxic waste fracking generates. But residents in Mendocino County have another idea for water protection—local control. A growing movement in this northern county—home to wineries, farms and redwood forests—is concerned about their already short supply of water, and are not willing to allow the toxic infrastructure and heavy water use that fracking brings. As Peter Norris, a Willits spokesperson for the newly formed Community Rights Network of Mendocino County (CRNMC) says, “Residents feel strongly that decisions about water here should be made locally and should be focused on the rights of community and our ecosystems, and enforced by laws.”

Fracking is slated to come to Mendocino in 18 months, though residents seek to stop it before it begins by putting a ban on the ballot this November—but the ordinance they seek to pass is more than just a fracking ban. Partnering with Global Exchange’s Community Rights program, residents there have recently formed the CRNMC specifically to assert their right to protect the community and local water by banning fracking for the extraction of hydrocarbons, banning the use of local water for fracking outside the county, as well as banning the dumping or transport of toxic fracking waste through the county. To do this, their ordinance will recognize their local authority to make decisions that directly affect them and their ecosystems in order to ban all practices related to fracking, and strip fracking corporations of the legal tools corporate executives use to turn communities into sacrifice zones for profit.

CRNMC’s Jane McCabe and Kimbal Dodge, with event posters.

The CRNMC is gathering some 6,000 signatures throughout the county in order to put the idea of community rights on the ballot this November. If passed, Mendocino County will join the ranks of over 160 communiti es—from big cities to conservative rural townships across the US that have protected the health safety and welfare of residents and local ecosystems by asserting their right to decide what happens where they live.

The CRNMC will be enlisting volunteers and signature gathering at a series of four public events sprinkled throughout the county:

Friday June 6, 2014, 7PM in Willits: LL Grange, 291 School Street
Saturday June 7, 7 pm in Ft. Bragg: Town Hall, 363 N Main Street
Sunday June 8 at 1 PM in Boonville: Anderson Valley Grange, Hwy 128
Sunday June 8, 4 PM in Ukiah: Methodist Church, 270 N Pine Street

The events will feature local speakers from the CRNMC, Global Exchange’s Community Rights program director, Shannon Biggs, and Americans Against Fracking’s founder, David Braun. Come join a lively discussion, sign the petition, or volunteer with the campaign!

For more information on the events, contact Peter Norris 707.456.9968, or visit the CRNMC’s website or facebook page.

Because a picture says 1,000 words, check out this short video on fracking, and get informed about Community Rights by downloading Global Exchange’s new toolkit!

The following post was written by Alina Evans and Anna Campanelli, interns with the Global Exchange Community Rights Program.

Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking) is one of the most destructive energy processes on planet Earth – even the EPA reports show that fracking is the second-biggest contributor of U.S. Greenhouse gases. But as California activist RL Miller reports in the Daily Kos, “California’s oil is as dirty as the Canadian tar sands. State data shows that several California oil fields produce just as much carbon dioxide per barrel of oil as the tar sands do. A handful of fields yield even more.”

Contrary to gas and oil company propaganda, this drilling process is unsafe, unclean, and absolutely not renewable. The truth is fracking is yet another dirty energy scheme poisoning our air, soil and groundwater, and now it’s poisoning us. Gas and oil companies are quietly bringing fracking to the Golden State, placing not just Californians, but the planet at risk. In fact the process has already begun, promising to make California the #1 oil producing state, or as some call it—the Saudi Arabia of the USA—but at what cost? Global Exchange is working with communities to say “no” and along with our partners we’re leading a speaking tour April 15-22 through California’s fracklands to educate and mobilize for action.

Photo: thinkprogress.org

How Fracking works:
Fracking is an enhanced drilling technique that through a process of vertical and horizontal drilling enables fracking rigs to extract natural gas and/or oil from shale formations. Millions of gallons of water, sand, and “proprietary” carcinogenic chemicals are injected at high pressures, fracturing the underground shale and releasing “trapped” natural gas and oil. Vertical fracking is employed to increase the lifespan of a pre-existing well, while horizontal fracking is used to tap previously inaccessible shale deposits through an injection process. For a good fracking primer, check out EARTHWORK’s Hydraulic Fracturing 101.

Doing the numbers:

Between 3-5 million gallons of water are used to frack a single well one time; one well can be fracked 18 times; this means that one fracked well requires between 54-90 million gallons of water in its lifetime-that’s enough to fill up to 9 Yankee Stadiums!
Water used for fracking just one well fills up to 9 Yankee Stadiums (Photo: Populus.com)
90% of wells in the United States are currently being fracked, that’s over 800,000 wells and counting.
596 chemicals (known carcinogens) are used in fracking. These chemicals are undisclosed under the trade secret provision protecting energy companies’ proprietary “recipes”
Each time a well is fracked, millions of gallons of these toxic chemicals are pumped into our earth along with our water.
On average, 330 tons of chemicals are used per fracking operation—2/3 of the toxic chemicals remain underground.
Earthquakes in frack zones have skyrocketed in places like Ohio, (not a state previously known for seismic activity) placing geologically sensitive California at extreme risk.
Extreme energy methods = climate chaos. California’s 15 billion barrels of fracked oil will release 6.45 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, on par with the Keystone XL pipeline’s carrying capacity in its lifetime (7 million metric tons).

The millions of gallons of toxic waste water produced cannot be processed by wastewater treatment. If the steel/cement casing of a well cracks from the pressure the toxins seep into the water aquifers that we drink from. Exploding wells, dwindling ecosystems, toxic sink water, sickness and deaths of animals and even humans are not uncommon reports coming from US communities who have been subjected to fracking, depending on whether it is natural gas or oil being fracked. The latest report come from Columbus, Ohio where, since March of this year, 11 earthquakes have resulted from fracking operations in the area.

Baldwin Hills (Los Angeles County) California’s largest frack field (photo Transition Culver City)

California’s Dirty Secret is about to blow
In the Golden state, fracking is unregulated and unmonitored. Corporations do not need to disclose the toxic chemicals they are using or inform communities that fracking is happening. As a water-poor state, fracking and its toxic wastewater presents a serious danger to our communities and ecosystems. And in a state prone to earthquakes, human induced fault pressures present an alarming geological risk. Fracking proponents claim fracking has been going on for 70 years in California with no harmful effects—a misleading apples and oranges statement at best. Old-school fracking did not use the same chemicals or drill as deeply or horizontally, nor inject the kinds of chemicals that modern fracking uses. As a result of all of this, fracking in California is a well-kept secret: only 50% of residents know what fracking is.But that is about to change. Here in California, as communities are learning about fracking’s dangers, they want to stop it.

Along with our partners, Global Exchange’s Community Rights Program is embarking on a 7-day speaking tour from April 15-22. The tour will visit impacted California communities from San Francisco to San Diego and expose the reality of fracking in the state and engage community members in the movement to oppose and stop this harmful and dangerous practice, exploring with our partners all of the efforts underway statewide to stop fracking from transforming the state and the climate.

Tour stops include: San Francisco, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Culver City, and San Diego, **with others still to be added.**

Each stop on the tour will include a day of action: along with our allies, we are working with host communities to strategize and develop unique actions that meet each community’s needs. Each day’s activity will be preceded by a local media plan, social media outreach, collaborative efforts, and planned meetings with various community groups. We expect much of the energy we generate on this tour will build toward larger statewide action.

$don't frack shannon$

Community Rights Director Shannon Biggs

Confirmed Speakers and partners on the road: We’ll bring Doug Shields, former Pittsburgh PA councilman enacting the first “rights-based” ban on fracking in the nation,

scientists, fractivists, and fracking experts from our partner organizations, many of whom take different approaches to regulate or ban or place a moratorium on the process. Our allies on the road include the Center for Biological Diversity, Food and Water Watch, 350.org, Clean Water Action, Transitions Towns, community-based groups, host community partners, and you! If you are concerned about fracking in your community or in general we are here to help you too! If you would like to join the tour, if you are interested in having us visit your community or if you would like to attend one of the events set up for the tour we’d love to hear from you.

Jessica Nuti and Executive Director Carleen Pickard at the Global Frackdown Bay Area

Global Exchange is helping Communities assert their right to say “NO fracking”

Five years ago, Global Exchange launched the Community Rights Program confronting corporate power at its core: by challenging unjust law and shifting the balance of power from one that protects the rights of corporations, to one that protects the rights of our communities and the environment. The Community Rights Program enters the California and national fracking debate via our expertise in grassroots, “rights-based” organizing, where we work with communities confronted by various corporate harms to enact local laws that place the rights of residents and nature above corporate interests. A right-based approach not only offers communities a way to stop the harmful practices of fracking in their midst, but addresses the core issue of a system of law that legalizes harmful corporate practices like fracking.

We’ve already been working with a handful of communities to pass rights-based fracking bans, including San Luis Obispo, and Culver City, and we hope to be working with many more. This efforts builds on the success of more than nine communities who have stopped fracking through passing rights-based fracking bans – the most notable in Pittsburgh, PA, led by featured tour speaker, Doug Shields. Across Pennsylvania, New Mexico and New York, nine other communities have followed suit (with many more underway), declaring their right as communities to protect the health safety and welfare of residents and the groundwater they depend on.

LEARN MORE: Want to be a part of the tour? Want the tour to come to YOU?

Contact Community Rights Program Director Shannon Biggs at: Shannon@globalexchange.org or 415.575.5540.
Stay updated on the specifics for the tour at our webpage: or join our list serve (emails twice monthly)

For another take on fracking in California from our Global Exchange colleague Corey Hill, check out this article at the East Bay Express.

Alina Evans and Anna Campanelli, authors of this blog post are interns with the Global Exchange Community Rights Program.

Activists convening at Rights of Nature Summit

21 climate justice activists convened in San Francisco on July 29-July 30, 2011 for the Rights of Nature Activist Strategy Summit. Attendees represented a wide range of organizations and fields; climate justice, environmental policy, and social justice organizations, think tanks, and experts in law.

Global Exchange convened this strategy summit to bring together environmental and climate justice leaders in order to deepen our mutual understanding of this emerging framework and explore how it might be applied to transform and enhance our current work.

The topics covered during this summit included:

Landscape of current work: Rights of Nature on the ground in the US and other countries at the local, national level, and internationally.
A special presentation by Ben Price, CELDF projects director presented his work with Pittsburgh, PA to ban gas fracking and elevate community and nature’s rights above corporate interests.

The issues addressed during this summit included:

The Road to Durban: rights of nature in the climate change context;
Beyond the current work: envisioning new strategies for action;
Exploring collaboration: opportunities for working together at the local, national and international levels.The budding movement supporting the Rights of Nature is at a critical point: at the UN General Assembly, on the road to the COP 17, and the rise of new laws at the national and local levels.

Meera Karunananthan, the national water campaigner for the Council of Canadians

Summit attendee Meera Karunananthan described the event in the following post, which originally appeared on The Council of Canadians blog.

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“Bubble-wrapping Nature Against Corporate Greed”

Rights of Nature Summit: Discussion of next steps following the launch of the book The Rights of Nature

As an environmental justice campaigner in North America, sometimes I feels like I am operating in a bubble.

I am in San Francisco in the midst of a national “debate” on the U.S. debt, in a bubble at the Global Exchange headquarters where environmental activists have gathered from across the country to discuss the need for a paradigm shift with regards to our relationship with the environment.

Three months after the launch of the book The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, by the Council of Canadians, Global Exchange and Fundacion Pachamama, a meeting took place in San Francisco this weekend to discuss next steps including joint strategies for the climate talks in Durban and the Rio + 20 Earth Summit in 2012.

Convened by Global Exchange, the meeting brought together representatives from organizations working to advance the rights of nature in communities around the world. Among them, la Fundacion Pachamama, an organization that played a central role in making Ecuador the first country to officially recognize the rights of nature within its constitution.

While Natalia Greene of Pachamama talked about the challenges of implementing this ground-breaking legislation, the rights of nature has created the space for communities to demand greater protection for the environment in a country with powerful foreign oil and mining interests. Although the Ecuadorean government has been inconsistent in its recognition of environmental rights, communities like the Waorani have been successful in keeping Brazilian oil giant Petrobras out of the Yasuni rainforest, one of the most biodiverse forests on earth by getting the government to establish a “no extraction zone” within an area containing rich oil deposits.

Constitutional change seems light years away in countries like Canada and the United States.
As the U.S. corporate media scrambles to determine who won the national debt debate in Washington, there is little doubt about who is losing. The wealthiest Americans will see little change, while the rest of the country deals with trillions of dollars in cuts to social programs or “entitlements” as the Republicans refer to them.

In the midst of these discussions on how to protect corporate profits while slashing programs to protect vulnerable segments of society, the case for communities to develop strategies against corporate destruction of the environment is even more poignant.

There have been 125 municipal ordinances recognizing the rights of nature that have enabled communities to stand up to corporate destruction of their land, air and water. Most recently, Pittsburgh stopped hydraulic fracturing by passing a community bill of rights. It is what, Ben Price of the Community Environmental Legal Defence Fund refers to as stripping corporations of their privileges. CELDF and Global Exchange have worked with communities across the United States to challenge corporate-friendly policies at the state and federal levels.

Rights of nature and water
Applied to water, the rights of nature approach calls for the protection of natural cycles of lakes, rivers, aquifers against harmful human activity. Many of the municipal ordinances have been used to protect surface and ground water from irreversible damage through hydraulic fracturing, groundwater extraction, toxic sludge spreading and other large scale industrial projects. In addition to ordinances banning harmful activities, there have been bills promoting sustainability enabling community to set forth policies promoting food sovereignty and self sufficiency. Santa Monica’s bill of rights has enabled water recycling and grey water use, which would otherwise be illegal according to state law, says Shannon Biggs of Global Exchange.

Last week, the Council of Canadians and its allies celebrated the one-year anniversary of the official recognition of water as a human right at the United Nations General Assembly. In our work to see this right implemented in national legislation, we will stress the need to recognize the human as a component of the natural world. Water is fundamental to all life and beyond human consumption; it is central to the rights of all other species to exist and flourish. As we have emphasized on numerous occasions, the right to water and sanitation will need to take into account the sustainable use of watersheds to ensure the protection of lakes, rivers, aquifers and the species that depend on them. We reject anthropocentric approaches and shortsighted measures to address water and sanitation needs like desalination which poses a threat to oceanic life.

Market mechanisms
Much of the discussion focused on the tensions between market mechanisms that call for the environment to be regulated by pricing mechanisms and the rights of nature paradigm. An earth-centred approach does not allow corporations to pay to pollute or abuse the environment. In recent years, corporations have partnered with environmental NGOs to promote such strategies as water offsets enabling multinationals like Coca Cola to gain PR points by destroying the environment in one part of the world while promoting conservation efforts elsewhere, proclaiming themselves “water neutral.” Water offsets, carbon trading and other market mechanisms have attempted to artificially quantity environmental damage by downplaying the impacts of damaging local ecosystems.

Anne Petermann of the Global Justice Ecology Project refers to this as “corporations trying to maintain business as usual by co-opting green discourse.”
So perhaps the strategy is not to step outside the bubble to attempt dialogues with those who will continue to strengthen the mechanisms of global capitalism that are responsible for the environmental crisis, but to expand and strengthen our bubble. To create bubbles in the form of no extraction zones, local bills of rights and municipal ordinances that keep corporate greed out of our communities.

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Find out more about Global Exchange’s rights based work right here on our website!

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action. This year’s topic is water.

It is widely understood that the ecosystems we as humans rely on to survive are diminishing, depleting, and drying up. Water— most essential to life– is being privatized and mismanaged at the cost of people’s heath and livelihoods, namely by multi-national corporations that are extracting water from communities without their consent.

Fortunately there is a movement towards a more just and sustainable stewardship of our resources. People worldwide are beginning to challenge this structure. In September 2010, the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature was established to propel a movement on the rights of nature in order to recognize the right, per se, of an aquifer to replenish itself or a river to flow. Global Exchange and the Council of Canadians are compiling a book on the Rights of Nature with participation from all corners of the world, where inspiring human rights and environmental leaders are speaking up for the rights of nature. Below is a piece from the book in which local activists in Mt. Shasta, CA are interviewed about their quest to assert the right of water in their community. Read and be empowered!

Mt. Shasta, CA — Recognizing the Rights of the Sacred

Global Exchange interviews Angelina Cook and Ami Marcus, of the Mt. Shasta Community Rights Project*

The picturesque mountain hamlet of Mt. Shasta is on the verge of making history in California and changing the debate about water in this draught-ridden state by passing the first law recognizing ecosystems and climate rights. Ancient water flows under the iconic snow-capped volcano, considered a sacred site by the Winnemen Wintu tribe. Yet the region serves as one of the main water sources for the state’s needs and corporate water bottlers. Now hydropower corporations are seeking to manipulate weather patterns, capture and own water before it hits the ground through the chemical ‘seeding’ of storm clouds. When residents discovered that constitutional protections allow corporate actors to override community concerns for themselves and the ecosystem, the issue became a matter of rights. With assistance from Global Exchange (GX) and CELDF, local residents formed the Community Rights Project to educate neighbors about the power of asserting community rights over corporations, and how recognizing the rights of nature provides a powerful new framework for protecting this beautiful place.

GX: What makes water withdrawal and cloud seeding harmful?

Two major multi-national corporations are already extracting undisclosed amounts of local water. When private interests manage water, the drive for profit overrides community interests. Cloud seeding is severely understudied and poorly understood, yet the state allows it WITHOUT regulation and WITHOUT environmental review. Nature is not a machine and we can’t treat it like an engine. We trust natural cycles for the amount and location of water we receive. Toxins like silver iodide are not manufactured to be dispersed into the air and environment. Cloud seeding can also result in catastrophic weather.

GX: Why not use existing “solutions” like regulatory law?

When it comes to upholding natural integrity, the regulatory system is dangerously inadequate. It exhausts the efforts of citizen stewards and denies us the right to say “no” to unwanted activities and development. At best it is designed to limit harms—and take a look at the results—every living system on the planet is in decline. If we expect different results we’re going to have to adopt a different strategy. When we asked ourselves how can we rise up to our responsibility as stewards of the Earth and prevent environmental destruction, we realized that we would have to unravel the regulatory juggernaut and embrace the rights of something much deeper and more fundamental than ourselves. Our current regulatory paradigm perceives nature as property to be used and exploited in any way that land owners and share holders deem profitable. This model was never designed to put nature first. Adopting new models for environmental governance is critical if we hope to restore and maintain a climate hospitable for humans on planet Earth.

GX: If this ordinance passes, you will be the first community anywhere to recognize rights for the climate. Can you talk about that?

Recognizing the rights of nature is acknowledging the indisputable reliance of human systems upon ecosystems, interconnected both visibly and invisibly through climate. We want to protect the natural weather cycles that create the purity and abundance of Shasta waters, meaning we must prohibit the contamination and manipulation of our atmospheric waters. In doing this, we are initiating the grassroots regeneration of our climate at the local level.

GX: Not everyone in Mt. Shasta embraces the rights of nature provisions in the ordinance Could you speak to that?

Local objections to this ordinance have been based in fear and misunderstanding. The Mount Shasta area is in the heart of California’s timber basket and our economy was raised on resource extraction and environmental exploitation. Though decades of economic desperation the region has and continues to signal the unsustainability of resource exploitation for private profit, a significant faction of our local mentality remains stuck in the quagmire of human dominance over natural systems. It is an education process for our community.

GX: In what ways do you see the ordinance being beneficial for the future of Mt. Shasta and California?

Mt. Shasta serves headwaters to the Sacramento River. What happens to water here trickles downstream and sets the tone for water resource management throughout the state. Recognizing nature’s rights to exist and flourish has the physical and political potential to establish a higher precedent for genuine environmental stewardship in California and Salmon Nation. Collectively, we have a waning window of opportunity to honor our natural heritage and restore our natural integrity. Reclaiming community rights as superior to corporate interests through the legislative process is a daunting, yet necessary step in our path towards biologically integrated conscious evolution.

*Interview with Shannon Biggs

Mendocino County’s Historic Vote Elevates Residents’ Rights, Bans Fracking