For decades, Lane County residents have been subjected to many corporate and governmental harms, such as the practice of aerial herbicide applications, clear cutting of our forests and corporate water withdrawal. Now, there are new harms that could threaten Lane County's watersheds, such as large scale distribution and data center developments.
These all cause harms at a watershed level.
Currently our environmental laws are part of a regulatory system which regulates rather than protects our water. Despite persistent efforts to stop these practices and developments, the harm continues unabated. Now, using the Community Rights model, a coalition of organizations and individuals have come together to secure Rights for nature and pro-actively begin to protect Lane County Watersheds.
Protect Lane County Watersheds (Yes on Measure 20-373) is the PAC moving forward The Lane County Watershed Bill of Rights — Measure 20-373 — to secure Right of Waters and Watersheds to sustainable recharge and to protect our drinking water.
An essentially different relationship between humankind and nature is necessary; one that reflects our dependence on nature and the need to live in harmony with the natural world. This requires providing the highest legal protection, one that recognizes the rights of both humankind and nature to health and well-being.
Water is routinely extracted, commodified, and polluted by corporate, governmental activities with little to no financial, civil, criminal, or moral accountability. This is unsustainable as all of life depends on clean water for survival.
We focus on protecting our communities from destructive corporate practices by challenging the corporate “rights” and privileges that presently permit these activities. No matter what the specific threat is—to the food system, to social inequities, to local economies, to the environment at large—the fundamental cause is the same: Governmental structures and corporate constitutional rights/laws are rigged against the people in order to serve corporate interests, regardless of their harm to individuals, communities and the planet.
Because there is a single over-riding cause, we can develop a unifying, over-riding remedy: The Community Rights Movement, which places our communities’ rights above corporate “rights”. How do we do this? By empowering ourselves to challenge and replace existing unjust laws with our own local and just Community Rights laws. This measure is the first step in creating the community we want here in Lane County.
We recognize that true decision-making requires action by concerned citizens. We join the more than 200 communities in the US who have decided to reclaim their power by crafting relevant, rights-based laws. Our work benefits from the assistance of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which works with communities throughout the world to protect the health, safety, and welfare of residents and the natural environment, and to establish environmental and economic sustainability.
