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NEF GIVES GRANT TO CELDF
PREVENTING COMMUNITY-HARM FROM FRACKING

GRANT TO CELDF FROM NEW EARTH FOUNDATION Since 1997, New Earth Foundation (www.newearthfoundation.org) has funded leading-edge projects that help improve the quality of life. In the current granting cycle, the Board of Directors decided to contribute to an outstanding project which involves helping communities ban hydraulic fracking through the important and effective work of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF, www.celdf.org).

CELDF’S MISSION The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is dedicated to assist communities to legally protect the environment and build sustainable communities.

DANGEROUS IMPACTS OF FRACKING Fracking brings significant impacts, including the contamination of groundwater and drinking water. Fracking produces millions of gallons of toxic wastewater, as gas corporations combine fresh water, sand, and chemicals together to fracture the underground rock and release the gas. Although many claim that natural gas is a “cleaner” fuel than coal or oil, research has found that fracking is a major global warming contributor.

REGULATIONS So-called efforts to “regulate” fracking make it appear as if the process is safe and allow it to take place.

FROM THE GROUND UP Through grassroots organizing, public education, Democracy Schools, legal counsel, and ordinance drafting, CELDF has assisted over 150 communities in the U.S. to develop first-in-the-nation laws banning corporations from water privatization, factory farming, sewage sludge dumping on farmland, and fracking. This includes assisting the first communities to establish a Community Bill of Rights, creating a rights-based framework of governance that includes a right to healthy environment, a right to clean water, and the “Rights of Nature.” Activities that would violate those rights are prohibited by the Community Bill of Rights.

PROTECTION CELDF has assisted the first communities in the country to develop Community Bill of Rights laws banning fracking. These laws also confront key legal barriers – including corporate constitutional “rights” and state preemption – which are commonly used to override local decision-making and force fracking into communities.HOW NEW EARTH FOUNDATION’S GRANT HELPS With the help of the grant from New Earth Foundation, CELDF is partnering with communities, conducting public education and outreach, teaching its Democracy Schools, and providing legal assistance to communities.LAWS BY THE INDUSTRY Our environmental laws, written largely by the industries they are intended to regulate, legalize activities such as fracking, rather than protect against them. Combined with key legal doctrines including corporate constitutional “rights” and state preemption, communities face a structure of law that blocks their efforts to protect the environment.

BEYOND HEARINGS Since state governments across the country are forcing fracking into communities against community wishes, communities are increasingly recognizing that traditional organizing strategies will not stop fracking. Because of this, an increasing number of communities in more and more states are requesting CELDF’s help.

STRUCTURAL CHANGE Yet, the problem is not simply fracking – but the structure of law that protects corporations over communities and the natural environment. The problem is a structure that elevates corporate “rights” over community and Nature’s rights. Recognizing the problem as being structural, communities are organizing for structural change. CELDF is working toward this goal and can be reached at www.celdf.org for more information.

For this and similar programs, New Earth Foundation welcomes donations which can be made by mail – NEF, P. O. Box 100, Sedona AZ, USA – or directly on the New Earth Foundation website www.newearthfoundation.org.

 

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Split earth as may result from fracking, causing earth quakes and endangering the thin earth crust to break.
Source: stockimage ID 38161568 © Naejung | Dreamstime.com

 

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Fragmentation of the thin earth crust, as may be a result of fracking, atomic tests, launching of rockets etc., resulting in sinkholes, earthquakes and volcano outbursts with their life-choking lava streams and ash rains. Can humankind learn from what they experience, and change? Or is humankind bound to repeat endlessly to create the unwanted and even unspeakable – the bursting of the earth?
Source: stockimage ID 34604802 © John Takai | Dreamstime.com

From Fragmentation Thinking to Fracking

“…the prevailing tendency in science
to think and perceive in terms of a fragmentary self-world view
is part of a larger movement
that has been developing over the ages
and that pervades almost the whole of our society today:
but, in turn, such a way of thinking and looking in scientific research
tends very strongly to re-enforce the general fragmentary approach
because it gives men a picture of the whole world
as constituted of nothing
but an aggregate of separately existent ‘atomic building blocks’,
and provides experimental evidence
from which is drawn the conclusion
that this view is necessary and inevitable.

In this way,
people are led to feel that fragmentation is nothing but an expression
of ‘the way everything really is’
and that anything else is impossible.
… there is very little disposition
to look for evidence to the contrary …
when such evidence does arise, as in modern physics,
the general tendency is to minimize its significance
or even to ignore it altogether.
…. in the present state of society
and in the present general mode of teaching science,
which is a manifestation of this state of society,
a kind of prejudice
in favour of a fragmentary
self-world view is fostered and transmitted…”

David Bohm.2010. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge. 19.
First published 1980.

 


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