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Jan 20, 2018
"Now I see the secret of making the best persons: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth." --Walt Whitman
Community-Led Initiatives that Are Protecting the Natural World
In 2008, Ecuador's leadership rewrote its constitution to include the rights of nature, effectively awarding legal rights to the environment. Indigenous communities have recognized the rights of nature for thousands of years, but Ecuador was the first country to make it a constitutional right by awarding ecosystems legal rights to protect the environment and its people. It was a seminal moment for the fast-growing environmental movement. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), based in Mercersburg Pennsylvania, has been at the forefront of the rights of nature movement since its inception. In 2006, the group worked with the Pennsylvania community of Tamaqua Borough to pass a rights of nature law to protect against toxic sludge being dumped on local farmland. The group has been involved in dozens of grassroots campaigns till date, including in Ecuador.
BE THE CHANGE
Do one small act in the coming week that acknowledges and respects the rights of a piece of nature where you live, such as collect trash from the roadside during one of your morning walks or leaving a strip of grass in your yard uncut.
