Mike,

I appreciate all your efforts towards saving the reef. It was due to your recommendation of Boynton Beach as a spot to collect that I scooped up grit and did the article on micros for Am. Conchologist.

There are many efforts across the country to curb the power of companies to treat the environment as their toilet. I just read an article about East Brunswick Township, PA, which passed a law declaring that sludge corporations possess no constitutional "rights" within the community.

It might be worth a look at the website for Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund at celdf.org which talks about this new way of organizing. Here's an excerpt about their training schools:

Democracy School

The Daniel Pennock Democracy School is a stimulating and illuminating course that teaches citizens and activists how to reframe exhausting and often discouraging single issue work (such as opposing toxic dumps, quarries, factory farms, etc.) in a way that we can confront corporate control on a powerful single front: people’s constitutional rights.

Democracy School explores the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and offers a new organizing model that helps citizens confront the usurpation by corporations of the rights of communities, people, and the earth. Lectures cover the history of people's movements and corporate power, and the dramatic recent organizing in Pennsylvania by communities confronting agribusiness, sewage sludge, and quarry corporations. Included with enrollment in the Democracy School is a 300 plus-page notebook of background reading material, and a copy of Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy. For a historical review of the Pennsylvania work through the end of 2003, see a feature article that appeared in Orion Magazine.

Created by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD), Democracy Schools were launched with five weekend sessions at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 2003. Since then, the number of schools has grown rapidly. In 2006, there are over a dozen locations across the country offering Democracy Schools, so peruse our list and find a school near you!

Weekend classes continue to be offered at Wilson College in historic Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

The Schools are built around carefully designed readings, clear presentations and group discussions.

Each School reveals how it came to be that the law enables corporate managers to dictate their values, and impose their projects on communities.
Includes an intense, comprehensive history of the judicial bestowal of constitutional rights of persons on corporations.

*****

David Kirsh
Durham, NC


"Life...is a minestrone."--Father Guido Scarducci

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