The fight for Community Rights in Pennsylvania has been going on for over two decades.  We have a history here of landmark work we would like to highlight. Modern Rights of Nature laws were born in coal country in eastern PA — Tamaqua Borough, population less than 7,000 — in 2006. The community rights and Rights of Nature movement has spread exponentially since that time, to hundreds of communities across the United States, and to dozens of countries around the world. 
            Reading, PA (July 2021): Petitioners in Reading, Pennsylvania have officially kicked off a campaign to amend the Reading City Charter to outlaw “toxic trespass,” the poisoning of people and the environment within the city. The ballot initiative is in response to unaddressed toxic waste and environmental racism in the post-industrial city. Link to press release here.
            We continue to see the work popping up in courageous communities throughout the state. Presently Clara Township (population 200) is threatened by a fracked waste injection well. The community has decided to resist and push back against corporate exploitative overreach by attempting to rewrite the constitution for the municipality. They have democratically decided to establish a Government Study Commission, which is doing research on other cities, boroughs and communities throughout the state. The study is looking at how to implement climate action plans, which are currently voluntary, and then how to advocate for cities to abandon investments in fossil-fuel corporations. Such a small community may feel like David facing Goliath, but we all know how that story ends.
            Grant Township in Indiana County is another small community fighting the Goliath of the fossil fuel industry. They have been successful in keeping out a fracked injection since 2014. In the time between then and now, the township has been sued three times, by Pennsylvania General Energy Co (the corp seeking to dump toxic waste water in an old abandoned well within the township boundaries) and by the PA Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP). (And in case you missed the irony- yes, the Department of Environmental Protection has sued a community for trying to protect its environment). The pending trial, which will take place in the next year, will take place in Commonwealth Court and will focus on whether the DEP has failed to protect the environment in PA, as well as whether the people of Grant Township have the authority to protect their environment. 
            The final thing we want to highlight is the work we have been doing for the past four years in promoting a Pennsylvania Constitutional Amendment, giving all communities in PA the Right to Local Community Self- Government. During this session, a number of Representatives in Harrisburg will be introducing this new amendment, which would then need to be approved in consecutive sessions. Local Community Self- Government returns power to those who are most affected by important decisions: the people of the community. 
            We are committed to a multi-pronged approach to building strong communities. We see this happening best through the following tasks:
            1) working with communities at the local level who are most affected by harmful activities;
            2) challenging the corporate state, whether it’s the corporations that perpetrate the harm, the state that legalizes the harm, and/or the courts that justify the harm;
            3) and building the legislative frameworks at the local and state level that ban harmful activities and setting forth new thinking and visions for a sustainable world that protects nature, people, and communities.