Thomas Alan Linzey Speech

Thomas Alan Linzey, Esq. at University of Pittsburgh School of Law: March 4th, 2004:

We’ve never had an environmental movement in this country. What we’ve had is groups and people resisting one hog factory farm at a time, one toxic waste incinerator at a time, one road project at a time, one asphalt plant at a time.

We’ve been playing defense -- and as anyone who plays strategic games like chess will tell  you -- if you’re always reacting, you’re going to lose the game.

Peoples’ Movements, on the other hand, are driven by communities unwilling to accept such a defensive role for themselves. Peoples’ movements are about moving beyond defense.

They focus instead on fixing the problems of governance that consistently shove them onto the defense in the first place. They question why the law is not on their side.  Movements recognize that the current framework of governance has rendered them remediless, and that the only solution available to them is to create new remedies by changing the plan of governance that placed them on the defensive.

It’s not easy work. Our culture makes it that much harder. Awards are given to those who work within the regulatory system to reduce adverse environmental harms from projects; Foundations give money to those groups who can show a track record of "success" by appealing permits and improving regulations.

True peoples’ movements are thus few and far between, and emerge only in response to serious crises that have erupted in this nation -- when the denial of rights to slaves and women was deemed incompatible with "all men are created equal", when an English King and his trading corporations made self-government impossible, and when denial of rights to African-Americans led to the Civil Rights Movement.

Movements thus seek to drive rights into the Constitution -- our framework of governance in these United States. Past Peoples’ movements have thrust groups of people into the protections of our framework of governance.

Mountains, lakes, rivers, whales, trees, raccoons, oceans, salmon, wolves, plants, and ecosystems have no rights under our framework of governance. They have no rights. No legal protections. Under the law, animals, plants, ecological systems, water, air -- they’re property, and are treated as such.

At one time in this nation’s history, people were also property. The Abolitionist movement thrust the rights of slaves into the Constitution via the Fourteenth Amendment , transforming once-property into people.

The womens’ rights movement thrust the rights of women into the Constitution via the Twentieth Amendment, transforming those once considered property into people. Indeed, the American Revolution transformed states that were once private corporations and royal proprietorships -- run and owned as private property by English investors -- into public, constitutionalized  governments.

Securing rights for that considered property means not fiddling around with regulating how that property can be used, but instead, it means changing the very framework of governance that defined those things as property in the first place.