June, 02 2021, 03:05pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Thomas Linzey, Esq.
Senior Attorney, Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights
tal@pa.net
First in the U.S.: "Rights of Nature" State Constitutional Amendment Filed in Florida to Protect Waterways
Would amend the Florida Constitution to recognize all waterways as having rights to "exist, flow, be free from pollution…and a healthy ecosystem."
WASHINGTON
Florida environmental leaders have begun collecting signatures to qualify a state constitutional amendment that would recognize legal rights of waterways in the state.
The statewide amendment, the first "rights of nature" measure in the United States to be proposed and approved for state ballot petitioning, would, if adopted, change the landscape of environmental protection in Florida. It was approved for signature circulation by the Florida Division of Elections on May 20.
The amendment would recognize the legally enforceable rights of all waterways across Florida to "exist, flow, be free from pollution, and maintain a healthy ecosystem." The amendment then provides that any Floridian or Florida organization can file a legal action on behalf of those waterways to require their protection, repair, and restoration.
The amendment also recognizes every Floridian's legal right to clean water, and authorizes Florida counties, cities, and towns to enact additional protections for waterways. It then shields those municipal enactments from preemption by the state legislature.
The state amendment is modeled on the Orange County, Florida, "Right to Clean Water" initiative which passed overwhelmingly in November 2020. The initiative passed with an 89% majority vote, and recognized legal rights of waterways. In April, the first enforcement case under the new law was filed - against a development company proposing to build on, and eliminate, over a hundred acres of wetlands and waterways in the county.
The amendment is part of a five-environmental amendment proposal aiming for the November 2022 statewide ballot. The other amendments would recognize new legal protections for Florida iconic species, ban toll road construction on conservation land, ban the dredging and filling of Florida wetlands, and ban captive wildlife hunting facilities.
Chuck O'Neal, Chair of the Florida Rights of Nature Network, explained, "It's time to replace a state government which has been focused on developing as much of Florida as it can, with a system which permanently protects what is important to Floridians and our tourism-based economy. This amendment would achieve several goals - stopping the systematic destruction of Florida's wetlands while providing permanent protection to what makes Florida special - its waterways and its clean water."
Mari Margil, Executive Director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, which provided assistance with the drafting of the measure and assists with "rights of nature" measures worldwide, stated, "For too long, state governments have enabled developers who want to destroy Florida's waterways. This amendment represents a re-programming of government, to a system which protects, rather than destroys, nature. In establishing the rights of waterways, the amendment is an opportunity to protect and restore nature, following in the footsteps of countries around the world which are changing how they protect threatened ecosystems."
Joe Bonasia, a member of the Board of Directors of the Florida Rights of Nature Network, explained the need for the amendment, stating, "There were 64 months of red tide from 1878 to 1994 in Florida. There have been over 184 months of red tide in the 27 years since then. Over half of Florida's waterways are officially declared "impaired," and the state has issued 23,000 permits for the discharge of pollution into our waterways during the past 50 years. This is all evidence that the system isn't working. We need a new approach to environmental protection, and recognizing the right of people to clean water and the rights of waterways is that new approach."
Mary Gutierrez, Founder and Director of Earth Ethics, based in Pensacola, Florida, added, "Northwest Florida is experiencing significant growth that is causing the loss of species habitat, surface water contamination, and increased flooding due to poor planning and increased development. We must act now to protect the waterways and land that sustain us. This amendment will do just that."
John Cassani, the Calusa Waterkeeper, added, "The Right to Clean Water Initiative, as a new or additive legal tool for protecting Florida's waters, may be our last best hope to save what is left."
To qualify for the ballot, the Right to Clean Water state initiative must collect nearly 900,000 signatures over the next eight months. Those interested in signing the petitions to qualify the amendments are encouraged to go to www.FL5.org and download, sign, and mail-in the petitions.
Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights is building a global movement to advance the rights of nature into law.
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Families Rally for Opioid Accountability as Supreme Court Hears Purdue Case
"I don't want their money," one woman who lost a son to the opioid crisis said of the Sackler family. "I want them in prison."
Dec 04, 2023
At the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, families whose loved ones are among the tens of thousands of Americans who have died of opioid use disorder each year over the past two decades rallied to push the nine justices to reject a proposed bankruptcy plan that would give the former owners of Purdue Pharma legal immunity—with many joining the U.S. Justice Department in arguing that the company should not be released from accountability for the opioid epidemic.
Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in 2019, as the number of Americans killed by opioids hit 50,000 and the OxyContin manufacturer faced thousands of lawsuits alleging its aggressive marketing of the addictive painkiller had fueled the rising death toll.
The company agreed to settle the lawsuits for $10 billion, with the Sackler family—which oversaw Purdue when OxyContin was introduced and flooded communities across the U.S.—contributing $4 billion. In exchange, the Sacklers would be shielded from future lawsuits.
The bankruptcy plan—which now includes $6 billion from the Sacklers following a push from lawsuit plaintiffs—has been approved by state and local governments, tribes, and families and individuals who would be entitled to money.
But the U.S. Trustee Program, a watchdog at the Justice Department, has joined some families in arguing that the Sacklers should not be shielded from liability for the opioid crisis.
"No Sackler immunity at any $$," read one sign held by a woman outside the Supreme Court on Monday, while another said, "My dead son does not release Sacklers."
The issue at hand in the case, Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, is whether it is legal to give a third party—the Sackler family—legal immunity in a bankruptcy case even though they themselves have not declared bankruptcy, also known as nonconsensual third-party release.
A lawyer for groups and individuals told the court that families and governments are highly unlikely to get any more out of Purdue and the Sacklers than the money the company and family have offered as part of the deal.
The plan would include $161 million in a trust set aside for Native American tribes and $700 million to $750 million in a trust for families and individuals who were able to file claims, with payouts expected to range from about $3,500 to $48,000. Governments would use the money to set up addiction treatment centers and other programs to mitigate the opioid crisis.
"Forget a better deal—there is no other deal," lawyer Pratik Shah told the Supreme Court on Monday.
Curtis Gannon, representing the U.S. Trustee Program, noted that the Sackler family already showed that a "better deal" could be possible when it offered $6 billion for the plan instead of $4 billion. The Justice Department is advocating for a new settlement that would not include nonconsensual third-party releases, saying the current bankruptcy deal violates federal law.
"We do hope there is another deal at the end of this," said Gannon.
The justices appeared split on the case, in which a ruling is expected next summer. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that appeals courts do not allow bankruptcy plans that take away the rights of alleged victims to sue parties that have not declared bankruptcy.
Outside the court, Alexis Pleus, who lost her son to opioid use disorder, told Aneri Pattani of KFF Health News that many families, including hers, will not be entitled to money under the current deal because they are required to provide records such as the original opioid prescription.
Beth Macy, author of the book Dopesick, told CNN Monday morning that while some families "are divided" about whether the bankruptcy plan and payouts should move forward, as the U.S. Trustee Program "has pointed out, only 20% of the families who were eligible to vote on [the proposal], even voted."
"I don't want their money," Jen Trejo, whose son Christopher was prescribed OxyContin at age 15 and died of an overdose when he was 32, told Pattani. "I want them in prison."
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US House to Vote on Declaring 'Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism'
"The fact that Congress has to pass a resolution saying that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the same thing means that people's efforts to end the conflation of the two are getting somewhere," argued one critic.
Dec 04, 2023
The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote this week—possibly as soon as Monday evening—on a resolution declaring that "anti-Zionism is antisemitism," a measure that Jewish peace campaigners called "deeply antisemitic."
House Resolution 894—introduced by a pair of Jewish Republicans, Reps. David Kustoff (Tenn.) and Max Miller (Ohio)—embraces the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) controversial working definition of antisemitism, which, while not explicitly mentioning anti-Zionism, includes "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination" and "claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor."
Kustoff said in a statement last Tuesday, when the measure was introduced, that "since October 7, we have seen an alarming rise in antisemitic incidents, attacks, harassment, and discrimination both in the United States and across the globe."
"Such hate has no place in our national discourse, and it is imperative leaders voice their strong opposition to these horrifying acts of violence and discrimination," he added.
"This is a cynical effort to conflate criticism of the government of Israel with antisemitism."
Many Jewish American critics, however, bristled at the conflation of hatred of Jews with opposition to Israel, a settler-colonial apartheid state with codified Jewish primacy illegally occupying and oppressing Palestine while waging what many call a genocidal war on Gaza.
"This is a cynical effort to conflate criticism of the government of Israel with antisemitism," Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of the progressive political action group Indivisible, said on social media. "It's not about protecting Jews. It's about shutting down dissent. And in doing so it makes all of us less safe."
The new resolution—which details numerous recent instances of antisemitism while completely ignoring concurrently rising and sometimes violent Islamophobia sweeping the United States—resolves that the House:
- Strongly condemns and denounces all instances of antisemitism occurring in the United States and globally;
- Reaffirms and reiterates its strong support for the Jewish community at home and abroad;
- Calls on elected officials and world leaders to condemn and fight all forms of domestic and global antisemitism;
- Clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism; and
- Rejects all forms of terror, hate, discrimination, and harassment of members of the Jewish community.
Referencing the trope that anti-Zionists are antisemites and Jewish people who oppose Israel are "self-hating," the Bay Area chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace
asked on social media, "So what, we're all self-hating Jews?"
The IHRA definition of antisemitism has been rejected by the scholars and other experts—many of them Jewish—behind the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which states that while anti-Israel sentiment "could be an expression of an antisemitic animus," it could also be "a reaction to a human rights violation, or it could be the emotion that a Palestinian person feels on account of their experience at the hands of the [Israeli] state."
The modern state of Israel was established largely by ethnically cleansing over 750,000 Arabs from Palestine 75 years ago. In the decades since, Israel illegally occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, whose 2.3 million people endure periodic wars that have claimed nearly 20,000 lives—most of them in the past two months—while living and dying in what human rights defenders call the "world's largest open-air prison."
The House resolution comes as Israel intensifies its retaliatory war on Gaza, where officials say that more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, maimed, or left missing by Israeli attacks.
Jewish Americans—from progressive left-wing activists to the Orthodox Torah Judaism movement—have been at the forefront of opposition to both Israel's war and U.S. support for it.
"Zionism is the greatest source of real antisemitism today," Jewish American filmmaker Dan Cohen
said in a Monday social media post condemning "Israel's genocide of Palestinians."
"The Israel lobby and the elected representatives it controls are responsible," he added.
Dr. Eric Reinhart, a Harvard scholar,
asserted that "not only is anti-Zionism not antisemitism, but a strong argument can be made that Zionism is in fact antisemitic."
"It is used to license Zionist violence against Jews who refuse to back it," he added, including "the Israeli government's recent attacks on their own anti-Zionist Jewish citizens."
Richard Beck, a senior writer at n+1, called the resolution "very dark."
"But," he added, "the fact that Congress has to pass a resolution saying that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the same thing means that people's efforts to end the conflation of the two are getting somewhere."
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Climate Coalition Says 'Stop Carbon Offsetting Now!'
"Carbon offset trading is reckless and irresponsible," said one campaigner.
Dec 04, 2023
A coalition of climate groups had a message for world leaders on Monday, Finance Day at the United Nations Climate Change Conference: "Stop carbon offsetting now!"
The conference, COP28, is hosted in Dubai by the United Arab Emirates—which, as the coalition highlighted in a joint statement, is set to "hold numerous promotional thematic events," despite two decades of negative impacts from carbon offset schemes.
"Carbon offset trading is reckless and irresponsible," declared Jutta Kill of the World Rainforest Movement—part of the coalition that includes ETC Group, Focus on the Global South, GRAIN, Indigenous Environmental Network, Just Transition Alliance, and the Oakland Institute.
"Throughout 2023, academic research, media, and civil society investigations have exposed how these projects routinely generate phantom offsets and result in land grabbing and human and Indigenous rights violations," the organizations noted, pointing to "the forced relocation of Ogiek Peoples in Kenya's Mau Forest" and "extensive sexual abuse at a Kenyan offset project."
"Over the past months, Kenya, along with Liberia, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, have signed deals with Dubai-based Blue Carbon
covering a total of over 24 million hectares of community lands," the coalition continued. "Carbon offset project developers, standards bodies, auditors, and credit providers have pocketed millions from churning out carbon credits that have failed to reduce emissions and exacerbated the climate crisis."
One "damning" probe from September found that nearly 80% of the top carbon offset schemes be deemed "likely junk or worthless." Another study from that month, focused on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) projects, similarly concluded that reductions were dramatically exaggerated.
"At COP28, world leaders and climate negotiators need to recognize once and for all that carbon markets are a failed source of climate finance. They are volatile and unstable, marked by fraud, incapable of reducing emissions, and actually harm communities," Oakland Institute executive director Anuradha Mittal said Monday.
The coalition pointed out that in addition to impacts such as relocations and abuse, "these projects, many of which are repackaged as so-called 'nature-based solutions' or 'natural climate solutions' or, when done at coastal and marine areas, as 'blue carbon,' have also drawn peasant and Indigenous communities into costly and complicated legal battles in their effort to affirm their rights and reclaim community territories and in their fights to resist the projects."
The Kichwa communities in the Peruvian Amazon, Dayak communities in Indonesia, and Aka Indigenous communities and Bantu farmers in the Republic of Congo's Bateke Plateau are among those negatively affected by carbon offsetting schemes.
"Over 20 years of history with offsets have resulted in the rights of Indigenous peoples being violated, increased land grabbing, and disproportionate impacts on Indigenous environmental defenders," stressed Indigenous Environmental Network executive director Tom Goldtooth. "The false solutions will become a crime against humanity and Mother Earth."
GRAIN's Devlin Kuyek said that "they prop up a system that has enabled corporate polluters and rich countries to delay action and profit from the crisis. Whether unregulated or with a U.N. seal of approval, carbon offsetting in all its shapes and forms, including REDD or so-called 'nature-based solutions' and 'blue carbon,' is a fraud that must be immediately scrapped."
The coalition asserted that rather than carbon offsetting, "what is urgently needed is renewed focus on keeping fossil fuels in the ground and commitments to real climate action based on equity and justice."
As Friends of the Earth International's Kirtana Chandrasekaran put it: "What we need are real emissions reductions and real climate finance. Anything less is failure."
The coalition's demands contrasted sharply with Sunday comments from Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, COP28 president and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company CEO, who claimed there is "no science" behind the push to rapidly phase out planet-heating fossil fuels—which one leading expert said "dismisses decades of work" by global scientists.
Going into COP28, a U.N. analysis warned that countries' currently implemented policies put the world on track for 3°C of warming by 2100, or double the Paris agreement's 1.5°C target. Already, the planet has warmed about 1.1°C relative to preindustrial levels.
Even though the international community is way off track in terms of meeting its climate goals, Bronwen Tucker, global public finance lead at Oil Change International, pointed out Monday that "on Finance Day at COP28, instead of rich country governments committing to pay their fair share for a fossil fuel phaseout, they tried to shirk their responsibilities."
The biggest historical contributor to planet-heating pollution, the United States, and foundation partners on Sunday announced the Energy Transition Alliance. Rachel Cleetus, the policy director and a lead economist for the Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate and Energy Program, said the offset initiative "is still very much a work-in-progress, and the details shared thus far raise a fair degree of skepticism about its ability to meaningfully contribute to addressing the climate crisis."
"Richer nations and large corporations should have no claim over monetizing the scarce remaining carbon budget and yet this program is premised on that unjust idea," Cleetus added. "At COP28, the primary focus should be on securing an agreement among nations for a fast, fair fossil fuel phaseout and ramping up public finance."
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