Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund Executive Director Thomas Linzey will speak about civil disobedience later this semester.
Thomas Linzey, executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, will speak to Ohio University and the Athens community on the need for community civil disobedience in the defense of our health and safety. His talk is scheduled for Nov. 13, 7:00 p.m., in Morton Hall 201. To understand Linzey’s call to action, consider recent news.
We learned last week that Antarctica’s ice melt is so fast that the ice sheets might collapse by 2100. We learned that the United States Congress may investigate ExxonMobil for violating truth in advertising and racketeering laws; company scientists knew decades ago that burning fossil fuel was causing climate change, but ExxonMobil has actively promoted climate change denial. And we learned that Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania have signed a pact to promote shale gas and oil development.
In other words, with the latest evidence that we are rushing headlong toward climate catastrophe, with confirmation that the greediest people in the history of humanity have been greasing the way, we learned that state government also is doing its best to hasten the end.
How are we to understand the news about the tri-state pact? And what’s to be done about it?
Linzey argues that we must break out of the “box of allowable ‘self-government’ ”: laws that reduce nature to property, laws asserting state and federal preemption of local rights to regulate community health and safety, court decisions that transform corporate privileges into protected human rights and rules meant to regulate the very industries that co-authored those same rules.
To break free of this box, Linzey advocates community civil disobedience. Communities can stand up for themselves by passing laws that assert their inalienable rights to health and safety. He calls for nothing less than a revolution in which we assert that our rights to health and safety are greater than the right of corporations to unlimited profit.
Do you agree? Do you disagree? Are you unsure? Come hear Linzey speak on Nov. 13, 7:00 p.m., in Morton Hall 201. Listen, ask questions, debate and exercise democratic possibilities that have been dormant for too long.
I’ll be there, anxious to hear Linzey and my community’s response. I hope to see you there, too.
Austin Babrow is a professor of communication studies at Ohio University.
