Increasingly the local scale is seen as the key to sustainability, but we ought to acknowledge the importance of other scales.
Earlier this week, an Ohio District Court of Appeals voted to uphold the Cuyahoga County trial court’s dismissal of a complaint brought by Mothers Against Drilling in Our Neighborhoods. The activist group, based in Broadview Heights in Cuyahoga County, had requested the court to uphold a community bill of rights that voters passed in November 2012.
The decision sets a precedent that will likely result in unfavorable ramifications for a similar community bill of rights that the Athens County Bill of Rights Committee is planning for this Novembers ballot.
Those community bill of rights, motivated by environmentalist and anti-corporate attitudes, would not only protect the rights of the communities that pass them, but also those of local ecosystems. The bill of rights sponsored by MADION, for instance, contains provisions for the rights of ‘natural communities’ within the city of Broadview Heights, which residents of the city will reinforce on nature’s behalf.
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund supports those and other campaigns for community bill of rights around Ohio and across the nation. CELDF aims to campaign for local sovereignty to create sustainable communities. Members of CELDF and those who support the community bill of rights seem to believe that sustainability can only exist on the local scale. This is because state and federal lawmakers are too easily swayed by corporate interests and generally don’t seem to adequately consider each individual community’s problems and concerns. By this line of logic, it is then necessary to secede a bit, to give the community and what’s local a bit more power to dictate what goes on within its borders in order to create sustainable communities.
Given the negative ecological, sociocultural and economic consequences of the current globalized system, this shift toward localism may be an effective way to help reorient our focus towards socioeconomic and ecological factors that global markets tend to regard as externalities.
However, by emphasizing the need for localism, we skirt a fine line between sustainability and elitism. By romanticizing the local and ardently opposing an ostensibly greedy and destructive global market, localism becomes an elitist reaction, a way for moneyed communities to protect themselves from perceived threats. This resistance from below, and its accompanying attitude of protectionism does more to create “shelters from the storm” than to actually get at the root of the problem. Communities without the means or people who simply don’t share the same concerns or views as CELDF most likely will not work to cultivate sustainability.
The romanticization of the local also usually assumes a homogeneity within that scale, and in doing so downplays the role of local inequalities, and also ignores the potential interactions between multiple scales. The local is seen as entirely separate from the state and global scales. What is good for the local is then what is best for everybody.
However, this is not the case. The rights of local ecosystems may conflict with broader environmental problems. For example, hydropower may be a clean substitute for fossil fuel, but how would a court balance the right of a river not to be dammed versus the harms caused by mineral extraction and air pollution due to demand for nonrenewable energy?
The local is nested within the global, therefore reform must not only come from below, but from above. Change must come from both the local scale upwards and the global scale downward, each level of government playing a part. Granted CELDF does operate on an international scale, but they do not work for international change. They only seem to seek to facilitate local campaigns.
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Those who wish to work toward sustainability — including CELDF — must acknowledge the interaction between the local, the state and the global in order to stimulate positive change. By ignoring the issue of scale localism may instead devolve into a form of elitism, a reactionary shift that does little to actually affect change.
They must acknowledge that part of the sustainability of any given community relies on the sustainability of the communities and institutions it interacts with. It requires that we focus on the local but also break out of the local shell, as we will need more than just shelters from the storm.
Austin Miles is a senior studying biology. Have ? Email him at am343011@ohio.edu.
