This story was featured in yesterday’s Midday Open Tread, but I felt it deserved a little more attention. As I live less than 20 miles from Lake Erie, this has a direct impact on me as well. From The Guardian:
...[T]he citizens of Toledo [Ohio], on the western basin of Lake Erie, will now be voting on a controversial legal bill on 26 February. What they will be deciding is whether Lake Erie has the same legal rights as a corporation or person.
Toledo, Ohio, uses Lake Erie as its source for drinking water. Unfortunately, the city runs into potential public health problems when there is an algae bloom in the lake, loading the drinking water with potentially harmful bacteria. A woman who was pregnant during the bloom of 2014 is quoted as saying:
My gynecologist told me: ‘Don’t even touch the water, it could make you and your baby very sick,’ and that really got to me.
If the vote succeeds, and the initiative holds up in court, the citizens of Toledo could sue polluters on behalf of the lake. It may sound a little crazy, but in these days of Citizen’s United corporate personhood, it makes sense. Indeed, in my mind, designating a natural body of water, upon which a significant population is dependent, as a person makes more sense than designating a corporation as a person. At least a lake harbors actual living things.
There are few precedents to this initiative, and none for a resource as large as Lake Erie. Among environmentalists worldwide, the response has been enthusiastic:
This type of action has been happening in other parts of the world, but usually has involved smaller ecosystems and legal settlements with indigenous people. New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Te Urewera forest in 2014, and an Indian court granted legal personhood to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in 2017.
“We need to create a new legal paradigm … to protect [areas like] the Great Barrier Reef,” said Michelle Maloney of the Australian Earth Laws Alliance. “The drafters of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights in Toledo share this understanding, that existing environmental laws are simply not sufficient to protect and restore the lake.”
In the United States, the Ponca nation in Oklahoma was the first Native American tribe to recognize the rights of nature in statutory law in 2017, a reaction to earthquakes and water pollution caused by fracking. Ponca leaders say they are “thrilled” with what is happening in Ohio.
For years, the people dependent on Lake Erie have pleaded to the federal and state governments for help, to no avail. Now, citizens are taking action on their own to save their natural resources.
“But what these groups finding problems with this bill are missing is why this thing came about in the first place,” [attorney Terry] Lodge says. “The people in Toledo have realized for a long time their water and their health was in danger from excessive pollution in the lake. Over the years they called for the cavalry repeatedly to help them. But the cavalry never came. So they have decided to be their own cavalry.”
As Obama said, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for…
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