Mar 31: Environmental Rights of PA Communities

Thomas Linzey, executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) will speak about the environmental rights of Pennsylvania communities, and the growing struggles of PA communities in protecting their environments from industrial waste and pollution. 

6 p.m. in HSS 225 at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (the new Humanities and Social Sciences Building, on Grant Street on the IUP Campus).  Free and open to the public.  

Is a corporation’s right to inject toxic waste greater, and more important, than a community’s right to govern itself and protect its water supply?  A community in Indiana County, Grant Township, is joining a nation-wide movement to reject corporate control of their land and resources.  

When the EPA issued a permit for a Class II injection well to dispose of waste water from hydraulic fracturing in their community, residents resisted by adopting a Community Bill of Rights Ordinance that secures community rights to local self-governance, and clean air and water.  As a result of this ordinance, a multimillion dollar energy corporation is suing Grant Township, claiming that the Ordinance violates the corporation's personhood rights, as well as other provisions of the US constitution.  


CELDF, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, is a non-profit law firm working with Grant Township, and a growing number of communities across the state and nation as they spearhead a movement to establish rights for people and nature over the systems that control them.  
Linzey is a graduate of IUP, and has been featured in The New York Times, Mother Jones, the Nation, and in 2007 was named one of Forbes Magazine’s ‘Top Ten Revolutionaries.’ 

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