Toward a Kaua'i Bill of Rights

Thursday evening Kaua'i Rising held an informational event featuring two lawyers from the CELDF talking about environmental challenges to local communities and their strategies and efforts to support people standing up for their rights. The three hour meeting was quite interesting and felt like about half that much time and was embedded in a cultural context with music and Hawaiian style opening and closings.

Kai Huschke and Ben Price from CELDF spoke at length as lawyers who has worked with numerous communities fighting large corporate interests they do not want exploiting their land - energy extractions such as tracking, strip mining, big agriculture.

They also described how the legal and political systems of this country are stacked heavily against local control. I knew well that in the hierarchy of our legal system federal law is supreme, then state, and finally local law, but the obvious effect of this structure had not in so many words occurred to me: local control is systemically quashed. On top of that there is Dillon's Rule which states that municipal law can only legislate matters expressly granted to it by federal or state law, or enshrined in the charter of the municipality. (For more than the preceding simplified sketch of the legal terrain, see the CELDF site resources with in-depth and authoritative legal information.)

Prospects may sound bleak for a grass roots reversal and in some ways that is so. On Kaua'i the hot button topic is GMO because the former cane sugar fields have been turned over to GMO seed production and experimentation, exploiting the year round growing conditions and plentiful water here. For more info on GMO issues see for example hawaiiseed.org.

John Dumas played a beautiful opening set while people assembled and then closed the meeting with a heartfelt rendition of Amazing Grace [download].

The political and legal strategy is complex and I won't attempt to describe it here much less evaluate options. One key point to understand about this meeting is that where it was crystal clear where the CELDF comes down on these issues, they were equally clear in their role in coming here being to advise options for the community to chose action. In a nutshell, there are three options to choose from:

1. Do nothing: you get the status quo and all prospects for escalation by corporate interests.
2. Regulate within the existing legal framework: you may get some concessions but not stop anything, and by doing so legitimize the activity and thereby contribute to its expansion.
3. Fight back: exactly what forms this takes and what the likelihood for victory may be remains to be seen. The glimmer of hope on the legal front is an argument built on the principles of human rights which government is responsible to protect and serve, not subjugate. Ultimately, it's a moral responsibility as well for the people to protect the land and nature.

In closing I would like to capture some excepts from the meeting out of context that I think best convey the spirit of it.

• Big corporations become The Machine of Endless Production of More
• One community resisting corporate exploitation was labeled by law enforcement as domestic terrorists, so they had T-shirts made up and wore them proudly.
• The legal strategy CELDF helps crafts becomes an organizing strategy.
• US law is based on English law which developed to support the process of colonization, so it encourages expansion of empire, wiping out local customs and practices to be replaced with by the new masters of newly acquired territories.
• The US constitution is largely a collection of commerce and property law. (The Bill of Rights is separate.)
• The CELDF used to carefully review corporate applications for extractive operations and point out all the errors and flaws to get them rejected. However, they soon stopped doing this because the corporations would just make exactly those corrections and refile. In effect, the CELDF realized they were providing corporations free legal services and legitimizing their operations.
• Responding to a comment wishing more people were at the event (I'd say it was less than 100), a wonderful auntie stood up and said, "The people who need to be here are here."
• Ben Price related a wonderful quote from working with an indigenous community. Upon learning about Dillon's Rule that municipalities are completely subject to federal and state control, an older Native American in attendance said, "So municipalities are the white man's reservation ... only he doesn't even know he's on a reservation, too."