by Nathaniel Smith

 

For a century, Americans have legitimately looked to their federal government to defend them against abuses from within. The shocking death toll of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire inspired a stream of measures to protect workers. The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling ushered in a national process of desegregation in public schools. Rachel Carson's 1962 book "Secret Spring" fanned a wave of indignation about pesticides and pollution damaging the environment, resulting in the EPA being founded in 1970.

 

But in the last few years, the equation has been reversed. Well-funded organizations, some of them even masquerading as defenders of the public interest, elevate profits and special interests over all else.

 

A state like California can stand up to the federal government and represent Americans at international conferences; New York State's attorney general has brought his 100th legal action against the Trump administration; and Pennsylvania's attorney general has just won an important round in his suit against fracking companies for cheating landowners through unfair and deceptive practices to minimize royalties owed.

 

But in many other ways, townships and local citizen groups are having to resist their own state governments. Thus, normally placid municipalities in SE Pennsylvania are protesting the Mariner East 2 pipeline, which with great environmental damage and potential human hazards is being pushed through their neighborhoods and near their schools and libraries to feed corporate profits from exports of fuel to Europe. The current shutdown of Mariner East 2 construction by the state is clearly a response to public outrage magnified by courageous office-holders.

 

At the same time, contradictorily, our state's Department of Environmental Protection is supporting in court the gas extraction companies' suit against the municipalities of Grant and Highland, which have declared their right to ban the disposal of fracking wastes within their borders.

 

As Justin Nobel's May 22, 2017, article "How a Small Town Is Standing Up to Fracking in Rolling Stone quotes Grant township activist Judy Wanchisn as saying: "We thought someone was going to save us, but what we hadn't yet realized was that no one was going to save us but ourselves."

 

Some of us recently viewed in West Chester, with Sierra Club co-sponsorship, the 2016 film We the People 2.0, which features the philosophy of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, based in Mercersburg PA. After long experience defending the environment within the extant legal system, CELDF concluded that we now need to start "thinking outside the box." That box is the series of laws that have been generated over more than a century to promote industrial and financial operations with a minimum of regulation (and nationally, that minimum is in a process of rapid shrinkage).

 

The logical conclusion is that communities must declare their own rights and make their own laws to defend themselves. The state, of course, does not like that, as the state claims supreme regulatory power ("preemption"), just as the federal government tries to clamp down on state initiatives (just look at current headlines about marijuana). Our democracy has confusing and interlocking layers: federal, state, county, and local, arrayed in legislative, executive and judicial branches.

 

What we can't lose from sight in this muddle of powers is, in the words of our Declaration of Independence, that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."

 

American history tells us: when the governed stop consenting and start protesting, government changes.