Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Take back your legal rights to protect your community against turbines!

Are you fighting an industrial wind turbine project and finding, to your horror, that you’re getting nowhere with state & federal regulatory agencies?

•State Department of Environmental Conservation (aka Ministry of the Environment)
•State Department of Health
•State Attorney General’s Office
•Army Corps of Engineers
•and so forth
Are you discovering that Big Wind operates in collusion with the state and federal government, and there is no way to legally prevent these corporate knaves from getting their permits to destroy your community?

In sum, have your community rights been usurped by state or provincial law (witness the Green Energy Act in Ontario, Canada, and equivalent legislation in Wisconsin and Maine, and pending legislation in Massachusetts)?

If the answer’s “yes,” you’d better watch this video. It describes the exciting, grassroots work of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). The video is about pesticide use in Santa Cruz, California, but you can just as well plug in “wind turbines” for “pesticides.”


Now, read this. It’s a letter from the CELDF, describing their services. (In this instance, it’s about hydrofracking in the “Marcellus Shale sacrifice zone.”)

Now ask yourself, Why can’t this approach be used against “wind farms”? Would the CELDF give advice, or, better yet, legal representation in your campaign? If they’re already stretched too thin, why can’t another group of attorneys and campaigners be formed to defend communities explicitly against turbines—using the same legal principles invoked by the CELDF?

Please forward to friends throughout the Marcellus Shale sacrifice zone:

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) is pleased to offer free assistance to you to get a local law banning fracking adopted in your municipality. Join Pittsburgh, and take a stand for Community Rights! [The City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, recently banned hydrofracking for natural gas.]

Please send an e-mail to me, including your name, phone number, address, and e-mail in the body, and the name of your municipality and county in the subject line to: BenPrice@celdf.org

We’ll prepare and send you the ordinance and petitions, outline steps and strategies, conduct conference calls with your core group of neighbors, and work with you throughout the process as closely as possible. Only costs: please reimburse mileage if we travel to your community to do presentations, etc. Free legal services to assist in the defense of the ordinance if there is litigation against the municipality, after the ordinance is adopted.

Check out our website: Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
And here’s the CELDF facebook page: CELDF—Facebook
Pennsylvania Community Rights Network facebook page: PCRN—Facebook
Northwestern chapter of PCRN Blog: NWPACRN
Sincerely,

Ben Price

Projects Director
CELDF
717-254-3233
BenPrice@celdf.org

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