Environmental speaker at two local events this week

Thomas Linzey, the Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, will speak at two local events on Sunday, November 13th and Monday November 14th.

Sunday November 13th, Thomas will be appearing, along with Derrick Jensen, a noted environmental writer and activist, in Charlottesville, Va. at 8pm at the Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church, 717 Rugby Road. The subject of their discussion will be The Rights of Nature. Derrick Jensen is one of the most outspoken voices in the environmental movement, and is the winner of numerous environmental awards and honors including the Eric Hoffer Book Award, USA Today’s Critic’s Choice Award, and Press Action’s Person of the Year award. Jensen is the author of more than twenty books, including Endgame, A Language Older than Words, and The Myth of Human Supremacy, his latest work.

The next evening, Monday November 14th, Thomas will be speaking at a Friends of Nelson sponsored Public Meeting at 7pm at the Rockfish Valley Community Center in Afton. The subject of this meeting will be Community Rights.

Both Community Rights and The Rights of Nature are major focuses of the work of CELDF. CELDF has assisted many communities in numerous part of the country to fend off the efforts of corporations who wanted to bring fracking, pipelines, factory farms, water privatization, and other environmentally destructive activities to local communities.

CELDF’S Community Rights work emphasizes the rights of a community to promote local self-government and first-in-the-nation groundbreaking laws to protect the rights of citizens to prevent environmentally hazardous, unsustainable endeavors from being pursued in those communities, by providing free and low cost legal services, grassroots organizing, and education to communities, states, and countries facing injustice, helping them to assert their right to fight the harms they face. The Rights of Nature include the rights of ecosystems to flourish and evolve, recognizing our dependence on nature and our need to love in harmony with the natural world. CELDF helps secure the highest legal protection for nature and sustainability, recognizing the rights of both humankind and nature to health and well-being.