Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

09/03/2026

What if the technology we’re told we “need” requires destroying the land we need even more? Phones. Data centers. Solar. Wind. Military technology. All require materials that have to come from somewhere.

In Michigan’s Porcupine Mountains, opponents of a proposed copper mine have launched Animikiiwadiswan, or Thunderbird Nest, a land defense encampment near the mine site. The proposed project threatens an area home to the largest old-growth forest east of the Mississippi.

And at the encampment, organizers are making another point: maybe connection, community, health, and well-being don't require us to be endlessly dependent on the very technologies driving more extraction.

Hear from Tom Grotewohl of Protect the Porkies on the latest Truth & Reckoning.
Watch the full conversation and learn about the encampment.

How much are we willing to extract in the name of “progress”?

https://celdf.substack.com/p/animikiiwadiswan-thunderbird-nest?r=25l6z6

09/01/2026

Can we innovate our way out of the problem, or are we just building a more efficient hamster wheel?

PaulK2 raised an important point in response to our recent piece: better technology, renewable energy, and smarter engineering can help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

Tish responds with another question: Who gets to decide what gets built in the first place, and are communities getting the full list of costs before those decisions are made?

Innovation matters. But if communities hear all the promised jobs and tax revenue while pollution, water use, waste, extraction, and other consequences stay off the spreadsheet, are we really making informed decisions?

Tish Responds: Can technology save us?

What do you think? Can better technology solve these problems, or does the system itself need to change?

08/30/2026

What if Nature didn't have to prove its value to us before we agreed to protect it?
In a new opinion piece for Tompkins Weekly, writer Elizabeth Keokosky explores Rights of Nature and the growing effort to fundamentally change how our legal system relates to the living world.

For far too long, Nature has been treated as property. Rivers, forests, wetlands, and ecosystems can be exploited and damaged so long as corporations stay within the boundaries of what regulators permit. Rights of Nature challenges that arrangement at its root.

Nature is not property. We are not separate from nature. And protecting the living world requires more than regulating how much destruction is legally acceptable.
It requires changing the relationship between people, place, and power. We're glad to see Elizabeth Keokosky and bringing this conversation to more communities.
Who decides what happens to the places we call home? We do.

Read the full opinion:
https://www.tompkinsweekly.com/opinion/rights-of-nature-b7edaa68

08/29/2026

There is a price for destroying a mountain. Apparently, there is also a price for trying to defend one. Our colleague Max Wilbert has spent years resisting the destruction of Thacker Pass, or Peehee Mu’huh, in northern Nevada, where a massive lithium mine is transforming a sacred and ecologically rich landscape into an industrial extraction zone.

Now Max is asking for help with the legal costs that have followed that resistance. They face a $49,890.13 federal fine connected to a composting latrine they built to assist Indigenous elders who needed bathroom access while visiting the land to pray.

Meanwhile, the mine itself marches forward under the banner of the “green transition.” That contradiction should bother us.

Because if our answer to ecological collapse is simply to replace one form of extraction with another, while land defenders are punished for protecting nature, then we have rewarded extractivism and penalized right-relationships.
This is Max and Will’s personal legal-defense effort, and we encourage those who can to read their account, share it, and support them. Resistance carries risk. It should not have to be carried alone.

Read Max and Will’s appeal and support their legal defense:
https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/please-help-support-my-legal-defense?r=25l6z6&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

08/29/2026

There is a price for destroying a mountain. Apparently, there is also a price for trying to defend one. Our colleague Max Wilbert has spent years resisting the destruction of Thacker Pass, or Peehee Mu’huh, in northern Nevada, where a massive lithium mine is transforming a sacred and ecologically rich landscape into an industrial extraction zone.

Now Max is asking for help with the legal costs that have followed that resistance. They face a $49,890.13 federal fine connected to a composting latrine they built to assist Indigenous elders who needed bathroom access while visiting the land to pray.

Meanwhile, the mine itself marches forward under the banner of the “green transition.” That contradiction should bother us.

Because if our answer to ecological collapse is simply to replace one form of extraction with another, while land defenders are punished for protecting nature, then we have rewarded extractivism and penalized right-relationships.
This is Max and Will’s personal legal-defense effort, and we encourage those who can to read their account, share it, and support them. Resistance carries risk. It should not have to be carried alone.

Read Max and Will’s appeal and support their legal defense:

https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/please-help-support-my-legal-defense?r=25l6z6&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

08/25/2026

The Great Lakes do not exist for us. We exist because of them.

For generations, our legal system has treated lakes, rivers, wetlands, and forests as property: things to own, extract from, pollute, regulate, and, if the paperwork is in order, destroyed.

Rights of Nature starts somewhere very different.

Our Tish O’Dell and Ben Price joined Tamara Graham for Rights of the Lakes to talk about what it would actually mean to recognize the Great Lakes as living communities with the right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve.

The conversation gets into the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, corporate personhood, the failures of conventional environmental regulation, and one of the deepest lies holding the current system together: that humans are somehow separate from Nature.

We are not protecting something “out there.” We are defending the living systems we belong to. The question is not whether the Great Lakes deserve rights. The question is how much destruction we are willing to tolerate before we finally admit they always had them.

Listen and read:

And So Do We

08/25/2026

Follow CELDF at .bsky.social for unapologetic conversations about Rights of Nature, community rights, corporate power, democracy, environmental justice, and the revolutionary work of changing the systems that keep communities and Nature subordinate to corporate interests.

We’re not interested in making a broken system slightly more tolerable. We’re interested in confronting it at the root, challenging the rules that keep power concentrated, and building something different: communities with the power to govern themselves and relationships with the living world rooted in reciprocity rather than domination.

Defend. Disrupt. Dismantle. Repair. Restore. Rejoin.
Come for the conversation. Stay for the system change.

https://bsky.app/profile/celdf.bsky.social

08/19/2026

The build-up of America’s nuclear arsenal created one of the most contaminated places on Earth. And the consequences didn’t disappear when the Cold War ended.

Along the Columbia River sits Hanford, described in our recent Truth & Reckoning conversation as the most contaminated site in North America, and potentially one of the most contaminated sites in the world.

Hanford was central to U.S. nuclear weapons production, including producing plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki and continuing production throughout the Cold War. And the nuclear industry’s footprint stretches far beyond Hanford. Uranium mining across the Southwest has left its own devastating legacy for Native communities, including around Navajo and Hopi lands.

This is the history hidden behind words like “production,” “progress,” and “national security.”

In our recent Truth & Reckoning episode, Djuli (Julie) Lomboy joins CELDF’s Max Wilbert for a conversation about her nearly 300-mile journey along the Imaɬ (Columbia River), Hanford’s nuclear legacy, and what it means to rebuild a relationship with water rooted in responsibility rather than domination.

Watch the clip, then read and listen to the full conversation:
https://celdf.substack.com/p/water-is-life-walking-the-columbia?r=25l6z6