Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

06/12/2026

What does it mean to restore our relationship with the Earth beyond surface-level sustainability language? How can community, responsibility, reciprocity, and a fundamentally different way of understanding humanity's place within the natural world guide us toward a better future?

Maybe the problem was never that humans became too disconnected from nature.
Maybe it's that dominant systems trained people to see nature primarily as something to own, manage, and profit from.

CELDF's Tish O'Dell will be participating in this upcoming event hosted by CROW Ohio in Cincinnati, Ohio, exploring Rights of Nature, ecological restoration, and humanity's relationship with the natural world.

Learn more:
https://crowohio.org/restoring-event/

06/10/2026

People talk about corruption like it’s a glitch in the system.

A few bad actors.
Too much lobbying.
Too much money in politics.

But what if the system isn’t malfunctioning at all?
What if it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do?

This piece examines how concentrated wealth and political influence don’t just shape policy outcomes… they shape the boundaries of what communities are even allowed to imagine, challenge, or govern in the first place.

And maybe that’s the darker part of “dark money.”
Not just the money itself. The quiet normalization of power operating beyond public accountability while still pretending to be democracy. Because when wealth dictates governance, communities are no longer deciding their future.

They’re negotiating with someone else’s.

Read more:

Half a million in corporate dark money propaganda buried Measure 20-373.

06/09/2026

Our new report highlights the organizing, resistance, education, and community action happening across the country in defense of ecosystems, local self-governance, and the rights of communities to challenge systems built around extraction and control.

From America 250 conversations to frontline organizing and Rights of Nature advocacy, this work continues because people continue showing up, speaking out, and building something different together.

And none of it happens in isolation. A lot can happen in six months when people refuse to accept destruction as inevitable.

CELDF’s 2026 Mid-Year Impact Report is about helping us reach our goal of raising $50,000 and welcoming 20 new donors to support the work ahead.

Systemic change doesn’t sustain itself.
People sustain it.

Donate today and help move the work forward.
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://celdf.org/2026/06/celdf-declares-disruption-2026-mid-year-campaign/&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1781027879758479&usg=AOvVaw3Vsllsz9gxU6LrnNwBdlk1

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is helping build a decolonial movement for Community Rights and the Rights of Nature to advance democratic, economic, social, and environmental rights- building upward from the grassroots.

06/08/2026

Did you catch this episode of Truth & Reckoning?

This conversation explores Hawaii not as a tourist destination or strategic military location, but as a focal point for colonization, occupation, militarization, and U.S. expansion.

The discussion examines how systems of domination were normalized through law, culture, land theft, military power, and the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty… not as isolated historical events, but as structures that continue shaping the present.

One of the most unsettling ideas explored in this episode:
What if occupation becomes so normalized that people stop recognizing it as occupation at all?

The conversation also challenges the idea that these systems belong only to the past, arguing instead that many of the same logics of control, extraction, and domination are still active today.

History gets a lot more uncomfortable when you stop treating empire like inevitability.

Watch Episode 23 of Truth & Reckoning:
https://celdf.substack.com/p/what-revolution-systemic-racism-sexism?r=25l6z6&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

06/04/2026

One of the strangest things modern society has normalized is treating destruction like an acceptable trade-off for “progress.”

Poison the water? Economic growth.
Destroy ecosystems? Energy independence.
Displace communities? Necessary sacrifice.

This piece connects Nebraska soil to Mid-East oil through the systems that consistently prioritize extraction over life itself.

Different geography. Same logic.

Because once land becomes valuable primarily for what can be taken from it, everything else becomes secondary… ecosystems, communities, even future generations.

And somehow we’re still expected to call that development.

Read more:
https://bit.ly/49CDln9

06/01/2026

False Claim: Americans enjoy a right of self-government in every community across the nation.

Closer to the Truth:

Most people are taught that local governments exist to represent the will of the people living there.

That sounds nice.

But under Dillon’s Rule, local governments ultimately answer to the state, not the community itself. Which means if residents pass laws or policies that challenge state interests, those decisions can simply be overturned.

In other words: your town may hold meetings, elections, and public hearings… but the state still decides how much authority your community is actually allowed to have.

That’s not local self-government.
That’s permission-based governance.

And permission can always be revoked.

05/26/2026

A lot of people love quoting “revolutionary” language until the conversation becomes too honest.

Then suddenly everyone gets uncomfortable.

This discussion takes a deeper look at the realities often edited out of America’s founding story: systemic racism, sexism, culturecide, genocide, and the structures that didn’t disappear… they evolved.

Because you can’t meaningfully talk about revolution while ignoring who was sacrificed to build the version of freedom we inherited.

And history gets real interesting when you stop treating national mythology like sacred scripture.

Watch here:
https://bit.ly/3RJpdlO