In rural Pennsylvania there are 80% conservative Republicans. They're rural municipal officials whose primary job is to take care of the roads, the folks that wear the steel-toed work boots and the John Deere hats, and as a Texas attorney that we work with likes to say, "belt buckles that would make a Texan proud." Now, these folks in rural Pennsylvania have been dumped on for years. After all, rural communities being dumped on and poor communities being dumped on is nothing new. Central Pennsylvania has had its share of toxic waste incinerators, asphalt plants, low-level radioactive waste storage facilities. It is nothing new to these folks to be dumped on.

But six years ago something else happened. Agribusiness and sewage sludge corporations set their sites on those rural communities, just like the corporations before them, to drive the locating of hog factory farms and the dumping of sewage sludge on farms in that rural area of Pennsylvania. So what happens when the unlikeliest of people, in the unlikeliest of places begin to reject notions of regulating factory farms and the land application of sewer sludge? We must be clear on that point, because regulating an activity automatically means allowing it to operate. Instead they begin to simply say no to the corporate vision of agriculture that's being imposed upon them. What happens when people dare to aspire grandly? By believing that community majority should be able to define their own sustainable vision for agriculture, and therefore exercise their democratic authority to reject a vision of farming designed by a corporate few. Perhaps most importantly, what happens when people become disobedient? By believing that they can make laws to codify their values, their interests, their goals, and their futures to build the types of communities that they want and that they need.

In 1998, working with these most unlikeliest of people, in the most unlikeliest of places, we began to find out. In that year a revolt of sorts began in rural Pennsylvania and it has been unfolding ever since. It was in that year that over 300 rural municipal governments, driven by their own rural communities, their own citizens, rebelled against a corporate agribusiness minority that was intent on imposing an unsustainable vision of farming upon them. Now, unlike other battles in the past, they refused to be diverted into treating factory farms, and the land application of sewage sludge simply as "land use issues".

They learned that the regulatory system provided a corporate written script for them to follow, spending decades and dollars enforcing environmental regulations that, even when working perfectly, simply regulate the rate at which we destroy our communities and our planet. Perhaps most importantly, they learned from other experiences in other communities, that most times the only thing that environmental regulations regulate is environmentalists. They learned that every single environmental issue isn't a single issue at all, but can be traced directly to the subordination by the law of the rights of communities to the rights of the corporate few. They learned that the bullies who run this place, line their pockets and enhance their power by stopping majorities from forming, by stopping people from linking hands for a sustainable future. But also, when forced, they pull out the Constitution. They wield the law. They wield the Constitution as corporate rights to override those majorities when they do have the energy to form. And with that understanding, our rural communities began to create majorities by reframing the otherwise single issues that they were faced with in rural Pennsylvania.

And while most of the environmental groups in rural Pennsylvania were focused on writing and enforcing regulations to get factory farms and sludge corporations to cause a little less harm, our rural communities were focused on saying no and building majorities that had the authority to build sustainable agriculture in their communities. And when they did so, they discovered that they were not the first.

They discovered that beginning in 1904, in places like Oklahoma and continuing into the late 90's in eight other Midwestern states, that community majorities in those nine states had worked to protect a family farmer based marketplace by passing statewide laws that ban agribusiness corporations from owning or controlling farms. They learned that in places like South Dakota and Nebraska, they didn't just pass laws by initiative, they passed constitutional amendments that made part of their state constitutions ban agribusiness corporations from owning or controlling farms. And so without pride of authorship in Pennsylvania, we stole those models.

Close to 100 municipal governments in Pennsylvania now have taken on corporate farming directly - not to regulate it, to cause a little less harm, but to say no, that there are no benefits to this corporate farming model and we want to build our own [model] in Pennsylvania.

Now when close to 100 municipal governments out of 1000 rural municipal governments in Pennsylvania start taking on the largest agribusiness corporations in the world, not just the corporations but their trade associations like the farm bureau, and agribusiness trade associations that front for them in the legislature - as everybody knows when you do that kind of work - there's an equal and opposite reaction to every action. And when you're dealing with the largest agribusiness and sludge corporations in the world the reaction tends not to be equal at all. For three years, those agribusiness corporations have had their agribusiness supported legislators come right at those rural communities starting in 2001, and precisely because those rural communities didn't pass ordinances dealing with parts per million, or water withdrawal, or the adverse environmental impacts caused by these facilities. Because they took a different path - a democratic path about majorities making laws to implement their values, their interests and their goals - the legislature had to come at them differently. They had to draft and introduce legislation that didn't change the parts per million to allow a little more pollution. Instead they had to draft and introduce legislation that sought to strip away the lawmaking power of those rural governments. Our rural township governments, the unlikeliest of people in the unlikeliest of places, had programmed them to come after them in a certain way - not over parts per billion on data that very few people understood - but on the ground of democracy.

In those townships, not one new teaspoon full of sludge has been spread. Not one new factory farm has been sited. Now, in addition to using the legislators at their disposal, corporations also have something else at their disposal, the courts. So they picked on the littlest guy, they picked on one of the most rural townships in Pennsylvania. And what did they do? They filed a lawsuit. And what did the lawsuit say? It said that that anti-corporate farming law that you've adopted as an ordinance, violates our corporate constitutional rights. It violates our due process and equal protection rights under the corporation because corporations are persons. On the front page of the complaint it said, "We are corporations, we are persons. And your ordinance - even though you formed a majority to codify your values, interests and goals - your ordinance is unconstitutional." Unconstitutional.

So we give various updates to township governments, rural governments, and community groups across the state about where this stuff sits. And I always remember, two years ago, standing in one of those places giving an update, and a rural township supervisor put up his hand and he said, "Mr. Linzey, this is great that we can pass sludge ordinances and factory farm ordinances. Or even moving into sprawl and land development issues about the corporatization of sprawl. And that's all good stuff. But what good is it if we pass an ordinance and we can still get sued and we have to spend a $100,000 going through depositions and discovery? We have to go through that whole process of being sued and being defendants." And we looked back and him and said, "What do you want us to do? And they said, "What we want is to eliminate corporate constitutional rights at the municipal level." So we said, "Yeah, we could do that."

So we went back to the office and we began drafting the corporate rights elimination ordinance. And we put the ordinance out there. We were wondering if there were any disobedient folks out there, and it turned out there were. Once again, these unlikeliest of people in the unlikeliest of places began passing it. First a place called Porter Township, in Clarion County, an hour and a half north of Pittsburgh, unanimously voted to adopt a binding law, becoming the first in the country to pass a binding ordinance eliminating corporate constitutional rights. Another township followed in early 2003, another rural municipal government. And so through the last six years for us now - and we're really at the beginning of the beginning now - it took us six years to get here.

Up till now our job has been drafting ordinances, local laws that municipalities can adopt to put their values, interests and goals into law. We've started writing constitutions now. We've started drafting local charters under the home rule provisions in Pennsylvania. It means that we're in the business of constitution-making now, not just ordinances. Because for the last six years we've been defining what a sustainable community looks like by default. We've been saying that sustainable communities don't look like certain things. They don't have agribusiness corporations operating in them. They don't have sludge corporations operating in them. We've been defining by default.

When we started the charter writing process, we had to think to ourselves and talk to our folks who we were writing them for, about what that meant, about what goes into those. What do we want? We're so used to not asking what do we want, but what can we get? And this process allowed our rural municipal officials to start talking about what they wanted. And one of the things that folks in one of our rural communities wanted was to write about the rights of nature.

I always get in trouble for saying this, but in the United States we've never had an environmental movement. We've never had an environmental movement. The reason is, that movements in this country drive rights into the Constitution. They drive rights into the fundamental governing frameworks of communities, and the country, and states. That's what constitutions do. We've never had an environmental movement in this country because the environmental movement has never sought to drive constitutional rights for nature into the Constitution.

Now when we look back at other movements, they didn't screw around with regulating things. The abolitionists didn't ask for a slavery protection agency. The abolitionists drove the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments into the Constitution. The suffragists drove their own amendment into the Constitution. That's what movements do. In the United States, nature has no rights. Ecosystems have no rights. Rivers have no rights. Bears, cougars, trees - no rights. They're property. They're property under the law. There was a point in this country when people were property. So what happens when we start writing charters that recognize the inalienable rights of nature? Not their usefulness to us, or their value to us, but their rights in and of themselves. What happens when those provisions give people the power to stand in as trustees, to litigate the rights of nature? That's where it gets exciting.