Two years after a federal judge invalidated the Lake Erie Bill of Rights that Toledo voters had passed in a special 2019 election, a similar effort is underway with New York’s state legislature.
New York State Assemblyman Patrick Burke, a 37-year-old Democrat from the Buffalo area, has introduced legislation “that will create a Great Lakes Bill of Rights with the goal of securing legal rights for the entire ecosystem and giving people and nature a role in the decision-making process regarding current and future projects that impact the ecosystem.”
That’s according to a statement issued recently by his office and the Pennsylvania-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which has worked with communities across more than 10 states trying to enact rights-of-nature laws.
Much like the mothballed LEBOR effort, the language for Mr. Burke’s legislation was written with CELDF’s assistance.
The legislation states “that the people and the natural environment, including each ecosystem of the state of New York, shall possess the right to a clean and healthy environment, which shall include the right to clean and healthy Great Lakes and the Great Lakes ecosystem.”
Mr. Burke said it is especially important to protect the Great Lakes now because of climate change’s impacts on that system.
“We have shown ourselves abysmally unwise and abundantly foolish to think the Great Lakes and its complex hydro cycles could filter the enormity of our toxic assault on its watershed,” Mr. Burke said. “Without immediate consequential action to change course, we will, every one of us, be complicit in that crime against Earth and humanity. Now is the time to act decisively.”
Markie Miller, one of the key leaders behind the Toledo-area LEBOR effort pushed by the activist group Toledoans for Safe Water, said it’s “great to see the momentum build.”
“Hopefully, communities across the Great Lakes region will continue to recognize their collective power,” Ms. Miller said. “The obstacles that lie ahead are well known, but we have an obligation [as] stewards and advocates for our future, [to] future generations, and for this life-supporting freshwater system despite the barriers presented by corporate actors.”
Mike Ferner, who created the Toledo-area Lake Erie Advocates group in response to the city’s 2014 algae-driven water crisis, said nothing’s etched in stone.
“Over time, different formulations, different legislatures, and different courts may eventually decide that we should quit treating nature as someone's property to exploit and invest it with rights like it deserves,” Mr. Ferner said. “It took 50 years for the Supreme Court to overrule Jim Crow laws. It took nearly 100 years for women to get the right to vote. If we don't completely destroy the planet, one day nature will also have rights.”
In his February, 2020 ruling, handed down almost a year to the day after Toledo voters approved the LEBOR, U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary said his decision to invalidate the successful referendum was “not a close call” because he believed the measure was “unconstitutionally vague and exceeds the power of municipal government in Ohio.”
The referendum voters passed called for the LEBOR to become part of Toledo’s city charter.
An agricultural corporation called Drewes Farms, based 35 miles southwest of Toledo near the Wood County town of Custar, Ohio, filed the federal lawsuit against it within hours of its passage.
The city appealed the ruling, then quietly dropped the appeal.
Judge Zouhary denied a request from Toledoans for Safe Water to be a co-defendant in the case, but allowed the DeWine administration to serve as a co-plaintiff with Drewes.
The judge said Toledoans for Safe Water used language “that sounds powerful but has no practical meaning” when writing the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, and that the document’s purported right to self-governance is “an aspirational statement, not a rule of law.”
“Under even the most forgiving standard, the environmental rights identified in LEBOR are void for vagueness,” he wrote.
Less than two months after Toledo voters passed the LEBOR, Ms. Miller and other members of her group addressed the United Nations on Earth Day.
First Published March 6, 2022, 7:00 p.m.
