American Democracy (and Other Fairy Tales)

Think your community can stop a new data center, factory farm, or fracking? Think again.

Think your community can stop a new data center from coming in? How about a factory farm, water bottling plant, or oil and gas drilling? No, no, and, well, no.

No one tells communities the truth—that they don’t have the legal authority to stop corporations from moving into their town, no matter the damage they will cause. The law simply doesn’t allow communities the ability to say “no” to things that will hurt them. It’s almost as if we don’t live in a democracy.

American Democracy (and Other Fairy Tales) takes you on the journey of a lawyer who set out to help communities protect themselves and the environment, only to find out that it was impossible without taking on the very basic structure of our government, the US Constitution itself. His story, and the stories of the people and communities he works with along the way, is one that reaches back to the founding days of America.

Author Thomas Linzey is the father of the “community rights” movement. He pioneered the first local laws to empower US communities to protect themselves, not just from corporate harm—but from a system of law that protects the rights of corporations to harm our communities, over the rights of communities to protect themselves from harm.

Linzey also launched the global “rights of nature” movement, writing the world's very first laws to recognize that nature—including ecosystems and species—possess legally enforceable rights.

The book concludes with a plan to create true local democracy by organizing for constitutional change. It calls for a system in which our communities can adopt laws more protective than those adopted by the state and federal government and that recognize the rights of people and nature to clean water, air, and soil, and a healthy environment.