Bellingham’s Coal Train Ban and Community Bill of Rights – an Idea Whose Time Has Come

by Derrick Jensen

Over the past several years, of all of the articles that I’ve written for magazines, two have caused the greatest consternation and dismay to mainstream environmental and progressive groups. The first, published in Orion Magazine in 2006, was entitled “Beyond Hope”, and the other, also published in Orion, in 2009, was entitled “Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change.”

The first piece advocated for giving up the false hope that someone else – an environmental group, a regulatory agency, some governmental official, or technology itself– is going to step in to change the dominant cultural system which is destroying the planet. In that piece, I declared that “a wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You cease relying on someone or something else to solve your problems, and you just begin doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.” I then went on to suggest that hope is actually a bane – because it’s really just a “secular way of keeping us in line.”

The second piece talked about how personal change carried out within the existing corporate culture – like recycling, changing our light bulbs, or driving hybrids – can’t ever equate to political change, because it doesn’t actually change the culture itself. I began that piece by asking, “Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight hour workday, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964?”

Both articles talked about the necessity of changing the dominant culture by forcing a power shift – a shift of decision making authority from a corporate minority who currently make decisions about transportation, energy, and agriculture, to majorities moving towards a sane culture which drives a new society which won’t kill the earth and our communities along with it.

Which is exactly why I got attacked by the mainstream environmental and progressive groups. Because they’re not about that power shift. They’re perfectly happy to prop up the existing culture by working to change a sentence in a corporate energy bill, or securing a small amount of funding for experiments in small-scale agriculture. In other words, they’re not about forcing a change to the culture – and the systems spawned by that culture – they’re about working within the existing culture to get it to cause a little less harm.

Extracting our communities from the dominant culture means creating a culture of resistance – a movement of people who understand that systemic change is necessary, and that systemic change doesn’t happen just because people decide to take shorter showers.

It’s why the Bellingham Community Bill of Rights, which the local NO COAL! group aims to put on the ballot in November, 2012, (with similar versions on the ballot in several other cities and towns) is so important. It envisions a new system of law which recognizes rights for the people of the community and its ecosystems; while subordinating the rights and powers of corporations to the community’s new Bill of Rights. It’s an example of what happens when people stop begging and pleading for change from governmental officials, and take their future into their own hands. It’s what happens when a cultural shift is underway – people using the law itself to support that shift, instead of the dominant culture using corporate law to abort it.

More importantly, it is sparking a change in the way that people think about these issues, and examining how the law itself is far from neutral – that it doesn’t recognize the community or nature as having rights under the law, but does recognize the rights of corporations to use them.

Ten thousand cities and towns across the United States need to replicate what residents of Bellingham are attempting to do – harnessing their municipality and the law to nurture a culture of resistance which begins to undo a centuries’ worth of law which is currently preventing a new culture from emerging. It is that new culture which must swamp the old if we are to continue to exist on this planet.

Kudos to all of those neighborhood activists, labor leaders, and community organizers who have worked to develop Bellingham’s Community Bill of Rights – for opening a new frontier for community decision making which openly challenges the stranglehold of a corporate class.

Support Bellingham’s initiative this year. I will be.

Derrick Jensen is the internationally acclaimed author of Endgame, the Culture of Make Believe, and A Language Older Than Words, and is a regular contributor to Orion magazine, Sun magazine, and Audubon. A former resident of Spokane, he earned his masters’ degree in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University, and now lives near Crescent City, California. His recently published works include Dreams and Deep Green Resistance.