Dom Alhambra

“The only thing that environmental regulations regulate are environmentalists.”
Jane Anne Morris, Corporate Anthropologist

1) If you are trying to prevent a harmful commercial entity from directly or indirectly destroying your local environment, there is no current legal method to ban these entities from entering.
1a) A traditional environmental lawyer must wait until the commercial permit application is accepted by the state government, and then must appeal the permit application.
1a.i) Appealing a permit application does not meant trying to stop the commercial entity for good. The appeal only finds deficiencies or omissions in the permit application, like missing signatures.
1a.ii) If the appeal succeeds, and the commercial entity’s permit is pulled, all the entity has to do is fix the permit application. Then, the permit application is accepted and the environmental lawyer can do nothing else.

2) Very often, environmental regulations are not written by those who are supposed to be protected from pollution and environmental destruction, but are written by those being regulated.
2a) Environmental regulations make it predictable as to how environmental lawyers defend against permit applications by exploitative entities.
2a.i) Federal and state environmental protection agencies do not exist to prevent pollution and commercial externalities, but to permit them and tax them. This is an incentive to continue pollution, not stop it.
2b) Traditional environmental lawyers hope they can at least waste these entities’ money with appeals, but that’s not the case.
2b.i) Expenses to permit re-application are tax-deductible, unlike the expenses of those attempting to protect themselves from polluted air, land, and water.
2b.ii) In a sense, state and federal agencies are paying for commercial entities to pollute air, land, and water, and penalizing those defending themselves.

Clarifying a Solution

There are methods to directly prevent a commercial entity from entering you or your community’s land.
a) The first utilizes a foundation of Western European law: private property rights.
a.i) If a piece of land is privately owned, then a commercial entity cannot infringe upon its existence, as the land is an extension of its owner.
a.ii) There are some limitations, state governments like Colorado allow one to purchase surface rights or sub-surface rights. This means that a land owner cannot protect themselves from sub-surface exploitation in these states, because a commercial entity can destroy everything beneath the ground including wells and aquifers.
a.iii) Even with these limitations, a land owner, if given the legal tools and support system, can launch lawsuits against direct or indirect violations of the land they do own. Lawsuits are typically ignored because the land owner does not have the financial capacity to do so, unlike the typical commercial entity.
b) The second method is highly experimental: To create local ordinance that recognizes the “rights of nature”: That a natural entity has the right to exist, flourish, and evolve naturally.
b.i) This runs counter to Western law, and is technically “illegal” for federal and state governments.
b.ii) Despite legal questions, small towns in the U.S. have pushed ahead to recognize the rights of nature, and thereby give themselves the local capacity to enforce this right against violators, as well as the ability to ban specific commercial entities because of their inevitable tendency to destroy the environment.
b.iii) The first town to adopt “rights of nature” was the conservative town of Tamaqua, PA. This led to the Ecuadorian government re-writing its national constitution to recognize the rights of nature. In Ecuador, there have been over 60 enforceable cases since 2008, where natural entities have sued violators.
b.iv) After Ecuador, the movement has continued to slowly expand in the U.S., including Pittsburgh when oil drillers wanted to frack inside the city limits (because a Catholic cemetery was letting them!).

America, Wilder’s Objective to Establish a Sense of Place

Even if community and land rights were successfully implemented in American towns, it is up to the culture of that community to uphold and enforce them. Modern economic and cultural processes have eroded the individual’s “sense of place”—they stake little personal identity in their natural surroundings. Because of this, seemingly intangible forces like corporate land exploitation and the subordination of individual and community rights to state and federal agencies appear be unstoppable, because that individual and community find neither the means or the inclination to stop it.

I believe that this “sense of place” is like a socio-psychological muscle that needs to be worked out again so a person can rediscover their skin in the game of life. Once this identity is worked back into shape, people and their communities will naturally adopt the tools to defend themselves against state-sponsored land exploitation.

America, Wilder is a research and development firm that seeks to experiment with ways to rekindle a sense of place for individuals and communities through legal, social, and technological innovations.
a) The initial goal is to collect all available resources (documents, lawyers, successes, challenges, etc.) in one place.
a.i) This will create a legal library and a trust fund that supports environmental lawyers, individuals, and communities afford to defend themselves against commercial exploitation.
a.ii) I also want to produce local workshops that educate individuals and communities on their ability to defend themselves against commercial, state, and federal exploitation.
a.iii) I want to make it fast, easy, and accessible to roll out local ordinances that leverage private property and the “rights of nature” against exploitative commercial entities and failed government programs.
b) Besides this, I have about four other solutions that contribute to a larger ecosystem of engaging people on a global scale to work with each other to ensure the protection of local lands. Each solution is distinct:
b.i) Develop an open-source crowd-funding toolkit for communities to purchase land back for protection and communal enjoyment.
b.ii) Create a membership-based co-op of private property owners that seek to perpetually keep portions of their land naturalized, and in return receiving financial and legal support from other members if running into financial/legal hardships maintaining these naturalized lands.
b.iii) Develop educational programs focused on outdoor skills, LNT, and the rights of nature. This would be a non-profit NOLS competitor that doesn’t seek to conquer land through mountaineering but to maintain stewardship of it through re-naturalization.
b.iv) Highly experimental, but real-world commercial examples exist: Create a blockchain-based land tokenization network that allows community members to have a stake in purchased/protected lands, incentivizing global purchasers to all or part of a physical “Non-Fungible Token”.
b.v) Create a land purchase trust that receives donations to procure pieces of land, and in return have donor names memorialized on purchased lands. Funds to make the land held in perpetuity are created by community events conducted on land, ecological research, and recreation.