Good Video on Right's-Based Organizing

This video is the best introduction that I've seen yet on what Community Rights and "rights-based" organizing is all about.

"Communities, municipal officials, environmental and social justice organizations, and others engages in this "rights-based" organizing have come to a shared conclusion--we can't achieve local self-governance or sustainability under the existing structure of law.

"And further, that in order to drive necessary structural change into our legal system, they must begin by making legal change at the local level, and then drive it upward."--Thomas Linzey from "New Frontiers: Building a Grassroots Movement for Community Rights and the Rights of Nature" video

Reading "Lined Paper" This Morning

A few quotes that caught my attention while doing some reading about human rights out of Daniel Quinn's If The Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways.

"If there are still people here in two hundred years, they won't be thinking the way we think, because if people go on thinking the way the way we think, then they'll go on living the way we live--and if people go on living the way we live, there won't be any people here in two hundred years."-- pg. 128

"To us, having to assert a right in to order to have the things we want or want to do is taken to be a sort of human norm." Pg.92

"I've searched many dictionaries of aboriginal languages, and very few of them seem to have a word for right in this sense. In all the reading I've done about aboriginal peoples, I've never come across any instance of them arguing about rights or asserting a right to do the things they do." Pg. 91

Resistance Radio and Rights-Based Organizing

Spent time with Derrick Jensen and Thomas Linzey on the mail route yesterday. I highly recommend this interview to anyone concerned about our children's future. With the planet warming faster than most expected we are going to be faced with the issue of whether or not Nature has the right to exist and flourish sooner than we think. Atleast that is my humble opinion. Or maybe I'm being too hopeful.