On October 24th, 2012, several agents from Pennsylvania General Energy, an oil-and-gas exploration company, met privately with local officials from the rural western Pennsylvania community of Grant Township. Fracking was booming in Pennsylvania, and PGE had been trucking tens of thousands of gallons of fracking wastewater to faraway injection wells in Ohio. Developing an injection well somewhere in Pennsylvania could save the company around $2 million a year, and Grant Township, a swath of woods and hayfields slightly larger than Manhattan and populated by a mere 741 people, seemed like an especially good spot.
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Fracking involves sending millions of gallons of chemical-laden pressurized fluid into deep layers of rock, creating fractures that release trapped oil and gas. In the past decade, Americans have been enjoying the cheap domestic energy resulting from the fracking boom, which now produces two-thirds of the country's natural gas and half of its oil. But fracking has also created its share of unwanted byproduct. Some 36,000 oil-and-gas wastewater-injection wells – disposal sites for the fluid that seeps to the surface after a well is fracked – lie sunk across our land. Pennsylvania presently has only eight active injection wells, but several are in the process of being permitted. And as the incredibly gas-rich Marcellus shale layer is developed, along with another massive shale layer a few thousand feet beneath it called the Utica, there will surely be more to come.
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Essentially, Wanchisn learned, the ground beneath her would be used as a vast toxic-waste storage locker. PGE planned to inject 42,000 gallons of fracking wastewater a day into a layer of rock 7,500 feet beneath the ground, where it was to remain for eternity. The pumping would continue 24 hours a day, every day, for half a generation or more – Wanchisn's teenage grandchildren could be married with children, and PGE would still be injecting fracking waste.
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Despite calls from Donald Trump and his EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, to roll back "out of control" environmental regulations, in reality, the federal government rarely blocks projects outright. Battles tend to unfold within the regulatory system once a project gets the green light – a community marks out a certain threshold for pollution and tries to ensure the polluting industry stays below that mark. When it comes to fracking, the EPA has been especially business-friendly, declaring injection "a safe and inexpensive option for the disposal of unwanted and often hazardous industrial byproducts," and has approved thousands of wells across the country.
"Americans are often under the belief that the EPA or their local state environmental agency is going to save them from environmental pollution, and that is simply not the case," says Leila Conners, a documentarian whose 2016 film, We the People 2.0, examines how corporations undermine American democracy. "What people have to realize is that they are participating in a system that is not working. Across our country right now, companies are allowed to dump their waste pretty much for free."
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or Linzey, the battleground could not be more fundamental. Congress' power to regulate state policy is laid out in Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution: "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." The Commerce Clause, as it's known, binds 50 sovereign territories into the United States of America. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law because discrimination was found to have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. The Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act share a similar story. In America, social and environmental justice hangs on commerce. And American corporations have feasted off this arrangement. "Our constitutional structure is an archaic suicide pact," Linzey says. "You are looking at a system of law that elevates rights of property and commerce above the rights of communities, people and nature."
The expansion of constitutional rights for corporations – commonly referred to as corporate personhood – began with an 1886 case involving the Southern Pacific Railroad. Chief Justice Morrison Waite, a corporate attorney who had never served a day as judge prior to joining the Supreme Court, determined the 14th Amendment, originally crafted to secure constitutional rights for freed slaves, applied to corporations as well. In 1906, corporations gained protection from unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment. A 1931 case involving a Russian shipbuilder protected corporations from unlawful government seizures under the Fifth Amendment. A series of cases in the 1970s granted corporations free-speech rights under the First Amendment, freedoms expanded in the 2010 Citizens United decision. Four years later, the Hobby Lobby case granted religious freedoms to corporations as well.
But the growing influence of corporations on all branches of the U.S. government has inspired an opposing narrative, albeit one on the fringes of legal theory: the development of a nature personhood. "Given the rigidity and hostility of the current Court's standing jurisprudence, the intransigence of Congress, and the over-crowded agenda of the Executive Branch," Georgetown legal scholar Hope Babcock wrote in a 2016 paper on the rights of nature in Ecology Law Quarterly, "this may be the only way to protect our disappearing natural resources."
That's where CELDF comes in.