What is Democracy School?
The Daniel Pennock Democracy School is a stimulating and illuminating course that teaches citizens and activists how to reframe exhausting and often discouraging single issue work (such as opposing toxic dumps, quarries, factory farms, etc.) in a way that we can confront corporate control on a powerful single front: people’s constitutional rights.
Democracy School explores the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and offers a new organizing model that helps citizens confront the usurpation by corporations of the rights of communities, people, and the earth. Lectures cover the history of people’s movements and corporate power, and the dramatic recent organizing in Pennsylvania by communities confronting agribusiness, sewage sludge, and quarry corporations. Included with enrollment in the Democracy School is a 300 plus-page notebook of background reading material. For a historical review of the Pennsylvania work through the end of 2003, see a feature article that appeared in Orion Magazine.
Created by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD), Democracy Schools were launched with five weekend sessions at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 2003. Since then, the number of schools has grown rapidly. In 2006, there are over a dozen locations across the country offering Democracy Schools, so peruse our list and find a school near you!
The Schools are built around carefully designed readings, clear presentations and group discussions.
* Each School reveals how it came to be that the law enables corporate managers to dictate their values, and impose their projects on communities.
* Includes an intense, comprehensive history of the judicial bestowal of constitutional rights of persons on corporations.
* Learn the secret of how People’s Movements have cut to the essence and won their struggles to be “found” in the constitution.
* The Anti-Federalists
* The Abolitionists
* The Suffragists
* The Populists
* The Labor Movement
* And learn about earlier Movements, including the Levelers and the Diggers.
* Experience the story of Pennsylvania communities, and New England Town Meetings, as well as North Western city battles – in the ongoing struggle to take the power to govern out of the Corporate Boardrooms and put it back in our communities where it belongs.
* For people of all ages, interests and occupations
* Classes consist of small groups of 10-15 people like you.
“If you take no other training this year, do the Democracy School. It is a superlative unfolding revelation of how corporations have hijacked democracy. It meticulously deconstructs the historical arc that brought us to this precipice. But most importantly, it then departs into the highly pragmatic and inspiring work now underway that is slowly turning the tide . . . This Second American Revolution may be the most important political work going on anywhere in the country or the world.“
-Kenny Ausubel ‘05, Founder and Co-Executive Director, Bioneers
“Democracy School was a mind-blowing experience. During the School, I was forced to come to grips with the understanding that I really knew very little about the true structure of law that controls our activism. Democracy School is a must for everyone who seeks to be liberated from our defensive, after-the-fact reactive organizing strategies.”
-Krishnaveni Gundu, ’05, Calhoun County (TX) Resource Watch
Join:
Thomas Linzey, Esquire, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). Co-author of Be the Change: How To Get What You Want in Your Community, and co-author of the Model Brief to Eliminate Corporate Rights.
Ben Price, Projects Director for the Corporations and Democracy Program. Community Rights Organizer.
Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Legal Defense Fund.
Gail Darrell, New England Community Rights Organizer.
Shannon Biggs, California Community Rights Organizer and Global Exchange partner; co-author of Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grass Roots
And other qualified and certified Democracy School lecturers.
Democracy School is dedicated to the memory of Daniel Pennock, a 17-year-old boy from Berks County, Pennsylvania, who died in 1995 after being exposed involuntarily to land applied sewage sludge. Daniel’s parents, Antoinette and Russell Pennock, have traveled across Pennsylvania to end the practice of sludge disposal by which waste management corporations reap massive profits hauling and spreading sludge on farmland. Their work has inspired ours.
Democracy School On-Line
We’re very pleased to provide the first on-line Democracy School. This is intended to give you a feel for the schools, the content, and discussion that takes place.
You can find the schedule for Democracy Schools here, and if you are interested in hosting a school in your community, contact our Democracy School Director Stacey Schmader at stacey@celdf.org.
Having trouble viewing the videos? You may need to update your Flash player. Go to http://vimeo.com/help/flash and click on “Click here and save the Flash installer to your computer.”
Democracy School On-Line – Part I
Democracy School On-Line – Part II
Democracy School On-Line – Part III
Democracy School On-Line – Part IV
Democracy School On-Line – Part V
Democracy School On-Line – Part VI
Democracy School On-Line – Part VII
Ten reasons to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline idea
Sen. Casey (202) 224-6324
Sen. Toomey (202) 224-4254
Tell them to “Vote No on the Keystone pipeline.”
The Keystone XL pipeline is a really bad idea whose time should never come. Here’s why:
- The Keystone XL pipeline would carry toxic tar sands oil 1,700 miles from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico to be refined and exported.
- Tar sands are the most carbon-intensive source of oil on the planet — just the production creates three times as much global warming pollution as conventional crude oil.
- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates the pipeline would add 27 million metric tons of heat-trapping CO2 annually.
- The pipeline would do little for our energy security or our domestic economy. Its main purpose is to make this oil available for export.
- The refineries on the Gulf Coast at the end of the pipeline are in Foreign Trade Zones where oil can be exported to international buyers without paying U.S. taxes.
- The pipeline threatens America’s water resources. Tar sands oil is more acidic and corrosive than conventional oil and is transported under higher pressure, posing a far greater risk of blowouts in the pipeline.
- Over the last five years, pipelines in Midwestern states with the longest history of moving Canadian tar sands have spilled three times as much crude per mile as the national average.
- These tar sands pipelines are not environmentally safe. The Keystone I pipeline was predicted to spill 1.4 times per decade, yet spilled 14 times in just the first year of operation.
- In summer 2011, an older tar sands pipeline spilled more than 800,000 gallons into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River — at $725 million, the most expensive U.S. pipeline accident on record.
- We cannot ensure the security of the nearly 2,000 mile pipeline, making it a target for terrorists.
The facts are clear: This pipeline is bad for our environment, our economy, and our security.
We need clean energy, used wisely and without wasting it, to build our 21st economy.
President Obama doesn’t want the pipeline. The American people don’t want this pipeline.
It’s time for Congress to kill it. For good.
PennFuture’s 10-point plan to set world-class standards for drilling, and to make sure those standards are enforced.
Download PennFuture’s Citizens guide to Marcellus drilling and add your business or organization to our list of endorsers who want to keep drilling out of Pennsylvania’s state parks.
- Pass a substantial drilling tax.
The Marcellus and Utica Shale natural gas is high-quality gas close to the biggest natural gas market in the world, and the industry stands to make huge profits for decades from our resources. The legislature must adopt a substantial tax with no loopholes or sweetheart deals. The tax should provide significant money allocated to the environment to help fund Growing Greener; to our wildlife resource agencies like the Fish and Boat Commission to fund and modernize their operations; to local communities that are forced to “host” drilling operations, with the increased infrastructure, public safety, and social services demands that come with drilling; and to help plug the gaping holes in our state budget.
- Prevent drilling in state parks.
Over half of Pennsylvania’s 117 state parks — 61 in total — lie atop the Marcellus formation, and the Commonwealth doesn’t own the mineral rights beneath about 80 percent of state park land. Under state law, mineral right owners have the unquestioned right to develop their property, so many of our treasured state parks could see significant gas exploration soon. That will damage Pennsylvania’s quality of life as well as local and state economies. Pennsylvania should prevent disturbing the surface of state parks for gas drilling and transmission, enact a significant impact fee and require stringent pre-development studies where it can’t be avoided.
- Prevent additional new leasing of state forests for drilling, and ensure drilling on public land is properly done.
Drillers already have access to one-third of state forest lands, 700,000 acres. A comprehensive two-year study by the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) concluded that further leasing of state forest land would significantly alter the ecological integrity and wild character of our forests. More leasing would also likely lead the Forest Stewardship Council’s to revoke its certification that Pennsylvania’s state forests are sustainably managed. The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and DCNR should reinstitute a recently rescinded policy to jointly oversee drilling on public land like state parks where the Commonwealth does not own the mineral rights.
- Ensure that the Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Oil and Gas Management has the capacity and the will to oversee gas drilling activity in Pennsylvania.
The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is charged with enforcing the environmental laws that regulate gas drilling. PennFuture advocated for the newly increased fees that significantly expanded the inspection and enforcement staff. But we also serve as watchdogs over these regulators. Our attorneys continually review permit applications for new wells and reports from ongoing drilling, to find out if drillers are complying with the law and if DEP is doing its job. Our outreach and legal staff also respond to complaints and inquiries from the public.
- Increase fines for drillers that violate environmental laws.
For too long, drillers and others regarded fines as simply the “cost of doing business.” Fines for violating environmental laws should be high enough to motivate the drillers to make compliance with the law a high priority.
- Gain greater protection for streams and rivers and drinking water from gas drilling.
PennFuture is supporting legislation that would require gas wells to be set back significant distances from streams, wetlands and water supplies, and to ban gas wells from being located in floodplains. PennFuture is also supporting legislation to require drinking water to be tested for radiation.
- Increase the existing bonding requirements for oil and gas wells to ensure that the taxpayers are not left with the bill for cleaning up environmental damages caused by drilling.
The bonding requirements imposed by the Oil and Gas Act have not changed since 1984 and are simply not sufficient to cover the cost of plugging abandoned and illegally operated wells today and in the future.
- Require the drillers to disclose the amount and chemical characteristics of frack water and wastewater.
Some industry leaders have agreed to voluntarily disclose what chemicals they are using at each gas well, but we should not have to rely on voluntary measures. All drillers should be required to release their information.
- Give DEP the tools it needs to reduce air pollution.
There are many sources of air pollution associated with drilling operations. But most of them are too small to trigger requirements for the drillers to control the pollution, if looked at individually. Until recently, DEP was investigating the total air pollution from operations. But the Corbett administration recently rescinded a DEP policy that gave the department the tools to total up the air pollution from many smaller sources that are linked together, consider them one large source, and require the drillers to install pollution controls. The policy needs to be reinstated.
- Make sure that local governments retain existing zoning powers to regulate drilling.
Local governments can minimize the impact on their communities by designating areas where drilling can be done, and requiring drillers to meet certain conditions about where they cannot drill and how they operate. PennFuture opposes any efforts to remove these existing powers.
http://www.fredonia.edu/department/chemistry/faculty/pdf/TheProblemWithPlastic.pdf
http://www.fredonia.edu/department/chemistry/faculty/pdf/WhyEducateForSustainability.pdf
http://www.fredonia.edu/department/chemistry/faculty/pdf/HowToReduceYourCarbonForkprint.pdf