May 31, 2018
Listing Recognizes CELDF’s Groundbreaking Work
Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), is profiled as one of the nation’s leading environmentalists in a newly published book, American Environmental Leaders.
This encyclopedia of American environmentalism comprehensively surveys those who, through words and/or deeds, have advanced awareness of environmental concerns from colonial times to the present. It is edited by Anne Becher and published by Grey House Publishing.
Linzey, who co-founded CELDF in 1995 with Stacey Schmader, says of his inclusion in American Environmental Leaders,
“It is an honor to have our work, assisting the people in governing their own communities through claiming their rights to be stewards of their environment, numbered alongside such luminaries as Ansel Adams, Rachel Carson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. They did so much to promote awareness of the innate beauty of nature, and the calamity caused by treating the environment as a limitless source of corporate raw materials. Now we are taking the structural steps to remedy that calamity by working with communities to change the framework of law created by, and which favors, economic entities over the inalienable rights of natural and human communities.”
CELDF is a nonprofit, public advocacy law firm that provides free and low cost legal services to local governments and nonprofit organizations fighting to defend communities from environmental degradation. CELDF assists communities in legislative and policy drafting, legal research, and legal defense, as well as education and training. CELDF has assisted over 200 communities across the United States to enact Community Bills of Rights laws that ban dangerous corporate activities, such as fracking and factory hog farms, within their localities. Since the early 2000s, CELDF has also worked with communities across the U.S. and the world to adopt laws recognizing legally enforceable rights for ecosystems and nature.