Advocacy after the General Plan updates

By Robin Huffman, BEC Advocacy Director

As important as encouraging sustainability has been in the Chico and Butte County General Plan update process, the plans being the local constitutions to community planning out to 2030; with their near completion, BEC advocates look forward to focusing on other means of protecting the land, air, and water. Oroville adopted its general plan a couple years back, Gridley’s is nearly through the process, and Paradise is to do a minor update. The general mood, with the possible exception of Biggs, is to keep agriculture as a mainstay of Butte County in the rural areas, and to promote sustainability however possible.

The old paradigm of unending growth is reluctantly giving way to a new reality: most of our communities are as big as we should get, and can get. We’ve met our genetic potential and then some. Let’s say we’re a plus size, and it’s time to shape up as a culture. We’ve overindulged in non-renewable energy and water usage. We’ve spread subdivisions onto farmland, thinking that food can always come from somewhere else. We’re realizing that we in the North Sacramento Valley have much of the best soils and water resources available in the world, and we’re beginning to more fully appreciate and cherish this fact.

But the law is not always on the side of sustainability. As speaker David Cobb pointed out at the recent twocampus sustainability conference (Butte College and CSU, Chico), corporate personhood is a court-created precedent that extends the constitutional right of humans to corporations. The result is essentially fascism, with corporations dictating what happens. It’s been said that if corporations are people, they are not well rounded. For-profit corporations don’t, and to some extent are not allowed to by law, care about others; they are without basic humanity. Corporations focused only on profit would run rogue over the environment, without a care for social equity or the sustainability of the economy, if not for the thread of democracy that remains out of their power.

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of a private power to the point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in essence, is fascism” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt Our U.S. constitution was, however, intended for human beings, and it is David Cobb’s belief that we can “legalize democracy”. Cobb is an attorney who is working full time to reclaim the constitution as intended. Details of the movement are found at MoveToAmend.org. BEC may host democracy workshops in the coming year.

How sustainable can we be with the corporates having decided how we will get our food, what we will eat, what we will drive, where our products will be made, what we will see on television, etcetera? Are we as a culture truly free with international corporations having so much influence on so many humans? Michael Ruppert’s story about the 100th monkey in the film Collapse (see the news brief) says that once the 100th monkey starting washing coconuts (to wash off nuclear waste from a nuclear test), researchers observed that all the monkeys started washing coconuts. Maybe sustainability will be like this too. Once a certain number of people individually make the transition to living locally, maybe everyone will make the shift, whether or not they know why it’s important.

From the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of the Environmental News.