Thomas Linzey

Thomas Linzey serves as Senior Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), an organization committed to globally advancing environmental rights. He is the co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), and is widely recognized as the founder of the contemporary “community rights” movement which has resulted in the adoption of several hundred municipal laws across the United States. He also sits on the Board of Advisors of the New Earth Foundation.

Linzey is a cum laude graduate of Widener Law School and a three-time recipient of the law school’s public interest law award. He has been a finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award, and is a recipient of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union’s Golden Triangle Legislative Award. He is licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania, and he is admitted to practice in the United States Supreme Court, the Third, Fourth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuit Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. District Court for the Western and Middle Districts of Pennsylvania.

He is a co-founder of the Daniel Pennock Democracy School – which has been taught in twenty-four states across the country and which has graduated over 5,000 lawyers, activists, and municipal officials – which assists groups to create new community campaigns which elevate the rights of those communities over rights claimed by corporations. Linzey is the author of Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community (Gibbs-Smith 2009), the author of On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability (PM Press 2016), the co-author of We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States (PM Press 2016), has served as a co-host of Democracy Matters, a public affairs radio show broadcast from KYRS in Spokane, Washington and syndicated on ten other stations, was featured in Leonardo DiCaprio and Tree Media’s film 11th Hour and We the People 2.0 (Official Selection of the Seattle International Film Festival), assisted the Ecuadorian constitutional assembly in 2008 to adopt the world’s first constitution recognizing the independently enforceable rights of ecosystems, and is a frequent lecturer at conferences across the country.

His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, the Nation magazine, he was named, in 2007, as one of Forbes’ magazines’ “Top Ten Revolutionaries,” and, in 2018, Linzey was named as one of the top 400 environmentalists of the last 200 years in the two volume encyclopedia, American Environmental Leaders (3rd Ed. Grey House Publishing 2018). He is currently working on a new book, “Modern American Democracy (and other fairy tales)” (forthcoming Spring, 2021). Linzey currently resides in Spokane, Washington.

Learn more about the CEDLF HERE


We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States

SKU: 9781629632292
Editors: Thomas Linzey and Anneke Campbell
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781629632292
Published: 11/2016
Format: Paperback, mobi, ePub, PDF
Size: 5.5 x 8.5
Page count: 192
Subjects: Political Activism/Law



Praise

“Nature’s right to gloriously carry forth are as inalienable as the sun rising each morning. Yet, we must fight hard to codify those immutable principles in human law and community practice. Tom Linzey and Anneke Campbell’s remarkable book help to revolutionize our thinking and our plan to enact and sustain this deep common sense. With an offence we can save the day. We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States is on the offence! ”
—Randy Hayes, Rainforest Action Network founder, Executive Director Foundation Earth

“For thousands of years, the law of human beings was to keep the covenant with the natural world. Greed, the rise of empire and the modern corporate state have undermined this covenant and placed communities, human health, and the natural world in peril. The work on restoration of the rights of nature, and the rights of those who live there, or community rights, is essential to the transformation of our legal and policy system into one which is sustainable, and one which will serve the needs of the natural world and the seven generations ahead. This book is not only the concept, it is most importantly the practice of the hard work of making change.”
—Winona LaDuke, executive director of Honor the Earth

“As we scan the landscape of cataclysmic destruction, both environmental and social, behind the curtain in most cases is an economic motive. The rhinoceros in the room today is corporate power, the inevitable logic of a system that relentlessly concentrates wealth, distributes poverty, and leaves in its terrible wake a democracy deficit. This powerful book is a field guide to nonviolent revolution. It tells the story of how courageous communities are using innovative legal and political strategies to restore nature, communities, and democracy. It’s some of the most important work in the world today. Read it and act.”
—Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder of Bioneers


On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability: The Community Rights Movement in the United States

SKU: 9781629631264
Editors: Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund • Introduction by Thomas Linzey
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781629631264
Published: 07/2015
Format: Pamphlet, mobi, ePub, PDF
Size: 5 x 8.5
Page count: 64
Subjects: Politics-Activism/Law



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