Lake Erie Personhood – is Cleveland next?

photo credit: tripadvisor.com

Tom Jackson reported at The Sandusky Register:

SANDUSKY — Voters in Toledo approved a “Lake Erie Bill of Rights” as an amendment to the city charter, a measure aimed at giving the lake and its watershed legal rights that can be defended in court.

A local farm immediately filed a lawsuit challenging the measure as unlawful. The Ohio Farm Bureau vowed to support the lawsuit.

The measure was approved Tuesday after winning approval by 61 percent of the voters.

Toledoans for Safe Water said they were pleased to get the measure approved despite the opposition of special interest groups, such as industry and the farm lobby.

“It was definitely a long, hard struggle to get to this day, but all the hard work and countless volunteer hours by everyone in our local community group has paid off,” said Crystal Jankowski, an organizer with the group. “We started this more than two years ago and had to overcome election board decisions and protests in court just to get on the ballot.”

Backers described the law as the first of its kind in the U.S. and said it guarantees the right of Lake Erie to exist, flourish and naturally evolve.

“It is in accord with the larger Rights of Nature movement and philosophy which, over the past decade, has resulted in Ecuador’s 2008 constitutional acknowledgment of the rights of Mother Nature; New Zealand’s 2014 granting legal personhood to the Te Urewera forest; and India’s courts ruling in 2017 that the Ganges and Yamuna rivers have rights to exist, thrive, and evolve,” a news release states, which was issued by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit which helped draft the amendment.

The “Rights to Nature movement” is apparently seen by at least some farmers as an attack on private property rights.

. . .

And how is Lake Erie to represent itself in court? Will we be electing a Lake Erie Regent to assert jurisdiction and define rights? Read the full report here. 

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