The record of a river invited to the table. The water was poisoned, the residents wrote the lake a bill of rights, and the voters passed it. It was sued the next day, the state took nature's standing away by statute that autumn, and a federal court voided the rest a year to the day after the suit. The lake was promoted from thing to person, and served.
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In August 2014 a toxic algal bloom in western Lake Erie reached the intake of the City of Toledo's water plant, and the city told its residents not to drink the water. Hundreds of thousands of people went without tap water for days. The bloom was fed by runoff from the farmland of the watershed.
Residents answered with a charter amendment, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. It declared that the lake and its watershed held a right to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve, and it gave the people of Toledo the power to enforce that right in court. On 26 February 2019 the voters of Toledo adopted it.
It was the most sincere thing a city could do for a lake, and it was done in the form of an invitation: the lake brought to the table as a party.
[See THE RIGHTS OF NATURE · RIGHTSHOLDER]
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THE HOUSE ANSWERED WITHIN A DAY
On 27 February 2019, the day after the vote, a farming partnership in the watershed sued the city in federal court. The State of Ohio intervened on the farm's side, and the court enjoined enforcement within weeks.
That summer the state legislature wrote its answer into the budget. House Bill 166, effective 17 October 2019, added a section to the Revised Code: Nature or any ecosystem does not have standing to participate in or bring an action in any court of common pleas, and no person may bring such an action on nature's behalf, Ohio Rev. Code § 2305.011(B) and (C). The state did not argue with the lake. It closed the door the city had opened.
On 27 February 2020, a year to the day after the suit was filed, the federal court held the Bill of Rights unconstitutionally vague and beyond the power of a municipality, and struck it entire, Drewes Farms Partnership v. City of Toledo, 441 F. Supp. 3d 551 (N.D. Ohio 2020). The lake's own attempt to be heard was refused along the way. The grant was made by a city and unmade by the state, because the state had never stopped holding the house.
[See THE GRANT · THE NATURAL LAW VESTMENT]
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AND THE LAKE WAS DINNER
A right is a claim held against a rival, weighed by a court. Brought to the table, the lake became a party, and a party's interest goes on the scale opposite everyone else's: the farms, the fertilizer, the yield, the jobs.
That is what a seat at the table gives a river. Not protection from the use, but standing to have its injury weighed against the use and priced. Invited to the party, the lake was what the party was serving, and the only question the court would ever have asked was how much the lake was worth to the parties who wanted to go on using it.
[See BURGLAR'S BUSINESS PLAN · SPEAKING FOR · ADMITTED INTO WHAT]
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WHAT WOULD HAVE HELD
The instrument that survives does not ask a court to recognize a new party. It names a use and an actor, under authority the body already holds, and says this use does not happen here.
New York's towns did that with drilling, and in 2014 the Court of Appeals held in Matter of Wallach v. Town of Dryden, 23 N.Y.3d 728, that their authority had never been taken away. Nothing was conferred, so there was nothing for the state to revoke. The lake did not need rights. It needed the town to remember that the whether was already the town's.
[See WALLACH v. TOWN OF DRYDEN · RESIDENCY]
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THE OBJECTION THAT HAS TO BE MET
The people of Toledo organized, drafted, campaigned and won a vote, after their water was poisoned. Calling the result an invitation to be eaten dismisses their work and blames the ones who tried.
The entry blames no one who tried. They dealt straight, and a con is built to work on the ones who deal straight. The diagnosis is of the instrument, not of the people who reached for it: the residents assembled without anyone's leave, and that assembly was the thing with force. What failed was what was added to it, a status issued by a party whose jurisdiction was never in question, which that party could withdraw, and did.
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The lake ran before there was a bench. It had residency before it had a docket.
The city offered it a seat, and the state took the seat back. The lake is still there.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
