Author Archives: admin

“Drift” Film Screening and Panel Discussion

Video – Community Stories shared at the Drift Screening: https://youtu.be/dDvb3TcTlXU

DRIFT Movie Poster

Lincoln County Community Rights and its allied organization Citizens for a Healthy County, are proud to present: “Drift: A Community Seeking Justice” a short film created by U of O students about the Gold Beach accident involving herbicide spray of a neighborhood. This event will be held August 27th at 6:30pm in the local PUD Public Meeting Room 2129 North Coast Hwy 101 Newport.

This is a fund raiser event for Citizens for a Healthy County. This group has filed a local initiative to ban Aerial spraying in Lincoln County.

This event will have several speakers that will discuss the harm inflicted on the community of Gold Beach in October 2013 and what we can do about it. The public will also be invited to discuss how aerial pesticide spraying has affected the lives of your family, friends and neighbors. Come join us and learn how citizens are using local lawmaking to exercise our right against involuntary poisoning by industrial logging practices.  Industrial logging cuts ten times more timber in Oregon’s coast range than the Forest Service and douses every clear cut with poisonous chemicals. These practices threaten our community’s health by contaminating our wildlife, fisheries and publicly owned water.

Citizens for a Healthy County is seeking to change this harmful practice in Lincoln County by a Citizen Initiative filed July 6, 2015. This initiative has been challenged and we need money to make sure this important ballot measure gets to the voters. This event is free to the public but donations to assist in support of the initiative are urgently needed. Contact Citizens for a Healthy County by email: mkrausster@gmail.com or by phone 541.961.6385

Life-long Forester & Activist: Roy Keene Presents in Yachats

Lincoln County Community Rights and its allied organization Citizens for a Healthy County, are proud to present:

Roy Keene, life-long forester and activist for sustainable forestry, in a talk at the Yachats Commons, on Friday July 17, 2015, from 6 to 9 p.m., addressing:

  • chemical deforestation
  • today’s industrial forests
  • a model of sustainable community forestry for Lincoln County.

A forest tour illustrating the previous evening’s talk will follow on Saturday, July 18, at 10:00 a.m. The event is free, but donations are needed and will be gladly accepted.

Questions: 541- 961-6385, mkrausster@gmail.com

Please read and print this event flyer for other to see!

LCCR-ROY-KEENE-EVENT-POSTER-

Lincoln County Community Rights Movement

The Community Rights movement seeks to protect the right of communities to make local decisions, and people’s rights at the community level. It is a movement that is spreading nation-wide as one community after another confronts situations in which it has to defend itself from unwanted action by corporations claiming the right to do business in them against the will of the local population, based on laws dictated at the federal and state levels. Since corporations are granted the constitutional rights of persons, and are additionally protected by federal contract and commerce laws and by state preemption laws, their claimed rights are guaranteed more securely than the rights of common people. Today corporations establish themselves forcefully in communities to frack, extract water, extract oil, dump sewage sludge, install factory farms, spray pesticides, all against the wishes of the community in which they operate, in spite of causing severe environmental damage to it.

The Community Rights movement seeks to empower communities to take their destinies into their own hands by passing ordinances that prohibit the harms which corporations are poised to inflict on them. In the legal battles that ensue, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), founded by attorney Thomas Linsey, provides legal support to the community in question. 160 communities in 8 States nationwide have so far passed such ordinances, thus freeing themselves from the corporate-driven harms listed above. In Oregon, there are at this point 9 counties with Community Rights groups working on these local ordinances, grouped together in the Oregon Community Rights Network (OCRN), in which people from the various groups are cooperating on crafting an amendment to the Oregon Constitution that would establish the fundamental rights of natural persons, their communities and nature, giving them the power to enact local laws that protect health, safety, and welfare. – Maria Kraus

Whistleblower Videos Reveal Helicopter Spraying Workers with Weed Killers

By Rob Davis | The Oregonian/OregonLive

“Each year, helicopters spray weed killers on more than 165 square miles of Oregon timberland, an area larger than the city of Portland. They do it under the West Coast’s weakest regulations.”

“Last year, state records show, another Applebee pilot allowed weed killers to drift 400 feet into a neighbor’s front yard during a Seneca Jones spray operation in Douglas County. Several people complained of being sickened. The pilot and the company were each penalized $407.”

Read the story updated May 22, 2015 at OregonLive

Wrestling Local Power from Corporate Control

Join Community Rights Lane County for a presentation about how local communities are fighting corporations around the country from the President of the National Community Rights Network Cliff Willmeng, CELDF lawyer Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin, and Ann Kneeland.

CRLC
This workshop presentation will explore provocative issues around democracy, the power of the corporate state, and communities’ rightful role in local decision-making. We’ll look at how the legal system presently subordinates communities and ecosystems to corporations, and how to change this.

Friday, May 22nd
6:30 – 8:30 PM
LCC Downtown Room 105

Community Rights Lane County
www.communityrightslanecounty.org

HB 3212 Undermines Laws Meant To Protect Family & Organic Farmers

A year ago this month, voters in Jackson County – led by local family farmers trying to protect their crops from GMO contamination – voted overwhelmingly to ban genetically engineered crops from being cultivated within their borders. This landslide win was a victory for grassroots activists and a rebuke for Monsanto and other corporations that spent BIG money to defeat the measure.

But now, a sneaky new bill, HB 3212, is moving through the state legislature that would undermine Jackson County’s trailblazing legislation. It gives the same industrial farm interests that fought GMO labeling the right to sue counties, cities and the state for “compensation” due to important laws that protect the environment and the public.

LabelGMOs
Groups representing family farmers, such as Friends of Family Farmers and Our Family Farms Coalition, are opposing HB 3212 since it would also undermine laws meant to protect family farmers and organic farmers from being damaged by industrial agricultural practices. Laws protecting family farmers from GMO-contamination or pesticide over-spraying, for example, would be undermined by HB 3212.

The bill has already passed the Oregon House and could soon be considered by the State Senate.

We need all hands on deck to fight this damaging legislation. Click here to find the phone number and email of your State Senator. Then, ask them to OPPOSE HB 3212 since it doesn’t protect the public, family farmers, or the environment!