EARTHKEEPING
NEWS
A NEWSLETTER
OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY
Volume Fourteen, Number Four
July / August 2005
A Little Child Shall Lead Them
His name was Danny Pennock. He was just a kid living in rural Pennsylvania. In 1995, he hunted on land in Berks County, Pennsylvania near a field sludged with human waste. When he played basketball across the street from the field, he got too near the sludge and took ill. Within seventy- two hours he was dead.
That was the beginning of the Daniel Pennock Democracy School, Rethinking Corporations, Rethinking Democracy. Danny wasn't the only child that died of exposure to sludge, but the Daniel Pennock Democracy School is working to make him one of the last.
What can local people do about the fact that since the Reagan Administration 60% of all sludge, or urban waste, is being dumped on the farmlands? Or that large hog farms are creating immense cesspools which have been proven to poison nearby farmers, destroying their lives?
Richard Grossman and Thomas Linzey, Esq. are the founder and coordinator of the Daniel Pennock Democracy School. Their aim is to gather a few local people at a time to deal with the local problems they face. These problems may vary from sludge in the fields to unwanted quarries. They all share the problem of big corporations, with unlimited resources, running roughshod over this whole planet to meet their ever-increasing economic goals. To try to deal with them through the law courts or regulatory agencies is futile and even counter-productive. But 300 townships in Pennsylvania and nine states in the Midwest, through 800 graduates of the Daniel Pennock Democracy School, are working to see that Danny didn't die in vain.
Courageous people like some residents of St. Thomas Township in Franklin County, PA are considering adopting a state-authorized Home Rule Charter to address the underlying problem and create a sign of hope. Their newly elected supervisor got word on his first day in office that if he opposed a corporation trying to build a local quarry, it would sue the township. He dropped his opposition, but a committed core has gone on the offensive in the courts and on TV. Their appeal is as follows:
- People have fundamental and inalienable civil and political rights.
- Governments are created by the people to secure these rights for the people.
- Governments have bestowed "Rights" on corporations.
- The corporations have wielded their "rights" to deny the rights of people and nature.
- This is usurpation, governments doing indirectly what they are prohibited from doing directly.
In a democracy, are the people sovereign, or are private corporations, who falsely claim the right to personhood? Where do we as citizens and communities of faith stand? Are we willing to do something about it? This is the challenge of the Democracy School Movement.
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