ENVIRONMENT

Personhood for the Caloosahatchee? Some think legal standing could be the river's best hope; event aims to explain

Amy Bennett Williams
The News-Press

Fast-growing cyanobacteria blooms fouling the massive lake. Global media descending to document dead wildlife and economic devastation. Dire warnings about blue-green algae toxins’ health consequences. A governor-declared state of emergency.

Sound like the South Florida water crises of 2018? Actually, it was Ohio's summer of 2014, when algae toxins in Lake Erie poisoned the water of 500,000 Toledo-area residents, rendering the supply unusable for three days – not just for drinking, but for bathing and cooking, authorities warned.

After that wake-up call, residents seeking a new path forward found the Rights of Nature Movement, which gives natural systems legal standing.

Earlier this year, voters in a Toledo special election passed the Lake Erie Bill of Rights referendum by a wide margin.

The planet’s 11th largest lake, the water source for more than 12 million people, joins others around the world with legal sovereignty, and if area activists succeed, the Caloosahatchee won’t be far behind. 

What's likely a cyanobacteria bloom taints the Caloosahatchee at the Alva dock

On Monday, the nonprofit Clean Water Inc. is hosting a dinner, movie and discussion at Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre in Fort Myers to introduce the idea to the area. Panelists include Markie Miller and Tish O’Dell, who helped organize the Ohio campaign, Calusa Waterkeeper John Cassani and Orange County’s Chuck O’Neal, who's working in  Alachua County to protect the Wekiva and Econlockhatchee rivers.

On the table will be how to give the Caloosahatchee River its own bill of rights, said organizer Karl Deigert, a Matlacha pharmacist, and advocate – “its own set of inalienable rights that we can then use to defend the river in court as a ‘special party in interest,’ which is the legal term,” he said, “much like protecting a minor child that cannot speak for itself.”

Getting it on the November 2020 ballot will be a heavy lift. "To bring the Caloosahatchee Bill of Rights to ‘we the people,’ we must petition and raise 45,000 signatures from registered Lee County voters," Deigert said. "Petitioning will begin once we feel we have the appropriate level of voter support," and Monday's event is a step in that direction.

Ohioans frustrated by government inaction on their water crisis seized on what they saw as an innovative strategy, Deigert said, and the same principles could operate here, too.

“Our community rights to amend the Lee County charter will … empower both residents and our elected officials frustrated by preemptive and ineffectual regulations and laws,” he said.

The movement has already withstood the late-night talk show snark test, when Miller sat down to explain the concept to comedian correspondent Michael Kosta on The Daily Show in July.

Plant life fills up an oxbow on the Caloosahatchee River on Thursday 8/8/2019.

“Our premise was to change the notion that nature is merely property and that if you own the permits that you get to destroy it,” explained Miller, of the Community environmental Legal Defense Fund. “By giving Lake Erie its own set of rights, we have a better way of enforcing protection.”

Kosta scoffed. “How far can this go? A lake is a person? What’s next? Is a swimming pool a person?”

Miller stayed cool, telling him: “We realized how vulnerable we were and how precious the resource was – that it could be taken away just like that.”

Sure, the word ‘personhood’ raises eyebrows, acknowledges fellow organizer O’Dell. “While we describe it more as the right to live to flourish, exist, be healthy, in our legal world, we use ‘personhood.’"

Plant life fills up an oxbow on the Caloosahatchee River on Thursday 8/8/2019.

It’s just shorthand for an entity with rights, she said. “I don’t find this crazy at all, because corporations have had personhood rights and they’re not even a living entity,” O’Dell said, “Yet nature that we depend on is not considered having the same rights that we do in — or that corporations do.”

Nine other Florida counties are working on similar campaigns, Deigert said. He’s hoping Monday’s event will kick off fundraising, because as it does in political campaigns, "money will eventually drive the bus.”

He allows that the idea will take some getting used to, just as emancipation and women’s suffrage did, but once the citizenry sees it in action, they'll wonder what took them so long.

Plant life fills up an oxbow on the Caloosahatchee River on Thursday 8/8/2019.

“I’ve been in Florida all my life," Deigert said. “I’ve watched coral reefs become dead rock piles. I’ve watched our freshwater springs go from gin-clear to brown. I’m done watching animals stack up on our beaches like friggin’ cordwood,” he said. “We have to follow a new paradigm of how we regard nature.

"The rights of nature movement is creating laws where laws don’t exist,” he said. “Imagine the first guy who said, ‘Let’s free the slaves,’ or the first guy who said, ‘I want to give my wife the right to vote,’ Can you imagine that?” he said. “This is the stage we’re in now, but one day we’re going to look back on this and go, ‘You know what? We got it done.’"

If you go

What: Rights of Nature: The Caloosahatchee Bill of Rights. Includes dinner, the Florida premiere of the movie “We the People 2.0" and a panel discussion.

When: 5:30 p.m. Monday

Where: Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre, 1380 Colonial Blvd., Fort Myers

Tickets: $23.50 (includes dinner). Online at eventbrite.com/e/rights-of-nature-the-caloosahatchee-bill-of-rights-exercise-your-rights-tickets-75612080769

Call: 239-898-2044