We The People * Thomas Linzey, Anneke Campbell

Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States. This empowering political text delivers a series of highly practical case studies of ordinary American communities that broke through bureaucratic corporate legal structures to ban destructive environmental projects by writing their own grassroots municipal laws.

The Story: Co-authored by prominent civil liberties attorney Thomas Linzey (the pioneer of the community rights movement) and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Anneke Campbell, this celebrated 2016 activist work is an unyielding cornerstone of grassroots political literature. The authors move past abstract academic policy debates, superficial protest slogans, and low-friction online petition checklists. Instead, drawing from more than two decades of raw, on-the-ground legal battles orchestrated by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), they show that saving a neighborhood from toxic corporate invasion relies on treating local self-governance as an fundamental, revolutionary right rather than a state-granted privilege.

The book takes environmental protectors, local organizers, and political science students through an exceptionally deep structural landscape across its 176 pages. The  location-by-location case study format details how rural towns and larger urban spaces from New Hampshire to Oregon successfully fought back against hydraulic fracturing, corporate mining, toxic waste dumping, and factory farming. The text unpeels how current laws actively "legalize" the damaging choices of mega-corporations, providing citizens with precise templates to rewrite the structural rules of local control, strip polluting industries of their corporate personhood entitlements, and assert legally enforceable rights for nature itself.

Rather than reading like a dry or abstract historical archive, the chapters are an eye-opening companion for modern civic action and community resilience. Linzey and Campbell pair their legal science with a warm, encouraging, and conversational tone, teaching readers how a dedicated focus on local constitution-drafting can defuse corporate intimidation, handle immense administrative pushback, and build a permanent environment of collective transparency. Published as a premium trade paperback edition by the legendary independent house PM Press, this popular, highly cited guide remains an essential roadmap for self-determination and grassroots leadership shelves worldwide.

Perfect For: Grassroots organizers, environmental activists, and independent startup builders looking for an uncomplicated, highly detailed text to master localized legal strategy and municipal policy engineering; fans of data-heavy political reform books; and libraries expanding their community action collections.

Published 2016 by PM Press.

Politics & Social Sciences / Environmental Law & Activism / Community Organizing / Grassroots Politics / Constitutional Reform / Civil Disobedience Sagas