Pennsylvania Town Fights Big Coal on Mining Rights

by John Hurdle. Published by Reuters June 15.
A small Pennsylvania town is trying to ban coal mining in a battle being played out across the state as rural communities try to assert control over mining, gas drilling and other businesses.

Blaine Township, a community of 600 about 40 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, hopes to trigger a legal battle that could determine the rights of municipalities throughout the United States to control corporate activity.

Some legal experts say the township is highly unlikely to win that fight. For now the dispute is in federal district court, where major energy companies have sued the township over three ordinances that would ban coal mining and require companies in any business to disclose their activities to local officials.

Penn Ridge Coal LLC, a unit of Alliance Resource Partners, and Allegheny Pittsburgh Coal Co., a unit of Allegheny Energy, say Blaine's laws violate their corporate rights.

The companies say the ordinances would prevent them from mining 10.6 million tons of recoverable coal beneath the township -- enough to supply electricity for 2 million people for a year.

The township has gone further than any of the 120 U.S. municipalities -- most of them in Pennsylvania -- that have passed ordinances to curb corporate activity such as factory farming or spreading sewage sludge, said its lawyer, Tom Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Of three townships sued by corporations over their ordinances, only Blaine has refused to back down, Linzey said.

Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, towns are resisting efforts by energy companies to extract natural gas from the massive Marcellus Shale formation amid fears that toxic chemicals used in drilling are contaminating ground water and endangering human health.

Creeks Diverted
In Blaine, residents are seeking to prevent coal mining -- which they expect to begin there in 2011 -- because they fear it will ruin their houses and disrupt water supplies, as they say it has in surrounding areas.

They want to block longwall mining, a technique that rips tons of coal from underground without putting anything in its place, causing the land above to sag. The practice, which has been used in coal-rich southwest Pennsylvania since the 1970s, has cracked the walls, roofs and basements of homes and opened fissures in the land, diverting or draining creeks and ponds.

In neighboring Morris Township, Tammy Bowman pointed to a pile of broken wood and concrete -- all that's left of an outbuilding she said was destroyed by shifting ground from mining beneath her 19th century farmhouse.

"It just started to drop and drop," she said. "It got so bad, you couldn't even walk in the door."

One section of her house is held up with mechanical jacks.

Near the village of Graysville, the 62-acre (25-hectare) Duke Lake, once used for fishing and boating, now sits empty after the shifting ground opened a crack in its retaining wall, environmentalists say.

Blaine's three ordinances, passed in 2006, 2007 and 2008, also assert that communities have a right under the U.S. Constitution to control business within their boundaries and that corporations do not have constitutional rights as "persons" to sue municipalities for passing laws that would hurt corporate interests.

"This illegitimate bestowal of civil and political rights upon corporations prevents the administration of laws within Blaine Township and usurps basic human and constitutional rights guaranteed to the people of Blaine Township," says the township's Corporate Rights Ordinance of 2006.

To implement the ordinances, township supervisors are now campaigning for "home rule," a legal code that transfers some powers from state to local control and is commonly used to raise taxes or increase the number of supervisors on a board.

Establishing Home Rule
Blaine supervisors want to use home rule to establish what they say is the township's constitutional right to control corporate activity. Voters on May 19 approved a plan to set up a commission to study the proposal and recommend whether to adopt it.

A third lawsuit has been brought by Range Resources, a natural gas company, asking the court to invalidate Blaine's demand that corporations disclose their activities.

Penn Ridge Coal and Allegheny Pittsburgh Coal are asking U.S. Judge Donetta Ambrose of the Western District of Pennsylvania to declare Blaine's ordinances invalid and unenforceable.

In April, Judge Ambrose denied the township's motion to dismiss the case. She is expected to rule late this year.

Linzey predicted the case will eventually go to the U.S. Supreme Court because it pits energy companies who want to exploit one of America's richest coal seams against residents who are determined to resist what they see as rapacious mining.

He conceded the court is unlikely to overturn more than 100 years of established law that gives corporations rights as "persons" under the constitution, but he said the expected outcome would become a springboard for a popular campaign for a constitutional amendment to strip corporations of those rights.

Blaine's supervisors said they want to establish a principle of local self-government that will inspire other communities.

"Who dictates how we are going to live here?" asked Board spokesman Michael Vacca. "Should it not be us?"

(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Cynthia Osterman)© 2009 Reuters

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Vote to test corporate water rights

By Ann S. Kim, Staff Writer; published May 11 by the Portland (ME) Press-Herald

A key battle in Maine's ongoing war over water will be decided in Wells on Saturday.

Voters at a town meeting will decide whether theirs will become the latest community to ban water extraction by companies like Poland Spring.

Rather than trying to regulate water extraction, the ordinance takes a "rights-based" approach by asserting that ecosystems have rights to exist, flourish and evolve naturally in town. Wells and any of its residents would have standing to seek damages in court against any company that interfered with those rights.

Under the ordinance, corporations would have no constitutional rights within the town. The Supreme Court has found that corporations have some constitutional rights – such as a right to free speech and against government taking of property without due process – but not others, such as the right against self-incrimination.

Two other Maine towns – Shapleigh and Newfield – used such an approach to adopt similar measures this year. The neighboring towns acted after Poland Spring, a subsidiary of Nestle Waters North America, started the process to drill test wells in search of a potential new water source.

In Wells, the controversy stems from a proposed 30-year contract between Poland Spring and the Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Wells Water District. Under that proposal – tabled indefinitely last summer because of a public outcry – the company would have been able to draw a maximum of 432,000 gallons a day from the Branch Brook aquifer. By comparison, the district's average daily water usage is about 2.8 million gallons, and peak use is about 7 million gallons a day.

The town attorney for Wells has advised selectmen that she believes the proposed rights-based ordinance violates federal and state constitutional principles, as well as state law and the town charter. Selectmen declined by a vote of 3-2 to put the ordinance on a town ballot, but supporters of the measure gathered enough petition signatures to force a town meeting.

The town's Ordinance Review Committee, meanwhile, is working on regulations for water extraction. A draft may be presented to selectmen May 27, said Bill Gosbee, the group's chairman.

The Pennsylvania-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund promotes the rights-based approach of the water ordinances and others dealing with issues ranging from sludge spreading to corporate agriculture to mining.

Regulatory schemes have failed to protect ecosystems and have instead helped "the corporate boys build a better permit," said Gail Darrell, the fund's community organizer in New England. A different view of nature – as something that must be able to preserve itself, rather than being plundered for profit – was needed, she said.

"If we treat nature as though it has rights, we can protect it," Darrell said. "So if a corporation understands, if it destroys nature, they have to fix it. They need to be responsible for the destruction."

Darrell questions why a corporation's goals should trump those of people when people are the source of governing power and corporations are only "creations of the state." She considers court decisions giving corporations constitutional rights "illegitimate."

"'Corporation' is not in our Constitution," she said.

While corporations are artificial legal entities, courts decide whether to treat them like people when it comes to constitutional rights, said H. Cabanne Howard, a University of Maine School of Law professor. No state or municipality has the authority to negate the rights that courts say corporations have, he said.

"You can't just pass a statute saying those decisions don't matter," he said.

Dave Owen, another Maine Law professor, said a local ordinance can't trump state law, which includes a regulatory scheme that allows the extraction of water by companies like Poland Spring, with certain limitations.

Owen, who specializes in environmental law, worked as a lawyer in California with environmental groups that tried to limit water extraction and with counties that defended groundwater management ordinances against constitutional challenges.

"The better approach, if this group is frustrated with that state scheme, would be to try to change it at the state level. Passing an inconsistent local ordinance would be only a symbolic act," Owen wrote in an e-mail message.

Leah Rachin, the attorney for Wells, says the ordinance would likely be found illegal in a challenge.

If the ordinance passes at the town meeting, she said, it could be challenged by a party that has standing, one that could point to a particular injury.

Selectmen would have the option to ask a court for a determination of the ordinance's legality, Rachin said.

Poland Spring would have no legal standing in Shapleigh or Newfield, where the company has no property or business operations, said Mark Dubois, the company's natural resource manager. More work has been done in Wells, he said, but it is too early to look into whether the company would have legal standing there.

In Pennsylvania, Belfast Township in Fulton County repealed its ban on corporate farming after the state attorney general's office took action.

The office targeted the ordinance, based on others by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, because it tried to restrict activities allowed in the state constitution, said Nils Frederiksen, a spokesman for the office. Under a state law, the attorney general has the authority to challenge local ordinances that violate farming-related state laws.

Skip Clark of Wells, a supporter of the rights-based ordinance, worries that the water district could enter into a deal before residents fully understand the issue. In the meantime, he said, the rights-based ordinance offers protection.

"The courts decide it's not constitutional – that's no problem," he said. "It gains time for this entire issue to be thrashed out."

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Maine Town Takes a Stand: Closes Tap on Water Privatization

Residents say no to Nestlé's plan to pump local water, and to their Board of Selectmen's attempt to regulate water takings

By Edward D. Murphy. Published March 1 by the Maine Sunday Telegram; reposted on CommonDreams.org

Shapleigh residents have banned companies from drawing or selling its water.

During a special town meeting Saturday morning, residents voted 114 to 66 to adopt the ban drafted by Protecting Our Water and Wildlife Resources, which had opposed Poland Spring's efforts to test, draw, bottle and market the town's water.

The ban had been opposed by the town's Board of Selectmen, which had favored instead a set of regulations on drawing water in the town that will be on the warrant for the regular town meeting on March 14.

"The problem in Shapleigh is that all three selectpeople want Nestlé (Poland Spring's parent company) in here," said Shelly Gobeille, one of the leaders of POWWR. "This vote says they can't come in."

In September, residents adopted a six-month moratorium on water testing, which was seen as a precursor to Poland Spring's plans to set up a pumping operation. The town's planning board used the time to work on rules and regulations for drawing the town's water, but POWWR wanted to ban all major water extraction operations.

When the Board of Selectmen refused to put POWWR's proposed ban on extraction on the town meeting warrant - arguing that two legal opinions said it was unconstitutional - proponents circulated a petition that led to the special town meeting.

Gobeille said POWWR is now concerned that the selectmen could seek to derail the ban, but Bill Hayes, one of the three selectmen, said he's inclined to let the ban go into force without the selectmen getting involved. However, he said, others could challenge its legality.

"The townspeople voted to enact it," Hayes said. "If they want to incur the legal expenses of defending it if it's challenged, that's up to them."

Hayes said that if Poland Spring wants to draw the town's water, it would be better to regulate the company's operations and make sure the town benefits financially. He said talks with the water bottler never got to the point where a dollar figure was discussed, but the amount the town would earn "would have been significant. This would have been an opportunity to defer" some property taxes.

Mark Dubois, natural resource manager for Poland Spring, said he was disappointed by the vote at the special town meeting.

"It's kind of disconcerting as a company with 400 jobs right now in York County," he said. "It's our home, too, and we're very discouraged we can't have a basic discussion about what we do and do well."

Dubois said the company draws water from nine sites in the state now and has sufficient supplies of water for its current needs. He said the company would have been looking to draw water from Shapleigh in 2011 or 2012, but noted that it takes a long time to gain the state and local permits that are needed.

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Is the Water Privatization Trend Ending?

By Julio Godoy, IPS News. Posted June 30, 2008. Posted on Alternet.

Paris is the latest city to take action to put water back into public hands, and they may be part of a new trend.

PARIS -- The announcement by the Paris municipality that water services will return to public hands by 2010 is in line with a global trend of ending privatisation of such services.

Mayor Bertrand Delanoë announced June 2 that the municipal administration would regain control of all water services for the city, ending a private monopoly that has lasted more than 100 years.

The contracts with the world's two biggest water service companies, Suez and Veolia, will not be extended after Dec. 31, 2009.

"We want to offer a better service, at a better price," Delanoë said. "We also promise that prices would be stable."

Delanoë said his administration will encourage other municipalities in the Ile de France region around Paris to end privatisation of water services.

"That France, once known as the heartland of water privatisation, is embracing a return to public management of water services, is a strong signal in this new pattern," Olivier Hoedeman of the Water Remunicipalisation Tracker told IPS. The group, a sub-division of the Amsterdam-based Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and the Transnational Institute, documents the decline of water privatisation.

The list of 're-municipalisation' of water services is long, and includes countries as diverse as Mali in West Africa, Uruguay where water has been brought back into the hands of the state at a national level, Buenos Aires and Santa Fe in Argentina, Cochabamba in Bolivia and Hamilton in Canada, besides other cities in France.

More than 40 French municipalities and urban communities have taken water services back into public hands over the last ten years, and brought improved services, cheaper.

In the 1990s many countries privatised their water and sanitation services, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, under strong pressure from neo-liberal governments, particularly in the European Union (EU), and from international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to 'open up' national services.

The biggest beneficiaries were Suez and Veolia, formerly known as the Compagnie Lyonnaise des Eaux and Compagnie Générale des Eaux respectively, which have been controlling water services in France since the late 19th century.

These two companies ventured into practically all privatisation of water services, from Argentina, Bolivia and Colombia in South America to numerous countries in Eastern Europe, and in the Philippines.

In Eastern Europe, Suez and Veolia won several privatisation contracts with the help of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), a state-owned institution created in 1990 following a proposal by former French president Francois Mitterrand, and headed since then by a French bureaucrat.

The EU was also instrumental in trying to impose the worldwide privatisation of water and other public services through the WTO.

At a November 2001 meeting of the WTO in Doha, Qatar, former EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy of France inserted a clause into the final text of a resolution, to call for "the reduction or, as appropriate, elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers to environmental goods and services." This would include water services. And Lamy now heads the WTO.

The EU has worked closely with the water companies to fashion its trade policies. In a May 17, 2002 letter, the European Commission, the EU's executive, invited private water companies to inform it of "the position and interest of the European industry, their main market, obstacles if any to access new markets, as well as other questions you would consider relevant in this context."

Bernard Maris, professor of economics at the University of Paris VIII, said Suez and Veolia were behaving like "conquerors" abroad. "At the same time, they have enjoyed a century of protectionism, and their home market continues today to be closed to foreign competitors."

Many of the privatised operations in France and abroad missed targets to expand and upgrade networks, introduced high price increases, and unaffordable connection fees. "Management activities were not transparent and accountable," Hoedeman told IPS. "As a result numerous contracts were terminated, often following popular unrest."

Privatisation of water services in the French Alpine city Grenoble in 1987 was promoted by leading ministers of the government of then president Jacques Chirac. The project by Suez was marked by corruption, fraudulent accounting practices, and high prices.

In 1999, French courts sentenced former ministers and leading Suez executives to prison sentences for their involvement in the corrupt operation, and ordered the company to pay back all water charges imposed between 1990 and 1998.
Once the court cancelled the Grenoble contract and returned water services to the city municipality, prices were immediately brought down. By the end of 2002, the price of water in Grenoble, at 2.14 euros a cubic metre, was about the lowest in all French cities. Similar improvement came in cities around the world that put an end to privatisation of water services.

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Bottled Water Industry Faces Growing Opposition

Last week’s decision in York County may be part of a national backlash.

by Kevin Wack
Published on Monday, June 30, 2008 by the Portland Press Herald (Maine)
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/30/10004/

Last week’s decision by a York County water board to delay a vote on whether to sell municipal water to Nestle Corp., the owner of Poland Spring, did not happen in a vacuum.

* Last month in McCloud, Calif., after encountering opposition to what would have been the largest water bottling plant in the country, Nestle announced plans to significantly reduce the plant’s size.
* Earlier this month in Enumclaw, Wash., the city council rejected a proposal to allow Nestle to build another such plant.
* And last Monday, the U.S. Conference of Mayors voted to phase out use of bottled water for municipal employees.

Across the country, opposition to bottled water is building, amid growing concerns about the industry’s environmental impact and rising fears about private control of public water supplies.

“There’s no question that there is a groundswell,” said Ruth Caplan, coordinator of Defending Water for Life, a Washington, D.C.-based campaign that opposes the bottled water industry.

There are several reasons for the backlash to bottled water. Some of it is driven by fears about global warming - given the amount of oil needed to bottle and transport the water.

Some stems from concerns about the chemical makeup of plastic water bottles.

Some of the opposition is a byproduct of the huge price disparity between bottled water and the kind of water that comes from the tap for free.

Here in Maine, some of the local opposition to Poland Spring’s operations has stemmed from the traffic generated by the trucks that transport the water.

Perhaps the biggest factor, though, is a fear that as bottled water becomes more popular, private corporations are gaining more control over a natural resource that is central to life.

“The fundamental issue is, who owns the water?” said Jim Olson, an attorney for Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, which has been engaged in a legal battle with Nestle. “If this company gets to do it, all companies get to do it, and you’re not going to be able to say no in the future.”

Caplan expressed concern that the bottled water industry is turning water into a commodity, the price of which will be determined by the market.

“What they’re trying to do is get us to think that drinking water comes out of their bottles, and water to wash with comes out of the tap,” she said.

Tom Brennan, a natural resources manager for Poland Spring, said the company’s products are not in competition with tap water. And, he said, there’s enough water in the ground for both uses.

Poland Spring hopes to draw as much as 250,000 gallons per day from the Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Wells Water District, which uses up to 7 million gallons per day, and has recently found sources to provide an additional 3 million gallons each day.

“We’re not depleting aquifers. That would be absolutely counterproductive,” Brennan said.

He and other defenders of the industry note that soda and beer also require water, but they don’t provoke the same opposition as bottled water.

Brennan acknowledged that opposition to the industry is growing, but he put it in the context of growth in the popularity of bottled water.

“To be quite honest, I don’t pretend to understand it,” Brennan said. “I think it’s isolated, yet loud.”

Poland Spring currrently gets water from more than 20 wells in eight Maine communities, including Fryeburg, Denmark and Dallas Plantation. The company has bottling plants in Hollis and Poland Spring, and - in response to rising demand - plans to open a third plant in Kingfield.

In York County, the water district’s recent decision to delay a vote on the Poland Spring deal followed a public meeting where more than 100 people expressed their opposition.

The water district’s trustees voted to postpone their decision until after an independent scientific review of the data underlying the proposal.

Emily Posner, the state leader of Defending Water for Life, said she was heartened by the outpouring of opposition to the deal. She said that people from all over Maine came out to stand up against the corporate control of water.

Brennan, of Poland Spring, countered that many of the people protesting the deal are not from the Kennebunk area or even from Maine.

“And that in my mind is somewhat troubling,” he said.

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Op-Ed suggests state-level protections for rural aquifers

Water conservation expert Amy Vickers has some good legislative proposals to protect Massachusetts's water supply from for-profit exploitation in this op-ed from Monday's Boston Globe.

Putting a cap on the bottled water industry
By Amy Vickers

Over a half-billion dollars of Massachusetts' taxpayer money will be spent this year on clean drinking water program loans to communities, yet Beacon Hill has been strangely silent about - and invested not one penny in defense of - small- and often low-income rural towns that stand alone against what many see as a threat to their drinking water supplies: Swiss-based Nestlé Waters.

Nestlé, the old candy company that once spawned an international boycott of its products for proffering cheap infant formula as better than mother's milk to women in developing countries, now profits from what many say is sullying another sacred solution: the bottling of pristine waters. It may soon do this in some of the state's most water-stressed and fragile communities.

For more than a year, Nestlé and its well drillers, technical consultants, and lawyers have been quietly surveying the profit potential in the few remaining unspoiled springs and aquifers in Central and Western Massachusetts. In its attempts to strike blue gold, the firm has aggressively pursued water extraction deals that have many locals seeing red.

Two recent efforts by Nestlé to pursue pumping operations in small towns illustrate why withdrawals for commercial water bottling operations in our state pose unacceptable risks, not only to local drinking water supplies, but also to such natural assets as fisheries and conservation land. Last summer, Montague residents halted - at least for now -Nestlé's pursuit of the spring water beneath Montague Plains, a state wildlife management area that also recharges critical ground water for a state fish hatchery and the local wells on which many homes and farms depend.

This spring, after considerable public outcry, Clinton town officials appeared to have finally rejected Nestlé's bid to extract and export up to a quarter-million gallons of spring water a day - equal to 4 million servings of some of the cleanest drinking water in the state - from the nearly 600-acre Wekepeke Reservation land that Clinton owns in the town of Sterling. The offer posed several legal issues, not least the fact that Clinton's 19th-century water rights to the Wekepeke are for surface water - not spring water - and only for town public water supply needs.

Clinton stopped using Wekepeke water in the 1960s and the town is now supplied by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. Sterling residents, 70 percent of whom rely on the Wekepeke for ground water to supply their home wells, were incensed and asked why another town would have the right to literally sell the water beneath their feet for global export to the highest bidder.

Since when has Massachusetts enjoyed a surplus of pristine drinking water supplies that multinational firms, not Bay State citizens, are considered more deserving to receive? The state classifies 70 percent of state river drainage basins as "flow-stressed." Since when have they been restored to such good health that we now have a surfeit of naturally clean freshwater ready for shipping to bottle-chugging out-of-staters - and this in an era in which we face unprecedented global warming, increased agricultural irrigation needs, and worsening water pollution, which requires skyrocketing treatment costs?

Leaders in government, business, religious, and spiritual movements across America are increasingly rejecting bottled water because of its indefensible environmental costs. It is time that this state also calls a halt to the aggressive intrusions of the bottled water industry into the vulnerable water sources that supply small-town homes, farms, and public conservation lands.

The Legislature should place an immediate statewide moratorium of at least two years on new bottled water extractions along with a cap on existing withdrawals.

In the meantime, an assessment of the state's available water supplies and needs - coupled with long-term climate change forecasts - must be made. Further, a statewide law must be enacted that affirms that the waters of Massachusetts shall be protected in perpetuity for its inhabitants, first and foremost, and that communities and aquifer protection areas may ban out-of-state water exports.

Unless it can be proven that Massachusetts has water to spare, there is no time to waste in stopping the bottled water industry from draining our most prized and irreplaceable sources of clean drinking water.

Amy Vickers, who lives in Amherst, is an engineer and water conservation consultant.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

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The growth of local power is a bright spot in seven bleak years of Bush

American cities, counties and states have offered a crucial counterweight to the White House on the issues that really matter

Rebecca Solnit in San Francisco
Friday December 28, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2232678,00.html

The centre cannot hold, and that's the good news in the United States these days. Quietly, doggedly, cities, regions, counties and states have refused to march to the Bush administration's drum when it comes to climate change, the environment and the war. Some of the recent changes are so sweeping that they will probably drag the nation along with them - notably efforts by Vermont, Massachusetts and California to set higher vehicle emissions standards and generally treat climate change as an environmental problem that can be addressed by regulation. The Bush administration has notoriously dragged its feet on doing anything about climate change, and it will now be dragged along by the states, themselves prodded forward by citizens.

It wasn't supposed to work that way. States' rights was a rallying cry for conservatives for much of the 20th century, first in allowing segregation and racial discrimination across the south and then in allowing environmental destruction around the west. Rightwingers have usually believed in a weak federal government - except when they run it; and that weakness, or rather the strength of the local, has been one of the bright spots during the seven bleak years of life under Bush.

The changes operate on all scales. Across the country, quite a lot of cities and towns have passed measures condemning the Iraq war or calling for the troops to be brought home. A handful of California counties have banned GM agriculture, and others have tried but been defeated by industry money - but may try again. North Dakota farmers created so powerful a pact against the use of Monsanto's GM wheat that the corporation eventually gave up on commercialising the invention worldwide.

My own city, San Francisco, has made plans to issue identity cards to undocumented immigrants, attempted to legalise same-sex marriage a few years back, and as of November 20 2007 banned plastic grocery bags in supermarkets and pharmacies as a step towards banning them altogether. San Francisco, which is as much a peninsular republic unto itself as an irritation on the left edge of the superpower, has also gone for solar energy in a big way, kerbside compost pick-up as part of a successful programme to radically reduce landfill, and various other green programmes (though affluence itself is environmentally devastating, and we also have lots of big cars and air traffic). We are also trying out a universal healthcare plan.

Since a 2005 national mayors' conference, more than 500 mayors from around the country have vowed to make their cities comply with or exceed the Kyoto accords, even while the federal government stalls. Any bleak picture you may have of the American hinterland as a vast sprawl of big-box stores, soulless suburbs and mindless consumption isn't wrong, but is incomplete. Eating locally, starting community gardens in the inner city, supporting and spreading farmer's markets, growing organically, promoting bicycle use, creating denser, more alternative, transport-friendly housing, increasing solar and wind technology, and building greener are all proliferating parts of the contemporary landscape too. Portions of New Orleans, for example, are being rebuilt to be energy efficient, use alternative energy and generally be green. Detroit is full of community gardens and experiments with local economies. As Los Angeles becomes a more and more Latino city, it develops more neighbourhoods of small businesses and lively pedestrian life.

From abroad, viewers mostly see this country as its federal government, the government that brought on a belligerent foreign policy while refusing to address the crises of climate change. It's more than fair to say that the federal government could not behave this way without implicit consent from the majority of the governed. And from afar, it's hard to see how tacit that consent is, or how much dissent is part of the landscape - it's a big part, especially on climate change.

Alexis de Tocqueville noted about 160 years ago that Americans had a talent for congregating in groups and organisations, so there's nothing new about the way that existing environmental groups and new grassroots organisations have taken up that issue. But it is exciting. Last year in Vermont the environmental writer Bill McKibben and a few college students started a walk across the state, something that grew into a thousand-person march to demand positive action on climate change. This push went for federal legislation to stipulate a reduction of 80% in climate-change gases by 2020, a far more radical standard than most have yet broached. A weaker federal bill is under consideration, and, pushed by his constituents, the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, continues to work towards far tougher regulations. However, the big changes may be made by an end run around the federales.

Since 2002, California has been battling the federal government for the right to set emissions standards for vehicles within the state. Since more than 10% of the nation's population lives in California, any such regulation could change the face of the domestic auto industry, and so both car-makers and the White House have tried to defeat the measures. Happily, they have lost.

One step came when Massachusetts sued to get the Environmental Protection Agency to stop saying that it didn't have the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; the state won in the supreme court in the autumn of 2006. Another landmark came in November when a federal circuit court for the west struck down national vehicle mileage standards that increase efficiency by one mile per gallon, which California's attorney general called "pathetic". Soon afterwards, the attorney general joined 16 states in demanding that Congress prevent the Bush administration from blocking its 2002 motor vehicle greenhouse-gas emissions law. Change for the better largely comes from the bottom up, and in a decentralised country it doesn't always have to reach the top to matter. These changes that are afoot across the US suggest that the federal government may become increasingly irrelevant on many issues.

The centre cannot hold, Yeats wrote; his next line is "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". Anarchism in the contemporary sense of decentralised direct democracy is on the loose, and that's the rest of the good news. Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it's part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the US.

· Rebecca Solnit is the author of Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power comment@guardian.co.uk

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