U.S. law gives constitutional rights to corporations. Now a countervailing legal theory is emerging that defines and defends the legal rights of the environment.

Mari Margill is Associate Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, based in their West Coast office in Portland, Oregon. But as she explains here, the organization's origins lie in Pennsylvania.


Obtaining legal standing for nature, says Margill, requires enacting new laws to spell that out, something that is beginning to happen in scattered local jurisdictions, but faces an uncertain future on appeal.

For more information about CELFD click here.

An ongoing dispute between beekeepers and citrus growers in the Central Valley raises questions that could profoundly affect agriculture throughout the state.

Read the state's proposed rulemaking language here.

Serge Labesque, with one of his hives.

There's also a solid, dispassionate summary of the whole issue on the Civil Eats blog.

 Petaluma's Libery 4-H club maintains a comprehensive website on beekeeping basics.

A Sebastopol-based non-profit has gotten a big boost from the MacArthur Foundation.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded the Conservation Strategy Fund  $400,000  over the next three years in support of their efforts to build natural resource economics skills to sustain biodiversity conservation in the Southern Tropical Andes, an area that spans southeastern Peru and northern Bolivia.

John Reid is the founder and president of the 10 year old Conservation Strategy Fun. The North Bay Report previously focused on CFS in December of last year.

Western concepts of property rights don't mesh well with the nomadic lifestyle of East African tribes like the Masai -but it's possible that eco-tourism can.

Elias Morandot and his wife, Mary, have been visiting California and reporting on the circumstances that face their Masai people as guests of Global Partners for Development, a Rohnert Park based non-profit that provides heath, educational and economic development assistance to small rural communities in East Africa, including Morandot's villagage of Arkaria (seen below.)

A more detailed analysis of the Maasai tribal land rights issue can be read here.

Ngorogoro Crater is one of the most popular destinations for tourists to see African wildlife within the Masai people's traditional territory. Two others are Seregeti National Park and the MasaiMara National Reserve.