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New Hampshire Town Passes Game-Changing Climate Ordinance

Voters in Exeter, New Hampshire, fearing the impact on their community from a planned pipeline project, declared Tuesday that their town’s right to a safe and healthy climate trumps corporate profits.

“Our right to a healthy climate is an unalienable right,” said Maura Fay, co-founder of the community group Citizen Action for Exeter’s Environment (CAEE), in a statement. “Any new energy infrastructure in our town must align with that right. We live here, and what we envision for our community comes before what any project developer and state government envision if it threatens our rights.”

Voters passed Article 30, the Right to a Healthy Climate Ordinance, by a vote of 1,176 to 1,007

The ordinance states, in part:

Exeter resident Stephanie Marshall recently laid out what’s at stake for the town—and the planet. In a letter to the editor published this month at Seacoastonline, she wrote:

The ordinance was drafted with the help of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which describes itself as “spearheading a movement at the local, state, national, and international level to establish rights for humans and nature over the systems that control them.”

The group says that the proposed pipeline project would cross eight towns in the state and “threatens to contaminate the Piscataqua River Watershed, an ecosystem that hundreds of thousands of people and countless species depend upon for clean air and water.”

Welcoming the vote, CELDF community organizer Michelle Sanborn said, “The residents of Exeter are well-organized, informed, and engaged.” She also cheered the community for “joining a growing Community Rights movement in New Hampshire.”

That’s reflected in the proposed New Hampshire Community Rights Amendment, which says that “the people of the state may enact local laws that protect health, safety, and welfare.”

With a hearing before lawmakers on Wednesday, the New Hampshire Community Rights Network (NHCRN), which drafted the proposed constitutional amendment along with CELDF, is urging constituents to call their representatives and demand they support the measure.

According to NHCRN, it “will be reintroduced as many times as it takes to pass it. We know from prior people’s movements that fundamental change takes persistent, unrelenting pressure.”

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