Toledo, Ohio, might not be the first place that comes to mind when people think about the problem of blue-green algae. But residents there have been battling the toxic cyanobacteria for years--and they’ve organized to stop the algae at it’s source by taking back control of the environment from the government’s environmental regulators. In other words, they assert, the water is being poisoned because environmental regulators permit it to be poisoned. Some Toledoans seek to put the power to stop that back in the hands of the community.
The new documentary “Invisible Hand” explores this issue, called rights of nature, with a highlighted focus on Toledo’s toxic algae and residents' response to solve their own problem.
The film might particularly resonate with residents of Southwest Florida, who suffer from the same blue-green algae blooms as Toledo. There, the blooms have left the people without water to drink, cook, or bathe in, sometimes for days on end. When that has happened, residents there can't even boil the water for use: Boiling makes the toxic algae even more harmful.
For Southwest Florida, the documentary might offer a bit of a roadmap moving forward to address its own toxic algae blooms.
The film follows the citizens of Toledo who bestow personhood rights onto Lake Erie, in hopes that it will give the issue enough power to combat corporate pollution and regulatory permitting.
"If a corporation has the same constitutional rights as an individual, why couldn't an ecosystem?" asks one of the women interviewed in the film. "Why would you want to harm a community by putting a poison in the ground?"
The film also follows citizens in Grant Township, Pennsylvania, as they fight to protect their small, rural community's land and water from fracking injection wells.
At the intersection of these issues--the environment, climate change, wildlife, drinkable water, and rarely enforced pollution regulation, etc.--is a community's right to govern itself democratically. If the river is too polluted to use water from, and the river doesn't have lawyers to say so, people need to take action, to ensure the water is safe for them to drink. The solution seems to be in developing and creating a new system of law to protect the natural environment, hence the rights of nature.
"Invisible Hand" is available to watch now online: http://www.invisiblehandfilm.com/premiere/