Thomas Linzey
Senior Legal Counsel
United States
Thomas Linzey serves as Senior Legal Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights. He is widely recognized as the founder of the contemporary community rights movement which has resulted in the adoption of hundreds of municipal laws across the United States. Further, he drafted the very first rights of nature law in the world (Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, 2006), and consulted on the very first rights of nature constitutional provisions (Ecuador Constitution, 2008).
Linzey is a graduate of Widener Law School and a three-time recipient of the law school’s public interest law award. He has been a finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award, and is a recipient of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union’s Golden Triangle Legislative Award. He is licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania, and is admitted to practice in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Third, Fourth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuit Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. District Court for the Western and Middle Districts of Pennsylvania. He co-founded the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. He also sits on the Board of Advisors of the New Earth Foundation.
Linzey is the author of Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community (Gibbs-Smith 2009), the author of On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability (PM Press 2016), and the co-author of We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States (PM Press 2016). He was a co-host of Democracy Matters, a syndicated public affairs radio show broadcast from KYRS in Spokane, Washington. He was featured in Leonardo DiCaprio and Tree Media’s film The 11th Hour and We the People 2.0 (Official Selection of the Seattle International Film Festival).
Linzey’s work has been featured widely, including in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and the Nation magazine. In 2007, he was named one of Forbes Magazine’s “Top Ten Revolutionaries,” and he was named one of the top 400 environmentalists of the last 200 years in the two-volume encyclopedia, American Environmental Leaders (3rd Ed. Grey House Publishing 2018). He is currently working on a new book, “Modern American Democracy (and other fairy tales)” (forthcoming).
