InFocus News

WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Gallatin County Tourism President Mark York about the upcoming exhibit and events from Illinois Humanities and the Smithsonian

WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Carbondale Mayor Carolin Harvey about her expectations for the role.

Harvey is the first Black woman to serve as Carbondale Mayor. The City Council is majority-female, and includes the first openly-trans woman, Clare Killman.

WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with SIUC Chancellor Austin Lane about enrollment projections, recruitment, relationship building, and more.

Ornithologist Mike Baltz explores the nature and necessity of Trail of Tears State Forest in Southern Illinois

WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Rainbow Cafe Executive Director Carrie Vine about Pride 2023, its importance, and a new organization aimed at helping LGBTQ people who are trying to relocate from other states.

You can get more information about:

Rainbow Cafe here

CARE (Carbondale Assembly for Radical Equity) here

Pride in Action Southern IL here

The Mississippi River flowed lazily under the Centennial Bridge, which connects Illinois and Iowa in the Quad Cities. Cars cruised past on a Saturday afternoon in early May, waving and occasionally honking at a long line of environmentalists who say the river is alive.  

Glenda Guster was among the roughly 80 people to join the Great Plains Action Society’s Walk for River Rights — the centerpiece of a three-day summit earlier this month for Black and Indigenous organizers from across the Mississippi River basin, who, among other things, want to grant the river legal standing.

Like many making the march across the river, Guster, who held a sign saying “water is life” over her head, said the river needs more protection.

“The river has rights, just like human rights,” said Guster. “Nature has rights, and it's up to us to preserve these rights.”

According to Sikowis Nobis, the founder of the Indigenous rights organization, the goal of the summit was to build a riverwide coalition to rethink the legal framework they believe imperils life on and in the Mississippi River. The way she sees it, the existing legal system cannot confront the types of environmental disasters that are increasingly imminent – but “Rights of Nature” might.

The idea is that natural entities like rivers, trees and wildlife have the same rights as humans and thus have legal standing in a court of law. Natural entities, the legal principle holds, constitute living beings with legally enforceable rights to exist that transcend the category of property.

“The earth is really suffering, and rights of nature would basically give personhood to the river,” said Nobis. “It would allow us to have more power to keep it safe.”

The legal movement to grant natural entities like forests and rivers the same legal rights as humans has won meaningful success abroad, and has in recent years picked up steam in the United States. Largely Indigenous-led campaigns to recognize the legal rights of natural entities like wild rice in Minnesota, salmon in Washington and the Klamath River in northern California are setting the stage for a nascent movement for the Mississippi River.

The implications of rights of nature as a legal instrument are far reaching. Companies could be taken to court for damaging ecosystems, and construction projects with the potential to cause environmental damage could be stopped.

That's exactly what happened in Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania. Thomas Linzey is a senior attorney at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights and drafted the document to grant the small borough rights.

“It may be a radical concept, or it was 20 years ago, but we're rapidly coming to a place where without this kind of new system of environmental law, we're all kind of done, we’re kind of cooked,” said Linzey.

Ultimately, locals were able to stop sewage sludge from being dumped in Tamaqua using the new ordinance.

Linzey said that before the rights of nature movement made its way into the mainstream, it was born from the cosmologies of Indigenous people that recognized the natural world as made up of living beings – not just resources or commodities.

In 2008, Linzey consulted the Ecuadorian government while it drafted its new constitution, the first in the world to ratify the Rights of Nature. In 2021, an Ecuadorian municipality appealed to the constitutional protections to overturn mining permits that they said violated the rights of nature of the endangered Los Cedros rainforest.

“The work has spread to other countries, and in the U.S. to about over three dozen municipalities at this point,” said Linzey.

Ecuador remains the only country in the world to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution. A similar proposal was considered in Chile last year, and the island nation of Aruba is currently reviewing its own amendment addressing the inherent rights of nature. Court decisions in countries like Bangladesh, Colombia and Uganda have successfully held up the rights of nature. Local laws and treaty agreements recognizing the rights of nature are emerging across the globe, particularly in the U.S.

Lance Foster, a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and a speaker at the Mississippi River Summit, said that a couple years ago, the success of rights of nature in South America got his and other tribes thinking, why not us?

“And we wondered why haven't the big rivers, like the Missouri River, and the Mississippi River, gotten those rights?” said Foster.

He said his tribe and others have created an inter-tribal resolution for the rights of the Missouri River. They hope to use it to fight industrial scale agriculture and deep mining operations.

“If the Mississippi had those rights recognized … it would be able to have standing in court for an advocate on its behalf to help clean it up,” said Foster.

Two years ago in Minnesota, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe brought a suit against the Enbridge corporation’s Line 3 on behalf of wild rice, called Manoomin. And last month, the city of Seattle settled a case with the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe over the claim that salmon had the right to spawn, among other rights.

Because the Mississippi and Missouri rivers flow through so many states and tribal lands, experts said it would be prohibitively complicated to secure legal standing for them in the courts.

But Foster said if corporations get legal rights in the U.S., why shouldn’t rivers? After all, they were here far before humans.

States like Idaho, Florida and Ohio have moved to preemptively ban the possibility that nature or ecosystems can have legal standing. Even so, Foster said the rights of nature isn’t as unthinkable as it once was. After all, children, women, Black and Indigenous people were denied rights once too — what’s stopping the river.

“It gives us a chance,” said Foster. “Now, will we take that chance as a society? I'm dubious most days, but we have to keep trying, we have to keep going to the bitter end.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and the Society of Environmental Journalists, funded by the Walton Family Foundation. 

It's being distributed through Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest, which reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.

Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.

A few years ago, Roma Garner and her baby moved to DeKalb, Illinois all the way from Ghana, in West Africa.

As she was settling in, Roma began to notice some delays with her son, Luke, who was a year old. But she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. He had met all of the developmental milestones to that point, so maybe he was fine.

One day, at the library, a woman from 4C: Community Coordinated Child Care, handed Garner a pamphlet. When she called, they told her about their free developmental screenings.

“They came in with their therapist, they screened him," she said. "They realized he had a speech delay. He had some occupational therapy needs and a fine motor delay."

Her son needed three early intervention services: developmental, speech and occupational therapy. She had no idea. She didn’t know these programs existed. At her income level, it was free. And it happened completely by chance.

“When we started, he wasn’t even saying up to two words,” said Garner. “Now he's saying so many words, his colors, counting to 20, the alphabets, speaking without prompts; he's signing simple sign language words that are really powerful and important. He's more regulated.”

Luke just turned 3. Early intervention is for children 0-3, so they’ve spent the last months coordinating with his school district to continue meeting his therapeutic needs.

Early childhood professionals call that a success. A child needs help, and therapy is coordinated in a timely, convenient, and affordable fashion. But that’s not always the story in Illinois. It’s a reason why the new Illinois state budget includes $250 million for early childhood programs, including money for early intervention services for Illinois’ youngest children with disabilities.

“There has been, for quite some time, not enough providers to take care of all the services that are required for families throughout the state,” said Angela Hodges. She’s the program manager of Child & Family Connections #3 in northern Illinois. She supervises early intervention case managers and, because of staffing shortages, has a full caseload herself.

In six counties, all early intervention referrals run through her office. So, a parent or pediatrician notices a development delay, sends it to Hodges, who helps the family connect with a therapist. Hodges’ agency serves just over 500 northern Illinois families, mostly in DeKalb County.

She says there are 16 early intervention services they can provide, speech therapy being the most common.

The law states that within 30 days of writing a family plan deciding which services they need children should begin receiving services.

“Maybe 10% are waiting more than 45 days," she said, "up to, I think in some areas, probably higher."

There are tens of thousands of kids statewide receiving services. Sometimes it can even take months to assess whether they need early intervention at all.

Hodges says they serve more children than pre-pandemic, but with less staff. It’s why wait lists have returned over the past nine months.

Even if they can line up a therapist for a family, it might not be convenient. A lot of early interventions happen in the child’s home, but sometimes it’s not possible. Hodges says she knows in Bureau County there are families who have to drive an hour to Peoria twice a week to receive services for their kids.

Otherwise, since the pandemic, they can offer families a virtual therapy option. Service providers are split on how useful video-based early intervention can be, especially since the kids are younger than 3. Samantha McDavid is the regional council manager for Birth to Five Illinois’ DeKalb County region.

“There are some therapies, like speech especially," said McDavid, "that over a screen are just never going to be as effective as if you're in-person and some of the other behavioral therapies where you really need to be in front of that child."

Many families aren’t interested in virtual therapy. Dan Coffey is the president & CEO of Service, INC. It’s a non-profit that runs another Child & Family Connections in northern Illinois. He says they have a lot of families who refuse video therapies. But, because technically they’re turning down services, they’re no longer on a wait list.

Some kids get early intervention services at a daycare too. Agnieszka Moroni is a pediatric occupational therapist.

“Playing is the major occupation for kids,” said Moroni.

She’s been going into homes providing early intervention for the past eight years in the Chicago suburbs.

“The nice thing about being in the homes versus other settings," she said, "is I see the setup of their crib, I see their setup of their highchair at the table; if we're talking about sleeping, I'm there, I can see it, I can problem solve with the bed. If we’re talking about feeding concerns, we can sit down and have a meal together, we can do snack time together."

Finding daycare is really hard, especially for families of kids with disabilities. Some daycare centers don’t allow therapists, so the kid just doesn’t get therapy at all. Some let her in, but with limited space.

“I'll come into a daycare trying to do an obstacle course, for example, but the only place I can work on that is a coat closet, because they're doing something else in the classroom,” she said. “And I'm like, ‘I have a very specific thing I want to work on with this child today!’”

Moroni says kids with disabilities essentially get kicked out of some daycares because the centers realize they don’t have the staff to support them.

After years of hearing those stories, Moroni decided to start her own daycare for kids with disabilities called TOTS Therapeutic Child Care Center. She’s currently in the fundraising process to open the center and hopes they can open next year.

“We want to send parents back to work," said Moroni. "But if there's no childcare, I mean, that's a huge percentage of the population -- any family who has a child under the age of five. I feel like it's kind of a forgotten population.”

Early intervention services aren’t always free either, like they were for Roma Garner and her son. Hodges says family fees were paused during the pandemic but are likely to be return this summer. Depending on family income, it could cost up to $200 a month plus the cost of daycare.

That’s not counting the cost of a daycare center, which can be around $400 a week.

Service providers stress that early intervention can make a difference for families like Roma’s. But the system is complicated, and advocates say issues like staffing can’t be addressed without paying service providers a fair wage.

Despite the complexities, program manager Angela Hodges says parents and caregivers are the experts on their kids. If they feel like something in a child isn’t developing appropriately -- trust their gut.

Copyright 2023 WNIJ Northern Public Radio. To see more, visit WNIJ Northern Public Radio.

WSIU's Jennifer Fuller previews MSP 23 with Managing Director HD Motyl, and the director of "Bridges of Madison County," Angela Schultz

WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with SIUC Assistant Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Sherrica Hunt about her new book, "Networking and Lattes"

WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with SIU School of Law Dean Camille Davidson about the School's Diversity Prelaw Summer Institute, it's mission and accomplishments