Thomas Linzey serves as senior legal counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), an organization committed to globally advancing the legal rights of nature and environmental rights. He is the co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), and is widely recognized as the founder of the contemporary “community rights” and “rights of nature” movements, which have resulted in the adoption of several hundred laws across the United States and around the world. He sits on the Board of Advisors of the New Earth Foundation.
Linzey is a cum laude 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 he is admitted to practice in the United States Supreme Court, the Third, Fourth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuit Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, the Nation magazine, he was named, in 2007, as one of Forbes’ magazines’ “Top Ten Revolutionaries,” and, in 2018, Linzey was named as 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). Linzey currently resides in Spokane, Washington.