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In June 2014, in a much awaited decision, New York’s Court of Appeals delivered a blow to oil and gas corporations while giving a much needed lift to communities facing fracking.

The court, which is the highest in the state, held that towns in New York can use local zoning laws to ban oil and gas extraction. The ruling has been widely celebrated among environmentalists and communities, and those involved are to be commended. This case proves that our communities are capable of collective mobilization, and that their actions can change the way that judicial institutions interpret and apply the law.

Yet the victory is likely to be a temporary one because the towns’ power over zoning can be taken away by the state or further limited by the “rights” of oil and gas corporations. The fragile nature of the win in New York state demonstrates the need for a legal foundation that’s based in community rights-such that communities have local, democratic, self-governing authority to decide what happens in their own communities-authority that cannot be stripped away by hostile state legislatures or overridden by corporations claiming that their rights trump those of communities.

There is a growing movement for local self-government building across the country, as communities in different states wrestle with the same problem facing those in New York-that is, a structure of law in which state governments, the federal government, and corporations can override local decision-making no matter the environmental or economic impacts.

Increasingly, communities are no longer willing to accept this. In some places, they are beginning to enact local Community Bills of Rights, laws that secure the right to democratic, local self-governance.

What happened in New York

The two towns that were the defendants in these cases-Dryden and Middlefield-are located in the Marcellus Shale region, where a massive underground deposit of shale rock reaches from New York state to West Virginia. Increasingly, gas corporations conduct hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” to access the region’s shale gas-or what has been deemed “natural gas.”

Communities throughout the Marcellus and across the country are rising in opposition to fracking, concerned about environmental and other impacts. Each frack well-of which there are thousands across the Marcellus-uses millions of gallons of fresh water, which are combined with sand and chemicals to fracture the underground rock and release the gas.