Climate Ground Zero and a recent 9 day sit-in in the Coal River Mountain

Climate Ground Zero which describes itself as "not another environmental organization" but rather "an ongoing campaign of non-violent civil disobedience in southern West Virginia to address mountaintop removal coal mining and its effects on our future" has pushed the fight for climate justice directly at the source of the problem. This a press release from their most recent direct action:

"PETTUS, WVa—After blocking Massey Energy’s operations on the Bee Tree Permit for nine days, Amber Nitchman, 19, and Eric Blevins, 28 descended from their respective trees. They had occupied the two oak trees—originally accompanied by a third tree sitter, David Aaron Smith, 23—to protest mountaintop removal and the blasting of Coal River Mountain. Upon descent, they were immediately arrested by West Virginia State Troopers. The sitters’ decision to leave the trees was made in light of the recent drop in temperature.

After a week of Massey security harassing the sitters with deafening sirens and air horns, a call-in pressure campaign was launched by Climate Ground Zero, Mountain Justice and other anti-mountaintop removal groups. The receipt of hundreds of calls from around the country led to an emergency meeting with Climate Ground Zero volunteers, the Raleigh County prosecutor and Governor Manchin. The meeting resulted in the moratorium and a call for an investigation of the abuse.

The tree sit represents Climate Ground Zero’s most sustained intervention in mountaintop removal mining operations since its campaign of nonviolent direct action began last February. Volunteers know that the fight is far from over and expect work to commence on the Bee Tree site immediately. However, they see this tree sit as a victory. “It halted blasting for nine days. I think they’ve wildly succeeded with their goals,” said Climate Ground Zero volunteer Mike Bowersox. In a final communication from her perch, Nitchman captured the group’s resolve. “Its not over until the blasting is stopped,” she said"

They are an inspirational organization that reminds me of the kind of work SNCC and the Freedom Riders of the civil rights movement engaged in in the South to defeat formal apartheid. They are building an organic movement in West Virginia to defeat the interests of the coal industry that has wreaked havoc on the region for decades and establish alternative energy sources and jobs for the people down there. This work is essential to putting pressure on our government to take the problems of coal and mountaintop removal seriously and put their weight behind pushing investment alternative, clean and sustainable energy that can help these communities in West Virginia. It is the fight of our generation!

Community organizing, direct action and climate justice

Interesting Campus Progress interview with Elisa Young, a founder of Meigs Citizens Action Now in southeast Ohio on the edge of the Appalachia, discussing her organizing efforts to combat the detrimental environmental effects that the coal industry has had on their community:

Appalachia doesn’t exist in the same America as the one recognizable from the streets of New York, the cattle ranches of Texas, or the cornfields of Iowa. It is, to paraphrase Michael Harrington’s The Other America, where King Coal reigns supreme. Coal companies wield immense power over these mountains, and their right to rule is largely unchallenged. Neither political party has escaped coal’s influence, which makes it virtually impossible to legislate against the industry

But Elisa Young is trying anyway. She lives in Meigs County, Ohio, on the edge of what we call Appalachia. There she is the founder of Meigs Citizens Action Now*, a community group that tries to combat the social and environmental damage business interests have inflicted in the community. The area hosts four power plants, and there are plans to build another five as well as an underground coal mine. Such construction would make for the highest concentration of power plants in the country. It would also dramatically affect the health of the surrounding communities, which are already subject to one of the highest lung cancer rates in the state.

Working with students from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, Young has fought against these new plants and the proposed coal mine. She has organized her community and raised awareness about their troubles throughout the country. Young has even received legal threats from American Municipal Power as a result of her actions.

Young attended Powershift ’09 late last month to speak on several panels, and Campus Progress caught up with her to ask her a few questions about the health effects of power plants, her local victories, and the fact that coal simply doesn’t lead to prosperity for the people of Appalachia.

Here's a portion of the interview:

Campus Progress: What are some ways have you tried to raise awareness about coal’s effect on your community? Have you had any victories?

Elisa Young: Back in 2006, I won an international women’s award from the Women of Peacepower Foundation that was for taking people on what we call “True Cost of Coal Tours,” and also for community organizing efforts. The tours were done for the specific reason of helping people witness what was going on in Appalachia at the hands of the coal industry. To show people that it is the entire cycle of coal that is causing problems. These companies have a parasitic relationship, sending power to places where they will never see the effects, where they will never get sick and die. It isn’t about doing one thing a little differently. If you don’t live there then you really don’t hear about those things, and if people don’t even realize there is a problem, then we’re never going to have any change.

I’ve opened up my farm, which has been in my family for seven generations, to touring groups. We will have groups stay overnight to do community service projects. It is absolutely critical that we raise awareness because one of the power plants that wants to come in to get their construction costs for the facility by socializing the costs and tying cities and municipalities into 50-year contracts. We took it upon ourselves to try to educate people about what a poor financial choice it was by visiting their city councils. Oberlin was one of those towns and ultimately they voted it down. The students got committed. They got involved in the election process and they got actively involved in getting people elected to their town council who would reflect the values of the city and vote against it. After we won, one of the city council members told me that before we came he had no idea that our community was suffering these impacts.

CP: Why don’t people hear more about it? Why do you think that all these things are happening to your community, and to communities like yours all over Appalachia?

EY: In general in Appalachia there is a lot of poverty, and there is a lot of money to be made from poor people. I think 70 to 80 percent of the coal fields of West Virginia are owned by absentee coal barons and they have no compunction and no commitment to the condition of the land after extraction. But I want you to understand that it’s all people have ever known. So there is desensitization or a general acceptance that your job may be dangerous, that your job may kill you, because that is all people have ever known. Things become so engrained its almost genetic, you don’t question it. You don’t even think about the reality that you live in.

Another piece of it is this: If you had someone who wanted to build a power plant in the Carson National Forest, you’d have people outraged. Once one power plant is there then you have people who are desensitized to it, so it’s easier to build a second one. We weren’t told about the health impacts, and we still aren’t. There is a huge disconnect between the illness we are suffering and the contaminants we are exposed to.

More along that same vein of direct action and organizing for climate and environmental justice, a prominent climate scientist in Britain recently said that protest and direct action are the only avenues to get comprehensive global warming legislation across the world :

James Hansen, a climate modeller with Nasa, told the Guardian today that corporate lobbying has undermined democratic attempts to curb carbon pollution. "The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working," he said.

Speaking on the eve of joining a protest against the headquarters of power firm E.ON in Coventry, Hansen said: "The first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.

"The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I'm not surprised that people are getting frustrated. I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we're running out of time."

Blue-Green Insurgency and the "Good Jobs, Green Jobs" national conference

I recently came across this article about the "Good Jobs, Green Jobs"national conference in DC in early February called Blue-Green Insurgency I felt was worth posting and just as promising for the climate justice movement as the recent youth led Capitol Climate Action and Power Shift '09. Here's a portion of it:

When you walk into a large Washington, DC hotel lobby and find it teeming with thousands of smiling, buzzing people—half in labor union jackets and ball caps, the other half dressed in 30-something hip-hop causal—you know some special is happening.

This was the lively, energized scene for three cold wintry days this Feb 4-6 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, as nearly 3000 activists and organizers gathers for the "Good Jobs, Green Jobs" National Conference. The gathering was convened by more than 100 organizations, representing every major trade union and every major environmental group in the country, among others.

It's called the "blue-green alliance," the core of which is the United Steel Workers and the Sierra Club, which jointly launched the "Green Jobs" movement nationally at a conference in Pittsburgh, PA a year ago. The turnout this year is triple in size and highly energized by both the victory of President Barack Obama and the looming onset of an economic crisis unmatched in scope since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In addition to the steelworkers, the building trades were well represented, and the green groups spanned a wide range of concerns, for toxics to energy to climate change. Also notable was the participation of a contingent of "high road" corporations rooted in the growing "green economy." Gamesa, a major Spanish firm specializing in wind turbines, and Piper Jaffray, a large paper company focused on recycled paper products, are two examples.

But a critical new dimension was added by Green For All, an organization rooted among inner city youth, and headed up by Van Jones. Jones is the author of "The Green Collar Economy" and an inspirational voice for a rising generation of multinational, multicultural insurgent youth.

Immigration raid protest in Phoenix, AZ and Sheriff Joe Arpaio

This past Saturday, thousands of protesters demonstrated in Phoenix against recent immigration raids led by local Sheriff Joe Arpaio. According to the Reuters article covering the event:

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has dispatched deputies into Hispanic communities in the Phoenix area where they stop people and arrest anyone who cannot prove he or she is a legal U.S. resident.

Under a deal allowing them to enforce federal immigration laws, the deputies have arrested more than 1,500 people whom they determined were in Arizona illegally.

Latino activists and lawmakers call his program a clear case of racial profiling because only people who look Hispanic are targeted. Arpaio steadfastly denies the charge.

Earlier this month, he stirred more controversy when he marched 220 illegal immigrants in shackles and striped prison garb through Phoenix under armed guard.

The word "unsentenced" was printed on their prison garb assuming their guilt even before their trials and paraded in front of TV cameras to a tent city encircled by an electric fence. So much for innocent until proven guilty under American law.

The NY Times labeled the stunt a "degrading spectacle," in an editorial in early February, orchestrated by Sheriff Arpaio "the publicity-obsessed star of a Fox reality show and the self-appointed scourge of illegal immigrants." He's facing a federal investigation for possible civil rights violations. But the Times aptly notes that, Sheriff "is not an isolated rogue":

As a participant in the federal policing program called 287(g), he is an official partner of the United States government in its warped crackdown on illegal immigration.

These immigration raids, which began under the Bush administration, have wreaked havoc on immigrant communities across the country. A report called "Over-Raided, Under Siege" released in January 2008 by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee examining the federal policing program, concluded that the "Department of Homeland Security is leading a new type of assault on the rights, lives and wellbeing of immigrant families, workers and communities in the United States" which subjects them to a "distinct form of 'collective punishment.' " Such treatment of immigrants has gotten international attention and increasingly tarnishes any American claim to human rights leadership globally.

One of the groups organizing the protest in Phoenix was National Day Laborers Organizing Network has built a campaign targeting Arizona for a "coordinated national intervention" to not only help out those immigrants suffering under these raids but to "to help scaffold efforts to achieve broader federal immigration reform goals":

Maricopa County, Arizona: Ground Zero

Immigrants’ rights are under unprecedented assault across the country, but nowhere more so than in Arizona. The infamous Sensenbrenner legislation never needed to pass to achieve its desired effects. The very ideas contained within the bill that brought millions of people onto the streets in protest have become the reality in Arizona, where immigrants have been dehumanized.

In Phoenix, the fifth largest city in America, the “attrition strategy” has been taken to extreme and dangerous levels. Sheriff Joe Arpaio has become the public face of ICE’s experimental and dangerous 287(g) program which devolves federal immigration enforcement responsibilities to willing local law agencies.

Sheriff’s deputies roam the streets in black ski masks, separating children from their parents during routine traffic stops. People with known relationships to white supremacist organizations direct law enforcement activity. Vigilantes deputized as part of an official “posse program” raid government buildings with assault weapons and attack dogs to chase down suspected janitors. And last week, the nation witnessed the ritual humiliation of migrants in a spectacle evocative of some of the most horrific episodes of human history.

In Phoenix, the idea that immigrants are “Illegal” has metastasized. The proposition is no longer just that immigrants should be deprived of rights, have less ability to form unions, not be allowed to send their kids to school, and be denied basic services. What is now being tested before is the country is whether those deemed to be “Illegal” are worthy of punishment.

They are asking people to do the following things to support their campaign:
1) Hold local teach-ins to raise awareness about the crisis in Arizona, and raise funds to support local efforts.

(2) Join us in Phoenix on February 27 and 28th for a national gathering and peaceful demonstration.

(3) Sign a petition to request the Department of Justice to investigate Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

(4) Call you Congressperson and let her or him know that we can not let our country become like Arizona.

the Youth Climate Justice movement, Power Shift '09 and Capitol Climate Action

The fight for a green economy and address the urgent danger of global warming has become one of the defining fights of our generation. This weekend around 12,000 youth have come to DC for Power Shift '09, a conference organized by the Energy Action Coalition, with an overall goal to push the White House and Congress to adopt comprehensive energy and climate legislation. This Monday, March 2nd around 5,000 participants will be involved in the largest citizen lobby day to storm Capitol Hill with their message.

On that same day Washington DC 2500 youth will be involved in a more direct action approach to put pressure on Congress through the largest act of mass civil disobedience for climate change in US history to shut down the Capitol Coal Plant. According to their website:

"The Capitol Power Plant — a plant that powers Congress with dirty energy and symbolizes a past that cannot be our future. Let’s use this as a rallying cry for a clean energy economy that will protect the health of our families, our climate, and our future. "

Already powerful members of Congress have responded to this looming large scale action. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently released a letter asking the Capitol Architect to switch the Capitol Power Plant from 100% coal to 100% natural gas by the end of 2009. The Capitol Climate Action coalition responded in a press release to reassure that the action was still on and that:

“Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid’s dramatic action shows that Congress can act quickly on global warming when the public demands it,” said Greenpeace Deputy Campaigns Director Carroll Muffett. “This move demonstrates that they recognize the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for a switch to cleaner energy sources.”

Power Shift and Capital Climate Action are coordinated by different groups and seemingly different views about how to get our government to address global warming in a systematic fashion. I feel that both lobbying and direct action are good to do in tandem as a general strategy to put pressure on lawmakers and decisionmakers. Its exciting to see this kind of energy and sheer numbers in DC from people my age taking on this hugely important issue. With a new administration there is alot of potential for expanding this movement and getting more involved to get results. If Congress still moves slowly in the next few months on this issue, I have a feeling there will be more large scale direct action across the country among youth.

I will be at the Capitol Climate Action on Monday and I will post the pictures from the even on this blog.