*written by two Rising Tide North America members.
In late August, two of us with Rising Tide North America (RTNA) traveled to the UK to attend the Camp for Climate Action, meet our British comrades face to face and, under the looming shadow of the Drax power station, collectively plot our strategy for manifesting an international uprising against the fossil fuel industry. There were loads of amazing people, fun new words to be learned, an impressive array of sustainable infrastructure, and over 130 workshops covering everything from climate justice solidarity work to building your own wind turbine.
The site for the camp was a squatted field in Megawatt Valley near Leeds, England, home to three large power plants, the biggest being “Drax the Destroyer.” The camp’s exact location was kept secret until it was secured a couple days before the camp started. For months, the Climate Camp had been publicly declaring their intention to shut down the coal-fired Drax power station (the largest power plant in the UK, responsible for producing 7-10% of the grid’s energy), and the camp was set up just a couple miles from Drax’s 12 massive cooling towers. Read on for more details & lots of great photos!
About Liz
While at the University of North Carolina, Liz led one of the first successful campus renewable energy campaigns in the southeast and won the Morris K. Udall scholarship in both 2002 & 2003. She organized the first Southeast Student Renewable Energy Conference April 2-4, 2004, to engage other Southern schools beyond UNC in energy and climate work. In the summer of 2004 she became a co-founding member of Energy Action Coalition, which she has been actively involved with since then. She co-chaired the Energy Action Coalition Steering Committee for 2 years and is Executive Director of the Southern Energy Network, which works with students in the Southeast on clean energy and climate initiatives as part of Energy Action Coalition's Campus Climate Challenge. In late fall 2005, she attended the UN Climate Negotiations in Montreal and helped start www.itsgettinghotinhere.org . In 2008, she joined the board of the Highlander Research and Education Center (www.highlandercenter.org).
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Photos tagged 'EnergyAction'
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Hi Liz,
I was there at the climate camp. It was an interesting experiance, nice and chilled aprt from the regular police searches!
I think the workshops where a really good element of the whole thing and the indipendant living and community structure was also interesting.