It’s Getting Hot In Here

x-posted from Solutionaries

As communications director for Summer of Solutions, I’m featuring every program to paint a picture of the diversity of solutions young people are building across the country.

The Summer of Solutions is a summer program designed to empower youth to create self sustaining community based solutions to environment and social injustice, climate change and economic insolvency. We work to build an inclusive, local community that connects across the country that will propel us into holistic, renewable energy economy.

This post features the powerful work happening in Corvallis, OR, as related to me by Nathan Jones.

Oregon’s Summer of Solutions program is three years in the making. In the summer of 2008, Nathan and others led a summer program called the Northwest Institute for Community Enrichment. Throughout the summer, the NICE kept in touch with Summer of Solutions – Twin Cities, and at the end of the summer they decided to team up for summer 2009 to run their programs simultaneously on a national scale.

Continue reading ‘This Summer Filled with Solutions in Corvallis’

{Written by Jenna Garland, South Carolina Organizer at the Southern Energy Network. Cross-posted from Southern Energy Network’s Blog}

Jake Sully and Neytiri from 'Avatar'

While visiting my parents recently, my mother treated me to a 3-D showing of Avatar at a theater close to where I grew up. I went in with a fair amount of trepidation. I’ve been following the media coverage of the film, as well as conversations between friends and colleagues who had seen it in the weeks follow its premiere. I was feeling very nervous about the racial dynamics of the film, and though I’d heard many people describe the film as very pro-environment, I wondered how pro-environment a blockbuster movie could be; how much can its themes and messages really challenge the status quo of our fossil fuel-powered society?

Continue reading ‘Avatar: the Problematic Environmental Blockbuster’

Last Thursday, March 4, was a huge day for student and youth activism in California.

Thousands upon thousands of students, labor unions, grandparents, entire elementary school classrooms, teachers, and concerned Californians (like me!) across the state rallied, marched, and generally rose some hell, to beat back massive tuition hikes and budget cuts to our state’s already fragile public education system.

Many of the thousands of students marching across California were the same students and youth who rallied just one year ago at Power Shift ’09 in DC for clean energy and bold climate policies. At both events, I was inspired by how diverse, creative and powerful youth movements can be. And how hard we have to work to sustain momentum and actualize the possibilities presented at these key moments.

Can California students (and faculty and Californians) build a movement powerful enough in the next few months to take on Chevron + Big Oil and give California students the right to quality, affordable education?

This should be the question on every California climate/clean energy activist’s mind and the topic of discussion in every student group meeting this week.

California student activists have an exciting (and challenging) opportunity to tap into one of the most exciting California student uprisings in recent decades and direct some of the energy into an absolutely win-win situation where Big Oil has to pay and our public education system is saved.

Continue reading ‘California Students- Ready to take on Big Oil?’

I’ve been familiar with mountaintop removal (the practice of blasting the tops off mountains and dumping them in streams to get at coal seams maybe a foot thick) for years now.  But this week it became personal.

I’m here at the 5th Annual End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington, joining residents from the coalfields of Appalachia in meetings with our Congressmen, gathering support for the Clean Water Protection Act (HR 1310) and the Appalachia Restoration Act (S 696).  This may be the 5th year, but the momentum is tangible.  We have 166 co-sponsors for the CWPA, bi-partisan support in both Houses and committee chairmen who are receptive to moving this forward. To build even more momentum, today is a National Call-In Day to urge your Congresspeople to support these bills.  Their offices are hearing from us in person and need to hear from even more constituents.

Please, take the two minutes to call your Rep.  Below are some of the most powerful points I’ve heard from local residents to communicate with members of Congress. Continue reading ‘National Call-In Day to Stop Mountaintop Removal’

Post By Junior Walk, Whitesville, Coal River Valley, West Virginia

Hi, my name is Junior Walk, and my family has lived in the coal fields of southern West Virginia for generations.  It pains me to see my heritage destroyed and defamed, and to see my friends and family poisoned by unclean water.   So, I decided to take a little trip to Washington D.C. to put a stop to it.

Today, I’m in our nations capitol to stop the heinous practice of mountaintop removal coal mining.  I’m here with the Alliance for Appalachia, as an employee of Coal River Mountain Watch; I’m here as an environmental activist; I’m here as an affected coal field resident; but I’m mostly here as someone whom cares about people, and all other living things.

My meetings today were cordial, I met with the offices of three different congressmen.  The first one was on the fence about the Clean Water Protection Act, the second one will probably co-sign, and the third was already a co-signer.  I think we’re making serious progress here, we already have more than 160 co-signers, and we only need 40-50 more co-signers.

When this bill becomes a law, it will effectively end mountaintop removal by making valley fills illegal (which they were in the first place).  Continue reading ‘From Coal River Valley to Washington DC’

Update: the full recorded speech is currently on the Department of Energy homepage

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu is speaking at Stanford University today about clean energy innovation and education. The live webstream will begin around 11:50-11:55 AM PST, or 2:50-2:55 PM EST:

Live video stream of Secretary Chu available here

Secretary Chu will meet with students beforehand for a special student roundtable discussion on energy. The event will be followed in the evening by a panel called “Educating the Energy Generation,” focused on how the U.S. can build a competitive clean energy workforce as quickly as possible. See here for an article about Secretary Chu’s visit to Stanford, “The Biggest Speaker of the Year,” and why his perspective is important.

In Oregon and southern Washington, the youth-led branch of the fight to close the Boardman Coal Plant has soared to heights in just the last month.  Building on work done last fall, which included turning youth out in force to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s hearings in different parts of the region, the youth movement to end coal burning at Boardman has in many ways shifted to the campus level.  

Youth are spreading the word about Boardman to their peers and members of the surrounding community about Boardman Coal through a flurry of events, letter to the editor-writing parties, rallies, marches, and probably other things I haven’t heard about yet!  From Southern Oregon University in the just north of the California border, to Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, the youth voice is ringing loud and clear: we want clean energy, not coal in the Northwest. Continue reading ‘Youth Take on the Boardman Coal Plant’

“Climate justice affirms the need for solutions that address women´s rights.”

– Bali Principles of Climate Justice

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, which means that it is the perfect opportunity for Three Course Discourse. This is where we get together with others and share a three course meal served with a themed discussion. Tomorrow’s theme: women!

So why have I decided to talk about women´s rights and International Women´s Day on a climate change blog? To answer this, I am going to reference Sharmeen Khan´s article, The Whiteness of Green. She talks about how the environmental movement is dominated mainly by white people of privilege and how they can alienate those who have additional struggles such as racial oppression. Khan clearly explains that if environmentalists do not develop an anti-oppressive lens when looking at the environment, their movement will be battling with other movements also fighting for justice.

“Environmentalists need to be taken to task for a vision that lacks a coherent analysis or practice of anti-oppression, because as long as environmentalists are . . . not in a place where social justice can be assumed . . . those of us dedicated to social justice and anti-racism will struggle against environmentalists to make our concerns heard.” Continue reading ‘You Are Invited To Three Course Discourse—To Discuss Why We Cannot Divide The Womyn’s Movement and The Climate Movement’

Petition Delivery to Chevron asking CEO John Watson to Clean Up Ecuador

This past week, Emergildo Criollo, an Indigenous Ecuador leader of the Cofan people traveled 3,000 miles from his home in the Amazon rainforest to California. He came to California to share his story and ask for support in getting one of the world’s largest oil companies (Chevron) to clean up one of the largest environmental disasters in history.

For a whirlwind few days this week, Emergildo shared his story with Chevron employees, California Senators and Assemblymembers, journalists, activists, and Chevron’s new CEO John Watson’s Lafayette neighbors.

Here is the story that Emergildo told (translated from Spanish):

“I want to start telling my story from when I was a child.

In 1964, I was 6 and living by the river.

As was the tradition of my people we would migrate from area to area to hunt. We were in (what is now called Lago Agrio) hunting.

At one point we heard this really loud noise coming from the sky. We thought it was a large bird (it was a helicopter). We were scared and hid. Continue reading ‘Emergildo’s Story’

Whoa!  Great cover story in the latest issue of the Nation.  Johann Hari delivers a devastating expose of the Big Greens and their overly cozy relationship with big polluters.   He reports on Big Greens taking money from eco-polluters as a fundraising strategy, and ignoring and undermining climate science’s alarm about reducing carbon to 350 ppm as “politically unrealistic.”

A few weeks ago, Rising Tide released a new zine called “The Climate is Dead: Long Live the Climate Movement!” which offers a similar critique.   Working within this economic system is only leading us into ecocide. 30 years ago, Earth First! formed as a call for “No Compromise” on protecting our wild places from the corporations and bulldozers as the Big Greens attempted to give it all away.  We’re still losing ground and can’t offset ourselves into sustainability.

As Hari puts it: “If we don’t build a real, unwavering environmental movement soon, we had better get used to a new sound–of trees crashing down and an ocean rising, followed by the muffled, private applause of America’s ‘conservationists.’”

The Wrong Kind of Green
By Johann Hari

Why did America’s leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests–and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as “unworkable” and “unrealistic,” as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?

At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted “brands” in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters–and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed. Continue reading ‘The Wrong Kind of Green’