On January 31st local residents and activists associated with Mountain Justice and Rising Tide North America showed up to confront coal kingpins at their exclusive annual gathering at the public entrance to the Ritz-Carlton Resort in Key Biscayne, Florida only to find out that they could not demonstrate because they didn’t have a permit. After some hassle a permit was granted so long as the grassroots dissent was kept to a reasonable volume and confined within the designated area under the watchful eye of a unit of militarized law enforcement officers. Ethan, a nomadic Rising Tide and Mountain Justice activist has spent the past several weeks in the region organizing this demonstration and connecting with the local group ‘Save It Now Glade’ (SING) working to fight Florida Power and Light’s proposed 1,960 mw coal plant in their Glade County community. He is now travelling to join the Southern Energy Network for our 4th annual Southeast Student Rewnewable Energy Conference to share his experiences and connect students running the Campus Climate Challenge to Rising Tide North America and the local communities they are working to support.
more info can be found at www.risingtidenorthamerica.org and www.mountainjusticesummer.org.
the University’s oldest building and currently home to the entomology department. Amongst display cases full of bugs and big refrigerators presumably also filled with bugs or bug-related paraphernalia I sat with friends, old and new, to discuss past developments, present status and future plans of the Mountain Justice Campaign to end Mountaintop Removal (MTR) coal mining. MTR is a method of mining coal by which up to a thousand vertical feet are blasted off of Appalachian Mountains and dumped into the adjacent valleys in order to access underlying coal seams. The process is eco-cide and culture-cide destroying not only some of Earth’s most biodiverse temperate forest ecosystems, but also upheaving and displacing those human communities where such mining occurs. It was late in Winter 2004 that folks from the four Appalachian states where MTR occurs decided it was time to do something big in defense of our mountains, our communities, our past and our future. Inspired By SNCC’s Mississippi Summer project in 1964, and Earth First!’s Redwood Summer in the early nineties, Mountain Justice Summer was born. Linking up communities across Appalachia and issuing a call out for volunteers from near and far, we would coordinate a summer of action and organizing to confront the coal industry in our ancient, sacred mountains.
