Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to 2 years in prison today at the Salt Lake City federal courthouse. He was taken immediately into custody, being denied the typical 3 weeks afforded to put his affairs in order and say goodbye to his friends and family.

Federal prosecutors asked for Tim to receive an extra harsh prison sentence in an effort to intimidate the movement that stands with him. They hoped that by condemning him to years behind bars, they would “make an example out of him” and deter all of us from taking meaningful action. But Tim is already an example. He’s an example of the courageous acts that people across our movements are taking to fight for justice and a liveable future. We support Tim by continuing to organize. Our response to this sentence is an affirmation: we will not be intimidated.  What’s your response?

The government’s statement is clear. Tim has been sentenced to 2 years as punishment for his politics; for the uncompromising content of his speeches and organizing in the two years since his act of civil disobedience protected 150,000 acres of land. Ironically, his principled views and motivations behind his actions he took were never allowed to enter a courtroom, due to their “irrelevance.” In a highly political trial, the jury was unjustly stripped of its right to be their community’s conscience and manipulated into making a political prisoner of a peaceful and concerned young man.

Author and activist Terry Tempest Williams said, “To think that a young man in an act of conscience might [do any amount of time] in a federal prison for raising a paddle in an already illegal sale of oil and gas leases, compared to the CEO of BP or the financial wizards on Wall Street who have pocketed millions of dollars at our expense  – and who will never step into a court of law to even get their hands slapped, let alone go to jail, is an assault on democracy.”

She’s right. But we have the power to turn this assault on democracy into a battle for democracy. Today the Salt Lake City community is expressing both their love and their outrage.

Fossil fuel lobbyists knew that Tim would be indicted the evening before it was officially filed, Jury members explained that they were intimidated throughout the process. The fossil fuel industry should not control our justice system.

Unless we decide to respond accordingly, as Tim serves his time, the real criminals — the fossil fuel industry wrecking our planet and our communities — will continue to run free, unaccountable for the countless oil spills, asthma attacks, contaminated waterways, cancer clusters, and carbon seeping into the air we breathe every day. If the justice system is intent on prosecuting the people protecting rather than pillaging the planet, we must confront the real criminals ourselves. With our heads held high, we continue to stand on the moral high-ground – and will do what’s right, despite the consequences. We know that mother nature’s consequences of inaction are far harsher than any imposed by a court system.

But we are not isolated individuals. We come together with our communities as groups of empowered agents of change who know our system is broken and does not represent us. Our communities represent us, and our vision of a resilient, just, and sustainable world that we are fighting for.

Tim’s sentence is a call to action.

For those of us who’ve been following his story fervently, our hearts were broken today. It is a sad moment. But we now have an opportunity and a responsibility to act on those feelings of hurt and outrage. For Tim’s sacrifice to truly mean something, for the spark it ignites in each of us to burn, we all must take action.

2011 has already become a year of peaceful uprisings around the country. As Tim once said, we were never promised that it would be easy. We know it will take courage, sacrifice and a willingness to sustain our resistance in our fight for real Justice. Tim has taken a step and we will take the next thousand.

Here are a few upcoming action opportunities to join:

• On Aug. 4, community members are calling for direct action at BP’s New Orleans offices in protest of the oil company’s continued lack of accountability for the devastating oil spill.
• On Aug. 12, Rising Tide North America and the environmental justice community is teaming up with economic justice and labor groups in St. Louis to fight corporations destroying jobs and homes with economic malfeasance and the climate with coal.
• In late August and early September, thousands are converging and risking arrest over 15 days at the White House in protest of the Keystone XL pipeline.

We’ll see you on the streets,

Peaceful Uprising and Tim’s community of courage.

Did you just go to Power Shift 2011? If so, you probably participated in the largest grassroots organizing training in our movement’s history. Hopefully, you learned how to tell your story of what motivates you to do this work and rise to the climate challenge. Perhaps you learned how to tell the story of your community, the struggles, hopes, and challenges of your friends, neighbors, dorm-mates, or co-workers.

I think you might have learned how to the story of now, why now is the time to get involved, to make the change needed to head off the climate crisis and build a clean energy economy strong enough to pull us out of the financial wreckage our out-of-control Wall street banks left us.

Guess what? Those stories can move people, motivate your friends and family to join the fight, and fire up a nationwide movement. However, you don’t have to always tell those stories one at a time. You can tell them to thousands of our friends, to our movement. I want to read these stories and learn about you, why you get up to take on climate change, your struggles, your victories.

So, consider It’s Getting Hot in Here an extension of your voice. The megaphone you need to tell the world, your movement, and your new friends all about you. We just broke two million views, so somebody out here is paying attention. Once you tell your story, stick around. You are going to learn from people, from all over the country, who just like you, care a whole hell of lot.

They may be nearby or clear across the country, organizing at an Ivy League or in the hollers of Appalachia, but if you read their stories, hear their heartbreak, their tears of joy, and their brilliant, beautiful ideas, you will slowly change.

They will become your new friends, your allies, those whose work keeps you going during the tough times and those who celebrate with you in the best of times. We need you and you will grow to find you need them too.

So, if you are that storyteller, email me: richard[at]firedupmedia.com and let’s get you started telling your stories right here on It’s Getting Hot in Here. All my love and in solidarity for a future worth fighting for.

It’s been a bold few months for citizen climate action.

In March, University of Utah graduate student Tim DeChristopher was convicted for derailing an oil and gas auction that would have sold off a huge chunk of Utah’s public land. And in February, thirteen Kentuckians, including farmer and writer Wendell Berry, walked into their governor’s office and refused to leave until they got what they wanted: a promise from the governor to pay attention, finally, to the havoc wreaked on Kentucky by mountaintop-removal coal mining.

Not going to Powershift? Or looking for an extra dose of inspiration before trekking to DC next weekend? Here’s a chance to hear from the activists themselves:

On April 12, at 7 pm Eastern, 4 pm Pacific, Orion magazine will host Tim DeChristopher, Wendell Berry, and Teri Blanton (Teri joined Wendell for the Kentucky Rising sit-in in February) for a free, live web discussion.

The group will discuss how climate activism is changing, what can be learned from the peaceful uprisings in Wisconsin and the Middle East, and take audience questions.

Register for this free web event, here: http://bit.ly/gKIZXF

Tim, Wendell, and the members of Kentucky Rising are reminders of the real challenge in front of each of us: matching belief with action. With all the bold activism we’ve seen recently, is there a better time to stand up and speak for the future?

Img. © Google

Just as it has been getting grim for advocates for climate science and small nonprofits everywhere, Google just announced two major initiatives that hopefully put a little wind in the sails for those beating against the tide.

Google has announced their new Google for Nonprofits program that offers a one-stop application for Google Adwords, Apps, YouTube, Google Earth and more. While many of the organizations and campaigns I have worked with over the years rely heavily on Google tools, this is an effort to make it far easier and simpler for organizations to get access and learn how to use them effectively. They also have setup a Google for Nonprofits Marketplace to connect nonprofits with organizations and consultants able to put these tools to work.

If you are reading this and you are thinking of starting a nonprofit, or you are at a small nonprofit and you feel like technology is always a struggle, this really makes it easy. I am helping a few groups go through this process and if anyone needs help, drop me a line, but they are making it easier than ever.

The other initiative is very exciting to people who care about climate science and have watched horrified as climate deniers have abused public relations techniques and tricked the media in generating fake controversy, forestall action, and create a generational divide in the understanding of climate science.

Google.org has brought together a team of 21 climate researchers to communicate on the issue of climate change. The Google Science Communication Fellows are a number of climate scientists who will be provided with training on new media, data-sharing, and communications, SolveClimate reported.

“Google.org, the technology giant’s philanthropic arm, has hand-picked a team of 21 fellows working in climate research to improve the way the science of global warming is communicated to the public and lawmakers through new media. “We are seeing very clearly with climate change that our policy choices are currently not grounded in knowledge and understanding,” said Paul Higgins, a Google fellow and an associate policy director for the American Meteorological Society.”

It is really exciting to Google come out swinging on climate science. Edmund Burke famously once said “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Google is starting to live up to their motto of “Don’t be Evil” by doing something. Now, it is time of us to step up and use these tools for good.

As someone who thinks a lot about creative activism, I’ve been impressed with how effectively Greenpeace has utilized YouTube and Facebook to kick off this campaign.  It seems to have started with the creation of a YouTube video (below) that Nestlé tried to censor, which links palm oil-containing products like the KitKat to destruction of rainforests and the last remaining areas of orangutan habitat in Indonesia.  According to most reports, Nestlé’s attempt to suppress the video backfired, encouraging angry online activists to make the clip go viral on the Internet, comment on Nestlé’s Facebook page, and send over 100,000 complaints to the company through a Greenpeace email tool.  Greenpeace reports Nestlé is now blocking their emails, but urges people to give the company a call and demand it sever ties with destructive palm oil.

Not only have activists succeeded in making their point to Nestlé directly – they’ve also made this a big enough story to get the attention of major news outlets around the world.  This has not only served to put Nestlé under the spotlight, but raised the profile of Indonesia’s disappearing rainforests generally.  Nestlé, clearly freaked about its public image, stated soon after the launch of the campaign last week that it would no longer purchase palm oil directly from Sinar Mas – the biggest palm oil company in Indonesia and one of the main destroyers of that country’s rainforests.  Yet Greenpeace points out the company still buys from Sinar Mas indirectly through other palm oil suppliers like Cargill.

Watching the online activity around Nestlé unfold over the last week has made me think long and hard about how social media sites might be used to put some serious pressure on other companies whose burning of fossil fuels and destruction of forests is holding the planet hostage.  Which corporation might be next after Nestlé?  Maybe some of the companies intent on cooking the planet with coal, obliterating forests for tar sands, or spreading global warming denial.  I think the Nestlé palm oil campaign is not only an impressive thing in itself, but an excellent reminder of how much well-organized online activism can accomplish.  So great work to Greenpeace on the launch of an inspiring campaign, and let’s see what other companies social media activists can make squirm through online organizing.

Dear Friends,

The epic fight to ward off global warming and transform the energy system that is at the core of our planet’s economy takes many forms: huge global days of action, giant international conferences like the one that just failed in Copenhagen, small gestures in the homes of countless people.

But there are a few signal moments, and one comes next month, when the federal government puts Tim DeChristopher on trial in Salt Lake City. Tim—“Bidder 70”– pulled off one of the most creative protests against our runaway energy policy in years: he bid for the oil and gas leases on several parcels of federal land even though he had no money to pay for them, thus upending the auction. The government calls that “violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act” and thinks he should spend ten years in jail for the crime; we call it a noble act, a profound gesture made on behalf of all of us and of the future.

Tim’s action drew national attention to the fact that the Bush Administration spent its dying days in office handing out a last round of favors to the oil and gas industry. After investigating irregularities in the auction, the Obama Administration took many of the leases off the table, with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar criticizing the process as “a headlong rush.” And yet that same Administration is choosing to prosecute the young man who blew the whistle on this corrupt process.

We cannot let this stand. When Tim disrupted the auction, he did so in the fine tradition of non-violent civil disobedience that changed so many unjust laws in this country’s past. Tim’s upcoming trial is an occasion to raise the alarm once more about the peril our planet faces. The situation is still fluid—the trial date has just been set, and local supporters are making plans for how to mark the three-day proceedings. But they are asking people around the country to flood into Salt Lake City in mid-March. If you come, there will be ample opportunity for both legal protest and civil disobedience. For example:

#Outside the courthouse, there will be a mock trial, with experts like NASA’s Jim Hansen providing the facts that should be heard inside the chambers. We don’t want Tim on trial—we want global warming on the stand.

#Demonstrators will be using the time-honored tactics of civil disobedience to make their voices heard outside the courthouse in an effort to prevent “business as usual”—it’s business as usual that’s wrecking the earth.

#There will be evening concerts and gatherings, including a “mini-summit” to share ideas on how the climate movement should proceed in the years ahead. This is a people’s movement that draws power from around the globe; for a few days its headquarters will be Salt Lake City.

You can get the most up-to-date news at climatetrial.com, including schedules for non-violence training, and information about legal representation. If you’re coming, bring not only your passion but also your creativity—we need lots of art and music to help make the point that we won’t sit idly by while the government tries to scare the environmental movement into meek cooperation. This kind of trial is nothing but intimidation—and the best answers to intimidation are joy and resolve. That’s what we’ll need in Utah.

We know it’s short notice. Some of us won’t be able to make it to Utah because we have other commitments or are limiting travel, and if you’re in the same situation, climatetrial.com will also have details of solidarity actions in other parts of the country. If you can contribute money to help make the week’s events possible, click here. But more than your money we need your body, your brains, and your heart. In a landscape of little water, where redrock canyons rise upward like praying hands, we can offer our solidarity to the wild:  wild lands and wild hearts.  Tim DeChristopher deserves and needs our physical and spiritual support in the name of a just and vibrant community.

Thank you for standing with us,

Naomi Klein,

Bill McKibben,

Terry Tempest Williams,

Dr. James Hansen

photo: MoveOn Flickr

You’ve probably heard about the Toyota vehicle recall, related to sticking accelerators.  But did you know that despite selling the Prius as the eco-conscious vehicle of choice, Toyota is still a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the most backwards trade group on climate?

Well, we have an opportunity to ask why.

On Monday, Digg is sponsoring a live dialog with Toyota’s US President and Chief Operating Officer, Jim Lentz.  Just like  CitizenTube, our question will be asked if enough people vote for it – so digg it now!

Last August, Bill Kovacs, the Chamber’s VP of Environment, Technology & Regulatory Affairs, called for a “Scopes Monkey Trial” on climate change, leading companies like Apple and Exelon to quit the Chamber while Nike left its position on the board of directors.  Many others have publicly stated that the Chamber does not represent them on climate change.

But did the U.S. Chamber of Commerce care?  Hardly.  In the final three months of 2009, it spent $79.2 million fighting climate change and other priorities of the president, for a grand total of $144.5 million for the year.  Whoa.

Toyota had this to say in its most recent North America Environmental Report: “With a new administration in the United States, the landscape surrounding climate change legislation has changed. Toyota supports the U.S. government’s initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve fuel efficiency through a single national approach.”

Additionally, Toyota is one of 46 companies in BELC, the Business Environmental Leadership Council, “focused on addressing the challenges of climate change and supporting mandatory climate policy.”

So what gives?

Despite pressure from groups like Moveon.org and others, Toyota has refused to leave and you can bet the Chamber is not about to change its ways.

Let’s remind Toyota that in addition to safe cars, we need a safe planet. Digg this question (you can login with your Facebook account) and spread the word.  We’ve got until Monday 11am EST to make this happen!

Please RT this: Tell Toyota COO to put the brakes on climate change & US CoC – Digg up this Q! http://ow.ly/14BdQ #climate #green #toyota #prius

Our movement benefits from the breadth and quality of stories and opinions shared here. Activists in Oregon can benefit from action ideas from Australia. On-the-ground activists fighting coal in West Virginia engage in discussion with San Francisco think tanks.  Climate activists share stories from around the world. We help the movement grow by broadcasting amazing victories, like the Green Job/Green New York Act and stopping a 1000 MW coal plant in Meigs Co Ohio.

In 5 years, these efforts created a blog that has huge authority on the web, and is read by everyone from journalists to activists to policy makers.  As we upgrade to a new decade, we’re upgrading the this site based on your feedback.

The IGHIH editors have put together a survey to collect input from readers, writers and partner organizations so we can better serve you and the climate movement. Thank you so much for your feedback!

Take the 5 min Survey

@UNFCCC #COP15 #FAIL. You could have tweeted it before any arriving delegates strolled from their jets to their waiting limos. All that sign waving (and wow was there a lot of it!) inspired millions waving their own banners at home, but the windowless plenary wasn’t paying attention. A significant number of anarchists got beat up and gave the mainstream media their cover story. In the end we observed a handful of rich countries smoking cigars in a backroom, playing dice with human life. The UN, of course, did “take note.” So did we, and clearly we’re not clicking any “Like” buttons on this one.

What are we going to do? Shout louder? Damn straight. Sign 365 new petitions before COP16? Hell yes. Consolidate our resources into the most powerful lobbying organization in the world? YE… um, what?

Not kidding. There are limits to non-violence. We’ve reached them. It’s time to enter the ring, line the gloves with brass knuckles and bloody the opposition. I mean that figuratively. Put the brass knuckles down.

In concrete terms, we must, right now, consolidate our movement, enlist the best of the best lobbyists, persuade middle-America into a sustainability frenzy and get ourselves elected to local government where we can be most effective. Our united campaign must start immediately. We’ve got until the elections next November.

That’s the general vision. Details after the jump.

The Pragmatic Lobby
When Tom Daschle exited congress, he didn’t even take a day off. He carried his nameplate to a new mahogany desk, pivoted and returned to congress to rub elbows with his old colleagues. The guy worked for us one day, for the health-care industry the next.

Some of you see Mr. Daschle as scummy. You’re probably right. But he’s effective. We need to be as effective.

Hiring lobbyists may be horribly unprincipled, but if no one’s alive in 200 years, ethics won’t be all that important.

We needn’t lobby unethically, nor manipulate scientific data or even use alarmist rhetoric — we merely need more powerful, connected lobbyists petitioning politicians for us. Refusing to get our hands dirty now will mean a lot of blood later.

There’s support for the idea of professionally lobbying our federal and state governments.

A recent Rolling Stone article applied this reasoning to finance reform:

… actual people are not really part of the calculus when it comes to finance reform. According to those close to the markup process, Frank’s committee inserted loopholes under pressure from “constituents” — by which they mean anyone “who can afford a lobbyist,” says Michael Greenberger, the former head of trading at the CFTC under Clinton.

We need to be constituents who can afford lobbyists. How can we raise that kind of money? I want to discuss this in a later post, but briefly, we can raise that kind of money by imitating the organizing model of the Christian church: expand the constituency, distribute the costs and offer products and services in return for donations.

The Pragmatic Marketers
An expanding constituency provides a firm base for fundraising, and it provides another asset: word-of-mouth marketing. The past few years of internet activity showed that individuals are not only the greatest source of content, but they’re also the fastest way to spread cheers or jeers for a product or idea.

But there’s an inherent weakness in social-network based marketing: social-networks preach to the choir. So while social-networking will let us reach out to people with similar vision (and thus mobilize a large mass), we must use alternative channels to reach middle-America and the opposition.

Churches are experts at this, and we can use their model of evangelists and missionaries — in fact the sustainability movement has relied on this model for years, but we need to redouble such efforts and augment them by persuading outliers and moderates that our cause is their cause.

There are benefits to joining us. We offer a great reward: an inclusive community, where all are welcome. Further, we can offer a salvation of sorts — however temporal it may be — from rising seas, economic instability, starvation, water poisoning, etc.

However, we face the urgency of seas that are rising NOW, fisheries and aquifers that are exhausted NOW. How can we quickly attract the support of Tea Partiers, West Virginia coal miners, the Religious Right and the rest of Rush Limbaugh’s Republicans?

The answer: the same way BP or Exxon does.

There’s an article on the DailyKos that explains this concept in-depth, but here’s the punchline:

We must persuade. We need marketing campaigns that makes anyone who doesn’t Green up look unfuckable, that makes living sustainably as desirable as Cribs makes Escalades.

We must persuade skeptics in the Religious Right that humans sustainably stewarding the earth isn’t human hubris. In fact, caring for our resources is less arrogant than exploiting them.

We must persuade moderate Christians — a base arguably larger than the Religious Right — to take up this cause as passionately as they have argued against abortion.

This persuasion is entirely ethical, because it’s true. Living sustainably actually is sexy, healthy and fulfilling. Living well and simply, forming communities that eradicate loneliness, is perhaps the highest calling of humans, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut. Raising the quality of life for all without sacrificing a single life to rising seas or poisoned water is Humane, possible and profitable.

What we’re proposing and fighting for is win-win-win-win-win, only the Right makes it sound like we’re the Sheriff of Nottingham, and makes itself Robin Hood. It’s time for our movement to write its own biography.

As our movement portrays itself accurately, our constituency will swell, and we’ll afford our campaign. In the meantime, the campaign can be crowdfunded entirely democratically, in the method of Threadless, Kickstarter and Kiva. The grasshoppers may have handfuls of greasy cash, but the ants have a few dollars each, and we are billions.

A [Green] New World
Further, marketing is more than TV-spots and Facebook ads. We do need citizen-reporting and snazzy ad campaigns. However, we also need visionary writers, producers and musicians to ditch the dystopian trend of the past century and write, film and sing an image of the future we can all pine for in that lull before we fall asleep.

I’m talking about the most exquisite, non-dystopian sci-fi ever written. We must give the world a vision of what the earth could look like if we got on our horse and rode towards sustainable efficiency.

A world where class-conflict is unnecessary, where Africa is not the podium for our pity because it can feed itself, where the oceans teem with life, where we ride on bullet trains from our backyard gardens to vibrant jungles, where we are friends with our neighbors, where we work 30 hours a week and take month-long holidays, where no one mentions “sustainability” as an abstract concept, because we live it concretely, unconsciously, without special effort.

We must translate the vision we see, the possibility we understand, and the dangers and obstacles that impede our progress from Newspeak to common language so the vision can be spread by every tongue, regardless of race, gender, orientation, religion or philosophy.

Further, since there are already success stories, we need to broadcast those widely, to establish the feasibility of our vision.

The Jewish faith and Kabbalah calls this process “tikkun olam”: the perfecting of the earth. It’s something every human wants, but wonders how to achieve. It’s our role to conceive the goal, discern the process and explain it to the world.

And who are we? We are any one who believes in justice, the rights of humans and the sustainable persistence of life on earth.

The Pragmatic Candidates
And now to get pragmatic. On top of lobbying the federal governments, reaching out to our opponents and the undecided, and presenting a message of hope to the world, we must also act as members of our governments, to execute the vision, to substantiate it on earth, from dream to reality.

Where I live in the Pacific Northwest, housing developers run around like bunnies on crack reproducing the same lame housing developments — paving paradise, Joni Mitchell once said.

Click to read the rest

It’s heart-rending to watch the hordes of dozers and woodchoppers setting up shop. They can scrape twenty acres in a day. All those hundred-acre woods, converted to five-car garages. I once saw a development where residents used lawn ornaments to tell their homes apart.

You can tell the reapers are coming because new signs appear on the off ramps. “Golden Glen — Homes starting in the low $200′s.” The signs are the flags of a coming army, one which will scar the foothills of Mt. Rainier, and the battle is unwinnable once begun. You’ve got to stop the saws before they start.

For years I shook my fist at the loggers’ trucks. Then my neighboring city acted substantially: they put a moratorium on developments like these.

The City Council voted and just like that, no more permits issued, no more trees felled, no more cookie-cutter houses as phantom echoes of American Dreams.

There’s something in that: cities (and counties/townships) are mini-hegemonies. Cities don’t need to draft legislation, run it through multiple committees, debate it endlessly among 100 or 435 people, revise and adapt, and then redact it into a single Bill. City Councils vote and that’s it. You can vote them out if you don’t like it.

And we can vote ourselves in.

Imagine if cities and counties across the country were counciled by pragmatic youth, the Pragmatic Party. We’d guide the development of our hometowns to ensure equality and sustainability. We’d be able to give small-businesses equal opportunity to compete with large businesses. We could make speeding tickets proportional to income. We could reform our school boards to educate students soundly, instead of teaching to the test and kissing up to No Child Left Behind.

We could modernize communications between residents and civil government, making city councils accessible to all voices. We could cut the fat out of our cities to remove unnecessary tax burdens. We could develop smart power grids that use energy efficiently by localizing demand. We could improve aesthetics, improve the quality of daily life, protect the environment and do it all with a mind to the future, and not merely current budgets and re-election. We could be the change we wish to see, finally.

Here’s to a Pragmatic Party, rising from a pragmatic movement, a tsunami of pragmatic citizens changing the social and political landscape by out-lobbying, out-advertising, out-voting and recruiting our opponents — human barriers who act only for themselves, and not as we act, for humanity.