image courtesy of Aldon

One Monday morning in early August, I was walking down 23rd street in Manhattan when a voice in my head yelled, “I want to get out of here.” Impressed by its sureness (I am a champion of ambivalence), I jumped online as soon as I got to work. I googled Cape Cod Community College and looked up their Language and Literature Dept. After a couple minutes of sleuthing, I found the name and email of the department chair. Ten minutes later, I had sent a carefully-tailored introduction of myself and job query to Ms. Polito. I told the voice in my head, “There.”

Over the past month, I’d been visiting my boyfriend on the Cape on the weekends and though he’d urged me to move, I’d always said, “What about work?” as though I would never be able to get a job there that wasn’t miserable. The truth was that I could do what I did in Manhattan on the Cape – if CCCC was hiring.

The work day rolled on in its familiar pattern. I chatted with my coworker Christine about our ESL Immersion kids and how we thought each would do on his or her upcoming ACT test. The dim lighting lulled me into a sense of being outside of time, outside of anything ever changing. But when I went to check my email around noon, I had received a reply from Sally Polito. She said that indeed, there were classes in need of instructors for the Fall semester. After a couple more emails, an interview was scheduled. 

Exactly a month later, I found myself walking down 23rd St. for the last time. I did feel a sense of relief, but I also felt a strong sense of loss. I’d been in New York long enough to grow roots. I felt like I was ripping them all out and, as many were intertwined with other people’s roots, I felt their discomfort as well. In some ways, I felt like I was betraying people, like living in New York really is a race and to peel off and leave is the same as quitting. Though I felt all this, I also knew it was just one way of looking at it. I think while living in New York, you often feel like your life is given meaning just by virtue of living in New York. Like War, New York is a force that gives us meaning. Being a New Yorker, or Brooklynite, if you will, can be an identity. For myself, I felt this taking over and I wanted to recapture the reigns of forging who I was and who I would be. In a way, New York had made it very easy to stay in one place. But I was ready to grow and to do that, I needed to liberate myself.

I’d fantasized about leaving New York almost since I’d arrived. I wrote two plays about it. In both, a character makes a dramatic exit for some wild environment. In the first,  it’s the Everglades and in the second, an undisclosed open field. It was a coincidence that a person I met in New York and later fell in love with would happen to live in a wild place, a place where you can walk a half mile and look out over a small lake surrounded by forest and see not one other human being.

My third morning in Cape Cod, I woke up and saw the sun shining brightly outside. I’d gone to bed homesick, but the morning light made me feel hopeful about this new place. I put on my clogs and started walking. Along my way, the only people I passed were landscapers and a woman picking tomatoes from her garden. I turned onto a gravel road. As I approached the edge of the land, I saw vivid blue water beyond it, wide and rippling. I looked to my left and saw no one. I looked to my right and saw no one. I felt a rise of elation in my chest. Here, here, I had made it to the place my characters had been longing to go. A wild place.

Why was this wild, open space so meaningful to me? In the city, illusions and commercial messages clogged my mind, inviting constant negative reactions that elbowed out room for active, creative thought. Here, there were no posters for Cougar Town or live HSBC bank promotions taking over Madison Square Park to analyze and, ultimately, feel superior to. Here, instead of feeling negative about and better than my surroundings, I was completely humbled. From this humbled state, I felt I could more authentically pursue my creative work and personal life. In the city, it felt like the songbird in my chest was muffled; here at the pond I felt it clamor robustly with life, push out its chest and sing.

William Blake said, “Sooner strangle a babe in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” Even when I was boxing up books and dishes in my beloved Brooklyn apartment and wondering if leaving a fully-fledged life in New York was the stupidest thing I’d ever done, I told myself that I had to follow this unbidden desire to its conclusion or bear the consequences of its suffocation.

As I stood overlooking that pond, I knew that I had made the right choice. I didn’t miss the walk down 23rd St., not even the intersection of 23rd, Broadway and Fifth that had always felt to me so important, like the confluence of great rivers. Once I had stood at that intersection and fantasized about stopping traffic to protest against war, in defense of life. Now I stood at my pond, finally living in defense of my own.

No Impact Man tells the story of Colin Beavan and his family’s attempt to live for one year without negatively impacting the environment. Starting with a firm conviction that this is a worthwhile pursuit, meaningful to the culture at large, Colin’s vision is both challenged and developed over the course of the year-long experiment.

The film makes parallel points. As much as it illustrates concrete actions toward no-impact, it also demonstrates, sometimes just by virtue of taking place in New York, just how inhospitable dominant American culture is to a “no-impact” lifestyle. As Colin and family cruise on bikes through Times Square, their smiles cannot obliterate the sea of cabs and huge flashing lights that surround them. Though at the end of the film Colin may be changed, the viewer is also forced to reckon with the fact that his changes don’t begin to touch the existing super-structure in which the well-meaning individual toils to evolve.

In one of the best moments of the film, 60’s anti-war activist Mayer Vishner, who shares his vegetable garden with Colin, points out to Colin that his wife Michelle works for Business Week which promotes the American corporate capitalist system (a blatant wrinkle in their family’s new virtue). Vishner says that if Colin thinks his individual efforts are going to do anything to knock out that system, he’s delusional. However, as a film about the individual’s challenge to live in tune with his or her evolving values, No Impact Man provides a whole lot to like, question and ponder.

Anticipating adjustment time, Colin’s experiment works in phases. The first phase is to eliminate all trash, freeze consumption of new products, eliminate carbon-fueled travel, dump the TV and purchase only local (within a 250 mile radius) food. Michelle, a self-described consumer and reality TV junkie, embarks on the journey from a supportive but uncertain perspective. She doesn’t feel Colin’s same inspiration but she loves him and is willing to cooperate more or less with his vision.

Early on, we see her begging Colin to give her permission to get a coffee so she can finish a story for Business Week. Here we see the inevitable situation we all face when we make world-bettering resolutions – the moment they come into conflict with something we want. What’s it gonna be? We don’t find out whether Michele got the coffee that night but later in the film she does state that she’s successfully finished a story without coffee and feels okay in general without it.

Early in the experiment, Colin and his family become the subject of a New York Times feature article with the tongue-in-cheek title “The Year Without Toilet Paper” (yes, eliminating all trash included TP). After the story runs, we see Colin cope with a maelstrom of public attention both in the form of media outlets wanting interviews and reader comments full of vitriol. Michelle tells Colin about coworkers avoiding her and gossiping that what they’re doing is unhygienic.

Undeterred by the criticism, Colin institutes Phase 2 of the experiment—getting rid of all store-bought cleaning products and replacing them with homemade, non-toxic versions (Dr. Bonner’s Castille soap, Borax and baking soda). He fills up their empty bottles with the solution and gets to work cleaning the kitchen.

The last phase— cutting out electricity—is the most dramatic and comes halfway through the yearlong experiment. To mark the occasion, Colin and Michelle throw a party. As the circuit breaker for the apartment is pulled, candles are lit and the guests perform charades in the flickering light. It’s shortly after the shift that we see Colin’s only real moment of doubt in the film when, not unlike a child frustrated at an ill-constructed sand castle that he thought was going to be perfect,  he says “This is stupid.” But the moment of frustration is short-lived and Colin musters the resolve to see the experiment to its conclusion. Eventually, he also gets a solar panel to power his laptop and other essentials.

Here, a question arises. After switching off the fossil-fueled electricity, why didn’t Colin seek out more new technologies powered by renewable energy? It’s possible he nixed that option given the commitment to make no new purchases during the year (though he did buy the solar panel). But, it would have added some excitement and hopefulness to the experiment and demonstrated that the shift to a lesser impact on the environment is not only about privation, but also innovation.

They say a good ending is a new beginning but the movie leaves off uncertain where Colin and family’s journey will lead. Toward the end of the film, we learn that Michelle has had a miscarriage. She talks directly to the camera when she says that the promise of a new baby would have made a perfect ending to the film, but instead, they are left with a lot of “loose ends.”

As the movie wraps up, hopefulness does rise from the sense that Colin himself will continue his work, now within a wider web of community groups, environmental non-profits and educators. We see clips of him giving talks at NYU and on a playground, and another of him speaking with Majora Carter about environmental justice for low-income communities.

When people ask him what’s the number one thing they can do to start making changes in their own lives, Colin tells them to join an environmental community group. I thought this was a great response and probably reflects the best discovery of the year-long journey—that one person alone can’t figure out the best path toward a better way of living, but with the support and shared knowledge of groups, we can make progress together. And as we grow in numbers, maybe even begin to challenge the dominant super-structure of burn, ship, consume and throw away.

Though many criticize Colin and his family for doing what they did from the perch of Manhattan bourgeois comfort, I wonder if the same film from, say, a lower-income, university-employed family living in New Paltz would have gotten as much attention. New Yorkers respond strongly to Colin’s experiment because they identify with Colin and likely his experiment will be most meaningful to those living in New York. In fact, though it displays what an energy-guzzling megalopolis New York is, the film also shows that going no-impact here is probably a lot easier than doing the same in a lot of other urban and suburban places in America. Now, we need a No Impact family in the suburbs of Houston. What does one do without the Green Market and a 35 mile commute to work?

image by rjones0856

The end of March brought amazing news in the fight to stop mountain top removal that has continued to blossom right in step with spring.

On March 24th, Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA, announced a decision to halt and review two mountain top removal mining permits, which by extension suspends 100 valley fill permits that would bury hundreds of miles of streams in Appalachia. Explaining this action, President Obama said, “…I want science to help lead us. I know that the Bush administration made some decisions pretty late in the day, at the end of their administration, on this issue. We want to reexamine it.” The exciting news spread fast and furious throughout the media outlets and by the end of the day everybody seemed to be saying hosannahs.

The next day brought more good news when Senator Alexander (R-TN) and Senator Cardin (D-MD) introduced the Appalachian Restoration Act, a companion bill to the House’s Clean Water Protection Act. This act would amend the Clean Water Act to prevent the dumping of toxic mining waste from mountain top removal into streams and rivers. “It is not necessary to destroy our mountaintops in order to have coal,” announced Alexander.

After the confetti cleared, journalists and environmentalists stepped in to survey the new terrain. It was agreed that the EPA’s decision marked a change in policy from the permit green-lighting days of the Bush administration. But the stricter review would not mean the end of mountain top mining, rather a return to the oversight that had been originally intended with the Clean Water Act.

But this correction alone was enough to set off alarm bells among mountain top removal supporters. Sensing the halts as the beginning of a tidal shift that would steal their power, they went on the offensive. West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin immediately flew to Washington to discuss what he perceived as devastating economic impacts for his state. The National Mining Association warned, “This is not good for jobs or for energy security.”

To calm the alarmism, the EPA rhetorically backpedaled, but did not repeal the halts. Master of positive-spirited advocacy and Interim Executive Director of Appalachian Voices Matt Wasson used the outcry as an opportunity to logically dispute the argument that the EPA’s halts mean any real threat to jobs in Appalachia.

On March 31st, the movement received another boost when Blair Mountain in West Virginia was added to the National Register of Historic Places. This battle between the United Mine Workers of America and the federal government is considered one of the most significant events in U.S. Labor history. Though the decision was greeted with approval in the state, the following week Governor Joe Manchin moved to de-list Blair Mountain. Much consternation followed and last Friday state officials announced that they had not actually meant to ask Blair Mount to be de-listed. It’s unclear whether the listing would absolutely preclude mountain top removal from happening on Blair Mountain, but it is clear that there is concern on the part of the coal companies that such may be the case. To show your support, please go and sign the petition against strip mining on Blair Mountain.

A clearer win took place in the first week of April. A two year struggle to prevent strip mining on Ison Rock Ridge in Virginia was won when the EPA acted to revoke A&G Coal’s permit to mine on that mountain. “I’m walking on air,” said local resident Bob Mullins. “I feel like we’ve finally accomplished something. This is a great victory to start with and now it’s time to get our friends and neighbors together to continue fighting for the cause and building this movement that is truly gaining momentum.”

Last but not least, this past weekend, longtime citizen activist against mountain top removal Maria Gunnoe was named a winner of this year’s prestigious international Goldman prize for grassroots environmental activism. Says Gunnoe, “I live on my family property and refuse to give up the only memories I have of my family before me. They want me out at all cost and I refuse to go, dead or alive.” In her passion and conviction, Gunnoe has been a major force in attracting supporters to the cause and continues to inspire those who have committed their lives to this fight.

Though the powerful interests that support it remain strong, recent events show that the movement to end mountaintop removal is working. We are seeing the beginning of a shift in policy and attitude at the federal level. In order to continue the momentum, the public needs to affirm this shift by voicing our approval. You can do so by sending letters to your senators, representatives and President Obama. Together, we can end mountaintop removal.

image by Steve and Sara

I was sitting on a bench outside the Charlotte airport, soaking up the sun. In front of me splashed a fountain. I was waiting for my flight back to New York and it happened to be a really sunny day. I took off my shoes, pulled my pants up to my knees and got comfortable to take in a statue. In the center of the fountain, the city’s namesake Queen Charlotte rose up on a high pedestal. But this was not an ordinary, erect sculpture. Her posture was something Martha Graham might have choreographed. Her entire middle caved in like a bowl while her head jutted forward and five splayed fingers held out in front of her – a crown. Maybe she was fighting the winds of the incoming planes, maybe the waves of the Atlantic dividing England from America. I wasn’t attached, though, to the actual story. This statue arrested me as though it had a message for me, for this exact moment.

I’d first seen the statue when I arrived in Charlotte, but I didn’t have time then to sit around and think about it. I was on my way to Warren Wilson College in Asheville for the first annual Headwaters gathering, a conference about climate change in Southern Appalachia. I had missed the first day’s speakers which included Majora Carter of Sustainable South Bronx and David Orr of Oberlin College. But my colleagues Steph Pistello and her friend Austin were still talking about them when we met up.

One of the messages Majora Carter had delivered about our work to fight climate change was the need to love our enemies. Apparently, she said this early in a panel discussion and it nipped certain lines of speech in the bud later on. I wondered to myself if, as the consequences of our enemy’s actions become more and more severe, whether we could really continue to love them.

The next day, we attended a writers’ seminar and my question from the previous day was put in a new light by Andrew Revkin, environmental writer for The New York Times. He said that we can’t just attack the bad guys, nor just love them; they exist because they feed an appetite. We have an appetite for what they provide and they wouldn’t exist if we weren’t buying. In the past, less than ethical business practices, say prostitution, have been defended on these same grounds: “Though is may be ethically wrong, we will never put a stop to the oldest profession.” I knew though that Revkin didn’t believe our appetite for fossil fuels was just a fact of life that would never change. So, where do we go after we’ve changed the focus from the bad guys to our own appetite?

Once an appetite exists, can it be gotten rid of? As I contemplated this question, I realized that there are appetites behind appetites. It’s not that we have an appetite for liquor, per se, we have an appetite for what it does to us - provide a sense of freedom from ourselves. Similarly, it’s not that we have an appetite for fossil fuel, we have an appetite for progress that fossil fuel effectively propels. With fossil fuels, we have been able to eat more kinds of food, see more places, build taller buildings, make more products, communicate with more people and generally do everything faster and further. How could we not love it? This process has been so satisfying that it’s become an end in itself. The fossil-fueled first world has become a giant cookie monster tearing gleefully through a world that’s getting smaller and smaller.

Though we may have developed an addiction to them, there is no innate biological need for fossil fuels. Our need for them is a consequence of a human need to make progress. Fossil fuels will not satisfy this need in the long run. But it’s true, just knocking out the “bad guys” who control the stuff is not the answer. For realistic change, we must think about how to change the way we satisfy the appetite behind the appetite for fossil fuels. Just as we’ll never extinguish our need for sex (at least, I hope not), we’ll never get rid of our need to strive for more. The change comes in how we define “more”. Will we define it literally, until the point that the entire earth’s been carved up into piles presided over by the most enterprising and ruthless of our race? Or will we define it figuratively as a quality of consciousness that elevates our experience of the physical world?

The statue of Queen Charlotte transfixed me with her posture and her offering. I was moved by the way she struggled against the prevailing forces that would beat her back. I saw her in the water, traveling through time to reach us. Her crown represented the higher consciousness that will save us from ourselves. And many have been coming to meet her, many who have already passed away. The ones who fought to end slavery, the ones who fought for women’s suffrage, the ones who fought to protect wild lands, the ones who fought for Civil Rights. We have been moving to meet her, but whether we will ever reach her and take our crown is uncertain.

As we have discussed so much here on the Sunny Way, the change we long for begins inside each of us. When we change our individual appetites, we take away power from “the bad guys” who are actually, like all of us, just strivers. They are particularly passionate strivers and it is not confusing from this perspective that they feel justified. Yes, they strive for the wrong things but this is only a reflection of our own striving for the wrong things. It is us, collectively, that show them what to strive for (and I do firmly believe marketing is a nefarious conspirator, BUT we retain free will). We, collectively, will not turn them “good”, we will rather direct their powerful energies to pursuing goals that better serve the earth and our future generations. When we have changed our appetites, we will take our crown and Queen Charlotte will lie down at last.

Taking my eyes from the fountain, I pulled down my pant legs and put my shoes back on. My focus came back to myself and I thought uneasily about getting on that airplane back to New York City. Was I starting with me? When would I?

image by whateva87

This is Part 2 of Sarah Moon’s report on last week’s Capitol Climate Action. Read Part 1.

We woke up at nine a.m. on Monday, March 2nd at the Hilton Garden Inn just blocks from the White House. We packed up our things and headed to the lobby. It was a beautiful sunny day with a thick, fresh layer of snow on the ground. After waffles and eggs at a café on the Hill, we made it to the corner of New Jersey and D Street. Waiting there were the leaders of the mountain top removal movement including Chuck Nelson, Larry Gibson, Rory McIlmoil, Teri Blanton and Goldman Environmental Award winner Judy Bonds bundled in warm winter coats. It had been decided that those on the front lines of the fight against coal, the residents of Appalachia, would lead the parade.

After helping each other affix I Love Mountains stickers to our hats and the backs of our jackets, Ozzy, our waiter from the Brickskellar, showed up smiling in a red, white and blue striped scarf. I had to jump up and down to keep the blood flowing in my damp feet. We could hear the cheering of the mass of people gathered at Spirit of Justice park two blocks way. As the cheering grew louder, my excitement rose. No longer able to wait, I ran up the hill to C Street, the Capitol rising before me. I looked to my left and lost my breath. There they were. A mass of people that filled the street from sidewalk to sidewalk waving red, yellow, blue and green banners.

Wranglers with white armbands corralled the mass as they rounded the corner and we fell in step with them chanting “Tell me what democracy looks like, This is what democracy looks like”, our nation’s capitol at our backs. We marched just four blocks south to the coal plant that powers it then turned right and marched along its north side. As we approached the first gate to the plant, the blue group peeled off. By the time I passed the gate, a line of people with linked arms blocked it. They smiled as they chanted. In the middle of the line, I spotted a girl from Yale who I’d met in West Virginia at Mountain Justice Fall Break. Her head was tilted and her brown eyes were lit up. It was all happening. 
We marched on to the next side. The yellow group peeled off and blocked its gate. As the blockade was achieved, the marchers cheered. We were doing it. We continued on, under a highway overpass, bright banners against the concrete and metal made drab by coal burning and car exhaust, cheering, “Hey hey, ho ho, this dirty coal has got to go!”

Randy Wilson, the musician who’d first gotten Stephanie Pistello and I involved in this movement by asking us to do a street theatre piece on mountain top removal in 2007 was a few feet ahead of me playing guitar and singing. I raised my voice with him and the people around me, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”
I reached out in front of me to author and former Merry Prankster Ed McClanahan who I’d met after the talk at Lisner the night before and smoothed the I Love Mountains sticker that was peeling off his back. He said he’d never had so many pretty women touch him in one day. I told him he should wear the sticker more often.

And then we were at the last gate where the green group, which represented the mountain justice community, had filed in to form the final blockade. I spotted my friend Mat Louis-Rosenberg, founder of the Prenter Water Fund, in the line-up, smiling wide. My heart swelled. This was no naïve, privileged college kid with a carefully cultivated sense of indignation. This was a bright and humble young man who had devoted the past nine months to physically bringing clean water to sick families in West Virginia. I looked at the crowd around me and wondered how many such efforts were being carried out among these 3,000 individuals.

When Bill McKibben got up to the podium to speak, he announced that we’d succeeded: all gates were now blockaded and we’d shut down the plant. We cheered. He told us that this was the beginning. And it did feel like the dawn of something. The snow was not the damper Fox News ached to portray it as. Instead, the undiminished turnout demonstrated the steadfastness of our commitment. Through this event, for the first time, we felt the strength of our numbers. There are few more powerful moments in life than when you realize that you are not alone. Maybe I had felt happier before in my life with my family or friends. But I’d never felt happy like this before. A happiness shared with 3,000 people all at once, a happiness based not on unearned rewards but on the work that lay ahead and the knowing that the work would not end, that none of us would stop until we had earned our Sabbath.

For more information, photos and video of the event, please visit http://www.capitolclimateaction.org

image by whateva87

I’ve never felt more certain that love is the answer than I did standing in the crowds outside the capitol power plant last Monday in the largest demonstration against global warming in U.S. history. As our elders Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry spoke from the podium, the next generation of environmental activists cheered out and waved banners and signs that read “Power Past Coal” and “Climate Justice.”

Just three months prior, Berry and McKibben had sent out a mass letter asking for people to gather in DC on March 2nd for an act of civil disobedience. “We don’t come to such a step lightly,” they wrote in the invite letter. “We have written and testified and organized politically to make this point for many years, and while in recent months there has been real progress against new coal-fired power plants, the daily business of providing half our electricity from coal continues unabated.” For thirty-some years, our elders had kept a flame alive. We were ready to pick it up en masse and let it shine for the world to see. 

The night before, 1,500 of us assembled at Lisner Auditorium on the George Washington campus for the Artists for the Climate event which served as a spirit-booster for the next day’s protest. Bill McKibben, tall and solid as an ash tree MC’ed the evening, speaking between each presenter. His voice was calm and wise with age, peppered with endearing “you know’s”. Discussing the request for the protest participants to dress formally, he explained, “We want them to see we’re not radicals. Radicals are people who want to double the amount of CO2 in the air and just see what happens.”

McKibben told us the magic number of climate change science – 350. According to leading climate expert James Hansen, 350 parts per million of carbon is the limit the atmosphere can handle without provoking a major climate shift. Right now, we are at 387. If we do not bring ourselves down to 350 within the next 20-25 years, climate change will be irreversible. Because coal-burning power plants are the leading contributor to this number, the organizers chose the U.S. Capitol coal-fired plant to be the focal point of the March 2nd protest.

McKibben used the occasion to announce a worldwide day of action to take place on October 24th, 2009 in which people in villages, towns, and cities around the world will share in promoting the message of 350. He encouraged us all to find creative ways to express the number in our communities. In considering how the message could be writ large in New York City, I thought of the artist Christo, famous for covering huge man-made and natural structures like the Reichstag and a mountain valley in Colorado. I envisioned the Brooklyn Bridge covered in a white sheet that read “350” in huge, blue numbers.

As this fantastic vision receded, McKibben was introducing his old friend Terry Tempest Williams, a naturalist writer and environmental activist from Utah. Piercingly, her words communicated a feminine wisdom about the crossroads we currently face. She calmly stated “it is time to resist the notion that what is good for corporations is what is good for humanity.”

Affirming our choice to stand up for change despite the recalcitrance of the U.S. government, she quoted Martin Luther King Jr., “All my life I’ve heard ‘Wait.’ This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant never.” She urged us not to wait or listen to anyone who would ask us to wait. Instead, she asked us to be brave enough to feel empathy for those who suffer directly the effects of environmental degradation and let that motivate us to sustained action. Having gotten into this movement because of the impact of mountaintop removal on the people living in Appalachia, that empathy was exactly why I was sitting in front of her that night and I vowed to keep my heart open as our work continued.

The evening culminated with speaker Wendell Berry, poet laureate of the environmental movement, who spoke a wisdom that seemed both universal and uniquely his own. He discussed his most recent book of poetry Sabbaths which he said is built around the question, “How do you get to the Sabbath? How do we reach a point of rest that’s legitimate and earned?”

This question immediately snagged my focus. Sabbath, I reflected, meant, simply, rest. Not the rest you take Saturday afternoon after drinking too much Friday night, but, as Berry had called it, an earned rest. I thought in a flash that most of us haven’t truly earned rest in a long time—earned it by working diligently and at length for something that does good for more than oneself. How many of us do that kind of work on a regular basis? How many of us don’t do it? How many do its opposite?

Listening to Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben and Terry Tempest Williams speak put me in touch with that yet-possible society in which work builds and gives life for everyone instead of misering the bounty away for a select few. I used to think maybe I was crazy for dreaming that something better was possible but that night, affirmed by my elders and the 1,500 beautiful bodies and brains around me, I rounded a corner. I could see now that I was not alone, I was one of many … and we were not crazy. We were the sane ones. Richard Dawkins writes in The Selfish Gene, “...if you wish as I do to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.”

If we can sway the consciousness of our leaders to phase out fossil fuels and phase in renewable energy, the victory will truly be without precedent in the history of life on earth. Given, as Dawkins calls it, our selfish gene, this moment was inevitable from the inception of our species. We would expand until we covered the globe. We would advance until we were out of balance with our resources. And we would be forced, at last, to choose between death and evolution. Dr. Seuss’s Lorax surrounded by his felled forest ... the princess in The Neverending Story pleading, “Atreyu, call my name” ... Morpheus in The Matrix asking Neo whether he will take the red pill or the blue. These are all popular, mythic symbols reflecting our subconscious awareness of the pivotal choice we now face.

For the next few Thursdays, we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

As the season of Lent begins, I wonder how many Christians will be participating simply out of habit. How many will give up chocolate until Easter more for the practical goal of losing weight than for getting closer to a higher power?

The truth is many traditional religious rituals like Lent have become empty for recent generations or, even worse, negative in spirit. Many of us look at Christmas, see materialism run rampant and lose our taste for the whole affair. Yet ritual, in essence, remains a powerful human experience with the ability to cleanse, revive and humble us. In Pronoia, Robert Brezsny demonstrates that anyone can make up his or her own ritual: a special dance to welcome the rising sun; a chant for all things that grow on the Spring Equinox; saying your own version of grace before you eat a meal.

Whatever it may be, ritual helps us appreciate that which is sacred in our lives. The stories Brezsny shares and the exercises he describes are all geared toward discovering one’s own sacred things and creating one’s own rituals. While reading Brezsny’s suggestions, I remembered that every evening at 6 when I was about 11, the church bells would ring and I would go sit inside the little lilac bush in our back yard. I think this “ritual” was an appreciation for dusk, my favorite time of day. Pronoia has awoken in me a thirst to bring authentic ritual back into my life, to identify those things I truly consider sacred and find a way of honoring them. Brezsny forces us jaded 21st Centurians to acknowledge that “the world is not enough” and yet it’s exactly what we need to appreciate what’s beyond it.

So I began considering how I could bring ritual into my life today as a 30-year-old woman living in Brooklyn, NY. The ritual couldn’t be around just any arbitrary thing or I wouldn’t take it seriously. The sacred thing that my ritual would show appreciation for would have to be something that I really needed in my life.

After thinking for awhile, I settled on Decomposition as my sacred thing or, in this case, concept. I chose it because I’ve been struggling a lot lately with an inability to let go of past relationships all the way from childhood to present. Recently, I’d felt the whole collective of past hurts and disappointments come roaring back at me as though they were calling out to be put to rest. I think by honoring the physical act of decomposition, I can accept it symbolically in my own life, allowing the past to decompose, to break down and become fertile soil for new growth.

I decided to make a shrine to Decomposition using an ordinary cardboard box. It’s fun to consider what I will put inside this shrine. Dirt in a glass jar. Dried mushrooms hanging from strings. I’ll paint the inside walls black and with brightly colored worms over it. An apple core. Partially disintegrated leaves. Photographs of beetles. Maybe I will decorate the outside top of the box with green and white paper flowers to show how new life grows out of the decomposition. I think the process of creating the shrine alone will be powerful, but showing deference to it at the same time every day for a month or more will be even more powerful.

Just thinking about this makes me feel good which must mean I’m on the right track (instead of the track in which I’ll feel ridiculous and give the whole idea up after two days). As a person who soul-searches but is also very reactionary emotionally, I often find myself making resolutions, then throwing them out when in an emotional state that triggers previous bad habits. But a ritual is a way of bringing consistency into my life, tangibly reminding myself of what I know is ultimately most important and not letting my emotions jerk me around, undoing the realizations I’ve made. This ritual, I hope, will hold me accountable for what I’ve told myself I value.

So I will build my shrine to Decomposition. I will pray to it at the same time each day for a month. I’d love a miracle, to wake up on the first of April as light and unencumbered as my 11-year-old self. But I will settle for a deepened mindfulness and a new appreciation for letting go. I’ll let Brezsny know what I find.

image by brunosan

This is the second half of Sarah’s experiences at the Inauguration. Click here to read the first half.

At the first buzz of the microphone that would announce the parade, I swelled – the time had come at last. But as the parade announcer’s voice came over the loudspeakers, I was thrown off. What was this? He spoke like a character from a contemporary film about the sinister banality of the 1950’s. Grease and tanning beds oozing faux-zeal from his person. I decided to ignore him. It was an easy and familiar a stance after eight years under President Bush.

First came small clusters of servicepeople, huddled strong and upright around American flags. Police motorcycles with their lights on escorted them. There was a long gap before the next group—the various corps of service musicians. The third corps down were dressed like Revolutionary soldiers with white ponytail wigs, whether they were women or men. Lex and I laughed like rude adolescents at the small-looking women who could not seem to fill out their uniforms or wigs. Another long gap. It seemed torturous. We had been waiting for four hours and now that the parade had started, it still felt like nothing was really happening. Then the announcer got excited and told us, “Ladies and Gentlemen, behind those police cars up ahead…is…the moment you’ve alllll been waiting for…” I hated that his game show host baiting worked on me, but my heart started to beat faster. Soon, finally, soon, we would come the moment this whole day had been building toward. We would see the new President of the United States, Barack Obama.

All of us on the bleachers stood up, but the red-clad volunteers told us immediately to sit back down. Docile with cold and long-waiting, we complied. Our Nashville friend, though, wasn’t having it and exited the area to go stand up against the fence. And then he was there, inside a car with dark windows. We were told it was him. I stared hard and saw Michele Obama’s dazzling grin, arched eyebrows and waving palm through the dark glass. There was no way to see the President.

As soon as the car turned the corner, Lex and I rose and scuttled down the bleachers, moving like mindless insects toward a source of warmth. As we got out onto the sidewalk, we saw Joe Biden and his wife coming up on foot, calm and waving in their simpatico blondeness. I felt a twinge of guilt for not having waited for them. But I stopped to take pictures through the fence. Joe, who even when he wasn’t smiling seemed to want to be smiling. It was almost like life was too easy for Joe. I liked him. Something about him brought needed levity to the servicemen, the 50’s announcer, the looming black figures on top of the buildings and the fact that Obama had been hidden away behind black windows.

As soon as he passed, we turned down 12th St., through the now-moot security gates and back toward the Washington Monument. On Constitution Ave, we saw the school bands staying warm by playing and dancing. A girl in a gold, full body leotard danced to a brassy spirit-booster. I wished it were August. For about eight minutes, we were stopped by the police at an intersection, not knowing why or how long it would be before we were allowed to continue on our way. Lex proposed turning in the opposite direction, toward the Capital to get around it all. This proposal filled me with a desperation that would have been wild if I’d had more energy. My physical impulse was to begin climbing something. “Let’s just wait,” I said and pressed up against the chain link fence to watch the Arkansas marching band. Then after a few minutes, we were allowed to cross through the line-up of parade performers and get onto the hill around the Monument.

We’d seen it at sun-up, now we saw it at sundown. Its red eyes flashed high above and the fat, orange sun washed it in fiery rays. That sun was so beautiful. Enough to make us forget how cold we were for a few moments. I wanted it to get caught in the branches of the trees. I tried to take pictures to hold onto it but knew no picture could have competed with my memory. It was not just the sun, it was the feeling. Its setting was proof that the day had happened. Whatever the TV would say, the radio, the magazines, blogs and future history books, I had my own version of what had happened that day and what it meant for me could never be obscured or re-spun. I knew that the day would become more, not less clear, as the years went by. I was certain that fifty years hence, it would live in my mind like the blooming rose of the Little Prince. I would tend it and never let it die.

After we left the monument, the light went out of the sky. Walking home was like picking up the misplaced props, sweeping the stage and shutting off the lights in the vacated theatre after a sold-out opening night. Every action was auto-pilot, feeding off a reserve energy hidden somewhere behind my kidney. The tired, drunken, glowing afterward.

I have no memory of the walk between the DAR and finally turning on to R Street. Once inside our friends’ house, we quickly collapsed, traded stories with our hosts and ordered Chinese food. After we ate, Lex took a hot bath. I asked her to save the water for me, but she forgot so I just took a hot shower. Each time the temperature dropped a half degree, I’d turn the knob a little further to the left, eking out every last degree. Some more people came over and together we watched the first dance at The Neighborhood Ball, replays on CNN and, finally, “The Daily Show.” It was good to be together with peers. We sat in a dazed, collegiate comfort, feeling young, lucky and a little off of our footing.

The next day at dinner, our friend, a lobbyist for the Clean Water Protection Act, said “Bush has been president for my entire adult life.” A post-traumatic shiver went through me. It was true. I had lived it and I still didn’t accept it. I remember a poem I wrote on Nov. 2, 2004: “The coffin that’s enclosed us can now begin to be dismantled,” That premature poem was only starting to be true now, four years later. I felt like a freed prisoner who was still coming to terms with her freedom. Somewhere deep inside I was singing but cast over that was a net of caution, like the screen of one’s fingers to ease one into the full view of something much anticipated, something though, that might not turn out to be quite what I imagined.

But what was I really afraid to see when I uncovered my eyes? If Obama spoke true, if we are the ones we have been waiting for, then isn’t the view that I was afraid to see, the view in the mirror? Maybe the reason so many came to see Obama on Inauguration Day is because so many of us for so many years—for African Americans since their ancestors’ first days on American soil—have not seen ourselves reflected in our presidential leaders. The greed, secrecy and war-mongering of our last president shamed us. Was this our reflection? Maybe it was in witnessing the incongruity between ourselves and what we saw in the mirror that we came to reassert ourselves as democratic citizens and rally for a leader who would truly reflect our values.

Many of us now can say that we see ourselves in Obama. And many of us understand that to continue to be happy with our reflection, we must stay engaged in the democratic covenant. While Obama brings us together, it is also essential that we maintain our individual identities, experiences, values and insights. Groupthink is not the goal. As James Surowieki who wrote The Wisdom of Crowds explains, “independent individuals are more likely to have a new information rather than the same old data everyone is already familiar with. The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.”

It is beautiful that so many came together as one on Inauguration Day. At the same time, to be an intelligent, enlightened democracy, we must also retain our individuality. We must think our own thoughts, we must maintain our own beliefs, and we must tell our own stories, even as we come together to change the world.

image by brunosan

There is something in me that wants to complicate the manufactured common reality that is so hard to escape in our instant, media-rich culture. It is one thing to have many stories coalesce into one as years pass and history books demand the “official” story. But when it comes to telling the news, there’s an essential need for alternative reports. Alternative reports, reports that have not been manufactured to perpetuate existing values nor to react to them, allow for a deeper understanding, often a more authentic reflection of what happened.

There is an official story of Barack Obama’s inauguration that tells of the sobriety and firmness of his speech, the thrill of the large crowds braving freezing temperatures, the bungled swearing in and the overall “historic” quality of the event. My individual story does not omit these aspects of the day, but it puts them in a very particular context. Inspired by C.G. Jung, I decided I wanted to write a completely personal version of the day’s events.

Jung wrote, “The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers.” I think Obama, quoting Alice Walker in his speeches—“We are the ones we have been waiting for”—would agree.

My best friend Lex and I left our host’s apartment on R St. about 7:15 on the morning of January 20th. At first, the streets were empty, but as we worked our way down the alphabet, our ranks increased. As we approached Eye St., we saw the crowd thicken to fill the street before us from edge to edge. It was sort of the visual equivalent of that intensifying chord they used to play before movies to tout the quality of the THX sound system. It filled me with awe and excitement. The crowd sucked on us like a whirlpool. We sped up our pace and soon were one with it, moving toward the same goal—a future we were all too anxious to embrace.

As we crossed Constitution Avenue, we found ourselves in the park adjacent to the Washington Monument. The open field inspired expansive movement and expansive emotions. I thought about Woodstock. Slow-motion film clips of glowing faces moving toward something as one. I’d never shared a feeling of momentousness with so many people before. As we emerged onto the hill leading up to the Monument, the gathering reached its crescendo. A perfect circle of American flags studded the crest. In the center, towered the huge, white obelisk, ancient symbol of sun worship. White seagulls dove in undulating patterns and, from a distance, the crowds of people seemed to move in a choreographed pattern, round and round and round, spiraling the obelisk, echoing the flags and the birds and the wind. Again, there was the feeling of a whirlpool, a centrifugal force. The rising sun bathed it all in the color of a new morning. The sun brought warmth, the symphonic motion brought beauty and the moment found a place in my eternal memory.

A mitigated terror and self-loathing set in when Lex and I realized that both of our camera batteries were, at barely 8 a.m., near zero. We needed cameras! But we also needed to find our entrance to the parade. Overstimulated by adrenaline and coffee, we jerked our heads around like neurotic birds, wondering where each line led, what each vendor was selling. As we walked by a particularly long line of people, Lex stopped and asked a woman, “Is this the line to get in to the parade?” The woman said, “No, it’s the line for coffee and donuts.” We kept on, finally making it to the 12th Street parade entrance. Nearby, was an underground mall in which we sought disposable cameras. It was impossible to think that we could be standing feet from the new president and not have the means to document it.

We got our cameras, along with a peanut butter Twix and a large pack of M&M’s at a little convenience store in that strange, sterile mall and emerged back on the surface a little warmer but more disoriented than ever. At least now, our mission was singular: Get through the gate.

There were about 400 people standing in front of the gate, clumped in tightly. Lex and I wedged our way in and waited. A person covered up like Casper the ghost danced and sang to herself in front of us. Her friend commented that if someone grabbed her ass, it would be okay. Someone else expressed gratitude toward her friends’ large breasts which were warming her back. Unfortunately, my friend Lex did not have a lot of self to spread around and I wasn’t quite desperate enough yet to cuddle up to a portly stranger.

After about 45 minutes, they opened the gate and we got into chutes for security screening. A woman next to us was holding a three year old who had to pee “very bad”. I let them go in front of me and crossed my fingers. Finally, we came up to the screening station. The woman in front of me at that point held up the line by committing an unexplained security no-no. As the guard watched closely, she pulled banana after banana from pockets all up and down her body. Luckily, security did not pick up that Lex was secreting a large grapefruit.

When we got to the bleacher stand for our section Yellow B, it was only half full. It was 11:15 a.m. so we had about 45 minutes to wait for the swearing in. Lex tried to convince me that we should go back to the Monument where there were viewing screens. But I was afraid that we wouldn’t be able to get back in the security gates, so we stayed on the bleachers.

As time passed, cold sapped the focus from my brain, leaving me feeling somehow larger than my body, as big as the whole bleacher stand, maybe as big as the entire crowd gathered that day. We passed the time dancing to a loop of music that included Aretha Franklin’s “Freedom”, Bill Withers “Lovely Day”, Sonny and Cher’s “And The Beat Goes On” and James Brown’s “Living in America” from the Rocky soundtrack. Nestling in to Lex to keep warm. Scanning the standing crowds opposite for signs of life. Sometimes the police would break their guard and play with the crowd, keeping them a little warmer and a little happier. A corps of Army musicians in their black fur-lined bonnets marched past. There were so many different military and security costumes on display: the black bonnets, the desert fatigues, the green sweater and khakis, the black overcoats. They made the would-be parade route seem like a strategy gameboard. And up above, along the edges of the tall buildings, armed security guards loomed, looking unnaturally large for how far they were away.

When Obama made his inaugural speech, we sat huddled and listened carefully to the loudspeakers. The weight of the speech made an immediate, somewhat jarring contrast to the upbeat songs that had just been playing over the same loudspeakers. Sitting in the bleachers, cold and expectant, wasn’t the context in which to analyze the speech. We needed to be excited and light-hearted to keep on in the cold. So we quickly let its gravity pass for later digestion and got back up to dance.

We met a nice woman from Nashville who laughed at me as I peeled the huge grapefruit Lex had shoved in her bag at 7 a.m. My hands froze as the sticky juice poured over them and onto the steel bleachers, but I kept peeling, energized by the sensation. I tore off the first slice, bit in and more juice poured out. I sucked it in, thinking to myself that it was sunshine.

At 3 o’clock, well past the announced 2:30 start time, we got the news that the parade would be delayed an hour because Ted Kennedy had had a seizure at the Inaugural luncheon. An hour before, Lex had found out about a chili stand on 10th St., inside the security gates. To avoid hating Ted Kennedy for being human and old, we resolved to make it to the chili stand where we would get something warm and thick to put in our bellies. On our walk there, many of the people we passed were entirely submerged in blankets. Soldiers in ever-more ironic-seeming desert fatigues smoked, looking cold and lonely for women who might keep them warm.

We ordered three chilis, two for the two of us and a third for our Nashville friend. As we stood patiently at the side of the trailer to wait, the people behind us asked with desperation, “Do you have hot chocolate?” “No.” “Do you have coffee?” “No.” They only had chili, beef brisket and cinnamon rolls. All hot. Pick your poison. Person after person ordered their portion of chili. But ours came first. Three steaming, styrofoam cups wrapped tight in a plastic bag, knotted at the top. Lex took the bag and held it next to her body as we walked back to the bleachers.

When we gave our Nashville friend the chili, she tried to pay us, but we said no, no. Finally, she reached into her coat and pulled out two blue rubber bracelets wrapped in plastic. “It’s not much,” she said, “but here’s a little souvenir.” The bracelets read “Inauguration 2009, Yes We Did.” It was something I would not have purchased on my own, but given as a gift, it became valuable.

Sarah’s Inauguration story will continue tomorrow.

image by CharlesThompson

A few Sundays ago, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President Bush. He threw them hard and fast. President Bush dodged expertly. Afterward, the President reacted jovially, even citing the incident as proof of Mission Accomplished: “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves.”

While the thrown shoes did little to shame President Bush, they did a lot to counteract the spin the Bush administration has put on the U.S. occupation of Iraq. They contradict the notion of American soldiers as liberators, identifying them, instead, as butchers of children and widow-makers.

In a world in which language spins enchanting webs around realities, making bad situations seem good or, at least, necessary, the anger of those who see the truth may be best expressed in action instead of words.

For activists to call others to fight for justice can seem, today, as empty as the Army calling Americans to fight for freedom. Weary with gibberish, the public glazes over at these verbal arguments. But when a shoe is thrown, the message comes through loud and clear.

So perhaps, action borne of anger is what we need today to crash through the webs of words that build up to defend injustice. Anger is an important emotion in activism. It is often the emotion that pushes people into activism in the first place. But if we are to use anger, we must do so intelligently and with an understanding of its pitfalls. Each individual must learn to use his or her anger so that it works positively, not negatively. Anger in activism can work negatively in three ways: by turning to cynicism, leading to violence or alienating allies.

One way in which anger works against an activist is when she begins to associate her identity with it. An angry activist may even use her anger to bolster her ego. Seeing others who are not made angry by, say, the abuse of animals for fur, she may say to herself, “They are too stupid to be angry, I am superior.” As soon as an activist begins to view her anger as a sign of superiority, she becomes no better than the oppressor with whom she is angry. It is through this ego-identification that the worst outcome of all can arise, turning cynic: “People are too stupid to get it. I’ll just focus on my own life and stop trying.” The next time she sees protestors holding placards of skinned and bleeding animals outside the department store, she scoffs. Now, she is better than them too.

The other danger, if anger doesn’t turn to cynicism, is that it escalates. Needing to prove his superiority, an activist may urge more and more violent action, showing how “committed” and “unafraid” he is. Again, the activist has allowed anger to become associated with his ego and distract him from the actual issue. He will harm and destroy more to feed his ego than the help the cause. Violence usually hurts public faith in the overall movement, just as the anarchists smashing store windows in the WTO protest overshadowed the more noble efforts of the peaceful protesters.

The third way that anger can turn counter-productive is when it becomes misdirected. In this scenario, the activist gets so rooted in her stance of anger that she applies it to everyone in her path, friends as well as foes. Recently, a friend wrote me with such a case. She was part of an environmental organization that was seeking to determine how it would word its mission statement. One member showed the statement to a friend and asked for input. When the member sent the edited statement to the group and said she would be distributing this version at an upcoming event, another member lashed out, angry that an outsider had been given this power. Though the edits were related to clarity and not content, the angry member was offended and attacked the “offending” member verbally. When other members discussed the incident, they found they’d all experienced such lashing from this person. This one member’s anger was clearly getting in the way of the group’s forward progress. Such ill-directed anger can lead an activist to be pushed out of a group, no matter how effective they could otherwise be.

Instead of becoming a part of one’s identity that must be fed and affirmed, anger must be treated as a magnificent messenger, commanding us toward right action for the whole. If something makes you deeply angry, heed that message. Your inner compass is telling you something is wrong. Once you’ve figured out what it is, the function of the anger has ceased and the anger can be let go. Then you can move into choosing a heart-centered means of righting the wrong. It may be changing consumption habits; it may be holding a rally; it may be writing a letter. The bottom line is: act. It’s in the name “activist”. The name is not “talkivist”, nor is it, much as I might like, “write-ivist”. At best, the talkers and writers inspire others to act. If we make people angry about an injustice, then good, may it move them to action, not cynicism.

By stepping away from the TV, the computer, and the podium and throwing our shoes, we act our beliefs. We may end up in jail. But if our compass is correct, the public will ultimately judge our actions as justified – even if the powers that be do not – and they will have served a purpose toward the greater whole. When Woodrow Wilson and his cronies tried to have suffragette Alice Paul declared insane by a psychiatrist, he said, “Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.” The quote may be amended to read, “Courage in the oppressed is often mistaken for insanity.” But though they may initially be deemed insane, when the oppressed act with courage, the justness of their acts rings out loud and clear to all those who suffer under oppression. As Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Anger is a messenger. Honor your anger. The greater it flares on behalf of others, the stronger your sense of justice. But know it for what it is – a direction, not a destination. Let it point you toward right action and let the memory of it maintain your spirit as you work to carry out that action. Do not tie your ego to your anger or your action. Seek your satisfaction not through the strength of your anger or the success of your action, but through the kinship you form with those working alongside you and the progress you make, together, to change the world.

Sarah’s story about this situation astounds me both in the extent of the awful acts perpetuated by the coal industry and in the power of the activists working to clean up the pollution and provide citizens with the clean water they need to live. There is so much to be fixed and rethought in the way we do things. I find the story of the activists in Prenter extremely inspiring in my own efforts to contribute in a concrete way, and hope you do, too. -ed. When residents of Prenter Road in West Virginia moved into their community, they were told their well water was so pure, they could bottle it and sell it. Today, that same water is making them sick. In response, the Prenter Water Fund was established this summer by activist Bobby Mitchell and local resident Patty Sebock. Since then, volunteers have been working urgently to get clean water to the community. “I don’t know how to be any more clear about this,” said fund manager, Mat Louis-Rosenberg, “People are dying now.” Louis-Rosenberg has been living in the Coal River Mountain Watch campaign house for the past two months, devoting most of his waking hours to the Prenter Water Fund. He is sustained by a stipend from his position as Coal River Mountain Sludge Safety Intern. Assisted by fellow activist and friend Glen Collins, he has his mission cut out for him. Collins and Louis-Rosenberg joked merrily about being the Water Planeteers for Captain Planet. “We need to get our rings!” they enthused. Humor helps scatter the shadow of King Coal, the force behind Prenter’s polluted waters.

In the 70’s, the Clean Air Protection Act caused the change in coal processing that has led to Prenter’s and other communities’ poisoned water. To make coal cleaner to burn, it is treated with a chemical solution of flocculants, surfactants, sodium hydroxide and sometimes diesel fuel. The waste product, called slurry, includes all these chemicals, along with heavy metals like iron, lead and barium from the coal. The slurry is pumped into abandoned underground mines or stored above ground in “sludge ponds”. A mountain three miles from Upper Prenter Road has been the recipient of underground injections for decades.

In the late 80’s, mountain top removal, a form of mining in which heavy explosives are used to expose coal seams, began in the same area. Roughly one month’s worth of bombing equals the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in WWII. After years of blasting, in 2003, Prenter residents began to report a change in their water. The correlation between the injections, the bombing and the increasingly black water was clear. Repeated force from the bombings upset the decades-worth of underground slurry, causing seepage into the ground water that feeds residents’ wells.

The health effects caused by this seepage are severe and pervasive. About 80% of residents surveyed, including one fifteen year-old, have had gall bladder disease or had their gallbladder removed. Five residents within 100 feet of each other have contracted brain tumors. Residents’ teeth are rotting – children as young as seven need to get dentures. Kidney failure and the subsequent dialysis are also common. When local resident Maria Lambert met Bobby Mitchell and he began asking her about neighbors’ health problems, she began writing down the names of the people in the area who she knew had died from cancer or cancer-related illness. Soon, she had filled twelve pages. “I was shaking so bad,” she said, “he tried to get me to stop, but I said I couldn’t or I wouldn’t remember.” From that night on, she has been involved in Prenter Water Fund, writing letters, speaking out and educating volunteers.

Despite the clear connections between their coal slurry and Prenter residents’ health problems, the coal companies deny responsibility. And while the state does officially regulate the underground injections, the coal companies have been able to manipulate the testing process to avoid accountability for the dangerous chemical and metal levels in the slurry. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection did have a specific person in charge of underground injections, but she retired earlier this year. The DEP has not yet sought anyone to replace her.

Not all citizens are calling for government intervention. While the body may be showing the effects, the mind can get in the way of recognizing their true cause. Many are still in denial that there’s a serious problem with their water. Lambert said, “It’s like, you know something’s not right, but you kinda put it in the back of your mind because you’re used to having the good thing and we had been told that there was nothing wrong but a little iron and sulfur in our water.” When she herself realized that her once pristine water was polluted, she said, “it was a major shock, I quit eating. I lost 50 pounds. I was kinda sick.” She continued, “After shock, you get mad. Then you get depressed because you think your government’s not listening to you. We were in the mountains and we thought [the water] was gonna be good. A lot of people don’t believe it, don’t want to believe it.”

Seeing what others would rather deny can be a burden. Like all who work to shift the status quo, she has moments when she gets tired. “But,” she said, “every time I’d say, ‘I can’t do it anymore, I just can’t do it,’ the phone would ring,” and she’d be on to the next action.

Due to the hard work of these activists, the Prenter Water Fund is starting to make progress in its attempts to clean up Prenter’s water system. The good news is that state and local agencies have pledged funds to the project. The bad news is the timeline associated with the best case scenario still has residents waiting two years before clean water comes out of their taps. For those who must drink, bathe and cook with toxic water, two years is too long to wait. A short term solution must be found while the long term problem is rectified.

Mat Louis-Rosenberg and Bobby Mitchell met at a 4th of July celebration on the top of Kayford Mountain where renowned activist Larry Gibson owns a family land trust that has become a major symbol in the movement to stop mountain top removal. Mat and Bobby connected and began talking about Prenter water. As their conversation progressed, they both had the same thought: “Why don’t we just get these people some water?”

In September, a $10,000 grant from the Paul and Vivian Olum Charitable Foundation gave them the money to jumpstart an effort to solve the short-term need for clean water. They have purchased barrels and arranged a filling station, provided by the Boone County Commission and West Virginia American Water, to be able to deliver fresh water to Prenter Residents. They need just $4,000 more to get the service fully started ($14,000 more to expand the service to every family in a ten-mile radius) and will have a $1,000 a month operating budget in part to pay the driver, who will be a Prenter resident.

Unfortunately, Prenter is not the only community in Appalachia whose water has been polluted by toxic coal waste. Louis-Rosenberg would like to eventually expand their efforts to become the West Virginia Water Fund. A major media campaign about West Virginia’s polluted water would, he believes, be incredibly influential. Collins and Louis-Rosenberg both believe that water is the issue through which the movement to stop mountain top removal will gain widespread support. “I think water is how we’re really going to beat MTR and is the single biggest post-MTR issue.”

Even if mountain top removal stopped tomorrow, the grave threat to Appalachian waters would remain. The amount of water used by the coal companies over the past 10 years in West Virginia alone equals 4.3 times the volume of Lake Ontario. The Brushy Fork slurry impoundment, outside Whitesville, is the tallest dam in the Western Hemisphere at 900 ft. In 1973, just such an impoundment overflowed, destroying a community of 4,000 and killing 118 people. Today, that same threat exists times more than a hundred—the number of slurry impoundments in West Virginia. A 2.8 billion gallon sludge pond sits perched directly above the Marsh Fork public elementary school, putting children’s lives in immediate danger.

Native Americans referred to coal as the earth’s liver. Indeed, it was because of the rich, nearby coal seams that Prenter’s water was once considered as good as Evian. Now that that coal has been removed and replaced with toxic waste, human organs must work beyond their capacity to prevent the body from being poisoned. But 100x safe levels of heavy metals such as manganese, iron, arsenic and antimony along with countless organic chemicals is more than human organs were designed to handle. So they are failing. Bodies in distress, bodies that are dying because of lack of access to a fundamental resource: this is a picture we don’t expect to see in America.

Before Louis-Rosenberg and Collins came to West Virginia, they had been working in post-Katrina New Orleans. When asked about parallels between West Virginia and New Orleans, Louis-Rosenberg said, “I couldn’t even describe to you the gut feeling of sameness.” He cited that West Virginia and Louisiana are the two biggest chemical hotspots in the country. And just as coal has destroyed the mountains, yielding toxic floods, “Oil and gas extraction destroyed the wetlands that would have impeded and prevented Katrina.” As in Prenter, he said “everyone’s dying, there’s poor healthcare and a huge prejudice against the lower class.” Hurricane Katrina may have awakened Americans to the fact that human rights violations that we expect to see in a dictatorship could happen right here in our own country, but by no means was it an isolated instance. Wherever there is large scale extraction of a prized resource—oil, coal, natural gas, copper, etc.—there is subjugation of human and environmental well-being. As resources become scarcer, this will only affect more and more of us.

“My hope is that as this issue gets people’s attention, it will help them acknowledge the larger problem,” concluded Louis-Rosenberg. At first, I thought he was talking about mountain top removal again, but he said no, bigger than that. As we stood in the kitchen of that little, creekside cabin, people floating in and out to grab handfuls of cornbread, I acknowledged that what really drives people is not something that can be put into words. I saw this something in Mat Louis-Rosenberg’s eyes. I heard it in his pauses and I felt it in the bond between he and Glen Collins. I felt it in Maria Lambert’s faith and perseverance, even when she gets tired. There’s a lot of work to be done, but when a commitment is borne through the heart, it rises above the red tape of dividend-driven “reality” and moves swiftly toward justice. This is how I know clean water is coming to the residents of Prenter Road, West Virginia.

If you would like to help bring clean water to Prenter Road, please go to www.prenterwaterfund.org where you can find out more and donate to the cause. To let Governor Manchin of West Virginia know that his state is violating the human rights of its citizens by allowing the pervasive poisoning of its waters, call 1-888-438-2731.

image by carolinenyc

In nearly every speech and debate this year, “clean coal” has been invoked by both candidates as a real solution to America’s over-dependence on foreign energy. Repeated enough, phrases begin to be accepted as truth. But the promise of “clean coal” is a fairy tale, no more possible than spinning straw into gold.

Taxpayers For Common Sense reports that, since 1978, the United States federal government has spent 2.5 billion dollars developing Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) technology, the prime example of “clean coal.” Thirty years later, there are no U.S. coal plants that capture and sequester carbon. Yet the money still flows. According to New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) officials, there is currently $350 million of federal money on the table for states who are able to build a plant that successfully captures carbon. The “winners” will be announced mid-2009. But with every dollar that continues to be poured into “clean coal” research and development, we all lose.

In the still-hypothetical process of carbon capture, the carbon dioxide produced from burning coal is captured before it is released into the atmosphere. It is then pressurized into liquid form, or supercritical CO2, and injected into rock beds deep underground.

Imagine this process from a human perspective. You’re consuming a substance that feeds you and keeps you going, but over time, you realize that a part of that substance is poisoning you. You don’t want to give it up because it’s cheap and easy to get, so instead you concoct a scheme by which you will separate out and bury the harmful element. Content with your new scheme, you keep chugging along and burying the bad stuff. Chug, chug, chug, bury, bury, bury. It’s true, you can’t see it—but you know it’s there and you know that one day you will have to do something about it.

Like Aaron Eckhart’s tobacco lobbyist in New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, geologist Veronica Rankin called supercritical CO2 “natural” and explained that over a long enough period of time (think what a “long time” means to a geologist), it will commingle with other liquids and become a solid. She also said that it is being injected thousands of feet underground, too deep to affect ground water. When an environmentalist at the meeting inquired about the potential danger to the water, a government proponent of CCS joked, “Oh, you mean The Perrier Effect?”

Let’s assume the gravest danger that buried surpercritical CO2 poses to water is, in fact, bubbles. There are other issues that challenge the assertion that carbon sequestration is perfectly safe. The first is that, though sequestration sites are supposed to be too deep to leak above ground and cause asphyxiation, the pipelines needed to carry this CO2 from the plant to the sequestration sites run much nearer to the surface. When CO2 is released into the air in high concentration, it is deadly. In 1984, the sudden surfacing of a CO2 bubble from Lake Manoun in Cameroon killed 40 people. Thirdly, as reported by Rising Tide Australia, CO2 leaks from sequestration sites at a rate of 0.1 to 1% per year. This is not enough to be deadly, but will contribute to Global Warming. At this rate, if all carbon were captured and sequestered starting in 2010, by 2060 the amount of leaked CO2 would equal this year’s world carbon emissions from all sources.

Finally, CCS only addresses the dirtiness of burning coal—what about the mining and transport required to get that coal to the plants? When proponents call CCS a “sustainable” use of coal, it is with a willful amnesia regarding everything that happens prior to that coal being set on fire. The extraction and transport of coal have never been and will never be sustainable practices. With the rise of mountain top removal coal mining, they’ve become less sustainable than ever. Fossil fuels are needed to dig out coal with huge machines, truck it to railroads and barges, then ship it to the plants. Coal from Wyoming is hauled off to Kansas, Michigan, North Dakota, even as far away as Georgia. The emissions from that transport, taking into account the extra 11-40% of coal it takes to capture and sequester CO2 and the energy needed to pipe supercritical CO2 to sequestration sites, must be figured into the ultimate projections of carbon emissions from CCS plants. By examining the total lifespan of the coal and its byproducts, it’s plain to see that any technology using coal cannot be labeled “clean.”

Imagine if the 2.5 billion of federal money spent on “clean coal” over the past 30 years had instead been put toward the development of renewable energy. Imagine if the $350 million currently on the table for successful CCS plants was instead an incentive for successful solar, wind and wave power plants. What if the public spoke out and demanded that no more government money go to subsidize coal—a substance that scientific geniuses Nikola Tesla and Lord Kelvin, at the turn of the century, both believed should be foregone in favor of renewable energy. Back then, Thomas Edison balked at their opinion, thinking coal would last for 50,000 years and knowing nothing of the damage it would cause our earth. We are no longer so ignorant.

By the World Coal Institute’s estimates, we know that there are approximately 147 years of coal left on the planet. In June, The Economist reported that even optimistic proponents of CCS do not believe it will be fully online until 2020. Imagine for a moment that the myth of clean coal were true—that the mining, transport and processing of this substance yielded a carbon footprint on par with that of wind and solar. If deciding which to fund, should it be the one that won’t last much longer than a human life, or the one that will last as long as earth’s life? I appreciate the enthusiasm of those who support “clean coal”—that enthusiasm for new technology is what we need. But we need it pointed in a direction that has a future.

People in high places are standing up and saying no to coal. In a recent speech, Al Gore promoted civil disobedience through protesting the building of new coal plants. This September in Kingsnorth, England, a jury historically ruled not-guilty on charges of property damage for a group of protesters fighting construction of a new coal plant. Leading expert on Global Warming James Hansen testified in their defense. Last May, North Carolina House Representative Pricey Harrison introduced a historic bill to ban mountain top removal coal in her state. And just last week, financial guru Jim Cramer told viewers of CNBC’s “Mad Money” that there is no such thing as “clean coal” and advised them not to invest in coal companies.

To put this carbon-heavy rock in the past where it belongs, citizens need to voice opposition to coal, in any form. Write or call your state representatives asking them to put a moratorium on new coal plants in your state, including those with proposed CCS technology, and instead push for legislature that supports renewable energy. Include a request to ban the use of mountain top removal coal at existing plants. Start conserving energy. Part of the ammunition of coal proponents is the sheer amount of electricity Americans use and the hope that they’ll keep using more—throughout Appalachia, billboards read “Coal Keeps the Lights On.” Turn the lights off, get a smaller fridge, line dry clothes, unplug appliances not in use, and switch to energy efficient bulbs.

Remember that only a hundred twenty years ago, Americans didn’t have electricity. Our experience with this form of energy is young; it is natural to innovate beyond the system we started with. The primary reason we have not done so sooner is because of the power and wealth of coal companies who secured an early monopoly on electricity generation. For so many reasons, it is time to break that monopoly and invoke not alchemic fairy tales, but the possibility of truly clean alternatives. And don’t let anyone tell you the little things don’t matter. When everybody in this country makes a small change, that change is multiplied by 300 million. Spread the word.

For more information on “clean coal”, visit Coal is Dirty. For more information on mountain top removal coal mining and efforts to stop it, visit I Love Mountains.

Sarah Moon is a member of New York environmental group Green Brigade and Co-Artistic Director of Headwater Productions, a company committed to arts and activism that raises awareness of environmental and social justice issues. Her play, Current Changes in Empire, tracks the history of electricity alongside the story of a present-day family whose home is endangered by mountain top removal coal mining. It is currently in development with Headwater Productions. She is the Writing Coordinator at the Student Academic Consulting Center at Baruch College and teaches Freshman Writing there.