Divestment: A Clash of Ideals and Investments at Swarthmore

by James B. Stewart, "Common Sense," The New York Times, May 17, 2014

Students at Swarthmore have pressed the school to divest itself of investments in coal mining. Credit Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times.

Kate Aronoff didn’t arrive at Swarthmore College in fall 2010 expecting to be an environmental activist. Nor did she know much about the stock market. She knew even less about asset management and college endowments.

That all changed her freshman year, when she and about a dozen Swarthmore students made a field trip to West Virginia to meet Larry Gibson, widely known and celebrated by environmentalists as the “Keeper of the Mountains.” A short walk from his two-room cabin on land his family has owned for generations, the students could see thousands of acres laid bare by mountaintop removal coal mining operations.

“The difference between the majesty of the Appalachian Mountains that hadn’t been ruined and the mountain peaks that were flattened was so stark,” Ms. Aronoff told me this week, as she was studying for finals. “We saw and heard about how toxic the coal mining industry is and how much of the economy is structured around coal mining. It was a moment when the connection between economic injustice and environmental injustice was just so clear.”

That moment, and others like it, have touched off a nationwide movement that is beginning to affect how colleges, universities, other institutions and pension funds are investing their vast financial resources. A week ago, Stanford University rocked the endowment world when it said its $18.7 billion endowment would not make direct investments in publicly traded companies whose primary business is mining coal for energy generation.

Stanford joins 11 other colleges that, to varying degrees, have pledged not to invest their endowment resources in fossil fuels. But Stanford’s prestige and the size of its endowment have suddenly thrust the divisive issue of fossil fuel divestment, and what is more generally considered socially responsible investment, onto the agendas of investment committees everywhere.

But at Swarthmore, one of the country’s most selective and prestigious colleges, where the student-led divestment movement had its origins, the college’s board members and administrators have listened repeatedly to the student activists — yet have firmly rebuffed their proposals on the grounds that they could hurt endowment income and are unlikely to have any impact on energy companies.

“It’s surprising that Swarthmore, which prides itself on social justice, would be so hesitant when you try to involve the institution itself,” Ms. Aronoff said. “It’s astounding to us to see the ways they continue to resist and won’t put their money where their mouth is.”

College officials seem sensitive to the point. “The students are terrific,” Giles Kemp, the chairman of Swarthmore’s board of managers, told me this week. “There’s no lack of admiration for their idealism. They want to make a positive difference in the world, which is Swarthmore’s mission. The frustrating thing, the ironic aspect is, the board is as much a believer in the threat to us and our children from climate change as the students are. Where we disagree are the tactics. After much deliberation, the board came to a different point of view.”

Swarthmore’s endowment is $1.635 billion, and has generated a one-year return of 11.9%, a three-year average annual return of 12.5%, and a 5-year average annual return of 6.4%. All three are better than the average rates of return for all colleges and universities. Much of the income is earmarked for scholarships.

While the activist students vow to keep the pressure on Swarthmore, they held a retreat this week to strategize and savor the Stanford decision, “We’re elated,” said Sara Blazevic, a Swarthmore junior who worked closely with students at Stanford. “I’m amazed at how this has taken off. It’s unprecedented how quickly it’s grown. When we started our campaign, it was kind of lonely. By the fall of 2012, there were 20 to 30 campaigns and then last year it really blew up.”

Students say the Swarthmore movement, which goes by the name Mountain Justice, was in part inspired by George Lakey, a visiting professor in peace and conflict studies, who led the trip to West Virginia and whose class examined various case studies in nonviolent activism, including the impact of divestiture on ending apartheid in South Africa. Ms. Blazevic also went to West Virginia.

“I was shocked to see the degree of devastation,” she said. “And I was troubled and disturbed that my tuition money and alumni donations were being invested in that kind of destruction. It was politicizing.”

Professor Lakey agreed. “The more these Swarthmore students learned,” he said by email from Iceland, “the more the students connected the dots and understood that the choice of extreme extraction over switching to sustainable energy is a choice that is simply wrong,” He added, “They felt gravely disappointed to find that their school, a Swarthmore that insists on its devotion to the future of the students, was in fact committed to a policy that makes the students’ future problematic.”

Ms. Aronoff, who was in Professor Lakey’s class, said she and other students were intrigued by the possibility of divestment, “but we weren’t even sure what an endowment is or how it works. We had to take a crash course on investing.” That led them to the Responsible Endowments Coalition and its executive director, Dan Apfel, who worked closely with the group. “He really helped us get the campaign off the ground after we had the idea,” she said.

The group got a lift when 350.org, led by the writer and environmental activist Bill McKibben, took up the cause, and started a cross-country bus tour to promote divestment. As interest spread to other campuses, the Swarthmore students were the hosts of a conference on the campus in spring 2013. “We thought we’d get maybe six other schools to attend,” Ms. Aronoff said. “We ended up with over 200 students from 75 schools.” A national student divestment network was forged soon after. But Swarthmore itself didn’t budge, although officials always seemed open to discussion of the issue, and the board agreed to an open meeting with students to discuss it.

“By last spring we’d met with them more than 25 times,” Ms. Aronoff said. “There was some value to going through institutional channels and having face time with administrators, but there was remarkably little progress.” At the open meeting, hundreds of students filed in, but many raised other contentious issues, like sexual harassment. The meeting became chaotic. Opponents of divestment were drowned out, and one vented her frustration in an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal (“My Top Notch Illiberal Arts Education”). At the next board meeting, divestment activists gathered in the hallway and used an open microphone to try to get the board’s attention, but board members ignored them.

“As a college that honors its Quaker roots, we encourage students to engage one another and us in matters related to the college and to the world beyond, and we listen to their points of view as we consider important decisions,” Rebecca Chopp, Swarthmore’s president, said. “Sometimes this is difficult, sometimes people do not agree, and sometimes it does not work the first time. But we will always be proud that Swarthmore is a college that supports debate and disagreement.”

Last fall, the board issued a formal letter rejecting the group’s demands. “The managers’ decision not to divest is broad and deep,” Mr. Kemp wrote. “It is our collective judgment that the cost of divestment would far outweigh any potential benefit.” He wrote that divestment would be costly to the endowment, with a decline in income of an estimated $10 million to $15 million a year, and that it would be a “symbolic” act with little if any impact on energy companies or public officials.

Mr. Kemp pointed out that Stanford’s endowment charter explicitly permitted the university to consider social causes in making investment decisions, while Swarthmore’s takes the opposite position. “There are a lot of worthy causes,” Mr. Kemp said, “but the question is, Should an endowment be used to advance them? Last year, there was a lot of agitation for companies to support Palestine and stop investing in companies having to do with Israel. Those students were as fervent in their cause as these students are in theirs.” He added: “The board concluded the way our endowment is set up, we weren’t meant to use for social purposes no matter how noble.”

The student activists wrote a rebuttal that ran in the campus newspaper, contending that Swarthmore’s “chief concern can no longer be the rapid and uninhibited growth of the institutional endowment. Endless growth is a false methodology that inherently prioritizes money over human, moral and environmental concern. It is the same logic on which the fossil fuel industry has operated since its inception, and what has driven us to our current economic and environmental crises.”

And some faculty members have taken issue with elements of the board’s position. “I don’t really support divestment,” said Mark Kuperberg, an economics professor. “I don’t think it will affect company behavior. But I don’t think it will hurt the endowment much, either.”

Stanford’s decision doesn’t appear to have affected the Swarthmore board’s thinking. “Ultimately, after considering many diverse viewpoints, the board made its decision,” Ms. Chopp said. “The board is simply not willing to accept the significant cuts in scholarships, faculty and curriculum offerings that a significantly lower endowment return would necessitate. We believe that to do so would have no measurable effect on halting climate change and, at the same time, would pose an unacceptable risk to the college’s finances.”

Despite their differences, Mr. Kemp acknowledged some pride in the students and what they’ve accomplished. “I may not agree with these students, but I think we can learn from them and admire their dedication and if we disagree, it’s not for lack of respect for their commitment and drive.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/business/a-clash-of-ideals-and-investments-at-swarthmore.html

Bill McKibben: Obama and Climate Change -- The Real Story

The president has said the right things about climate change – and has taken some positive steps. But we're drilling for more oil and digging up more carbon than ever

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

by Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone Magazine, December 17, 2013

Two years ago, on a gorgeous November day, 12,000 activists surrounded the White House to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Signs we carried featured quotes from Barack Obama in 2008: "Time to end the tyranny of oil"; "In my administration, the rise of the oceans will begin to slow."

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Our hope was that we could inspire him to keep those promises. Even then, there were plenty of cynics who said Obama and his insiders were too closely tied to the fossil-fuel industry to take climate change seriously. But in the two years since, it's looked more and more like they were right – that in our hope for action we were willing ourselves to overlook the black-and-white proof of how he really feels.

If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet's biggest oil producer and Russia as the world's biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we've begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.

Greenland Melting: Climate Change's Disasterous Effects

You could argue that private industry, not the White House, has driven that boom, and in part you'd be right. But that's not what Obama himself would say. Here's Obama speaking in Cushing, Oklahoma, last year, in a speech that historians will quote many generations hence. It is to energy what Mitt Romney's secretly taped talk about the 47% was to inequality. Except that Obama was out in public, boasting for all the world to hear:

"Over the last three years, I've directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We're opening up more than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We've quad­rupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We've added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth, and then some. . . . In fact, the problem . . . is that we're actually producing so much oil and gas . . . that we don't have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it where it needs to go."

Actually, of course, "the problem" is that climate change is spiraling out of control. Under Obama we've had the warmest year in American history – 2012 – featuring a summer so hot that corn couldn't grow across much of the richest farmland on the planet. We've seen the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and the largest wind field ever measured, both from Hurricane Sandy. We've watched the Arctic melt, losing three quarters of its summer sea ice. We've seen some of the largest fires ever recorded in the mountains of California, Colorado and New Mexico. And not just here, of course – his term has seen unprecedented drought and flood around the world. The typhoon that just hit the Philippines, according to some meteorologists, had higher wind speeds at landfall than any we've ever seen. When the world looks back at the Obama years half a century from now, one doubts they'll remember the health care website; one imagines they'll study how the most powerful government on Earth reacted to the sudden, clear onset of climate change

The Fossil Fuel Resistance

And what they'll see is a president who got some stuff done, emphasis on "some." In his first term, Obama used the stimulus money to promote green technology, and he won agreement from Detroit for higher automobile mileage standards; in his second term, he's fighting for EPA regulations on new coal-fired power plants. These steps are important – and they also illustrate the kind of fights the Obama administration has been willing to take on: ones where the other side is weak. The increased mileage standards came at a moment when D.C. owned Detroit – they were essentially a condition of the auto bailouts. And the battle against new coal-fired power plants was really fought and won by environmentalists. Over the past few years, the Sierra Club and a passel of local groups managed to beat back plans for more than 100 new power plants. The new EPA rules – an architecture designed in part by the Natural Resources Defense Council – will ratify the rout and drive a stake through the heart of new coal. But it's also a mopping-up action.

Obama loyalists argue that these are as much as you could expect from a president saddled with the worst Congress in living memory. But that didn't mean that the president had to make the problem worse, which he's done with stunning regularity. Consider:

• Just days before the BP explosion, the White House opened much of the offshore U.S. to new oil drilling. ("Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," he said by way of explanation. "They are technologically very advanced.")

• In 2012, with the greatest Arctic melt on record under way, his administration gave Shell Oil the green light to drill in Alaska's Beaufort Sea. ("Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic opportunities it presents," the president said.)

• This past August, as the largest forest fire in the history of the Sierra Nevadas was burning in Yosemite National Park, where John Muir invented modern environmentalism, the Bureau of Land Management decided to auction 316 million tons of taxpayer-owned coal in Wyoming's Powder River basin. According to the Center for American Progress, the emissions from that sale will equal the carbon produced from 109 million cars.

Even on questions you'd think would be open-and-shut, the administration has waffled. In November, for instance, the EPA allowed Kentucky to weaken a crucial regulation, making it easier for mountaintop-removal coal mining to continue. As the Sierra Club's Bruce Nilles said, "It's dismaying that the Obama administration approved something even worse than what the Bush administration proposed."

All these steps are particularly toxic because we've learned something else about global warming during the Obama years: Most of the coal and gas and oil that's underground has to stay there if we're going to slow climate change.

Though the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 was unquestionably the great foreign-policy failure of Obama's first term, producing no targets or timetables or deals, the world's leaders all signed a letter pledging that they would keep the earth's temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius. This is not an ambitious goal (the one degree we've raised the temperature already has melted the Arctic, so we're fools to find out what two will do), but at least it is something solid to which Obama and others are committed. To reach that two-degree goal, say organizations such as the Carbon Tracker Initiative, the World Bank, the International Energy Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, HSBC and just about everyone else who's looked at the question, we'd need to leave undisturbed between 2/3 and 4/5 of the planet's reserves of coal, gas and oil.

The Powder River Basin would have been a great place to start, especially since activists, long before the administration did anything, have driven down domestic demand for coal by preventing new power plants. But as the "Truth Team" on barack obama.com puts it, "building a clean future for coal is an integral part of President Obama's plan to develop every available source of American energy."

And where will the coal we don't need ourselves end up? Overseas, at record levels: the Netherlands, the U.K., China, South Korea. And when it gets there, it slows the move to cleaner forms of energy. All told, in 2012, U.S. coal exports were the equivalent of putting 55 million new cars on the road. If we don't burn our coal and instead sell it to someone else, the planet doesn't care; the atmosphere has no borders.

AAs the administration's backers consistently point out, America has cut its own carbon emissions by 12% in the past 5 years, and we may meet our announced national goal of a 17% reduction by decade's end. We've built lots of new solar panels and wind towers in the past 5 years (though way below the pace set by nations like Germany). In any event, building more renewable energy is not a useful task if you're also digging more carbon energy – it's like eating a pan of Weight Watchers brownies after you've already gobbled a quart of Ben and Jerry's.

Let's lay aside the fact that climate scientists have long since decided these targets are too timid and that we'd have to cut much more deeply to get ahead of global warming. All this new carbon drilling, digging and burning the White House has approved will add up to enough to negate the administration's actual achievements: The coal from the Powder River Basin alone, as the commentator Dave Roberts pointed out in Grist, would "undo all of Obama's other climate work."

The perfect example of this folly is the Keystone XL pipeline stretching south from the tar sands of Canada – the one we were protesting that November day. The tar sands are absurdly dirty: To even get oil to flow out of the muck you need to heat it up with huge quantities of natural gas, making it a double-dip climate dis­aster. More important, these millions of untouched acres just beneath the Arctic Circle make up one of the biggest pools of carbon on Earth. If those fields get fully developed, as NASA's recently retired senior climate scientist James Hansen pointed out, it will be "game over" for the climate.

Obama has all the authority he needs to block any pipelines that cross the border to the U.S. And were he to shut down Keystone XL, say analysts, it would dramatically slow tar-sands expansion plans in the region. But soon after taking office, he approved the first, small Keystone pipeline, apparently without any qualms. And no one doubts that if a major campaign hadn't appeared, he would have approved the much larger Keystone XL without a peep – even though the oil that will flow through that one pipe will produce almost as much carbon as he was theoretically saving with his new auto-mileage law.

But the fight to shut down the pipeline sparked a grassroots movement that has changed the culture of environmentalism – but not, so far, the culture of the White House. For me, the most telling moment came a month or two ago when it emerged that the president's former communications director, Anita Dunn, had taken a contract to flack for the pipeline.

The reason for fighting Keystone all along was not just to block further expansion of the tar sands – though that's required, given the amount of carbon contained in that expanse of Alberta. We also hoped that doing the right thing would jump-start Washington in the direction of real climate action. Instead, the effort necessary to hold off this one pipeline has kept environmentalists distracted as Obama has opened the Arctic and sold off the Powder River Basin, as he's fracked and drilled. It kept us quiet as both he and Mitt Romney spent the whole 2012 campaign studiously ignoring climate change.

We're supposed to be thrilled when Obama says something, anything, about global warming – he gave a fine speech this past June. "The question," he told a Georgetown University audience, is "whether we will have the courage to act before it's too late. And how we answer will have a profound impact on the world that we leave behind not just to you, but to your children and to your grandchildren. As a president, as a father and as an American, I'm here to say we need to act." Inspiring stuff, but then in October, when activists pressed him about Keystone at a Boston gathering, he said, "We had the climate-change rally back in the summer." Oh.

In fact, that unwillingness to talk regularly about climate change may be the greatest mistake the president has made. An account in Politico last month described his chief of staff dressing down Nobel laureate and then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu in 2009 for daring to tell an audience in Trinidad that island nations were in severe danger from rising seas. Rahm Emanuel called his deputy Jim Messina to say, "If you don't kill Chu, I'm going to." On the plane home, Messina told Chu, "How, exactly, was this fucking on message?" It's rarely been on message for Obama, despite the rising damage. His government spent about as much last year responding to Sandy and to the Midwest drought as it did on education, but you wouldn't know it from his actions.

Which doesn't mean anyone's given up – the president's inaction has actually helped to spur a real movement. Some of it is aimed at Washington, and involves backing the few good things the administration has done. At the moment, for instance, most green groups are rallying support for the new EPA coal regulations.

Mostly, though, people are working around the administration, and with increasing success. Obama's plan to auction Powder River Basin coal has so far failed – there aren't any bidders, in large part because citizens in Washington state and Oregon have fought the proposed ports that would make it cheap to ship all that coal to Asia. Obama has backed fracking to the hilt – but in state after state, voters have begun to limit and restrict the technology. Environmentalists are also taking the fight directly to Big Oil: In October, an Oxford University study said that the year-old fight for divestment from stock in fos­sil-fuel companies is the fastest-growing corporate campaign in history.

None of that cures the sting of Obama's policies nor takes away the need to push him hard. Should he do the right thing on Keystone XL, a decision expected sometime in the next six months, he'll at least be able to tell other world leaders, "See, I've stopped a big project on climate grounds." That could, if he used real diplomatic pressure, help restart the international talks he has let lapse. He's got a few chances left to show some leadership.

But even on this one highly contested pipeline, he's already given the oil industry half of what it wanted. That day in Oklahoma when he boasted about encircling the Earth with pipelines, he also announced his support for the southern leg of Keystone, from Oklahoma to the Gulf. Not just his support: He was directing his administration to "cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done."

It has: Despite brave opposition from groups like Tar Sands Blockade, Keystone South is now 95% complete, and the administration is in court seeking to beat back the last challenges from landowners along the way. The president went ahead and got it done. If only he'd apply that kind of muscle to stopping climate change.

This story is from the December 19th, 2013 - January 2nd, 2014, issue of Rolling Stone.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/obama-and-climate-change-the-real-story-20131217

Gail Zawacki and the RAMPS mountaintop removal protest at Patriot Coal's Hobet mine in Lincoln County, West Virginia

Behind the scenes at a big mountaintop-mining protest: The good, the bad, and the ugly

By David Roberts, Grist, August 2, 2012

Over the weekend, a group of protestors affiliated with the group Radical Action for Mountain Peoples’ Survival (RAMPS) managed to shut down operations at Patriot Coal’s Hobet strip mine in Lincoln County, W.Va. Some 20 were arrested; most remain behind bars, facing high bail and likely the most severe charges West Virginia authorities think to throw at them.

During their protest, they faced threats and intimidation from locals and police alike. Here, one woman who attended the protests, Gail Zawacki, shares her personal experience and thoughts. I don’t agree with everything expressed, but I think it’s a valuable look into the mechanics and psychology of activism in coal country.

——

It took several weeks for me to make the decision to travel to Appalachia after first learning of the announced protest against mountaintop removal. Part of my hesitation was just nervousness about venturing into the unknown, and some due to wondering if it would be a failure — a waste of time and money. But as the numbers increased to the hundreds on theRAMPS Facebook page, and a young lady signed up to drive with me from New Jersey on the ride board, I was encouraged to go ahead.

Part of my ambivalence was that I was unconvinced that my agenda was reflected in RAMPS policy, which is avowedly against the localized ravages of mountaintop removal but not necessarily against coal itself. My primary concern, beyond the existential threat of climate change, is trees dying from air pollution, a significant portion of which derives from burning coal, as anyone who reads my blog or Dead Trees…Dying Forests knows. And as it happens, there is indeed a contingent that opposes MTR but not underground coal mining or burning, as subsequently confirmed by statements in an article and video from Waging Nonviolence.

But I discovered there were enough participants involved who are primarily concerned about climate, resource exploitation, and corporate hegemony that I felt I was in good company. In fact I recognized several people from Occupy Wall Street and the tar-sands protests in Washington, D.C., which struck me as both good and bad. It was nice to see familiar faces, but I had the uneasy impression that it meant there are far too few who are willing to actually do anything about the multiple converging disasters on the horizon.

Initially, I was confident in the intention to be arrested, having already done so in planned actions outside the New York Stock Exchange and against tar sands in Washington. In both cases, I was released in a matter of hours. However, when my partners decided to leave after the police arrived and issued a warning, I was relieved. A growing inkling had developed that this action, the largest ever shutdown of a mountaintop-removal site, was likely to provoke a commensurately extreme response.

That suspicion was correct. The organizers had historically cultivated what they considered reasonable relations with law enforcement, but this episode would prove a break with that tradition. Veterans of the long struggle against King Coal warned us that civil disobedience in West Virginia presents a unique set of circumstances, but even they were taken by surprise at the coordinated virulence of the counter-protest, the police complicity, and the ongoing harsh terms of incarceration for those who were arrested.
Twenty people are still in jail, with the ridiculous condition that each must post in-state property valued at $25,000 as bail. Neither cash nor bondsman is acceptable, so for anyone who is not a resident, it’s almost impossible to arrange. This constitutes an outrageous abuse of the justice system, since almost all of the charges are minor offenses. The RAMPS website has updates and a link to contribute to the legal fund.

The camp was, um, rustic to say the least. Even though we retained many modern amenities — propane for cooking, and port-a-potties — it still gave a taste of what it would be like to live without conveniences Americans take for granted. Like showers. Frankly, I doubt many people in the developed world will take to such deprivations with grace. The very nature of mostly leaderless, horizontal protests attracts outcasts and rejects, lonesome ragamuffins, rabble-rousers, and young women with hair flowing unchecked on legs and under arms. Few campers expressed feeling burdened by the constraints of tent living. After three days, however, I couldn’t stand my own stickiness anymore, so I snuck off to a river to wash my hair with the tiny fishes. It turned out to be one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, and I had it all to myself.

At first I didn’t comprehend why we were meant to arrive several days prior to the event on Saturday; I expected to be bored and idle. Instead the schedule was packed and a general feeling prevailed that we could have used more time in advance to prepare and get to know each other. Every morning and evening, the entire camp met in a circle, while orientations were held for smaller groups throughout the day.

We split into self-selected “Affinity Groups” of around eight to a dozen, determined largely by our preferred degree of arrestability. Each group decided for itself which of the two actions they wanted to attend — trespassing at the mine, or a less risky diversionary demonstration at a park. The members then volunteered to attend the trainings offered for various required roles — support, legal information, advanced de-escalation, medics, mine safety, and techniques in locking down and passive resistance. In the process, trust is developed among the members, which is essential when you need to rely on each other in a situation fraught with unpredictable dangers.

As time passed, a number of people, disgruntled from various controversies, drifted away. My affinity group — the late, lamented McPherson Madness — collapsed completely as the bulk of the members recoiled from an emerging consensus that bail and jail time were far in excess of what most of them had anticipated. Several stated resentfully that they felt they had been misled, which left me adrift. Not all affinity groups were inclusive of new members. Finally, I met two late arrivals and we formed a band of three, as the advance brigade with a banner warning the target vehicle to stop, loosely associated, with the only remaining affinity group intending to lock down on a vehicle.

In fact, with some stellar exceptions, there was a pervasive atmosphere of cliquishness and, in some individuals, an overweening self-importance that was downright obnoxious. It was more pronounced than anything I encountered at Occupy. For a movement that wants to expand, they might want to consider some sort of systemic outreach, because for a newcomer to join it is quite overwhelming and requires mastering new terminology that almost amounts learning a new language, not to mention norms that seem bizarre to the uninitiated — like announcing, at every single meeting, your preferred gender pronoun along with your name. Seriously? I prefer She, Her, He, His, They?

I’m 57 years old, so perhaps I don’t understand the zeitgeist of the younger generation’s elaborate concerns about gender identities, personal space, and rules about touching. I wonder if this cohort is justifiably more aware and explicit about boundaries, or whether perhaps they are reacting to a lifetime of exposure to too much casual pornography, erosion of respect, or even sexual assault. One girl related to me her anger that her boyfriend refused to use a condom which resulted in her contracting an STD. Well, I suppose there’s nothing new about that.

Beyond those relatively benign issues, the atmosphere was almost excruciatingly intense. In fact, the morning of the action I woke up and wondered in a moment of slight panic whether I had inadvertently stumbled upon a cult. Very late the night before, while constructing the pipes and chains to lock themselves in place, the young people shared a peculiar fervid light in their eyes almost like they were in a drugged trance, no doubt from exhaustion and anxiety.

There were certainly moments of levity and friendly interactions, but overall it was extremely stressful and many people were on edge. Whether that’s endemic to the sort of personality attracted to direct actions or is a temporary condition from the apprehension just prior, I can’t say. It didn’t help that surveillance helicopters regularly swept over our camp.

The “Rainbow People,” a scruffy lot of vagabonds who travel on a dilapidated old bus, departed after being publicly chastised for saying “you guys” instead of “y’all” and not accepting the onus of white male privilege, among other transgressions. They also resented being told that they had to wear shirts and not peace signs. Hippie is an image shunned by most activists.

Everyone was expected to engage in role playing in a mock conflict with miners and protesters and this proved invaluable practice for what indeed followed. Much was made of the importance of sensitivity to the plight of the miners, who are already losing jobs because mountaintop removal requires fewer workers and the demand for coal is waning. It wouldn’t have been prudent of me to reveal that I just don’t feel the special empathy for miners we were supposed to have.

Did anyone mourn for the lost canvas sail makers when steam ships came along, or the farriers who became obsolete when people abandoned horses and took to cars? We are supposed to feel for the miners because it’s all they know how to do, it’s a culture, and it has a history, but to me it’s an ethic that — like just about all human endeavors everywhere — simply grabbed onto to a cheap, easy income to live beyond our environmental means. I believe RAMPS has the fanciful notion that they can bridge the differences with miners if only they can educate them, which has about the same probability of success as convincing a fundamentalist religious zealot that they imagined God.

Several times I asked organizers: What would West Virginia look like if there just happened to be no coal? How would people get by?

The answer was inevitably: There just wouldn’t be so many people. Really, it’s likely there wouldn’t be any people. In other words, those mountains are incapable of sustaining a human population. Even the Indians, I was told, never lived there — they only visited to hunt.

So I guess you could say, the problem isn’t MTR, or coal. It’s our numbers.

I’ll go one step further and say (and I in no way mean to include all the other fine folks in West Virginia, because this statement already got me accused of, perish the thought, stereotyping!) that the counter-protesters were not just vicious and belligerent, they were incredibly stupid. Why do I say so? In one of many “conversations” that ensued over the course of the afternoon of the protest, a woman demanded to know why we were there given that we weren’t from West Virginia. I told her as politely and calmly as I could that the toxic emissions from coal plants travel hundreds of miles, giving people far away (like my daughter) cancer. Despite this, she continued to demand to know why I was there, as though she hadn’t even heard my answer. Two miners in the back of a pickup engaged in a loud discussion, meant to be overheard, deriding us for caring about the environment. One declared, “Ain’t no pollution here!” Not two miles from this:

One local article doesn’t come anywhere close to describing the reality of what we called “The Gauntlet” as we walked for hours after the protest to find our vans. Dozens of anti-protesters in miners’ gear drove pickups, ATVs, and motorcycles that threatened to run us off the road, roaring around the twisting, narrow corners at insanely high speeds, throwing sticks and rocks. I would say most of us were terrified.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the only reason they didn’t shoot or otherwise attack us is that they, too, had training, from the coal companies, and were instructed to intimidate us but not do anything that would create bad publicity for the coal companies by causing permanent injury. Having said that, there is no question in my mind that had we responded with anything in kind, the situation could have easily crossed the line into physical violence.

When we finally did locate our vans, which had been prevented by the police from rescuing us, the trucks blockaded our vehicles on the street. The verbal assault continued for about two hours while we were trapped, fearful we would be stranded at their mercy in the dark. Finally three state troopers arrived and made them let us through. Several vehicles then tailed us for well over an hour into the night, boxing us in on the freeway, before we finally lost them.

Among the anti-protesters, the women were the worst, cursing and screaming. My favorites were, “Brush your fucking teeth!” and “Take a fucking bath!” It occurred to me, when one girl complained that we were insufficiently appreciative of the sacrifice miners had made to provide the rest of us with electricity — such as her brother, who had sustained injuries on the job — that their dependence on coal resembles the emotional traits of abusive relationships, in which victims cling irrationally to their abusers.

Confederate flags and signs that demand “End the War on Coal”decorate their houses, many of them trailers. The inhabitants feel besieged and in their minds are clearly waging a war. Even neighbors of our isolated campground, which was located down a long, graveled single lane, were overtly hostile. The morning of the action, one person was missing and it turned out that he had been out walking when a man shouted to him, “Get off the road!” Thinking a car must be approaching, he leapt onto the lawn, and the man, who was brandishing some sort of club, said, “I can’t believe you’re so dumb you fell for that. Y’all are on private property now and according to West Virginia law, I can take you hostage.” Really! Our comrade refused to fight and so eventually the man’s wife called the police and they arrived and set him free.

When we finally got back to camp, we found out that someone had put spike strips on the drive, cut trees with a chainsaw to block it, and left a half-dozen 9mm bullet holes in the campground sign (one right through the sheep’s heart).

I have speculated that perhaps the reason more people haven’t realized that trees are dying from pollution is that so many of us live in cities or are otherwise cut off from nature. And yet here in the midst of huge forests, the worst epithet the miners could derisively hurl at us was “tree-hugger.” They have no appreciation for the trees at all, other than to exploit them. They are still logging relentlessly.

All in all, it was an excellent adventure, even fulfilling the cliché of “empowerment.” Although the trees in West Virginia are no healthier than the sickly specimens that haunt me in New Jersey, there are just so many on so many mountains that it was an enormous pleasure to walk in their blue shadows. And I do actually have sympathy for one of the signs on a miner’s truck, which declared, “Don’t Like Coal? Burn Candles.”

The miners, like other climate deniers, understand in a visceral way that there is no technological replacement for the concentrated power of fossil fuels. They continue to stick their fingers in their ears because scientists and activists simply haven’t been truthful, and deniers know it. There is no way that catastrophic climate change — and consequent extinction for most species — can be averted unless human population is deliberately restricted and individual consumption in the developed countries is drastically curtailed. So they tune out the scientific evidence of climate change.

Ecological and health costs of industrial civilization have been given short shrift in the climate-change narrative: epidemics of cancer and heart disease, hormone-disrupting plastics leading to obesity and diabetes, ocean acidification and coral bleaching, habitat destruction and water contamination from coal mining, tar sands, and hydrofracking … and what is completely obvious, but never discussed, the collapsing ecosystems on the land as trees and annual agricultural crops absorb ozone and lose resistance to insects, disease, fungus, and drought.

Food and health are things that people care about, not melting ice caps in the Arctic from CO2, as dangerous as that is. With this obstinate strategic error, the climate movement has won very few battles and totally lost the war.

But don’t go down without a fight.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/behind-the-scenes-at-a-big-mountaintop-mining-protest-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

RAMPS: Daring protesters shut down Obama-backed Hobet 45 mountaintop removal strip mine in West Virginia

by Jeff Biggers, Huffington Post, July 28, 2012

Ramping up renewed efforts to end mountaintop removal mining in central Appalachia, scores of protesters staged a daring action at the controversial Hobet strip mine today in Lincoln County, West Virginia, shutting down operations through a series of coordinated lock downs, tree-sits and banner drops. In a symbolic challenge to the Obama administration's failed regulatory policies, the protest targeted the Hobet 45 mountaintop removal mine, which had been granted a widely denounced permit over two years ago.

According to RAMPS, a West Virginia-based grassroots groups that organized the "mountain mobilization" protest as part of a nationwide summer of actions against devastating extraction industry operations, St. Louis-based mine owner Patriot Coal has left behind a legacy of destruction in coal country for both area residents and miners. Patriot filed for bankruptcy earlier this month, which could also affect pension and United Mine Workers of America union contracts.

"The government has aided and abetted the coal industry in evading environmental and mine safety regulations. We are here today to demand that the government and coal industry end strip mining, repay their debt to Appalachia, and secure a just transition for this region," said Dustin Steele of Matewan, West Virginia, in a released statement. The son and grandson of union coal miners, Steele took part in one of the truck lockdowns.

Protesters at Hobet mine in Lincoln County. Photo courtesy of RAMPS campaign.

Citing the mounting evidence of the health and humanitarian crises in the coalfields from toxic mining fallout, including a rise in black lung disease and links to birth defects and cancer, the protesters also stationed banners on the mine site: "Coal Leaves, Cancer Stays."

"The coal companies are poisoning our water and air, and they're treating the workers no better than the land -- fighting workplace health and safety protections to get the most out of labor as they can," said Junior Walk, a former coal company employee from nearby Whitesville, West Virginia, who won the 2011 Brower Youth Award for his environmental activism.

Protesters also called on the Obama administration and regional politicians to launch more sustainable job training and coalfield regeneration projects.

Coal mining residents have pleaded for basic civil rights and environmental protection for years, with more than 20 peer-reviewed studies suggesting higher risks and links between reckless strip mining and devastating health impacts, including birth defects, cancer and chronic heart, lung and kidney disease. (A recent report noted that strip miners are even subjected to unacceptable levels of black lung disease.)

A bill, the ACHE Act, calling for an emergency moratorium on mountaintop removal mining was recently introduced into Congress.

For updates on the protests and arrests, follow RAMPS campaign.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/ramps-campaign_b_1714569.html

Moving Planet: Coal Country: From India to the Heart of Appalachia by Nicole Ghio

Moving Planet: Coal Country: From India to the Heart of Appalachia by Nicole Ghio

byboatsieFollowforMoving Planet, Daily Kos, September 23, 2011

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Nichole Ghio, Sierra Club Campaign Liaison, Policy and Organizing,  reports on Day 2 of of India/Appalachia Coal Activist Exchange Moving Planet Event in West Virginia

“You are not alone.”

We are on our second day of day of cultural exchanges between Appalachian mountaintop removal coal mining communities and Indian coal activists, and if there was one theme “you are not alone” was it.

Appalachia Rising

West Virginia activist Catherine Hoffman summed up the purpose of our meeting in Oak Hill West Virginia by saying simply, “I had no idea that the same thing is happening in India as is happening here.” In both Appalachia and India people suffer because of coal mining; they are poorer and have very little chance to control their own fate. It is, in fact, all too easy for the coal industry and the media to pretend that the opposition doesn’t exist.

But it does. Across the world, local communities are rising up to oppose coal projects that evict people from their land, make the water undrinkable, destroy local economies, and pollute the air. What gives us hope is that many people in countries all over the world are in the same fight as folks here in Appalachia.

Mountain Top Removal Site

MovingPlanet@Kos is a collaborative action with the Moving Planet team, the Global Campaign for Climate Action, WiserEarth, tcktcktck, the Sierra Club, DeSmogBlog, EcoCity Builders, and Transition US. Together, we are launching a 'package' of educational and inspirational writing and art, rattling the twitterverse in a cooperative social media campaign, and sharing some of the most innovative and extraordinary 9/24 events. Visit the  Moving Planet Earthship for updates and links to news and postings as well as all Coverage@Kos.

As the discussion progressed, the same stories of corruption, intimidation, and even violence came up again and again. And every time the development and prosperity promised to the local communities never appears.

Paul Brown is a West Virginia coal man. He is the grandson of a coal miner, the great grandson of a coal miner, and the great nephew of a coal miner, and he spent 21 years as an electrical inspector in coal mines.  But he cannot support mountaintop removal mining. As a child, he saw firsthand the inequities coal brought to his community. Even though he grew up in a new home in the heart of coal country, his family didn’t have access to electricity. Instead, they burned coal oil for light.

Appalachia provides a preview of what coal will bring to India’s poor. After 100 years, the coal fields in Appalachia are still the poorest parts of West Virginia. Why should we expect that coal communities in India will fare any better in the next 100 years?

India’s Fierce Coal Struggles

Halfway around the world and a few decades later, Amulya Nayak sees the same thing happening in Orissa on an even more frightening scale. For every megawatt of power, 10 people are displaced from their homes – forced off their land to make way for coal development. Pollution from mines and power plants makes farming and fishing impossible, and with their land taken away the local people lose the livelihoods that supported their families for generations. But the plants do not provide employment for local people. Instead, companies rely on contract workers who cost little, are easy to fire, and are less likely to unionize. After sacrificing their land, their economy, and their way of life for coal-fired power, Orrisa’s poor can’t even access the electricity being generated. Despite living next door to the power plants, 90% of people in Amulya’s district don’t have access to electricity.

The situation is so critical in Orissa that communities have declared: “We don’t want electricity, we want to survive.”

Vaishali Patil put the realities communities are facing on the ground in India into cold, hard statistics. She explained that the government is forcing people off their land for the benefit of industry under the guise of development, but in reality they are only helping a small portion of Indian society to prosper while the rural farmers become even poorer. In 1962, 70% of Indians relied on agriculture, and 80% of these people owned their own land. Today, 70% of Indians still rely on agriculture to sustain them, but only 30% of farmers own their own land. She asked the audience, “how can you call these projects development? Whose development are we talking about?” How can forced land acquisition be in the national interest when the majority of people do not actually benefit?

Shared Struggles

“I’m getting tired, but I will prevail.”

This was Catherine Hoffman’s message, she and many folks from around the world are profiled in a new Sierra Club publication profiling everyday folks taking the fight to big coal (http://www.sierraclub.org/...).  Today, we gather again for Moving Planet, a nationwide day of action, to enjoy a traditional Indian meal and continue to share stories and learn from each other. But now we know that there is support in India, in China, in Australia, in South Africa, and everywhere that affected people are rising up in protest against coal projects that sacrifice their water and their air but give them nothing in return. But now they are fighting together.

Photos

First Image: (left to right)Soumya Dutta,  Catherine Hoffman, Vaishali Patil,  Debi Goenka,  Paul Brown and Ginger Danz.
2nd Image: lst Delegation
3rd Image: 2nd Delegation

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/24/1019766/-Moving-Planet:-Coal-Country:-From-India-to-the-Heart-of-Appalachia-by-Nicole-Ghio