The Brindisi facility is Italy’s biggest coal-fired power station and the country’s largest single C02 polluter. The Greenpeace sabotage operation will entail blocking the coal conveyor belts and preventing coal from going into the plant.
Pete Seeger has been an incredibly important inspiration not only in my life, but also for countless others throughout the entire planet. He has accomplished so much and continues to be an unbelievably hopeful, powerful and influential activist and musician.
Democracy Now covers Seeger’s 90th birthday party concert in New York that benefited Clearwater, the environmental nonprofit that Pete and Toshi Seeger founded in 1969; the organization’s mission [...]
Six Greenpeace climate change activists have been cleared of causing £30,000 of criminal damage at a coal-fired power station in a verdict that is expected to embarrass the government and lead to more direct action protests against energy companies. Article by John Vidal of the Guardian.
The jury of nine men and three women at Maidstone crown court cleared the six by a majority verdict. Five of the protesters had scaled a 200-metre chimney at Kingsnorth power station, Hoo, Kent, in October last year.
Why do athletes train in conditions that are harder than game conditions? Because it makes them better at what they do. Likewise, environmentalists could learn a thing or two from successful activists in countries where the going is harder. In this sense, China makes a great environmentalist training ground. Here, you’ll find both daunting challenges and inspirational environmental activists.
Protip #5: How to create win-win situations and gain popular support
Pan Wenshi was recently featured by the International Herald Tribune for his success working with locals in a small Chinese village to protect the white-headed langur. But it wasn’t until Pan lent a hand to help locals that he began to realize success. After Pan helped a villager to get clean drinking water, the villager freed a langur from a trap and brought the animal to Pan, who learned from the experience. Now, Pan advocates for new schools and health clinics in the area where the langurs live. In return, he gets local support. “When you help the villagers, they would like to help you back,” says Pan. “Now, when outsiders try to trap langurs the locals stop them from coming in.”
Pan’s success grew when he won an environmental award that allowed him to install biogas collectors. The villagers could now cook without the toil of chopping firewood and the langurs benefited by slowed deforestation. Serving the needs of others has allowed the langur population in Pan’s nature reserve to expand from 96 to over 500. “This [serving the human community] is the most important thing we can do,” says Pan. “If the villagers can’t feed themselves, the langurs don’t stand a chance.”
Before being ‘green’ became fashionable, and terms like ‘eco-chic’ were coined, being environmentally conscious was synonymous with words like ‘granola’ and ‘treehugger,’ generalizing the eco-conscious crowd as a free-spirited-Birkenstock-wearing-Grateful-Dead-loving bunch of Liberal hippies chanting ‘Peace, man.’
But being green has definitely gone mainstream, and from celebs like Julia Louis-Dreyfus with her lavish, multi-million dollar solar-powered home, to Pierce Brosnan, aptly named the ‘Best Dressed Environmentalist’ by the Sustainable Style Foundation, the stereotype of the gritty, unkempt nature wanderer that once dominated the category no longer applies.
Recently, MSN posted a list of the ‘Top 14 Green Celebrities,’ which contained some long-time environmental advocates and a few surprising new additions, all echoing a commitment to championing this important cause through various initiatives like Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary film about global warming, the 11th Hour, featuring interviews with green leaders and a companion website where everyone can sign up to take action in their local communities, and George Clooney’s Oil Change, a campaign aimed at ending America’s independence on oil.
Returning to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our Earth’s atmosphere is the level that most of the world’s scientific community agrees as the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. When industrial revolution began, it was 275 parts per million. Today, we’re far above that at 385 parts per million and continuing to rise at an accelerating pace, often contributing to the extreme weather, shrinking glaciers and numerous other effects of climate change familiar to more and more of us.
View this stunning 350.org video animation on YouTube, created by the innovative Free Range Studios, designed to reach out to the world to foster the coming together of global community to address this challenge — and hold our political leaders accountable to provide the policies that encourage the changes we must all make as citizens and green business owners.
For most ecopreneurs, addressing climate change is at the core of our triple bottom line approach to operating our green business, putting into practice ways to mitigate climate change, be it in how we use or over-produce energy from renewable energy sources like the wind and sun, serve up organic or pasture-raised cuisine from a sustainable food system, focus on a more bio-regional or local economy, and cultivate relationships with their conserving customers. Many paddle a kayak with a community of like-minded ecopreneurs, rather than try staying afloat on the Titanic dependent on increasingly expensive fossil fuels while trying to dodge melting glaciers.
There was very little new in Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford’s(D-AZ) wedding to Astronaut Mark Kelly. There was plenty of something old, borrowed and blue, however, as the couple were married in the small community of Amado, south of Tucson, AZ on Saturday. Giffords, a staunch and outspoken proponent of solar power and everything environmental, made her statement well with a “low carbon footprint” wedding, complete with plates and forks made of sugar cane, a borrowed kiddish cup [...]
She’s back, ready for another challenge and promising to stay active as an environmental protester. Betty Krawczyk is in the news again, this time planning to run for Mayor of Vancouver, BC, Canada in November of 2008. I talked with her after her release from the Alouette Correctional Center a few weeks after our first interview, and she spoke of many things: the new political party she’s joined as a
She’s back, ready for another challenge and promising to stay active as an environmental protester. Betty Krawczyk is in the news again, this time planning to run for Mayor of Vancouver, BC, Canada in November of 2008. I talked with her after her release from the Alouette Correctional Center a few weeks after our 
