He seems cool.Courtesy Energy Action CoalitionPete Griffin spent three years working at Think MTV, the “social issues” and volunteering arm of the entertainment behemoth. He helped run its Choose or Lose election campaign and its Break the Addiction environmental series. He knew these do-gooder campaigns were far from MTV’s sexiest offerings.

“Social issues weren’t why people tuned in to MTV,” he said. “They tuned in to watch The Hills or Real World and that’s why they interacted with our brand. My challenge there was figuring out to engage people who weren’t interested in an issue. Or they’re interested but don’t know how to take action. It required a lot of creativity.”

Climate-change organizers should be able to relate—they’ve got the same challenge. Now they’ve also got Griffin--he left MTV last month to become campaign director at Energy Action Coalition, a youth-focused coalition that put together the successful Power Shift rallies and the Campus Climate Challenge.  It’s also helping with the “wake-up call” flash mobs on Monday, part of Climate Week NYC. Last week I talked to Griffin, 30, about the new job and lessons he learned at MTV:

He is also named Peter Griffin. This is funny.Q. So how did you make the transition from an animated sitcom on Fox to real-life climate activism?

A.Well, it wasn’t easy getting off the drawing board and into the real world. No, I’d been with MTV for eight years, starting in advertising, then in international marketing, and for the last almost three years I was managing all the social campaigns for MTV networks. That was everything from election coverage to issues like sexual health, human rights, education.

As much as I enjoyed working on all of these different issues, I got to the point where I knew that climate change was the most urgent issue and the most important to me. But I knew that I still wanted to work with young people. The energy and passion that young people bring to their work was something that I wanted to maintain.

Q. You made an unusual move in coming from an entertainment corporation to an activist group. What does the world of MTV have to offer to climate activism?

A.The power that MTV had was our reach. We had an audience of almost 100 million people in the U.S. and almost half a billion people around the world, in almost 80 countries. When you have those tools at your disposal, you know your message is going to be heard, even if it’s just by a fraction of the audience.

Q. So the climate movement needs a worldwide cable network.

A.Yeah, I wish that were possible. MTV had a huge global media platform, which was unique. But we still had to figure out how to get people involved in issues that are so important to young people. I hope I can bring ideas about how to creatively engage people, because I’m coming from a place where people don’t necessarily want to receive our message.

As we look to expand the youth climate movement, I hope some of those skills can be helpful. We need to get more people involved. Just sending them emails telling them to sign petitions doesn’t make them feel like they’re doing something. We need to be more creative.

Q. So what are you working on this fall? (After all of Monday’s stuff.)

A.We’re launching regional Power Shift summits. We did the big national conference in March. Now we’re working with our grassroots partners on developing 11 regional summits across the country. We really hope to put pressure on our elected officials and really display the power of young people, because we can’t wait any longer for bold legislation on climate and energy.

We get a lot of mixed signals about Congress passing an energy bill. But it doesn’t really matter what they tell us because we’re not going to stop fighting. The issue is still urgent, and no matter what they say and do, we’re going to keep the pressure on our elected officials.

Q. How do you make up for the vast funding gap between the fossil fuel industries and green groups?

A.We very much operate from a place of respect. We understand that people will have different opinions, some of them valid and some of them not. We want to make sure we’re sharing truthful information and showing our passion. But sometimes when we’re going up against lobbyists with a lot of money, they’re not interested in those things. They’re only interested in their bottom line. So we fight that with our size and we fight it with our passion. Those are those things that continue to grow, and I think they’ll ultimately make the difference.

For more juicy details than you could ever dream of: follow our coverage of Climate Week 2009 on Twitter and in the news.

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National lawmakers did next to nothing about climate change over the August congressional recess, but climate activists and their fossil-fuel foes were busy.  Here are highlights from their summer antics:

Clean-energy activists at a Maine rally.Photo: 1Sky

Track the debate and take action >>>

What did we miss?  Tell us in comments below.

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A coalition of more than 300 organizations including faith, human rights, social justice and environmental groups will deliver letters to the local offices of U.S. senators this week calling on them to strengthen climate legislation narrowly passed by the House of Representatives in June.

The effort is part of a broader grassroots initiative that aims to demonstrate support for bold leadership in the fight to solve the climate crisis.

"We're organizing on the ground, in communities around/throughout the country, to mobilize the everyday people who will feel climate impacts, and to defeat the entrenched, polluting special interests in Washington and pass a truly strong bill in the Senate," says JW Randolph of Appalachian Voices, an environmental advocacy group headquartered in Boone, N.C.

Other groups involved in the initiative include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the United Church of Christ Network for Environmental and Economic Responsibility, and the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment.

The push to strengthen the legislation comes as a recent ABC-Washington Post poll found that the majority of Americans -- 57% -- supports the changes to U.S. energy policy being put forth by Congress and the Obama administration. Another 29% oppose the proposed changes, while 14% have no opinion.

In the letter to senators [PDF], the signatories express "profound concern" about the American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill, which they criticize for containing massive giveaways to polluters and for failing to ensure the fastest possible transition to clean energy. The letter calls on lawmakers to ensure that the Senate version would:

* Reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to 350 parts per million, a level that scientists say is necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change. ACES is based on a target concentration of 450 ppm.

* Maintain existing Clean Air Act protections against greenhouse gas pollution. ACES strips the Environmental Protection Agency of the authority to regulate such pollution.

* Minimize the use of offsets and other loopholes. ACES creates a system that would allow polluters to increase carbon emissions at one locale if they invest in projects that offset those emissions elsewhere.

* Eliminate polluter giveaways. For example, ACES currently offers generous subsidies to the coal industry in the form of funding for so-called "clean coal" research.

The effort to strengthen the climate legislation comes as polluting interests are stepping up their efforts to fight the existing bill, occasionally using tactics designed to appear grassroots but that are in fact part of a corporate-funded public-relations campaign.

For example, when a group called Energy Citizens announced earlier this month that it would be holding a series of rallies to oppose the climate legislation, the Wall Street Journal exposed the organization as an alliance funded by the American Petroleum Institute.

Also opposing the existing legislation is a new group called the Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security, or FACES of Coal, which claims to be an "alliance of people from all walks of life." But bloggers revealed recently that the group's website is hosted by K Street PR firm the Adfero Group -- and that the people pictured on its website purporting to show average Americans who support the coal industry are in fact stock photos.

Adfero's clients also include Koch Industries, the largest privately owned U.S. oil company whose principals are major funders of efforts to deny the reality of global warming, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is also leading efforts to fight greenhouse gas regulation.

President Obama wants to have the climate legislation passed into law before December, when he and other world leaders will gather in Copenhagen, Denmark to craft a new global climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol. An International Day of Climate Action is planned for Oct. 24 to draw attention to the 350 ppm goal.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Innovation in progress. Excuse our dust. For more images from the JP Green House, visit Leise Jones Photography.I was bringing two new friends down the street for a tour of the JP Green House last week. "Now prepare yourselves," I warned, as I always do, "it's not bright shiny green yet. You'll need to use your imagination."

We rounded the corner and there it was: A hulking, gray house with a strange triangular shape on a prominent streetcorner.  Gray shingles were falling off the exterior. Plastic tarps covered the gaping window-openings. In the garden, the grass grew tall around the dumpster and a huge pile of brush at the back was waiting to be shredded. Pumpkins and squash vines were spilling out over the raised beds of vegetables, and my attempt at making a flower bed had revealed my feeble knowledge of plant-aesthetics. Weeding was overdue. A large hillside on the north side of the garden was covered with blue tarps, smothering out our nemesis, the pernicious invasive weed Vincetoxicum.

Inside, I showed off the newly repaired foundation with pride, though to the untrained eye it is merely a concrete floor. The interior is entirely gutted, with no interior walls and only the frame to show.  I verbally painted the vision for my guests: Picture the 12 inches of insulation and the polished concrete floors that will keep in the passive solar heat from the south walls; the solar panels and the mini wind turbines that will provide the minimal amount of electricity we’ll need for appliances.

Imagine a big open first floor with a kitchen and living room connected to the "community room," which we will open to our neighbors for meetings, book groups, potlucks, climate-action planning, meditation, songfests, and a homeschooling collective. Imagine groups of schoolchildren visiting for tours of a zero-carbon house and discussions about the meaning of sustainability. Imagine the deck outside the kitchen, an herb garden, a thicket of berry bushes.  Picture clean laundry waving in the breeze, and the Earth flag over the front door. I go on ...

Most people get it; they see the vision as we describe it; they get excited. We are careful to talk about process, because we know it will be endless. When asked, I will expand the vision to include our sense of what our three children will learn from living in a demonstration home, learning to give tours, raise chickens and vegetables, and contemplate the future without paralyzing fear. And I will talk about the trouble and the passion of building a dream with the love of your life: fighting over money and housework and the kids, the grief of climate change we face together, the spiritual work of building together.

There are occasionally cynics, who point out how far we have to go. It’s okay -- I am occasionally one of them.

It was an excellent week of climate news, much of it covered here on Grist. I watched with fascination as the comments accrued in response to Adam Sacks' post about the need to tell the full, horrifying truth about the coming ecological crash. The same tension between despair and hope is everpresent in our household as well. Elizabeth Kolbert’s wonderful article about No Impact Man and other successors of Thoreau brought up an issue I talk about constantly: The very American desire to "fix yourself," in this case "green your lifestyle" to degrees of near absurdity, usually as some sort of a time-limited personal project, which begs the question of whether these aren't just gimmicks. This despite the clear evidence that climate change cannot be solved by millions of people making relatively easy "lifestyle changes."

What makes us different? We have asked that question of ourselves and others and we are still answering it.

Part of the answer is just humility: A demonstration home is just that. We are trying to model a viable future, and be honest in the process about the difficulties and the compromises. (Ken insists on having a clothes dryer; I refuse to give up leather shoes; we have to drive all of our kids to school, because the schools in walking distance don't please us.)

Another part of the answer is action. We are committed to our political work on climate (we are the Boston "hub" for 350.org), to the point where we neglect the house itself to do it.

The most gratifying news of the week for me was the announcement of the new initiative by the Yes Men, BeyondTalk. Go to BeyondTalk.net and pledge to engage in civil disobedience for climate change.

Ken and I discussed it. We decided that we would have to take turns doing actions, so that we don't both get arrested at the same time. Someone has to take care of the house and the kids. And we considered whether we should set up a small fund for bail and other legal expenses. Then we went back to our discussion of our options for exterior siding: Should it be red?  Definitely not green.

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Bill McKibben—author, Grist board member, and 350.org leader—appeared on The Colbert Report Monday night to talk climate change and spread the word about the International Day of Climate Action on Oct. 24. He also gave a solid explanation of the significance of the number 350. The ever-courteous Stephen Colbert threatened to upstage him by launching his own 349.org.

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Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Enlightenment thinking

Carl M via flickrThose of you following our last post (Should Kuba Have a Puppy?) can see that both votes and comments on this question are running 9 to 1 in favor of the gratification of pet ownership. This is even though eco-curmudgeon Ken has made the point, with hard statistics, that keeping domestic animals essentially ensures the death of wild creatures that we would all heartily agree to preserve (indirectly, through habitat loss and overuse of resources).

So what?

Well, the JP Green House is meant to be a demonstration project. We aim to build a zero-carbon house on a low budget, grow veggies and raise chickens for eggs, cut our consumption to a level sustainable for the planet, and make it all public. This means full transparency of finances, building dilemmas, relationship agonies, parenting fiascos, and just the overall messiness of the thing. (Quick house and garden update: Foundation finished, windows and insulation are next, debating exterior options, many radishes, one pumpkin, fabulous dahlias, still short 50k.)

How does the utopian vision jibe with the fact that Kuba wants a puppy, the reality that Ken bought a motorcycle last week, the admission that I am writing this on a 95-degree day in Boston with my window AC blasting?

Are we a demonstration of hypocrisy? Or the immense difficulty of living within our earthly means? I'm afraid we're bound to reveal it all.

Fellow climate-organizer A., who does not own a car and rides his bicycle 12 miles from a prosperous Boston suburb to protests and meetings in our neighborhood, is one of the most sincere environmentalists I know. He writes brilliantly about the failures of major green groups to reckon with the true implications of climate change. He rants inappropriately at meetings, and never avoids calling people on their lifestyle failures. He’s more of a crank than Ken (and that’s saying something). And he smells a little funny.

A. enjoys bugging people. Last week out of the blue he responded to an email I sent from work about the economic crisis by accusing me of ignoring the true ecological disaster. Do you always address people you barely know this way? I snapped back. Basically, his answer was yes. In contrast, I try to walk a tightrope on which I avoid offending anyone by openly criticizing their consumption. I know I might regret my general affability and politeness in twenty years. Geez, we were all too busy to go to those climate protests and write our Congressman before Greenland melted...

I’ll leave you with all this hypocrisy, unresolved in my own mind.

But now for our next poll. I was over at Sue's house around the corner, today, drinking my third cup of coffee and bitching grandly about the past week, which has just been a slugfest for me, when I came up with a brilliant new question.

"How do you think the neighborhood would react if we raised rabbits for food?" I asked Sue. "I love rabbit--we used to eat it in Europe a lot. Delicious with garlic and spinach."

"Around here?! I don’t think so. You’ll have all the vegetarians and vegans picketing by the front door."

"Really? Do people realize where store-bought meat comes from?" I launched into a tirade about factory farming and got the evil eye from Sue, while her ten-year-old daughter turned pale across the room. (Point of fact: Our family is omnivorous, but we currently buy only meat raised humanely and organically on a local farm. We eat it with relish, however, the blood running down our chins. Also, I wish I had a picture of the day Eli ate a raw baby octopus, with the tentacles hanging from his mouth.)

So, the JP Green House question of the week is: Should we raise cute fuzzy bunny rabbits and slaughter them for their meat? Should we make moccasins and baby booties from their skins, sell rabbits-foot keychains for good luck, so as not to waste any usable byproducts?

Well why the heck not? Cause it's mean?

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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

This weekend I caught up with Will Allen who was keynoting the always excellent Northeast Organic Farming Association's Annual Conference in Amherst, MA. He’s founder and CEO of Growing Power, the country’s premier grassroots urban gardening program, and also a MacArthur Genius Award Winner and former pro-basketball player.

Growing Power demonstrates growing methods through on-site workshops and hands-on demonstrations, and has farms in Milwaukee and Merton, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois, where they grow vegetables, fish, bees, livestock, worms, and more. They have also established satellite training sites in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Mississippi.

Erik Hoffner: What’s the youth component’s importance to Growing Power?

Will Allen: We started out as a youth serving organization. If there wasn’t a youth program from the beginning, I probably wouldn’t be doing this work now. But I quickly realized that we needed to also get adults involved, that it had to be a multi-generational effort at engaging the community. The fastest way to do that, though is through the youth, and they bring in the adults. A program like ours can then be quickly regarded as an asset by everybody in a community if it anchors people, and is a preferred place for their kids to be.

EH: What’s the gender breakdown of the young people involved in your programs?

WA:  This new kind of agriculture is a majority women’s movement. I look around when I’m at events like this one this weekend, and by and large, it’s women.

EH: What do the kids go on to do after they work in Growing Power’s ‘youth corps’ apprentice program?

WA: We work with some of these kids from the ages of 8 until they go to college, and many do go to college, and part of their success could be because we focus on academics for 2 hours every day. We require the kids to write and read about the hands on stuff they’ve done that day. It spurs them on to learn more, dig deeper. They might get curious about microorganisms, for example, and go learn about them. They get excited about it. I think that’s what we do best, both the kids and the adults, we inspire people to want to go do something, start a project, not just sit on a couch.

EH: Have Growing Power participants gone on to start gardens of their own?

WA: Yes, but better yet, more than half of our employees are former Youth Corps or Interns. Some others of our staff come from among the 2,000 volunteers we have.

EH: Where else have Growing Power alums gone to grow?

WA: We’ve trained thousands of people, and they started hundreds of programs around the country. Many more are now coming to us 3 days a month for our Commercial Urban Ag Training program. It’s 5 months, half of it hands-on, the other half’s classroom on how to start a small scale farming operation.

EH: On what economic model?

WA: Non-profits and for-profits both. Since we started this 3 years ago, we’ve seen a lot of non-profits, in part because today, non-profits need ways to make money. A program like this earns a lot more revenue than traditional youth development programs.

EH: Where are your alums growing, in urban settings only, or are they going rural too?

WA: Both. Suburban too. Many African Americans who said they’d never farm again are going back to the land, even to their ancestral rural lands in the South. Ten years ago, they would never have come on board with this revolution. They’d say, “that’s ‘slaves’ work.” So it’s very satisfying, and it’s important, to see this change because they often represent the most food insecure communities.

So we’re starting to see this as a multi-cultural, multi-generational grassroots ‘revolution’ – even the top-down types, the corporations and politicians and universities want to get on board, after fighting small scale farming for so long, and that’s fine, we need everyone. We need millions of new farmers doing small-scale agriculture.

EH: What’s the deal with land tenure?

WA: Tenure is so important. It’s why when we incorporated Growing Power, we became a land trust, because we wanted long-term tenure. In order to grow good food we have restore the land, which has been so contaminated. That means building soil, and it takes time. I wouldn’t start a project on rented land unless I could get a 10 year lease.

But renting is viable. Land is expensive, and if you wait around to buy land, the community’s going to starve.

EH: If you could change one thing about how cities are run, what would it be?

WA: All city planners should be required to incorporate green space and food growing into their urban plans. The American Planning Association’s magazine new issue, it’s all about food. Ten years ago, that topic was unheard of. So that’s progress.

EH: How important is networking to Growing Power’s work?

WA: Very important. We share everything we learn, pass it on, and hope they’ll pass it on to others. That’s how change happens, and a revolution comes about. I’m calling it that now, the Good Food revolution, because that’s exactly what it is.

Visit Growing Power here. Also, enjoy an audio interview with Will Allen from this weekend at Sea Change Radio.

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In February 2009, Canada's Public Safety Minister and the country's Correctional Service announced a planned closure of all six of the prison farms owned by the people of Canada and operated by CORCAN - the branch of the Correctional Service that operates the farm rehabilitation programs which also provide employment training to inmates. The excellent syndicated Canadian radio show Deconstructing Dinner, which covers the local food movement, detailed all of this in its July 2nd show, and it's a fascinating listen.

The proposed closure is a move that's spawned a national grassroots movement to block the action, Save Our Farms.

Why close the farms, Mr. Minister? Because, he explains, they've lost $4 million (doesn't that sound like the cost of a training program, though?) and, worse, prison farms are training people in skills that are 50 years behind the times - growing food by hand, milking cows, and such. This guy apparently has no idea what's on the horizon for food production, and prefers the model with the hydroponic aquabots tending to seas of floating produce or something.

Never mind that Canada's prison farm infrastructures are often relied on by small private farms nearby, that they supply cheap fresh food to large institutions, and the fact that the inmates interviewed in the story told of enjoying the farm work and testified to its great therapeutic effects and a desire to continue this work after release. Add to the picture Canada's farm succession problems and its burgeoning local agriculture revival and one would seem to be mad to close these farms. The one in Kingston, Ontario, is likely the largest urban farm in Canada, a last reservoir of open land in a sprawling city.

Where the prisons plan to get their fresh food from post-CORCAN is my question, and rumors abound that the farms will either be privatized or worse, sold for development at a profit. But what a loss that would be: Canada’s prison farms sit on some of the most desirable agricultural land in their regions and many are close to urban areas.  And there's an ironic twist: Canada's prison farms are an international model and have been recently toured by delegations from Japan, Russia, and New Zealand, the latter hoping to take its own prison farms organic.

In the US, prison farms are also a source of tilth and production. A quick search turns up items like these two:

Nashville prison saves $150K composting all food waste; grows 100 acres of veggies.

And then there's New Jersey, whose largest farmer is its prison system, managed by AgriIndustries - 'a self-supporting operation without appropriated funds. Annual revenues total approximately $11.5 million, with substantial savings to all users. The departments of Corrections, Human Services, and Military and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Juvenile Justice Commission, utilize products from AgriIndustries.'

Their site also says that their operations 'utilize and train about 100 inmates daily in all areas of food production technology,' and that, (surprisingly, to me), 'the food production industry is the largest employer in New Jersey,' and that 'inmates receive training and experience that may qualify them to gain employment when they leave the prison system.'

If that last bit is true, it's another in a long list of reasons why these rehabilitative programs ought to be championed and remain integral to prisons. It's just plain healing to grow and care for things, and we are going to need a lot more people, with criminal records or not, that know how to do that in the near future.

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Timothy DenHerder-Thomas (left) and fellow "solutionaries."Photo: Summer of Solutions blogFossils like Washington Post columnist George Will may think that "the Mall does not reverberate with youthful clamors about carbon." But that's because a growing number of young people are engaged in less-visible efforts at the grassroots level. It's not their parents' activism -- with all the marching, chanting, and sign-waving that entails -- but by focusing on the work on the ground, some young activists are achieving the kind of change that can't come from political rallies alone.

Timothy DenHerder-Thomas, just a few months shy of graduating from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., with an environmental science degree, is busy coordinating the second Summer of Solutions, a project that he and fellow student activists in the Twin Cities began last year. Now expanded to nine cities across the United States, S.O.S. gets young activists working on sustainability projects in local communities. Many of these projects are centered around energy efficiency and home weatherization, green jobs education, and community gardening, and all have the goal of becoming self-sustaining.

"We saw that lots of people usually sort of drop off the scene during the summer because they go get a different job or that sort of thing," said Matt Kazinka, a junior at Macalester and another coordinator of the program. "We decided we wanted to make an intentional space for us to work on some projects that we had already started."

Kazinka, DenHerder-Thomas, and some of their peers came up with the idea for S.O.S. and created a nonprofit called Grand Aspirations to support their work. So far all of their funding has come from small-scale, local grants and individual contributions, DenHerder-Thomas said, just enough to provide cost-of-living stipends to those working on S.O.S. projects full-time during the summer. In some cities, like Omaha, S.O.S. participants live and work together, but levels of involvement across the country vary, with many students finding time to donate to S.O.S. between other projects and jobs. DenHerder-Thomas estimates that, including part-time volunteers and some older folks, up to 150 people across the country are involved, mostly in communities where they either grew up or now attend school.

"A huge idea behind the organization is that people in different locations know better what will work in their area, in their local community," said Abbie Plouff, another part of the national coordination team. A student at Hamline University in St. Paul, she joined the organization this year.

Although work is tailored locally, S.O.S. wants successful projects to be replicable. "The projects and programs that we set up via Summer of Solutions, be they in the Twin Cities, or in Austin, Texas, or in Corvallis, Ore., can also work as models that other communities can then hook into and look at and use," Plouff said.

As part of a movement in which small-scale efforts can feel like mere drops in the bucket, these students have a refreshing clarity of vision when it comes to their role in problem-solving. They don't expect to change the world by taking shorter showers. But they also don't underestimate the potential of smaller projects to grow into big changes.

"The vision and purpose behind Summer of Solutions is that it's very much connecting the local and the global," said DenHerder-Thomas. "It's linking people on the ground, in their communities, with models and ways of thinking that can change the way the whole thing works ... We're going to try this here, and other people around the country are going to do similar things, and then we're going to talk, and figure out how to make it into a larger solution."

A new kind of activism

DenHerder-Thomas, Kazinka, and Plouff think of their work as "solutionary" -- taken out of the negative context of what's wrong and put into the positive context of what can be done about it. That means, as Kazinka eagerly pointed out, that "it's really, really fun."

"It feels real," he said. "It feels like you're making an impact, because you are."

The type of work these "solutionaries" (as they call themselves) do can be hard to pin down, DenHerder-Thomas said, maybe because youth today are starting to see a range of progressive issues as more integrated than they've traditionally been imagined. "We definitely feel that the work we're doing is environmental," he said. "But it's also about economic recovery, and it's also about energy security, and it's also about creating social justice in the midst of a recession."

DenHerder-Thomas, Kazinka, and Plouff all trace their involvement in the environmental movement to the discovery of its intersections with other progressive causes. "You can work for social justice through working for environmental justice," Plouff said. "Environmentalism ended up being my home because it's the most holistic thing that I could think of to work on."

DenHerder-Thomas grew up in a low-income community in Jersey City, aware from an early age that there was something dysfunctional about the way his world, with its "poverty and pollution and intolerance and cultural fragmentation," was structured. "It was never really defined as environmental to me until later, because I never really had exposure toward things that would more typically be called nature," he said. But a few years ago, just before he went off to college, the pieces started to come together. "Communities all over the planet are really being depleted, and a lot of their economic and social systems being corroded, by the way we do development, which is based on the way we use energy," he said. He began to see clean energy solutions as "ways to revamp our economy around social justice."

Kazinka had the same realization when he saw Van Jones speak at Power Shift 2007, a youth climate summit he attended. "Seeing how he framed the green economy as an opportunity to create social justice and economic opportunity through environmentalism ... really was just a moment where it all came together for me," he said. "All these things that I've been interested in are one."

Summer of Solutions lives as an example of how environmentalism has moved beyond the domain of tree-hugging hippies and nature enthusiasts, and why, as a result, pigeonholing a new wave of young environmentalists as such is no longer an effective opposition tool. To that end, Plouff said she's very conscious of avoiding "traditional in-your-face activism," instead focusing on meeting people in the middle, and listening to what they have to say.

"Listening is really huge," she said, "because people want to know that you care and that you're not just kind of filing [away] the information that they're giving you, or just completely disregarding it. So trying to cultivate deep relationships with people even if they don't agree with you in a conversation -- I think that's really important."

For example, Plouff explained, when fighting a coal plant, "know who you're talking to," and emphasize to community members worried about job losses that renewable energy resources can not only replace the coal jobs lost, but create additional ones.

As for the future of their work, the solutionaries are more realistic than optimistic, but always hopeful.

"Transition will happen. That isn't really optional," said DenHerder-Thomas. "If you have an unsustainable society, that means it will not be sustained. It won't continue in its current form. Something will change ... The question is always, How bad is it going to get in the meantime?"

Summer of Solutions just hopes to help positive change come before things get too much worse.

Related Links:

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Tom Friedman on “What They Really Believe”

Winning the clean energy race: a new strategy for American leadership

That pleading little essay I wrote in 2005? It was probably the last moment I could have written it. Clearly there were lots and lots of people already thinking the same way, because ever since it's seemed to me as if deep and moving images and sounds and words have been flooding out into the world.

Bill, built from Flickr pix.Kalman Gacs, 350.org/galleryThat torrent of art has been, often, deeply disturbing -- it should be deeply disturbing, given what we're doing to the earth. (And none of it has quite matched the performance work that nature itself is providing. Check out, for instance, James Balog's time-lapse photography of glaciers crashing into the sea -- if we could somehow crowd that thrashing sheet of ice into the Guggenheim for a week, people would truly get it.) But for me, it's been more comforting than disturbing, because it means that the immune system of the planet is finally kicking in.

Artists, in a sense, are the antibodies of the cultural bloodstream. They sense trouble early, and rally to isolate and expose and defeat it, to bring to bear the human power for love and beauty and meaning against the worst results of carelessness and greed and stupidity. So when art both of great worth, and in great quantities, begins to cluster around an issue, it means that civilization has identified it finally as a threat. Artists and scientists perform this function most reliably; politicians are a lagging indicator.

But once a threat has been identified, the attack has to be at least a little organized. Which is why I'm so pleased that many artists are not just doing their own thing, but also increasingly figuring out how to come together to make the sum of their voices louder than the individual parts. Let me use the example that's closest at hand: the 350.org campaign that I've been helping run this past year, the biggest global grassroots effort on climate change.

We're working with ministers and mountain climbers and youth networks and even politicians. But with artists too. I've been shamelessly asking friends to shape their work to fit our message: that 350, as in parts per million CO2, is the most important number in the world, that beyond it the world simply doesn't work in the ways it must for our civilization to survive. And people have responded in remarkable ways. You can see many of them on our website, from crafters to fine artists to someone who somehow managed to make a portrait of me from hundreds of Flickr photos of 350 demonstrations around the world. (I've always hated looking at pictures of myself, but that one I stared at for a long time, because it seemed to illustrate a principle that matters to me: we are who we are because of our connection to others.) 350.org is one of the first campaigns I know of with an official artist-in-residence, Kevin Buckland, who is coordinating as best he can many of these contributions. But mostly it's like a potluck supper. Everyone is bringing what they do best.

We've asked writers if they would pen 350-word poems and essays, and many have responded. Here's the great Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, for instance.

Photographers are organizing around the world, not only to send us images, but also to document the thousands of actions that will be taking place on October 24 on our global day of action. (That day itself will be a carnival of performance art; I've just come from helping cobble together what we think will be the world's largest underwater demonstration, in the Maldive Islands.) We'll take the pictures they upload from around the planet and show them on a giant screen at the U.N. that day, and then deliver prints to every delegate and negotiator.

Amazing artists keep stepping up to fill needs we didn't even know existed. John Quigley, for instance, who is the Rembrandt of what you might call aerial art -- arranging human beings on the ground to make a point from above. Here's a picture from Poznan in Poland, and from Bonn, Germany, and from Bali, Indonesia. (See more aerial art in our performance art slideshow.)

Musicians too. Some of them world-famous: Moby will apparently headline a concert/rally on the big day in Mexico City, and Groove Armada in the U.K.; Sigur Rós let us use a song of theirs on our most recent organizing video. Fred Small provided us a marching song that we put to great use when we helped shut down the Capitol Hill Power plant in Washington in March. Rev. Lennox Yearwood and the Hip Hop Caucus have been helping us plan events across the country that use a different beat than old-school environmentalists are used to. Today's email brought not one but two cuts from one of my favorite pairs of singers, Michigan's Seth Bernard and May Erlewine. I asked them -- humbly but insistently -- for a song; they went to work. That's how it's been with pretty much everyone. (Read more about climate-change tunes and North American bands going green.)

A graphic depiction of the task at hand.Michael Lagocki, 350.org/galleryThere's no limit to the stuff we can use, from pros and from amateurs. Crafters have sent in endless great patterns; graffiti artists have started taking the number to the streets and building buzz; dancers have been creating dances of 350 steps and more; great video artists put together our first organizing video, which has now been seen all over the planet.

My point four years ago was that we needed art to help build a general consciousness about climate change, the greatest problem we've ever faced. That's happened. Now we need to focus some of that beauty and witness and anger sharply enough to help spur deep and lasting change. It's always hard for any of us who are writers and musicians and visual artists to subordinate our own personal vision even a little -- that's what makes us artists. But the pleasure of working together in common cause more than makes up for the imposition. Please join us!

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Greenpeace USA

Engaging in a bit of a lovefest, Greenpeace and Kimberly-Clark announced today that the paper-products giant has finally agreed to clean up its act. It will source the fiber for its tissue products, under brand names that include Kleenex, Scott, and Cottonelle, from “environmentally responsible sources,” including those that are FSC-certified and recycled. The company has also committed to end the purchase of non-FSC fibers from Canada’s Boreal forest by 2011. For its part, Greenpeace will drop the five-year-old Kleercut campaign that has long urged Kimberly-Clark to quit destroying the Boreal just so cold-sufferers can experience a softer blow.

In a fit of hard-earned mutual admiration, Kimberly-Clark VP Suhas Apte said, “We commend Greenpeace for helping us develop more sustainable standards,” while Greenpeace USA Forest Campaign Director Scott Paul called Kimberly-Clark a “responsible company” and said its “efforts are a challenge to its competitors. I hope other companies pay close attention.”

Those other companies include Georgia Pacific and Procter & Gamble, both of which Greenpeace is still pressuring on the sustainable sourcing front.

I contacted Michael Conroy, who wrote a book on corporate greening and grassroots campaigns called Branded (and whom I interviewed last year for Grist), to see what he made of the news. “This is a huge victory for global forests, the FSC, and Greenpeace,” he replied. “Kimberly-Clark is the world’s largest manufacturer of tissue paper products. The nature of the commitments, the specific timetables provided, and the Kimberly-Clark agreement to report back regularly on what proportion of the fiber sourced for its tissue has come from recycled and FSC-certified sources makes this a very credible commitment.”

Conroy also pointed out that the conclusion of Kleercut, which “used print media, social networking, YouTube videos, and incredibly creative ways to wear down Kimberly-Clark resistance, shows that the new tools for communicating with consumers are bringing even more power to civil society as we seek to transform the social and environmental practices of the world’s largest corporations.”

Ginger Cassady, senior campaigner for ForestEthics, was also pleased as punch by the news. As Cassady wrote in an op-ed for Grist this spring on Kimberly-Clark’s “Scott Naturals” line, “Kimberly-Clark has no trouble with innovation—if they can make an anti-viral tissue product, for god’s sake, they can make Kleenex with 100 percent post-consumer recycled content.” Angry that the company was still “wiping away ancient forests to make Kleenex,” Cassady used that piece to advise consumers to avoid the distraction of a single product line and keep their eyes on the entire company.

The company’s new policy, she told me today, “is among the strongest in the world ... truly impressive.” Along with Greenpeace, she says she hopes the move by Kimberly-Clark will influence other companies. “ForestEthics congratulates Greenpeace and allies for a campaign well run,” she said.

In short, it’s an ugly situation with a hugfest ending—as evidenced by this goofy Greenpeace video:

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It's officially summer, and one thing that brings, besides Kennedy yacht races on Nantucket Sound, is an army of thousands of kids with clipboards, out canvassing neighborhoods, street corners, and subway stops for green: green causes and the green of cash.

This tried and tested organizing tactic is a mainstay of many groups from Sierra Club to the PIRGs (college-based public interest research groups), and is one of the biggest, most regular shows of force that the green movement has outside of climate rallies and mountaintop removal protests.

It's proven to build member rolls and donor bases, yet has many detractors. A guest commentator here at Grist started a heated debate 2 years back with his assertion that it's a waste of effort, in that the clipboard horde does not invite or engender activism amongst those canvassed, and just turns people off when it asks for money. Better to just talk with people, or do outreach via electronic channels, he said.

Rereading the comments, I found much to agree with, both pro and con. Yes, some canvasses are worse than others in terms of info and action items. Much of the money raised goes to pay for the canvass effort, leaving little extra to fill out the group's budget. Yes, it's a really tough job that has a high rate of burnout. And yes, around 40 percent of what you give to the canvasser stays with him or her, not the group or mission.

But what the writer missed is that a canvass is often a group's biggest outreach effort. It brings real people to others' doors to start a conversation, no matter if these chats are sometimes clumsy, ill-informed, or frustrating. And it's paid for by its own proceeds.

The canvasses I've worked, a PIRG fighting an incinerator in New York and a wolf reintroduction project in Colorado, were grueling but exhilarating. Both focused on gathering signatures and letters while distributing literature, and in the former case resulted in an outright win.

All we had to do was prove that recycling would handle just as much of the waste stream as burning trash would, at a fraction of the cost. But we had to do that one person at a time.

What I think is an under-appreciated aspect of canvasses, though, is that for many, it's the first time they'll get paid for their activism. And that's crucial. If we want more green leaders tomorrow, we need to find them work today. Just look at the conservative movement to understand how important that is.

I didn't stick with canvassing long, but used it as a stepping stone to other jobs in organizing, as so many do. It was a formative experience for me, to face my fear at every door and try to make a connection with a person who usually didn't want to talk, and share my passion for this world. And along with other gigs I stitched together, I was making a living as an activist.

This is why I don't flinch at giving a donation to someone at my door, after asking how else I can be involved. I know lots of people insist on sending their donations in by mail to the main office to avoid giving canvassers a cut, but not me. That 40% is part of what keeps green boots on the ground.

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Dispassion as the world ends: The absent heart of the great climate affair

It was about five years ago. I was talking with a radical friend about my then-recent personal decision to prioritize work on the climate crisis. I had done so after the European heat wave in the summer of 2003 that led to 30,000 or more deaths. This catastrophe jolted me into serious study about the issue of global warming, study which led me to conclude that the dangerous, earth-heating-up process was happening much more quickly than I had thought it was.

My friend didn’t disagree about the urgency of the climate crisis, but his view was that what we needed to do about it was to build a stronger movement to replace capitalism with a 21st century version of socialism. At the time, I didn’t agree. I felt that we didn’t have the many, many years that it would take to build the kind of powerful mass movement that would be necessary to accomplish that objective, especially given the weaknesses and disorientation of the Left. I felt that the immediate historical need was to do all we could to get off of fossil fuels and onto a renewable energy/energy conservation path. I was convinced that this clean energy movement, to be successful within the limited time period we have, would have to include a very broad range of people, people like Al Gore, for example, not exactly a revolutionary.

However, for the past few months, since liberal Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman made public a first draft of comprehensive climate legislation for the House of Representatives, I’ve been seriously re-thinking this question.

Waxman’s draft of “The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009,” ACESA, was very problematic, but as it evolved through behind-closed-doors negotiations between Waxman and coal state, oil state and industrial agriculture Democrats, it got even worse. The target for greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions reductions over the next 10 years, an absolutely critical period of time if we are to have any hope of avoiding world-wide catastrophe, is way too weak, and it is questionable if even this weak target would be met. It contains a huge percentage of problematic “offsets” that will likely allow U.S. corporate polluters to avoid or minimize actual reductions of emissions from their dirty coal plants or oil refineries for 15-20 years or more. It gives away free 2/3 of the permits to emit ghg’s to corporate polluters; half are given directly to the fossil fuel industry. It strips the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate coal plants and other stationary sources of ghg’s. Its cap-and-trade framework allows Wall Street speculators to get into the huge new “carbon market” being created. It is nuclear power-friendly, and it projects giving the U.S. coal industry tens of billions of dollars for carbon capture and sequestration, an unsafe boondoggle that is, at best, a decade away from being commercially viable, if it ever is.

All of this from a liberal Democrat who, in the spring of 2008, one year before the release of the ACESA bill, introduced legislation calling for a moratorium on the building of any new coal plants unless they sequestered 85% of their greenhouse gas emissions. The ACESA bill will allow new coal plants to be built without having to sequester any carbon dioxide or other ghg’s until 2025.

It’s a similar thing with our “yes we can” President. All through his campaign for the Presidency one of his top issues was a call for a steadily-declining cap on ghg emissions and a 100% auction to polluters of ghg emissions permits. Most of that auction money would be returned to taxpayers and consumers to help them deal with higher prices, with some of it used for clean energy and green jobs investments. In March of this year Obama included this plan in his proposed 2010 budget authority legislation. But when he couldn’t get a filibuster-proof 60 U.S. Senators to support this, and after Waxman came out in late March with his ACESA bill draft, Obama went silent. Like Waxman, he allowed the powerful fossil fuel interests which continue to dominate Capitol Hill to wreak their carnage.

I wasn’t a big Obama fan. I wanted him to win and said so publicly, but I also said publicly that Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney was the candidate whose platform and personal history of courageous leadership were most consistent with my own beliefs. However, I did believe that an Obama Presidency would create openings for progressives and revolutionaries, and based upon Obama’s consistently-articulated, 100% auction position, I thought we had a good chance to get some decent climate legislation through the House of Representatives even if the odds were much longer in the Senate.

I was wrong.

What might have made a difference? Things might have been different if there had been a much stronger, more massive radical wing of the climate movement to visibly push back against the fossil fuel Democrats and the environmentalists who quietly went along with them. If there were demonstrations of thousands around the country, or a massive sit-in on Capitol Hill, this might have had an impact. Instead, most environmental and climate groups used their usual tactics, doing some lobbying to try to strengthen ACESA but engaging in virtually no “street heat.”

Where was the U.S. Left during this battle for strong federal climate legislation? It was around, here and there, individuals writing articles, some groups putting out statements, but by and large independent progressives who understand that corporate capitalism is our underlying problem were largely missing in action.

Why This Issue Is So Critical, Short- and Long-Term

There are a number of reasons why this issue needs to be one that every person in the world who considers themselves part of the Left should be studying about and taking action on.

The most important one is the reality of the climate science. There is no question that the burning of fossil fuels, the destruction of forests and the general disregard for our ecosystem manifested by industrial capitalism, as well as 20th century efforts to build socialism in the Soviet Union and China, have led us close to the edge of a cascading series of ecological disasters that are a grave threat to the future of life on earth as we have known it for thousands of years. Stronger and more destructive hurricanes and typhoons, spreading desertification, more intensive and extensive heat waves, chronic and numerically increasing wildfires, rising sea levels, 100-year-floods happening every decade or less, the disruption of agriculture, growing water scarcity—all of this is happening now, and it’s going to get worse. The question is whether we as a human species, worldwide, are going to be able to gather the spiritual and political strength in enough time to make a rapid shift away from our past polluting practices. We must, we absolutely have to do this to prevent the acceleration of global warming which, sooner or later, will lead us past critical climate tipping points.

What are these tipping points? There are four: the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets, the thawing of the methane-full permafrost in the northern latitudes, the release of methane frozen in ice on the bottom of the ocean as the ocean warms, and the decimation of the Amazon rainforest caused by drought or by humans cutting down too much of it. Any one of these tipping points alone would likely cause such catastrophic impacts or trigger such a major spike in greenhouse gas emissions that the extensive ecological disruption would be almost impossible to reverse for centuries if not millennia.

We aren’t at any of these tipping points yet, but each year that goes by without a dramatic worldwide effort to seriously reduce our ghg emissions brings us closer to one or more of them.

Any “revolutionary” or alleged revolutionary movement which doesn’t do all that it can to prevent this worldwide catastrophe is a complete and total contradiction in terms.

The climate crisis is also a fundamental justice issue. Who is it that is being hit first and hardest as the world begins to experience the negative impacts of a hotter world? It is the people who did the least to cause it, low-income people and people of color. It is Black people in the 9th Ward in New Orleans who lived in the neighborhoods least protected from a strong hurricane. It is Indigenous people in the Arctic where the ice and permafrost are melting, villages are collapsing into the ever-rising ocean waters and hunters are experiencing an unstable and weakening ice. It is residents of islands in the South Pacific where rising seas are threatening to displace entire nations from their historic homelands going back thousands of years.

Those with the least resources are those with the fewest options as climate impacts affect their livelihoods and living situations.

The politics of this dynamic is currently playing itself out as the nations of the world struggle to come up with a stronger international climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, expiring in three years. For close to two years there’s been an effort underway to come up with a treaty by this December at a major United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen. Yet as of right now there are significant differences between the Group of 77 and China, the formerly colonized countries of the global South, and most of the industrialized countries of the North, with some European exceptions. The global South is demanding significant cuts in ghg emissions by the industrialized North, at least 40% below the baseline year of 1990. They are demanding this since over 80% of the ghg emissions in the atmosphere affecting all the nations of the world are the result of the North’s economic development over the past 150 or so years. Yet the United States, responsible for over a quarter of those historic emissions, is proposing via the ACESA legislation to reduce U.S.-based emissions no more than 7-8% by 2020.

Revolutionaries who recognize the deep-seated inequality and injustice of the world economic order, growing out of centuries of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism by the coal- and oil-burning capitalist powers, have a responsibility to support the call for a truly just treaty. Only such a treaty can begin to restore the necessary trust internationally that would then make possible rapid leaps forward to renewable energy-based, sustainable and fair economic development throughout the world.

There is a growing and interconnected, international grassroots climate movement that is planning for action in scores of countries all around the world this fall, beginning on October 24th (www.350.org) and continuing with other actions leading up to and during the Copenhagen climate conference in December. This movement has been steadily developing since 2005. It is a hopeful development and a concrete indicator of the potential for the climate issue to galvanize and advance an independent progressive movement that puts climate justice issues at its center. Another reason why the Left should be doing consistent work on this issue is because, as a once-great revolutionary leader once said, “the masses make history.”

Everyone is affected by this issue. Some are affected more by it and are suffering and will suffer earlier and more seriously, but this is an issue that ultimately affects us all. 75% of U.S. Americans understand that global warming is real and that we need to shift away from the use of fossil fuels. People are experiencing the changes in weather patterns in their daily life.

You can be sure that Barack Obama and John McCain would not have made this a major issue in their 2008 campaigns for the Presidency if it wasn’t one that their polls showed had resonance among the broad voting public.

We have a significant opportunity to build the kind of mass-based movement that, sooner or later, can force the kinds of changes needed in the way the U.S. creates its energy. As we are seeing right now with what is happening on Capitol Hill, there is a need for people who understand the way in which corporate power operates. We need people who can help the climate movement avoid the trap of blindly following Democrats who say one thing but, once in power, are then willing to settle for something very different. In this process progressive independents can build a stronger base of support and a more activist movement able to increasingly challenge corporate power and those subservient to it.

Helping people to understand the way in which power works, helping them to develop the tactics and the organizational strength to overcome it on particular issues—this is a key task for an independent progressive movement. In the process of doing this work and exposing the powers-that-be for who and what they are, we will be laying the basis for broadly-supported revolutionary changes in our energy policy, as well as in other areas of society.

On a very practical level, renewable energy technology can be used on local levels to provide “power to the people,” not just the power of the sun or the wind but power to build local economies that are more self-sufficient. Think about a local neighborhood which joins together to install rooftop solar panels and/or several windmills which, in combination, provide most or all of the electricity needed by that neighborhood. Organizing a neighborhood to do this is, first, a way to bring people together around a commonly-shared need—affordable and reliable electricity. The process of community organizing around a commonly shared need can develop confidence and hope within the community that will then likely manifest itself in other positive projects and initiatives. It will give people a sense of their power when they join together with others.

This kind of a process is the essence of what is needed to build a popular movement capable of eventually making revolutionary change.

Finally, but very importantly, the process of building a clean energy revolution will organically lead growing numbers of people toward a deeply-felt appreciation for and connection to our natural environment. This is something needed not just by the general population but by too many of those who call themselves radicals or revolutionaries. It is needed because the negative values of domination and greed which undergird capitalism and the destructive corporate practices which flow from them are responsible for tremendous environmental damage and pollution. The development of an ecological consciousness and a will to act on it on the part of ever-larger numbers of people is an absolute prerequisite if we are to have any hope for developing the kind of future new society which sees itself as one with nature, not its master.

On an individual level, appreciating, connecting to and learning from the natural world is an essential aspect of how new women and new men can emerge who are able to give leadership within a 21st century revolutionary process.

There are many things that make good revolutionaries: an ability to listen, a sensitivity to human suffering, an understanding of history and economics, basic organizing skills, a commitment to development of new leadership, self-motivated discipline, a willingness to sacrifice for others. Many of these qualities are enhanced by a personal connection to the many other life forms with whom we share this planet Earth.

In the words of an Ojibway prayer,

“Grandfather.
Look at our brokenness.

“We know that in all creation
Only the human family
Has strayed from the Sacred Way.
We know that we are the ones
Who are divided
And we are the ones
Who must come back together
To walk the Sacred Way.
Grandfather,
Sacred One,
Teach us love, compassion
and honor
That we may heal the earth
And heal each other.”

Amen.

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One man gathers rain to recharge groundwater reserves and another pushes salt water through a desalination plant for subsequent sale. Are these both viable solutions to the world’s water crisis?

With the impacts of climate change, water waste, contamination and mismanagement driving us ever closer to the edge of a cliff, ensuring clean and plentiful water to both people and nature becomes tougher and more urgent each day.

A seemingly broad variety of water management strategies was on display at the recent 5th World Water Forum (WWF), confusing participants with repackaged policy prescriptions and technological bells and whistles. Helping people sift the wheat from the chaff were discussions of how to manage water as a commons. A concise set of principles offered a hopeful roadmap forward.

The forum was a mostly a civil affair, with the notable exception of riot police beating and arresting 25 Turks protesting peacefully for public water and against its privatization. The World Water Forum is convened by the World Water Council, a private, French non-profit whose board of governors tilts towards water privateers.

It’s a tri-annual gathering of government delegations, non- governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and private industry representatives. This year’s forum featured an advocacy effort by 16 governments to move the forum to the U.N., presumably a more accountable institution. The well-subscribed conference - over 30,000 people in attendance - seemed to demonstrate not only that the water crisis is a shared concern, but also, perhaps, the amount of money that can be made trading this precious fluid.

Ragendra Singh, known as the rain gatherer, travelled across Asia to Istanbul to address the forum. Working in arid Rajastan, India, Singh has revived the ecology of the Arwari river.  After twenty years of building small earthen dams called johads and a movement called Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), flow has returned to the once dry river, providing sustenance to thousands of families.

At a WWF trade booth, a representative of a Spanish desalination company projected powerpoint slides of barges docked off of coastal cities, sucking in sea water and spitting out drinking water (and brine and emissions). Over 60,000,000 people worldwide drink desalinated water.

The two faces of water technology couldn’t have been more dissimilar – and more caricatured. Ragendra Singh wore a long white kurta. He spoke of water with a mystical air, a grin spreading beneath his ragged beard. The balding desalination representative wore a grey suit, his lips pursed in grim determination to sell his technology.

Both men claim to fulfill a critical need in getting water to those who need it - in Ragendra’s case, beneficiaries include plants and animals. Is there a way for the average person, simply looking to get water to the thirsty, to evaluate if these two strategies are complementary or contradictory?

As a society, we can perhaps agree – although I may be overly optimistic here - that in its broadest conception, water is a commons, a public good to be shared by all and passed on undiminished in quality and quantity to future generations.

In a session on this topic entitled, “Water Commons: Global Experiences in Progressive Water Management”,  Maude Barlow, Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the UN General Assembly, suggested ten principles to manage water for the common good. The principles seem a useful measuring stick against which strategies of water management can be assessed. Does the strategy do the following?

1) Affirm water as a commons, that is, it belongs to everyone and no one, passed onto future generations in sufficient volume and quality;
2) Ensure the earth and all of its ecosystems rights to water for their survival – indeed it is on those ecosystems that human life depends;
3) Conserve water as society’s first course of action (enforced by law), including suggesting drastic changes to industrial and agricultural practices;
4) Treat watersheds – the source of water - as a common as well and not simply the water itself;
5) Encourage local, community management while legally binding communities to respect upstream and downstream neighbors’ rights;
6) Forge or affirm trans-boundary agreements that respect water sovereignty for both communities and nations;
7) Provide water as a basic principle of justice, not as an act of charity;
8) Ensure public delivery and fair pricing of water;
9) Promote enshrining the right to water in nation-state constitutions, laws and a UN covenant;
10) Employ innovative legal tools to protect water and manage water as a commons, including through public and community trusts.

International panelists presenting alongside Ms. Barlow, all participants in the Peoples Water Forum, a pro-public water gathering of international activists, described how these principles are applied in their communities. 

Oscar Olivera spoke of Cochabamba, Bolivia’s post-Bechtel experiments with community-managed water utilities to deliver quality water at fair prices. Adriana Marquisio, president of Uruguay’s water workers union, proposed a “new public” in which the public utility for which she works measures efficiency not just in terms of liters per second but via public oversight of how water fees and system improvements are spent, public health indicators, partnerships with communities and ecological health of groundwater reserves. New learning occurs through relationships with sister utilities called public-public partnerships.

V. Suresh of the Centre for Law, Policy and Human Rights Studies in Chennai, India, described training programs for water engineers and local governments to work more effectively with the communities they serve. His colleague, Vibhu Maher, manager of Tamil Nadu’s water supply, offered insight into alternative pricing schemes that are not based on “full cost recovery” – a mantra of the World Water Forum to saddle users with all system costs – but progressive cross subsidization, much in the way public schools are financed. Wenonah Hauter of Food and Water Watch narrated the failures of water privatization in the U.S. and Mr. Singh himself described how water governance can be organized around natural hydrological contours.

What do these water commons cases and principles reveal about how to think about desalination and rain water gathering?

Rain water gathering for aquifer recharge seems to fit well within the commons paradigm, although begs for measures to avoid monopolization or commodification of harvested water. A persistent challenge is scaling up this kind of ecological recovery to densely populated urban areas and delivering the water efficiently.

Desalination clearly has a number of hurdles to cross. Who owns the water that comes out of the desalination plant, who receives it and at what cost? What are the impacts on ocean ecology? Does the technique – which presents oceans as a limitless water supply -offer any incentive for conservation? These hurdles may not be insurmountable, but water advocates ought to insist that concerns be answered.

Managing water as a commons requires trial and error experimentation. Some of these local experiments are featured in a new publication launched at the forum, entitled “Local Control and Management of Our Water Commons: Stories of Rising to the Challenge." With principles in hand, the creative work of building just and sustainable water management systems becomes just a bit easier.

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At SEJ, doom and gloom without the sense of humor

As Mother Jones recently chronicled, the environment community is fractured on the House clean energy and climate protection bill, though the bigger pieces -- Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, League of Conservation Voters --  are squarely for it.

Al Gore last night in a open invitation conference call sought to rally activists to call Congress and demand passage. But with a fair amount of internal debate persisting about the merits of the bill, along with much the progressive media infrastructure failing over the last several weeks to highlight the twists and turns of the legislative drama, many progressive citizen-activists have not been especially motivated to engage Congress on climate, if they were even aware that the time was ripe for engagement.

The latest flare-up within the progressive movement is unconfirmed speculation that environmental groups supporting the bill are resisting attempts to try to strengthen the bill on the House floor, for fear that such attempts would threaten the fragile coalition of green-state, coal-state, oil-state, and farm-state Dems needed to attain a majority.

Is this a helpful debate to have right now?

To answer that, first answer this question: do we need a stronger bill with fewer concessions to carbon-polluting industries?

Look at this way. Duke University professor Prasad Kasibhatla concluded that if the rest of world follows our lead after the House bill approach is implemented, we would keep carbon pollution below 450 parts per million. Some scientists say that's enough to avert a climate crisis, while some say we need to reach 350.

In other words, we don't know for sure, but a stronger bill would be the safer route.

So, how best to do that?

Anyone who has closely followed the legislative sausage being made knows the following:

1. Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey had to do Herculean wheelin'-and-dealin' with fossil-fuel lovin' Dems to painstakingly piece together this compromise.

2. They did it without having any grassroots intensity in support of a strong carbon cap to hold skittish congresspeople's feet to the fire. In fact, Waxman and Markey had to do these deals precisely because they had no grassroots political leverage.

Which means pursuing last-minute amendments is futile.

There is zero reason to believe that the coalition could hold if any changes were made to the bill at this point. (Or to be more direct, there is zero reason to believe any amendment that would strengthen the bill would pass in the first place.)

Berating the Big Green groups for being strategic realists is not a useful internal debate to have. Their political calculations are not why the bill required multiple compromises.

The missing ingredient throughout this process has always been grassroots intensity, which has been depressed thanks to the fractured environmental community and lack of attention from both traditional media and progressive media.

You want to set the stage to strengthen the bill? Add that ingredient. Call Congress. Call 877-9-REPOWER. Pass the bill with a burst of grassroots momentum.

Don't sit on your hands and let Waxman and Speaker Pelosi drag the bill over the finish line with a whimper. Let Congress know that voters are watching this vote, and will reward congresspeople who had the vision to combat global warming.

From a political perspective, the details of the compromise don't matter right now. It's simply a global warming bill. And congresspeople are listening to find out if their constituents want a global warming bill, don't want a global warming bill, or don't care one way or another.

The best thing to do right now, is to give Congress the right answer.

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Electric cars powered by the burning of biomass would "average 81% more transportation kilometers and 108% more emissions offsets per unit area cropland than cellulosic ethanol" according to a recent study, and climate science guru James Hansen has declared implementation of biomass crucial to combating climate change, but those endorsements won't make a bit of difference if few bio-electricity plants are built due to pollution and sustainability concerns.

At least that's the state of play here in Massachusetts, where 5 biomass plants are proposed and face big hurdles. Two are further along than the rest: Russell Biomass proposes a 50 MW plant along the Westfield River in the south-central part of the state, and Pioneer Renewable Energy is proposing a 47 MW plant just east of Greenfield, Mass., near the Vermont border.

Western Massachusetts is an environmentally-minded region rich with wood resources (it's 70% trees), yet each proposal has attracted notable grassroots opposition, and for some good reasons. Russell's proposal is being opposed due to disputes over siting, pollution, and large water withdrawals from the Westfield, as outlined by Concerned Citizens of Russell. The Greenfield plant is opposed by a broad coalition of individuals, 450 of which packed a zoning board hearing recently, on pollution, trucking, and sustainabiiity questions.

In 2002 Massachusetts adopted a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) to encourage the generation of clean, renewable electricity in the state using indigenous resources such as wind, solar, and biomass. Under this legislation, Massachusetts must generate 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by the year 2025. Which explains the state's enthusiastic support for these projects.

A resource assessment performed as part of the Massachusetts Sustainable Forest Bioenergy Initiative found that there is enough sustainable, harvestable wood within the state to meet the needs of a 150 MW facility. In their words, "Early studies indicate that as much as 4 million tons of woody biomass could be produced annually in Massachusetts, mostly from forests and forest products industries. Utilizing only half that volume for the production of electricity would represent an estimated 150 MW of renewable generation, and substantial rural economic development associated with the fuel supply."

So by their own math, 5 plants at 50 MW would exceed the sustainable wood supply. Presumably wood would also be imported? Another point of confusion for many citizens is if trees fix carbon, why do we want to burn so many for energy? While these questions could be adequately answered or at least attempted, the state has done itself no favors in terms of providing answers, and worse, recently put its foot in its mouth: asked at a recent hearing, a state forester admitted that they lack a definition or a sense of what "sustainable harvest" would look like.

The state also stumbled by approving Pioneer's Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) review without requiring an environmental impact report on the effects of the operation. Certainly, an examination of air pollution, particulates, trucking, and sustainable supply should be undertaken: so says a citizens' group that has now served the secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs with an intent to sue on this issue.

The proposals would be more palatable at least if they planned to capture heat for district heating or industrial use, but despite some rhetoric from the project proponets seemingly indicating a willingness, the reality appears to be that these plants will be focused solely on producing electricity, putting them at a very low efficiency rating (20 percent by many estimates vs 80 percent for combined heat and power) in terms of getting full value from the available BTUs of the feedstock. In the words of one opponent, "use the resource wisely or not at all."

Certainly biomass can be done right, generating both heat and power and at a community scale. A hospital in the city of Northampton, between Russell and Greenfield, has a biomass plant, but the scale is much more appropriate.

And that's what it boils down to in cases like this too often. Too much money is at stake to create sensible, appropriate projects, "renewable" or not, when there are shareholders to pay.

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A side of flashmob with your lunch?

An unnamed group of climate activists is planning to descend on one of the larger Capitol Hill cafeterias on Tuesday to call for strengthening the American Clean Energy and Security Act. They're using Craigslist to gather supporters.

Here's the ad:

Dear DC-ite.

Your presence is requested on Tuesday, June 23rd for a special mission. At precisely 12:15pm, all of us will be walking through the Longworth office building cafeteria and will freeze in place for 120 seconds. At the end of 120 seconds, at the signal, we will drop playing cards (aces, of course) to the ground, or throw them up in the air and let them fall where they may. And we'll quietly resume whatever we were doing, presumably walking calmly out.

Specific instructions:
-show up at Longworth cafeteria at 12:05pm on Tuesday, June 23rd dressed in business attire.
-Bring an Ace playing card (or several) in your pocket. You are encouraged to write "The world needs better" on your card(s)
-At 12:15 precisely, freeze where you are. >>> No sitting, and don't obstruct any cash registers, doors or walkways.
-At 12:17, (120 seconds later) after the signal, drop the aces to the floor, and quietly disperse.

The action refers to the ACES bill, otherwise known as Waxman-Markey. Our stance: We need a good global climate agreement by the international negotiations in Copenhagen. ACES is not good enough. It needs to get better.

Longworth cafeteria is located in the center/basement of Longworth Congressional Office building. Its quite nice, and Tuesday is a 'farm days' lunch.

Anyone know who's behind this? Post in the comments below.

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Wondering what you can do? These groups have climate campaigns and info galore—check out their sites, connect with them on social networks, and get involved!

350.org
A grassroots group led by author Bill McKibben and born out of the belief that climate change needs a robust social movement behind it. The name comes from the maximum “parts per million” of carbon dioxide that many scientists believe our atmosphere can safely handle. 350.org grew out of the 2007 Step It Up campaign that held more than 2,000 rallies nationwide in 2007. Now it’s focused on Oct. 24, 2009, the International Day of Climate Action.
     Key Peeps: Bill McKibben—environmental author, Grist board member, all-around eco-stud

1Sky
A campaign working to build a network of advocates who can push the 1Sky Solutions—creating green jobs, freezing climate pollution, and halting use of coal and other dirty fuels. The group helped lead a push against new coal plants after the coal-ash spill disaster in Tennessee last December.

Energy Action Coalition
A youth-led network behind the Campus Climate Challenge and two Power Shift youth conference/rallies in Washington, D.C., plus the Power Shift ’09 campaign—“Rebuild Our Economy and Reclaim Our Future.”
     Key peeps: Cofounder Billy Parish is a Grist contributor

Focus the Nation
Another youth-focused group that uses campus teach-ins, town hall meetings, and other events to spread the conviction that climate change delivers the kick in the pants our nation needs to transition to a clean energy economy. It claims to have organized the largest teach-in in U.S. history—nearly 1 million people at 1,900 institutions—in January 2008.

The Climate Project
Al Gore founded this international campaign to train citizens to present the climate slideshow he made famous in An Inconvenient Truth. At first, Climate Project presenters focused on educating the public about the science of global warming. This May, the group took on a new, more activist mission: helping to pass a climate bill in Congress.
Key peeps: Al Gore

Alliance for Climate Protection
Another Gore-founded group, the Alliance focuses on major advertising and awareness campaigns—The We Campaign, This Is Reality, Repower America. It plans to coordinate with The Climate Project in supporting a climate bill this year.
     Key peeps: Al Gore, again

StopGlobalWarming.org
A “virtual march” for climate action.

Tcktcktck.org
A new coalition of groups like 350.org and Greenpeace focused on reminding the world that the time for a global climate plan is tck-tck-tck-ing down to this December’s negotiations in Copenhagen.

CLEAN
A collection of state and local groups pulling for a national energy policy based on renewable sources, not fossil fuels.

Blue Green Alliance
A partnership of labor and environmental groups raising support for green jobs.  Led by the nation’s largest manufacturing union, the United Steelworkers of America, and the nation’s largest environmental group, the Sierra Club.

Apollo Alliance
A coalition of labor, business, environmental, and community leaders that believes the U.S. transition to clean energy must be like “big, bold, and fast”—like the Kennedy-era Apollo space program that put a man on the moon after less than a decade. Sample groups: Teamsters, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Green For All.

Earth Day Network
Climate campaign: Climate Change Solutions Campaign

Sierra Club
Climate campaign: Climate Crossroads
Student campaign: Sierra Student Coalition

Environmental Defense Fund
Climate campaign: Operation: Climate Vote

League of Conservation Voters
Clean energy campaign: The Heat Is On

Rainforest Action Network
Anti-oil campaign: Freedom From Oil

Greenpeace International
Climate campaign: The Solution to Climate Change

Natural Resources Defense Council
Climate campaign: How to Fight Global Warming

Friends of the Earth
Climate campaign: Demand Climate Justice

Also check out Oxfam International‘s Climate Change campaign

Did we miss your favorite group? Tell us in comments below, or email us.

Find out more about climate change and what you can do about it in our Climate Citizens section.

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Help us find out where members of Congress stand on climate change—they haven’t all been clear on this. Send the message below to your U.S. senators and/or representative, then post the lawmaker’s reply in comments below or email it to us.

Dear __________:

I am writing to learn more about your views on the important issue of global climate change.

In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences and 10 other science academies issued a statement that “the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking cost-effective steps that will contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions.” The Academy also stated that the planet as a whole is warming, and that the burning of fossil fuels is directly tied to changes in atmospheric chemistry and rising surface temperatures.

Do you agree with National Academy’s finding and, more broadly, the international community’s consensus view that climate change is primarily driven by human activities?

Are you supporting a comprehensive climate bill?  What principles will guide your decision to vote for or against such a bill?

Will you encourage President Obama to ensure that the United States plays a leading role in the next round of global climate talks, scheduled for December in Copenhagen?

Thank you in advance to your answers to this question. Climate policy is a complex issue that demands thoughtful consideration by government leaders like yourself.

Sincerely,

__________

Don’t know who your representative is? Here’s a handy way to look it up by zip code.  And here’s a list of senators by state.

Find out more about climate change and what you can do about it in our Climate Citizens section.

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Think people who love the planet are all wimps and weenies? Think again. Here are thirteen who are giving green a bad reputation—in a good way. Read on to learn more about these Mother-lovers—and leave your own nominations in the comments section below.

Training day.Beige Luciano-Adams/ELLA13. Homeboy Industries. With the tagline “Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job,” you know these homeboys aren’t messing around. Thanks to an ambitious job-training program that includes solar-panel installation, the former East L.A. gang members are slashing energy use instead of each other.  “I wanted a new way of life,” says ex-convict Albert Ortega. “Solar puts me on the cutting edge.” Can we get that on a tattoo?

Bonds rallies support for her mountain home.OHVEC 12. Judy Bonds. It takes a badass to take on Big Coal, and Judy Bonds is doing it. The daughter of a coal miner and a self-described “hillbilly,” Bonds has gained international notoriety for her tough bituminous talk. It’s all an effort to protect her native West Virginia from the mountaintop removal practice she says turned her home into a “war zone.”

He wrestles with his conscience.11. El Hijo del Santo. This Mexican wrestler may hide his face with a silver mask, but he makes no secret of his intentions when it comes to the environment. As spokes-hero for the nonprofit WildCoast (CostaSalvaje), El Hijo del Santo is packing a world of hurt for the ocean’s enemies. Watch out, polluters—you don’t want to endure the Tope de Cristo.

The Isa-ing on the cake.eight double via flickr10. Isa Chandra Moskowitz. This vegan-punk chef is taking over the world—one decadent, dairy-free delicacy at a time.  As an author and co-founder of the cooking show Post Punk Kitchen, Moskowitz is bringing mainstream audiences two flavors of badassery for the price of one. But will punk officially be dead when The Man starts baking vegan cupcakes?

Global Coolio-ing.9. Coolio. When the rapper toured historically black colleges and universities to throw down the truth about climate impacts last year, he was fully armed—with stats. But earlier this year, Coolio made headlines by denying the reality of anthropogenic climate change. “The earth’s been doing this for millenniums,” he puffed on Celebrity Big Brother. Oh Coolio—stop blowing smoke up our ass.

An offer you can’t refuse.8. Wind farm mafia. Looks like the garbage biz is yesterday’s news: a leading mafia family got busted in a Sicilian wind-turbine scheme earlier this spring, leading to a major investigation into fraudulent power-selling practices. Translation: There was no wind in their sales.

That’s Mr. Mayor John to you.thecapsolution.org7. John Fetterman. The mayor of Braddock, Penn., is a big, bald, tattooed badass. Who just happens to have a heart of gold. “Mayor John,” as he’s known, is reinventing this downtrodden steel town in Pittsburgh’s shadow—and getting the word out about proactive climate and energy solutions. Yeah, that’s right, he’ll carbon cap your ass.

Just the flax, ma’am.EPA.gov6. EPA Criminal Investigation Division. Didn’t know the EPA had a Most Wanted list, did you? Didn’t know the agency tracked and shot its first eco-fugitive earlier this year, did you? The EPA: Not just for prairie grasses anymore.

Grr.5. Ah-nold. Yes, he’s the most overreported “unexpected environmentalist” of the new millennium. But how could we make this list and leave him out? We know what lies beneath the fancy suits, Arnold. Once a badass, always a badass.

Who you callin’ shrimp?Texas Gold4. Diane Wilson. A fourth-generation shrimper who captained her own boat, Wilson turned activist when she found out her Texas county was the most polluted in the country. The self-dubbed “unreasonable woman” took on Gulf Coast manufacturers, wrote a book about it, and hasn’t stopped fighting since.

His dedication is permanent.mytats.com3. Jess Yen. This award-winning southern California tattoo artist has a yen for influencing people’s perspectives on green issues. Amidst the tat-samples on his site, he dedicates some ink to educating clients about climate change—and gives 10 reasons to go vegetarian. “As an individual or an eco-tattoo artist,” he told one interviewer, “I do what I can every day to cherish and conserve the sacred resources.”

Don’t let the grandfatherly smile fool you: Ted is tough.governor.oregon.gov2. Ted Kulongoski. Sure, he looks like a gentle 69-year-old who merely “cares” about climate legislation, state parks, sustainable housing, and tailpipe regulations. But the governor of Oregon, whose second term ends next year, has a storied past that includes stints as a Marine, truck driver, bricklayer, and steelworker.  On top of that, he was raised by nuns—so you know he’s got a tough hide.

Munter puts it best: “Never underestimate a vegetarian hippie chick with a racecar.”NextEra Energy1. Leilani Munter. Stunt double? Check. Race car driver? Check. Biologist and conservation activist? Uh, OK. Munter doesn’t mess around when it comes to the environment: she hopes to educate racing’s 100 million racing fans about green living, serves as an ambassador for the National Wildlife Federation, has testified on Capitol Hill, and wants to convince her industry to use more alternative fuels. Says this CarbonFreeGirl: “Just because you’re green ... doesn’t mean you can’t be fast.”

This badass list was created by Ashley Braun and Katharine Wroth.

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