5 Reasons to Be Hopeful We Haven’t Totally Screwed Ourselves and the Planet … Yet

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet

Posted on April 26, 2011
This article is also found HERE.

Powershift 2011 — even earning face time with the president.

These five reasons are what get me up in the morning and help me believe our cup is indeed half full. These are the folks making waves, rocking the boat of complacency, and they need our help.

Frack Off: One of the most amazing developments in the environmental world has been the organizations that emerged and joined forces in protest to the dangerous natural gas drilling practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. While corporate polluters still get a free legal pass to pollute, thanks to Dick Cheney, fierce opposition has arisen to overturn that and to end fracking altogether. Momentum ignited from the film Gasland and grassroots activism around the issue has helped to spark a ban on fracking in Pittsburg and a temporary moratorium in New York. Groups like Food and Water Watch, Democracy for America, Water Defense, Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, Earth Justice and others are putting the heat on the drilling industry and any politicians dumb enough to have their back.

Thomas Linzey told me, “We think today’s contemporary activism is the wrong frame, and in addition it is aimed at the wrong thing. Most of it’s federal and state activism. We think those things are pretty much dead. The only place where there is a window to operate is at the local level and then that can be used to upend the state and federal to build a new system of law, which I think our communities are recognizing is needed.”

CELDF helps communities fight pollution and corporate control where they live by training them in Democracy Schools to understand the legal loopholes provided for corporations. CELDF then helps communities to draft their own constitutions and ordinances that put the rights of people and nature first.

Appalachian Voices and their coalition partners have brought the fight from the coalfields to the capital, but they need critical mass — they need the rest of us to get behind their efforts.

And the mining of coal is just the beginning. Groups like the Sierra Club are working to shut down coal-burning power plants and Rainforest Action Network has been targeting the banks that fund polluting projects. We know there are cleaner ways to produce energy and these organizations are trying to end the reign of dirty power and dethrone King Coal.

Food Day — it’s a new initiative aiming to make October 24 of this year the biggest organizing day around food, ever. Driven by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Day will highlight local solutions to our food crisis, letting people get involved in this important issue right where they live.

Bill McKibben said earlier this week at Powershift where 10,000 young environmental leaders converged. “We have waited late to get started and our adversaries are strong and we do not know how this is going to come out. If you were a betting person you might bet we were going to lose because so far that is what’s happened, but that’s not a bet you are allowed to make. The only thing that a morally awake person can do when the worst thing that ever happened is happening is try to change those odds.”

Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet and editor of the new book Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraLohan.

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