THE WELL-TRAINED ACTIVIST

And The Award Goes To... An Advocacy Student!

2011-04-13T23:30:00.000-05:00

Just got word from Antioch Advocacy student Jamie Capach that the video that she produced about Antioch University New England's Transportation Initiative here was selected as a winner of the "My Energy Plan" video competition sponsored by Clean Air-Cool Planet and the University of New Hampshire. A number of Antioch's Environmental Studies students appear in the video, which was written by ES students Rachel Brett (AUNE Green Guru)and Alyssa Kassner (AUNE Transportation Coordinator).

Check it out:

My Path To Transition Organizing

2011-04-01T16:16:00.007-05:00

My becoming a local Transition organizer, on top of my work as a professor of Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability, was not at all a surprise to my family, my closest friends, or my colleagues in the Department of Environmental Studies at Antioch University New England. They all saw my new volunteer work as consistent with my previous efforts over the years as both an activist and an activist educator. While the Transition movement often attracts people who have not been social movement activists before, some of us are fairly old hands. I am one of those old hands.

Organizing Activist Study Groups in The 1970s

Back in the mid-1970s, for example, when I was relatively new to grassroots activism, I helped organize a series of weekly study circles for environmental, peace, and social justice activists in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Our aim was to help each other see beyond the next demonstration, the next hot-button issue, or even the next volunteer shift at the food coop or community garden. Several of us sensed that we needed to go beyond our urgent, but largely unreflective activism. We wanted to create a more thoughtful politics than our heart-felt, but somewhat knee-jerk responses to date. The assembled participants in this series of study circles had decided to work together in order to construct a deeper, more mature analysis, vision, and strategy to guide our activist work in an emerging age of global ecological crisis.

I loved our living room gatherings in Twin Cities. Each week, after a potluck supper, we would settle-in for two and a half hours of reports and discussions based on our readings and our experiences. The learning process was participatory and lively--consciously rooted in the popular education theories of Paulo Freire and Myles Horton. Topics of the study circles included the environmental crisis, ecological limits to growth, North-South relations, US social justice issues, militarism, alternative social and economic visions, Gandhian nonviolence, and other organizing strategies. The curriculum for these "Macro-Analysis Seminars" was developed as a program of activist self-study designed by a Philadelphia group that was part of a national activist network called Movement for a New Society.

Rethinking Economic Growth

Looking back, I see now that we were working together to systematically construct and refine a collective action framework that was similar to the emerging "Transition Model" of today in many, many ways. I especially remember reading and discussing Bill Moyer's groundbreaking 1972 essay, "De-Developing the United States Through Nonviolence." Echoing central themes from Rob Hopkins' The Transition Handbook, Moyer explained how modern industrialized societies would at some point need to make a significant break from the dominant development model of ever-escalating economic growth and ever-expanding energy use and pollution. In light of emerging research, such as the Limits to Growth report put together by a team of MIT scientists, Moyer argued that there is increasing evidence that "there are not enough resources (including minerals, fossil fuels, water), and the environment's pollution-absorption capacity is not great enough" to sustain the dominant pattern of industrial development for too many more decades.

Anticipating the problems of peak oil, climate change, and the unsustainability and injustice of the global economy, which are all highlighted by the Transition movement today, Moyer argued that "complete world development" along the lines of the dominant industrial growth model is impossible. He then concluded that "over-developed" industrial nations like the United States will therefore have to choose between intensifying their war against the poor and the planet, while still risking future decline or collapse, or creatively "de-developing" themselves and finding ways to transition to a more just, resilient, and fulfilling way of life. As he noted in the piece, "In this long-range vision of a more egalitarian world in which the industrialized nations are de-developed, the standards of happiness would be based more on human relationships and individual actualization than quantities of material consumption."

This unconventional perspective challenged all of us active in those long ago study groups. Back then, almost all progressive activists still claimed that we should--and could--grow our way out of imperialism, poverty, and war by forever expanding the economic pie available to all people. Some of us, of course, also added that we should throw in some wealth redistribution policies in order to further enhance both social equality and democracy, but we were still firmly committed to unending economic growth. After exploring Moyer's ecological perspective, however, most of us in the study groups were able to begin moving beyond the dominant pro-growth consensus that held together most conservatives, liberals, and even self-styled radicals at the time.

Working in the "Anti-Nuclear" Movement

Several of us in the Twin Cities, and several others influenced by Moyer's thinking around the country, went on to assist the formation of a regionally-rooted, but nationally-networked alternative energy movement that waged numerous nonviolent direct action campaigns across the country. We set our immediate sights on blocking the construction of 1000 proposed new nuclear reactors in the United States, which we saw as a dangerous and very flawed attempt to maintain the dominant model of business as usual."

This particular "de-development" movement was ultimately successful at capping the number of US nuclear reactors at less than 200. This is a significant victory, even though we wished the final number had been zero. At that particular point in US history, however, and perhaps in part due to the limits of our oppositional organizing model, we were not able to build a strong enough movement to go farther and achieve our long-range vision of a transition to a decentralized, non-nuclear, post-oil economy built on a foundation of extensive energy conservation, an overall reduction in global energy demand, and switching to safe and renewable energy sources produced largely at the local and regional level.

By 1980, Moyer and co-author Pamela Haines wrote a new piece stressing that the "anti-nuke" movement would be wise to reframe itself as a more positive, safe energy movement and "actively advocate alternatives as well." As Moyer and Haines put it in this new piece, we need to be "calling for a shift from the traditional hard energy path of massive centralized generating plants using nonrenewable fuels to a new soft energy path of flexible decentralized generation based on a diversity of mostly renewable energy sources." Why? They argued:

It is not enough to add [the fossil fuels industry] to nuclear power as another system that must be fought. We need a vision of what we want America's energy future to look like, so that we can develop a strategy for the citizens' movement to get from here to there. Without a vision, we don't know where we are going, we get frustrated and stuck in protest, and don't have a basis for deciding what to do next. It is also important to have some ideas of what the transition period looks like so we can have benchmarks for recognizing our victories along the way.

Back to the Future With the Transition Movement

Now, close to 30 years later, this unfinished agenda has been strongly lifted up by the international Transition movement. We can see these visionary themes in the Transition movement's call for efforts to foster community resilience, promote energy descent planning, and move forward on the redevelopment of sound local economies that are just and sustainable. Such a constructive, community-driven program for a more relocalized and resilient world was certainly raised for our consideration in Moyer's writings, but he left it largely undeveloped in light of his more urgent priority of challenging nuclear power plant construction through local nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns. With the Transition movement, this neglected element of Moyer's and Haines' thinking is now being put front and center again.

Not surprisingly, this new movement excites me. In all my work as an activist and activist educator since the 1980s, I have been puzzling over, and experimenting with, how to move toward the long-range, sustainability vision that was first brought to my attention by Bill Moyer and people like Pamela Haines. After all these years, one of my core conclusions is that it is no longer sufficient to put all our hopes into a mass revival of using the grassroots social action tools of electoral campaigning, voting responsibly, lobbying our elected officials, or even putting real "street heat" on corporate or government officials by participating in nonviolent protests and direct action campaigns.

Please do not get me wrong. I still believe that all of these forms of civic engagement are very important and still needed--and should be engaged in by active citizens everywhere. Yet, like most Transition organizers, I have also come to believe that something else--something very important--needs to be added into the mix of our activism and placed much closer to the center of our work. That something is a global movement of local grassroots organizing aimed at creating relocalized, resilient, and sustainable economies and communities through positive, practical, citizen-led projects and alternative institutions.

Today, between the cracks of my fulltime teaching gig, I'm trying to do my own small part of nurturing the growing transition movement right here in Keene, New Hampshire. It also makes for great service learning projects for my students.

For more information on our local community work, check out The Keene Transition Movement Community Website and Blog.

Is The Transition Movement A Yuppie Diversion?

2011-04-01T15:40:00.006-05:00

I am feeling a little like "Dear Abi." Yesterday, I got an email addressed to me and several other Transition movement organizers around the country. It was in response to the Transition US March e-newsletter. I'm not sure which article upset this reader, but he wrote me and several others the following note:

IS TransitionUS JUST A SORT OF YUPPIE SUBSTITUTE FOR TAKING SERIOUS POLITICAL ACTION ON, SAY, THE YANKEE G.E. NUKE PLANT IN VERNON, VTAND THE 100+ such plants that are scattered across our country? In a few words, are you simply DIVERTING US, with cutsie-pie, from doing serious and adult things?

Below is a slightly revised version of my response:

Dear Friend,

I'm not really clear if you are just stating a conclusion, or if you are actually curious about the question you have raised. Anyway, I've tried to take your question seriously and answer it at some length below. I look forward to hearing back from you at your earliest convenience.

A Bit About Who I Am

Besides running an activist training program at Antioch University New England, and being a long time activist before that, I am a founding member of the Transition Keene Task Force--a group of eight friends and neighbors who got inspired by reading Rob Hopkins' The Transition Handbook together. We are the 56th Transition initiative in the US and the first in New Hampshire.

The Transition Movement's Analysis

Like many people, I was originally attracted to the Transition movement for a variety of interrelated reasons. One motivation for many Transition activists is the movement's unflinching analysis that our local communities, our nations, and the larger global community are increasingly facing a severe threat from the "perfect storm" of climate change, peak oil, and an increasingly dysfunctional global economy. Business as usual is just not working or creating a sustainable, just, or fulfilling world.

As Hopkins' notes, "It is no longer just a case of whether we should be questioning the forces of economic globalization because they are unjust, inequitable or a rapacious destroyer of environments and cultures." Added to these concerns, we now have to add the likelihood that the impacts of global climate change and the end of the Age of Cheap Oil will send serious shockwaves through our industrial civilization--shocks that will almost inevitably change the way we live, work, and play in the future. This troubling view of our future is becoming increasingly convincing to a growing number of people. As Paul Hawken notes in his book Blessed Unrest, "If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don't have the correct data." My guess is that you likely agree pretty much with the Transition movement's analysis. If so, we already have a lot of common ground.

The Transition Movement's Vision

The greatest appeal of the Transition movement to me, however, is probably its palpable sense of historic opportunity and its vision of a more resilient, just, and fulfilling way of life at the end of the Age of Cheap Oil. A core tenet of the movement is that a "future with less oil could be better than the present," but only if we "engage in designing this transition with sufficient creativity and imagination." The movement's visionary approach is based on finding creative and effective ways for communities to unleash positive, solutions-oriented, grassroots citizens' initiatives to (1) significantly lower community energy use; (2) convert to more local, safe, and renewable energy sources; (3) foster a more localized, green-collar economy that can meet the basic needs of all its citizens; and (4) strengthen the very heart and soul of local community life in ways that offer deeper connection and life satisfaction than mass consumer culture.

This vision appeals to many people when they hear about it. As Hopkins explains in his book, "I have delivered this message many times, in talks, courses and blog posts, and have yet to encounter anyone who thinks that stronger local economies, increased local democracy, strengthened local food culture and more local energy production are a bad idea." While Hopkins is likely exaggerating about the universally positive response he receives in order to make a point here, it is still a good point. The Transition movement's vision does seem to appeal to an increasing number of people in my town, including people in several different places across the conventional political spectrum.

While the Transition movement's politics of relocalization can be viewed as radical because it seeks to foster a transition towards sustainability, social justice, community well-being, and participatory democracy, such visions also matter to principled conservatives. Indeed, as Transition fellow-traveler Pat Murphy notes, modernist "values of novelty, comfort, convenience, ease, fashion, indulgence, luxury and competition along with other indolent values associated with declining empires must give way to different values such as cooperation, temperance, prudence, moderation, conviviality, and charity." Anyway, you might even be in rough agreement with the transition vision. If so, we have even more common ground between us.

The Transition Movement's Strategy

A third thing that draws in many of the movement's participants, including me, is that the Transition organizing model promotes an innovative and inspiring strategy for change--and at a local scale that many people see as the most workable for themselves. Most Transition movement leaders and many participants are wise enough to know that concerned citizens will ultimately need to encourage the development of creative international treaties, and more daring national, state, and local public policies that promote a large-scale transition towards economic relocalization and energy descent. Yet, the movement also believes that the levers for this kind of change are not immediately available to grassroots activists. As Richard Hienberg states in his foreword to Hopkins' book, "On the whole, national governments are slow to understand and act on this imperative, as there are too many interests vested in maintaining the status quo."

While not at all discounting the vital role of elections, lobbying, and the conventional issue campaigning--or even the nonviolent direct action approach of somewhat more militant groups--the strategic emphasis promoted by Transition movement leaders and participants is on organizing local, community-based, self-help projects and alternative institutions that are fun, energizing, relevant, and are likely to engage many new people as active citizens.

Adding The Transition Strategy To The Activist Mix

This strategic approach might be what you are most worried about--because you may see it as a distraction from the kind of issue campaigning and protest efforts you think are most needed now. Is that true? If so, I would ask you to remember one thing and to consider another.

First, please remember that many Transition activists do actively engage in elections, lobbying, issue campaigns, and some--like myself--even engage in and support nonviolent direct action. We are not diverted. We are just adding another tool to our activist tool box by doing Transition organizing.

Second, I encourage you to consider the Transition movement's main strategic orientation--which is essentially what Gandhi called the "constructive program"--as a supplement rather than a distraction or a diversion from other types of activism. I personally think that any successful movement for fundamental social change will require a local-level constructive program of education and action like that focused on by Transition initiatives, as well as elections, lobbying, issue campaigning, opposition to certain types of development and technologies, and nonviolent direct action. Different movements, organizations, and networks might focus on one or two of these types of tactics and not others for various reasons, but all of these approaches to change are likely needed. If we can agree on that, then we have tons of common ground--we are just focusing our primary strategic energies in different needed areas. Might you possibly agree with this?

Conclusion

Now the future may prove the Transition movement wrong about the wisdom of its strategic approach, but I think it is safe to say that we didn't arrive at this perspective from an immature, cutsie-pie, yuppie perspective. I would thus encourage you to see us as potential allies in the wider movement for positive social change, and perhaps even refrain from calling us names. Still, with that observation on the tone of your email aside, I do think your basic question is a good one and I've done my best to answer you fully and thoughtfully.

In closing, I just want to say thank you for all of your activist work and your efforts to contribute to the transition to safe and renewable energy sources and greater energy conservation. I certainly see you as an ally in this effort and hope you come to see me and my compatriots in the Transition movement as potential allies as well.

Best,
Steve

Nic Marks on the "Happy Planet Index"

2011-04-01T10:13:00.003-05:00

I have long been a fan of the New Economics Foundation in England because I think they are doing some of the most creative thinking about how we might organize and conduct our political and economic lives in order to promote sustainability, social justice, personal fulfillment, and the common good. They also take into account the realities we will likely confront in the face of the end of the Age of Cheap and Abundant Oil. Here is a recent talk by Nic Marks, one of the founders of NEF, on their tool called "The Happy Planet Index." In it, Nic also talks about the importance of thinking in visionary terms and not just scaring people with worse case scenarios. I thought many sustainability activists might be interested in watching the talk. It is just 17 minutes long.

From Japan to Our Local Nuke Plant: What's a City Council To Do?

2011-03-26T07:58:00.003-05:00

I read with sadness the Keene Sentinel‘s March 22 article entitled “Reactor damage worse than thought.” I am so moved by how Japan’s dedicated nuclear plant workers in are risking their lives to keep the rest of Japan as safe as they possibly can. This is real heroism. I’m grateful to all such workers around the world who work so hard to make sure this potentially dangerous technology does not cause the worst damage it can. I think, too, about our nuclear plant workers in nearby Vernon, Vermont, who are trying to keep us safe from the worst that could happen at Vermont Yankee–a plant which uses the same design as the failing and increasingly radioactive plants in Japan.

Witnessing this kind of dedication in the current crisis situation only makes me more concerned that the majority of the Keene City Council recently refused to sign on to a letter approved by several other towns in the evacuation zone around the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant supported by the Safe and Green Campaign (and an Antiioch Advocacy student who works part-time for them). This “controversial” letter, as one councilor called it, did not even take a position on whether or not nuclear energy should be part of the mix in our energy future. It simply called on the Entergy Corporation to provide full support to our citizens and the local workers at their Vermont Yankee plant as the State of Vermont implements its plans to close the plant once its current license expires next March.

What was “controversial” in the proposed letter put before our City Council? Was it that the letter asked “that Vermont Yankee workers, many of whom live in our towns and cities, be given first preference when workers are hired for the multi-year decommissioning and site clean-up process?”

Was it that the letter asked “that when the reactor’s radioactive components will be dismantled and removed or stored on site, workers remaining on the site receive the maximum protection from radiation exposure?”

Was it that the letter asked “that those workers whose jobs are discontinued or who choose not to accept employment during this post-shutdown period be guaranteed a generous severance package of pay and benefits as well as opportunities for retraining for available jobs at decent wages, including jobs in the rapidly expanding ’green energy’ sector?”

Or, perhaps, it was that the letter asked “that there will be extra attention to maintenance and repair of all systems associated with the reactor, coupled with heightened inspections, monitoring, and testing to minimize the possibility of a major accident and ensure that people, animals, and the environment are not exposed to an additional risks of breathing, drinking, or otherwise ingesting radioactivity?”

Usually, I am very impressed by our City Councilors, who have repeatedly shown themselves willing to take strong and creative stands on protecting or improving our community. However, I think that they missed an important opportunity this time to state clearly their strong public support for the decent treatment of the dedicated workers at Vermont Yankee and the public health interests of all area citizens.

In light of the events going on now in Japan, I hope that our Council will revisit this issue and stand up clearly for both the health and safety of our citizens and the workers at Vermont Yankee who risk their lives for us everyday to avoid the worst outcomes that are possible with a potentially deadly technology like nuclear power.

I don’t think that is too much for the citizens of Keene to ask. Do you?

Nonviolent Action To Decommission Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant

2011-02-07T20:19:00.003-05:00

Below is a letter from Brattleboro area journalist and green jobs activist Eesha Williams. It includes an invitation to support a nonviolent action supporting the Vermont Legislature's decision to decommission the aging and accident-prone Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in March 2012. The action at the Entergy Corporation offices in Brattleboro will take place on Monday, February 28, at noon. While the Transition Movement that I am active in is often described as "more like a party than a protest," enforcing the people's desire for clean energy and green jobs could well make this action worth supporting. I ask people to decide for themselves.

Here's Eesha's letter:
Dear Friends,

Last year, the people of Vermont used the democratic process to order Entergy Corporation of Louisiana to close its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in March 2012. Instead of obeying the will of the people, Entergy is now spending vast sums of money on lobbying, TV advertising, and lawyers to try to keep its dangerous, polluting nuke running until at least 2032.

Me and at least four other people are planning to risk arrest for non-violent civil disobedience at the Entergy office in Brattleboro at noon on February 28. We are asking the public to come out to support us and witness our action. We will not damage any property and we have notified the police. We will cooperate with the police if and when they arrest us. We will peacefully walk to the police cars and not say anything rude or confrontational to the police. We will consider allowing anyone to risk arrest with us if they contact us by February 21. I can be reached by phone at (802) 254-2531 or by e-mail by going to ValleyPost.org and clicking "contact."

Eesha Williams
Dummerston, Vermont

Antioch Advocacy Grad Leads Gulf of Maine Restoration Coalition

2010-12-23T09:30:00.003-05:00

A Report From Peter Alexander:

I have good news to share about the new US Gulf of Maine Habitat Restoration and Conservation Plan. The Plan was officially released at a press conference in Portland, Maine last week and received a great deal of media coverage. The Associated Press article was most widely distributed, and a front page article in the Portland Daily Sun provided some great in-depth coverage. Maine Public Radio also ran a really excellent in-depth report. If you would like to read or listen, you can find the coverage here:

Maine Public Broadcasting Network

The Boston Globe

Portland Daily Sun

Now that the plan has been finalized and published it is going to take a lot of work to get Congress to implement it, and we are going to need all the help we can get to accomplish this. The National Wildlife Federation has taken on the leading role and has contracted with me to create a regional coalition of conservation and advocacy groups that will be working together to convince Congress to take action. We are not expecting instant results: it took five years before Congress finally started implementing a similar plan for the Great Lakes. Yet, with your help, we can move this plan forward.

Here are some of the ways you can help:

1) Be part of the advocacy team, ready to call or write Members of
Congress or other elected officials at key times during the campaign
(for example, when a relevant bill is being considered).

2) Tell your friends about the plan and ask them to be part of the
campaign to get it implemented (we will keep the survey page open and
they can sign up there at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XZWD7VK). Use your social networking sites (Facebook, etc.) to talk about the Plan and the need to get it implemented.

3) Send a tax-deductible donation to support the campaign to: Gulf of Maine Restoration • National Wildlife Federation Northeast Regional Center • 149 State Street, Suite 1 • Montpelier, Vermont 05602

4) Send me your ideas for events and activities that can advance the cause.

Please let me know how you would like to help, and feel free to send any other ideas or suggestions. I look forward to hearing from you and to working with you to restore and conserve our beloved Gulf of Maine!

All the best,

Peter

Peter Alexander
Director, Gulf of Maine Restoration Coalition
Member of Steering Committee, America's Great Waters Coalition
peter@peteralexander.us

Here are some useful links:
Download the Plan.
Download just the Executive Summary.
Download the Expanded Spreadsheet detailing the Plan's cost estimates.

Our 10/10/10 Service Learning Project

2010-12-03T16:50:00.004-05:00

At the beginning of this Fall semester, a Transition Keene Task Force organizer asked the Environmental Studies class on "Organizing for Social Change" to help with local organizing for 10/10/10, a Global Work Party for Climate Protection sponsored internationally by 350.org that utlimtatly included over 7,300 different work parties in 188 countries. The class agreed to work on this project as part of the course's service learning project. They planned and carried out several 10/10/10 related activities:

Assisting with the filming and editing of a 30 minute documentary on all the Keene 10/10/10 work parties including Antioch's (see YouTube clips below);

Raising over $1,010.10 for Antioch's Green Bikes Initiative;

Organizing three bike related on-campus workshops for 10/10/10;

Inspiring other campus groups to host additional Antioch workparties (like the AUNE Community Garden and AUNE Library workparty events); and

Encouraging Antioch alumni, student, faculty, and staff turn out for the Keene-wide evening 10/10/10 celebration downtown.

It Takes A Village To Save A Planet: Green in Keene on 10/10/10

Part I

Part II

Part III

Introducing Dr. Vincent Harding

2010-10-19T10:51:00.004-05:00

On October 14, Antioch University New England, Keene State College, Mothers Uniting, and the City of Keene Martin Luther King/Jonathan Daniels Committee hosted a community conversation led by Dr. Vincent Harding--a renowned social movement activist, scholar and liberation theologian who worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1960s. It was my honor to introduce Dr. Harding to over 250 local people. My remarks are below.

Good evening, friends. My name is Steve Chase and I direct Antioch’s environmental studies masters program in Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability.

It is a great honor for me to be able to introduce Dr. Vincent Harding to you tonight. Dr. Harding is a long-time activist, historian, and theologian and he has personally inspired me as an activist, a scholar, and a person of faith ever since I first read his book There Is A River: The Black Struggle For Freedom in America. That was back in the mid-1980s. Soon after, I learned about Harding’s close association with Martin Luther King, the American leader who I imprinted on most as a child. This connection between King and Harding leads me to a story I want to tell you tonight.

In the mid-1980s, a coalition of churches, civic groups, and small business leaders organized a campaign in Seattle to honor Martin Luther King. Their specific goal was to get their city council to change the name of the main street running through Seattle’s predominantly black neighborhood from the “Empire Way” to the “Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.” After a few months, they got the city council to agree.

The night after the vote, the neighborhood organizers invited community members to a large Baptist church for a victory celebration. That night, Vincent Harding spoke to the community. He urged everyone there to fully embrace what the community had accomplished symbolically--and to make it real in our daily lives. As he said, “We have worked together to change the road we travel from the Empire Way to Martin’s way.” Isn’t this the very challenge we have before us—changing the road we travel from the Empire Way to Martin’s Way?

For me, the full meaning of “Martin’s Way” is made most clear if we turn back to Martin Luther King’s April 4, 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech at New York City’s Riverside Church. King co-wrote this speech with Vincent Harding, who had long been urging King to take a public stand against the US’s criminal war against the people of Vietnam.

In that groundbreaking speech, King (and Harding as the main speech writer) called on all of us to turn away from our nation’s complicity and passive support of the three core social sins of empire: racism, militarism, and extreme materialism. Today, we could add to this list our society’s destructive addiction to oil, which has now led our nation to become the single biggest purveyor of both global warring and global warming.

We clearly have much work to do if we are to Dream a New America that follows “Martin’s Way” instead of the “Empire Way.” We have much work to do to create an America where “we the people” engage in a “nonviolent revolution of values,” where we establish liberty and justice for all, where we shrink our ecological footprint and stop impoverishing or occupying other countries in order to steal their resources. Where we create the Beloved Community so often invoked by King or “a more perfect union,” the phrase that runs through Dr. Vincent Harding’s more recent work. Where we are no longer afraid to put on the table of public discussion the “real issue” we need to address, which as King put it is the “radical reconstruction of American society itself” so that we live in a world that is ecologically sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling.

This deep vision and agenda for social change articulated by King toward the end of his life and by Harding in all the decades since is what following “Martin’s Way” actually means to me. If you don’t remember this aspect of King’s legacy, I strongly encourage you to read Dr. Harding’s book, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero, which is the best book on King I’ve read.

Yet, tonight we have an opportunity even sweeter than reading a great book about Dreaming A New America in the privacy of our homes. Tonight, we get to engage as a community with one of our most insightful and compassionate movement elders. This is a precious and rare opportunity not to be missed.

Sisters and brothers, it is my deep honor to welcome Dr. Vincent Harding to speak with you tonight.

EAOP Graduate Wendy Stott's Final Report on Her Summer Fellowship with the Congressional Progressive Caucus

2010-09-28T10:09:00.000-05:00

September 2, 2010

So I have now been in DC for about three and a half months. It is still hot and humid, just to let you know.

August has been slow as the Congress is in recess and the members are working in their districts. I have continued to update the CPC website, always looking for new op-eds by CPC members and articles for “CPC in the News.” I have also drafted several items for the Caucus, including talking points for a jobs press conference, press releases, CPC Budget Principles, and a letter to President Obama recommending Elizabeth Warren to serve as Director of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

The big issue that has been my continued interest for the past couple of months is the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (a.k.a. the Debt Commission). I told you in my last posting that I wrote a one-pager that turned out to be quite helpful at least for one Representative. Well, the co-chairs of the commission, former Senator Alan Simpson and White House Chief of Staff for President Clinton, Erskine Bowles, met with the CPC last month. In preparation for this meeting, I drafted an update to the previous one-pager which had information on what has been happening with the commission in the interim, as well as main points of which the CPC should be aware and possible issues to address with the co-chairs that would affect the CPC mission. I also got to sit in on that meeting, which was really great. I learned a lot about both of the co-chairs and their views, as well as social security, which as you may know, has been a disputed topic in regards to this commission.

Finally, I have been working on an issue that is important to me. Prior to my time here in DC, I worked as a veterinary technician for a total of three years, including all through grad school at Antioch. With my background in veterinary issues, I am hyper-aware of over-the-counter products that are sold claiming that they are “flea and tick treatments” but in actuality are nothing more than organophosphate poisons that have seriously harmed and killed many animals. During a recent visit to the clinic at which I used to work, I witnessed the death of another beautiful animal from one of these “treatments”. He was a beautiful male tabby cat who looked almost exactly like one of my beloved cats. I fell in love with him as soon as he came in the door. Watching him die, despite excellent nursing and medical care, was just an incredibly difficult thing to do.

I returned to DC knowing that I am in a position in which I can try to do something about these “treatments” being sold to unsuspecting consumers. So, I wrote up the beginnings of a bill to ban the use of organophosphates in pet products. The Legislative Assistant in the office who handles animal issues and the Legislative Director both support the bill and feel that it will have the backing necessary to at least get drafted. So, I mostly wrote a bill. It will be controversial, as the companies that make the products won’t want to discontinue making money. But hopefully animal lovers will give it the momentum and support it needs to pass so that helpless animals will no longer be harmed by the products. But even if it isn’t passed or never comes close to getting passed, if it even saves one life from a pet caretaker knowing the danger from hearing about the controversial bill, it will be worth every second I spent working on it and then some.

My time here at the CPC is coming to an end in the next couple of days. This was an incredible experience for which I am incredibly grateful. I was welcomed in this office by its many staff members as well as the Congressman, and I was able to work on interesting and timely issues, as well as issues important to me.

Beck and King Are A Like Oil and Water--They Don't Mix. But Then Neither Do Obama and King.

2010-08-28T13:45:00.004-05:00

It was a little painful, of course, but I did have to laugh this week when right-wing TV entertainer Glenn Beck said that he and people like Sarah Palin were responsible for creating the US Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. While Beck and Palin will be making that same claim today on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial--on the very Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice where King gave his famous "I Have A Dream" speech--there are big, big differences between their supporting the U.S. military invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and opposing universal health care, economic stimulus, anti-poverty, and federal jobs programs and what King and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement would advocate.

Still, it is all too easy to point out the differences between King and a radio and TV "shock jock" like Beck. The more important distinction to be made is to the real gaps between King's position and President Obama's--and most of the Democratic Party. While Beck hates the whole idea of "social justice" and "community organizing," which were central to the Civil Rights Movement, we will likely need to focus on both and turn the heat up on the current administration in order to move it in a stronger, more positive direction.

To get a sense of what Martin Luther King would be saying to us today if he were alive, take a look at this 30 minute clip of King on Meet the Press from Augustin 1967. We've got some real work to do folks.

A Quick Transition Movement Video

2010-08-06T15:55:00.003-05:00

I not only teach about the Transition Movement as part of the core curriculum of the Environmental Studies master's concentration in Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability, I'm also a co-founder of the Transition Keene initiating group. The last few nights I have been working on creating a wordpress.com website for the group entitled Relocalization: The Keene Transition Movement's Interactive Website and Blog. That's not ready for prime time yet (though it will be announced here soon I think). Yet, today, I wanted to share a good video I found for the local Transition Movement's homepage. I would love people to write up some comments about the strengths and weaknesses of this short video.

Antioch University New England Wins Green Business Award

2010-08-05T13:32:00.000-05:00

A Letter To The Antioch Community From Abigail Abrash Walton...

Dear Friends,

Our sustainability efforts are being recognized! AUNE has won Business NH's Lean & Green 2010 Award for large companies. We're featured in the August 2010 issue of Business NH, now on newstands, and we'll be honored at an event in Portsmouth on September 14.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this success (by turning off lights, switching to CFLs, powering down your office equipment, composting, recycling, etc.). Those small individual actions all mount up to some significant hard numbers in terms of reducing our collective institutional carbon footprint -- and we're saving money doing it.

Stay tuned: our next initiative focuses on helping all of us who commute to campus to do so in less carbon-heavy ways (and, yes, there will be prizes involved).

All the best,

Abi

Abigail Abrash Walton
Faculty, Department of Environmental Studies
Assistant to the President for Sustainability & Social Justice
Antioch University New England
40 Avon Street
Keene, NH 03431
TEL: 603/283-2344 (direct line)
603/357-3122 (general number)
FAX: 603/357-0718

EAOP Graduate Wendy Stott's 1st Report on Her Summer Fellowship with the Congressional Progressive Caucus

2010-07-26T11:53:00.002-05:00

A Report on My Summer Fellowship with the US Congressional Progressive Caucus
by Wendy Stott

I can hardly believe that I have already been here for almost two months.

DC as a whole is great. It’s very hot and humid, but I love taking public transportation to work every day (even if it isn’t always incredibly smooth). It’s also great to be somewhere where there are so many people who are passionate about issues. Also, I have always been a bit of a political nerd so being in the thick of the political scene is really fun.

The past few weeks have gone by in a whirlwind. From the beginning, I have had the task of updating the daily email that goes out to the staff of the U.S. Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) members. The email has the “Dear Colleagues” (which are letters from the members requesting support for legislation or events, briefings, etc.) of other CPC members, and there are always new things to put in, take out and update. Coordinating this daily communication has oriented me quickly to the work of the Caucus and introduced me to the variety of issues and initiatives that CPC members are addressing. I have also done a lot to prep for the CPC member and staff meetings, which are every other week. Andrea, the Caucus’s executive director, has been taking me to other relevant meetings as well. I also have extensively updated the CPC website, which has been a great learning experience for me. Check it out at http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/

My favorite things that I have done thus far include a letter that I drafted on behalf of the CPC chairs to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Democratic leadership asking the Speaker to support legislation to create jobs. I also researched and wrote up a one-pager on the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (a.k.a. the Debt Commission) which was convened by President Obama earlier this year to bring the national debt down to a more manageable level. The informational one-pager was just meant to give the basics to the CPC members on what the commission is supposed to do, how, and when, and who sits on the commission. Well at the CPC meeting, a member complimented the document and said that he hadn’t seen all the information put together like that before and it was incredibly helpful just to have such a great summary and background. Of course, Andrea and I were the only people in the room who knew that I was actually the one being complimented. But all the same, it still meant a lot. I have continued to work on this CPC issue, and we are planning to schedule briefings soon in order to bring attention to the fact that entitlement cuts will likely come from this commission, which could end up being even more destructive to our slowly recovering economy. What we need to be doing right now is putting people to work, not taking away government support.

I have also been able to work these past couple of weeks on the proposed Resolution Copper Mine that mining multinationals Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton are trying to create in the Tonto National Forest. Rep. Grijalva is opposed to the mine, and as Chair for the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, he has asked me to provide him with background information on the issue to assist in the hearings that will be forthcoming. It is great to continue the research and advocacy on mining that I began during my coursework at Antioch. My Advocacy Clinic projects and our Environmental Justice field studies trip prepared me well to take on this challenge.

I will provide more details on life in DC and on Capitol Hill in my next report!

Popular Education Workshop at Highlander Center

2010-05-05T19:59:00.001-05:00

The Highlander Center was the main inspiration for the eight year old Antioch University New England Environmental Studies master's program track in Advocacy in Social Justice and Sustainability. Here is a chance to go to Highlander for a great workshop at a very low cost.

United For A Fair Economy's Popular Economics Education Institute: An intensive Bilingual Training of Trainers program for activists working for social and economic justice.

UFE’s Popular Economics Education workshops transform dry economic statistics into memorable learning experiences that connect with people’s lives and lead to action. This 3 1/2-day bilingual Training of Trainers Institute will give you an opportunity to explore the methodology behind the workshops, practice leading a presentation, and give and receive constructive feedback, as well as to review information about the roots of economic inequality and what we can do to move the struggle for economic justice forward.

We will demonstrate UFE’s most recent workshop on the current economic crisis, “Bankers, Brokers, Bubbles & Bailouts” as well as “Economic Refugees: Immigration and the Growing Divide.” Also, participants should be prepared to have fun and share diverse cultural perspectives.

TRAINERS: Jeannette Huezo & Steve Schnapp, UFE Senior Education Coordinator
WHERE: Highlander Education & Research Center, New Market, TN
WHEN: Thursday, May 27, 2010 - Sunday, May 30, 2010
REGISTRATION DEADLINE: May 11th.
COST: Registration has been reduced to $125, thanks to very generous contributions by UFE supporters. Fee includes training, room & board, and materials. Limited scholarships available. Transportation NOT included. Limited scholarships available. Visit UFE's website to register and to apply for scholarship (if needed): http://www.faireconomy.org/issues/economics_education/tot_application_2010

For more information contact:

• Jeannette Huezo, 857-277-7881 or jhuezo@faireconomy.org
• Steve Schnapp, 857-277-7868 or sschnapp@faireconomy.org
• Susan Williams, Highlander Education Team Coordinator, 865-933-3443 x229

My "Creative Maladjustment" Talk Now Online

2010-03-20T13:18:00.001-05:00

I was just updating my resume for my annual performance review and was double checking the dates of the Psychology-Ecology-Sustainability conference at Lewis and Clark College--where I gave one of three keynote addresses in 2007. Well, by doing that web search, I learned that my entire talk, which was entitled "Creative Maladjustment: Activism as a Way of Healing Self, Society, and Planet," has been put online at Google Video by Lewis and Clark.

It is one of my favorite and most comprehensive public talks, so I'm including the video below in case anyone is interested. You really have to want to watch it to click on it, though, as the talk is about 75 minutes long and the first four or five minutes are plagued by some minor sound problems (which can be skipped though). Still, once I get rolling, I tell some of my best stories and I speak fairly comprehensively about the politics of creating a "psychologically smart" social movement for ecological sustainability and environmental justice. So, hey, I'm just putting it out there for folks in case any of you are interested...

What A Win It Was! The Vote Against Vermont Yankee Last Week

2010-02-28T14:43:00.002-05:00

A Reflection By ES Advocacy in Social Justice and Sustainability
Faculty Member Abigail Abrash Walton

Many of the advocacy students and I spent last Wednesday's snow day watching, listening to, and analyzing (via our online chat feature) the Vermont State Senate's discussion and debate of Senate bill S-289 to approve or disapprove the extension of Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant's license to operate for another 20 years. (What a great live, online learning experience!)

The vote was 26 against 4 to close the leaking and decaying plant in 2012 when its license expires. Vermont is the only state legislature in the country that has reserved the right to authorize or deny any extensions to a nuke plant's original license.

There's a long history of advocacy on this issue, and a number of our Antioch students have been involved in shutting down Vermont Yankee, including Peter Alexander (ES EAO '04), who served as ED of New England Coalition, one of the three leading groups that has campaigned for closure of the plant. Today's 4.5-hour-long Senate process was both a terrific live case study of legislative advocacy in action, as well as an excellent look at the democratic legislative process at work.

For those of us who understand that progressive change typically comes from the bottom up, this excerpt from a first-hand report by ES EAO alumna Carrie Abels ('06), who was at the Statehouse for the debate and vote, was welcome confirmation that what we teach in the advocacy & organizing program here at Antioch is both relevant and effective:

At the lunch break, I ran into Sen. Peter Shumlin as he was walking alone outside the Statehouse. I thanked him for actually having the guts to take a stand on something, given how Congress is operating these days. He said he couldn't do it without the kind of people in the gallery [[i.e., the hundred or so grassroots & professional advocates who braved the weather to be there in force for the decision]].

Our current students will welcome SIT professor Jeff Unsicker and long-time close VY campaign advocate to our Advocacy Clinic class next Friday morning for a debrief and discussion of next steps in the Vermont Yankee campaign.

In Transition--A Movie and A Movement

2010-01-30T11:18:00.006-05:00

In Transition 1.0 from Transition Towns on Vimeo.

OK, say you are not a ostrich with your head buried in the sand. Say you are really wondering how can we create strong, vibrant, resilient, and sustainable communities in the face of increasing challenges like peak oil, climate change, and an unstable and often unjust global economy.

Well, I suggest that you learn more about the international movement of local Transition Initiatives and explore getting directly involved in this creative and positive work in your local community. My own trajectory is clear. I first read The Transition Handbook last year, then checked out the new Transition US website, and attended a training in Boston for potential Transition activists back in the fall. I also started teaching the Transition Movement organizing model as part of my class on “Patterns of Environmental Activism” at Antioch and shared with my students the new online video describing the movement, called In Transition.

More recently, I have attended a few public meetings of Transition Putney, just across the Connecticut River in Vermont, and that group of adventurous people inspired my New Year’s Resolution for 2010 to start an initial organizing group for launching an official Transition Initiative in Keene, New Hampshire, which I and some other Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability grads--along with various other neighbors in Keene--are now putting together.

What might be the right next step for you?

Advocacy Grad Goes To Washington... For Gulf of Maine

2009-12-29T12:57:00.006-05:00

The Portland Daily Sun ran the following editorial about Peter Alexander's work to restore the health and vitality of the Gulf of Maine on December 23, 2009. Peter was in the very first cohort of Antioch University's Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program... and has been making us all proud ever since.

Great Waters effort will need folk singer skills
Saving our watershed is too important to be interesting

Peter Alexander has an Interest-Significance Ratio challenge.

The ISR, as regular reader may recall against all odds, holds that the more significant something is, the more boring it becomes: The United Nations Summit on World Hunger could not be more important, yet is mostly followed by bloggers seeking new insomnia treatments. However, find a receipt for recently rented porn in your neighbor's recycling box — riveting. You can make your own list, but it's a national trend: C-Span's daily coverage of Congress spending billions and determining who gets health care? B-o-r-i-n-g.

American Idol's weekly controversy over which judge said something stupid or a "reality" TV show about rich housewives proving that money doesn't come with directions? B-o-f-f-o.

Alexander, a sort of Swiss Army Knife of environmental activists, is out to adopt a regional water master plan.

Many in our local music scene know Alexander primarily as a folk singer, and his "change" songs have become important enough to the national health care debate that groups fly him around the country to play at rallies. But he's also been involved in the Great Lakes restoration and other water conservation efforts and recently visited Washington D.C. to for a series of meetings with congressfolk and EPA officials.

We gather he sleeps little.

The D.C. work includes his role as a leader of the Gulf of Maine Restoration & Conservation Initiative, a push to make the Gulf of Maine a part of the America's Great Waters ecosystem programs.

Okay, already I sense even dedicated enviros mentally wondering how they can crawl to the nearest coffeehouse. Do not drive or operate heavy equipment after reading the previous sentences. But hang in there -- the next step involves big money and I'll name-drop Obama.

Last month, President Obama appropriated $641 million for implementation of restoration plans in the Great Lakes, Puget Sound, Chesapeake Bay and several other systems. The Gulf of Maine was not among those honored with funding, and locals suspect it's because the region does not have a "go-to agency" -- or that Sen. Snowe didn't know somebody was loosening purse strings.

In a letter to Lisa Jackson, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, signed by about 20 regional groups, the Initiative noted a Congressional report urging the EPA to "undertake a study of pollution and water quality issues in the Gulf of Maine with the assistance of regional stakeholders to determine whether a comprehensive plan should be developed for this region."

Say what? Whether a plan should be developed? Study issues? We have been studying issues for years. We have your plan right here.

In what amounts to a smack-down in the genteel word of such things, the letter responds to the urging: (To Administrator Jackson) "You may know that for nearly a year diverse stakeholders in the Gulf of Maine, including state and federal agencies, the NGO (non-governmental organizations), and business interests have been working together to create a comprehensive restoration and conservation plan ... In an effort to capitalize on the past work and move forward, we in the Gulf of Maine believe further study is not necessary but instead are poised to work with the Environmental Protection Agency starting today to implement the next phase -- the Gulf of Maine Restoration and Conservation Plan."

Translation: No way we should have been left out, you don't even know that we've done the work some committee directed us to do, and let's get on with it.

And did we mention we're from Maine? Maybe you've heard of our senators? They are rumored to have some clout around Congress.

Okay, if you're of a certain political mindset, the idea of a new "comprehensive plan" sends shivers up your spine, in a bad way. But this effort more or less mirrors efforts for other large watersheds, and the emphasis is on building from existing groups -- really, packaging an array of existing efforts under an umbrella that will get us included in future Great Waters funding.

Let's see -- a large bureaucracy, a coalition of two dozen groups, a huge effort to preserve one of nature's great watersheds, and oh yeah we'll have to include Canada sooner or later.

Mr. Alexander may need to plug in an amp on this one, but it's a heck of a tune.

Another Student Letter to the Editor on Health Care

2009-11-17T15:06:00.002-05:00

Health Care Problems: A Curable Disease

To the Editor:

There is a new disease on the horizon threatening all of us called uninsurance. A recent study by the Cambridge Health Alliance conducted by Harvard researchers reported that 45,000 people in the United States will die each year due to lack of health insurance often from skyrocketing insurance premiums. The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, states uninsured Americans have a 40% greater risk of dying than their privately insured counterparts--and the number is rising.

The point is this—even one death attributable to the unavailability of quality health care is unacceptable; yet people are dying because they can’t afford health insurance! Politicians say they understand the needs of “the American people”. Why aren’t they taking a united stand on behalf of the American people?

Here’s the good news--this is a curable disease, one of which our lawmakers are losing sight of while they waste valuable time and energy in partisan politics. This is not a time for divisiveness; but time for “we, the people” to join together to make our voices heard. Please, I encourage you to put pressure on Congress to support a health care reform bill with a public option today!

Karen Rose

Vermont Environmental Action 2009

2009-11-16T11:06:00.003-05:00

A Report By EAOP Student Michael Goudzwaard

On the heels of the 350.org day of global action, Vermonters met at the Environmental Action 2009 Conference on Saturday, November 7, to explore the key issues facing the Green Mountain State. I was thrilled to be joined by Antioch EAOP master’s candidate Liz Newman, EAOP Director Steve Chase, and EAOP alumna Aja Lippincott, who now works for Global Justice Ecology Project.

Liz and I first learned of the conference working on an environmental justice project for a Vermont client through the ANE Advocacy Clinic. We planned to meet some advocates we had talk to on the phone and to further explore possible collaborations for our client.

In addition to networking and eating great local cheese, we were representing Antioch in two primary ways. First, equipped with banners, literature and free pens, we were recruiting potential students. Second, we engaged potential clients of the Advocacy Clinic to think about how our pro bono advocacy work could be help them take innovative and strategic environmental action.

I talked to a group that was fighting a big box store development in their town. I explained that Shapleigh, Maine and other towns have passed a local ordinance that gives rights to nature and allows citizens to defend those rights against corporate exploitation. Shapleigh passed the ordinance to protect its drinking water from being sold off to a transnational bottled water company. We were both excited about using this new ordinance to protect against sprawl and bringing self-determination back to the people of a VT town.

The afternoon offered some excellent workshops. I attended a session on Funding Real Change, comprehensive funding strategies for grassroots action. Ginny Callahan from the New England Grassroots Environmental Fund walked us through the grant application process giving tips and encouragement from a funder’s perspective. Mia Moore, Finance Director for Democracy for America and Alyssa Schuren, Development Director of Environment America presented donor-funding strategies and tools to increase giving and diversify funding for campaigns and organizations. I walked away with a new understanding and excitement for donor funding.

Finally, after lunch we heard from five gubernatorial candidates about their positions on environmental issues. All five committed to closing the aging and unsafe Entergy Nuclear Power Plant, supporting Vermont agriculture, and creating a clean energy, green-collar economy. I am thoroughly impressed and slightly jealous of the candidates Vermont has for its next governor.

Another Student Letter to the Editor

2009-11-11T10:45:00.001-05:00

To the Editor:

As a local graduate student who has health insurance and a limited income, I am forced on a regular basis to choose when I can afford to see a doctor. I struggle to pay my health care premiums yet my health insurance does not include many of the things that should be covered services, such as vision and dental care or even office visits to see a physician. A case as simple as strep throat or a sprained ankle could leave me without rent or groceries.

I would like to thank Senator Jeanne Shaheen and Representative Paul Hodes for supporting the healthcare reform bills so far. Seeing the cooperative efforts put forth to gain bipartisan support to move these bills forward gives me hope that soon I will be able to afford a health care plan that actually covers my needs.

As these bills move forward, I encourage Senators Shaheen and Gregg and Representative Hodes to support a public option and not the trigger option. Not only would a public option make health coverage more affordable, it would provide insurance coverage to a greater number of citizens. This would reduce overall costs of health care as people receive the medical attention they need, while also improving our quality of life. However we cannot wait for a “trigger” that would enact this public option in five or ten years, if ever. Our health care system is already not working for me and many Americans. Giving private insurance companies even more time will not fix the system.

Please contact Senators Shaheen Gregg and Representative Hodes to tell them that Keene residents support an immediate public option that will sustain all Americans into the future. Thank you.

Angela Mrozinski

Animal Rights Letter to the Editor

2009-11-06T08:44:00.004-05:00

One of the ways that the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program helps students hone their persuasive writing is to encourage them to write lots of letters to the editor. Here's a letter to the editor on animal rights recently published in the Keene Sentinel. It was written by Wendy Stott, one of our second year students:

To the Editor:

Recently Kenny Crammer wrote to the editor about the horrific treatment that animals are forced to endure during their brief yet excruciating lives on factory farms. Mr. Crammer made the case for a vegan diet based on these facts. I would like to thank Mr. Crammer for his letter on behalf of the animals and also add to it by making the case that veganism is also better for your health and the environment.

I think most of us are aware that eating foods packed full of fats and cholesterol can clog up our arteries and lead to illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease. Those are good reasons to stay away from cheeseburgers and fried chicken but now there are new reasons to think twice about everything animal-based that you eat.

New research is being done by T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus at Cornell University and author of The China Study, what may be the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. Dr Campbell was raised on a dairy farm and originally set out to prove how nutritious dairy is for humans. However, his extensive research found exactly the opposite conclusions.

Among other things, Dr. Campbell discovered that what you eat during the promotion stage of cancer can have a huge impact on whether the cancer spreads or is reversed. “The nutrients from animal-based foods, especially the protein, promote the development of cancer whereas the nutrients from plant-based foods, especially the anti-oxidants, reverse the promotion stage.”

Dr. Campbell discovered that casein, which makes up 87% of milk protein, modifies enzyme activities, increasing cholesterol and enhancing atherogenesis, which is the early stage of cardiovascular disease. Dr. Campbell stated, “Our work showed that casein is the most relevant cancer promoter ever discovered.”

Animal agriculture is destroying our planet as well. The EPA has stated animal agriculture is the single largest non-point source water polluter in the nation. According to the Audubon Society, more than 1/3 of our fossil fuels and almost ½ of our water in the US is used for animal agriculture.

University of Chicago geophysicists Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin calculate that each American meat eater produces one and a half tons more greenhouse gasses every year than each vegan.

There is much more to learn on these topics and I encourage you to do further research. Here are a few websites to get started: GoVeg.com, vegan.org, massanimalrights.org.

And for the full article with information on Dr. Campbell’s findings: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/142875/is_eating_a_plant-based_diet_a_cure_for_cancer/

Wendy Stott

2009-10-28T16:54:00.003-05:00

KEENE, NEW HAMPSHIRE JOINS GLOBAL DAY OF CLIMATE ACTION
TO SPREAD MOST IMPORTANT NUMBER IN THE WORLD
One of Over 5,000 Simultaneous 350 Events in Over 180 Countries

Keene, NH: October 24th—Over 80 people from Keene State College, Antioch University New England, and the wider Keene community gathered Saturday for a downtown rally, a march along Main Street, and a concert at the Keene State College Student Center. At the Student Center, they also took an areal photo of people assembled to make the number 350 to represent the Keene community as part of the largest international day of climate change activism ever. These participants joined more than 5,000 communities in over 180 countries as part of a global day of action coordinated by 350.org to urge world leaders to take bold and immediate steps to address climate change and reduce carbon emissions.

“There’s no doubt now that the citizens of Keene want to see real action from the world on global warming before the problem gets any worse,” said Anastasia Dubrovina, student at Keene State.

Around the world today—from capitol cities to the melting slopes of Mount Everest, even underwater on dying coral reefs—people held rallies aimed at focusing attention on the number 350 because scientists have insisted in recent years that 350 parts per million is the most carbon dioxide we can safely have in the atmosphere. The current CO2 concentration is 390 parts per million.

“That’s why glaciers and sea ice are melting, drought is spreading, and flooding is on the increase,” said Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and author twenty years ago of the first major book on climate change. “And it’s why we need a huge worldwide movement to give us the momentum to make real political change. Our leaders have heard from major corporations and big polluters for a long time—today, finally, they heard from citizens and scientists.”

These global actions come six weeks before the world’s nations convene in Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference to draw up a new climate treaty. 89 countries have already endorsed the 350 target, as well as the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, the world’s foremost climate economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, and Nobel prize-winner Al Gore.

Images of the events from around the world, including the rally at Keene State College, were featured on giant video screens in Times Square in New York as part of a 350 countdown, and are accessible at 350.org as part of a online photostream. Visual documentation From the Day of Action will be delivered to the United Nations on Monday.

“People have said the science of global warming is too confusing for average citizens to understand,” said McKibben. “Yesterday’s events prove that millions of people understand exactly what is at stake in the next few years, and that they want swift action to safeguard the future.”

Even though the forecast predicted heavy rain all day, over 80 Keene State students and Keene community members gathered together to act on our need for climate action.

ABOUT 350.ORG

Founded by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben, 350.org is the first large-scale grassroots global campaign against climate change. Its supporters include leading scientists, the governments of 92 countries, and a huge variety of environmental, health, development and religious NGOs. All agree that current atmospheric levels of CO2—390 parts per million—are causing damage to the planet and to its most vulnerable people, and that government action at the Copenhagen climate conference is required to bring the earth’s carbon level swiftly down to 350 ppm.

350.org is member of a global alliance of faith groups, non-governmental organizations, trade unions and over a million individuals calling for a fair, ambitious, and binding international climate change treaty.

For more information, visit www.350.org.

Bill McKibben on The Colbert Report??!!!?!?!!!

2009-08-18T19:34:00.001-05:00

Check out this interview with environmental writer Bill McKibben on the Colbert Report, the Comedy Channel's fake right-wing news program. The interview is about McKibben's new climate action effort called 350.org.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Bill McKibben

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Protests

Here is what Bill said about it all in a letter today to friends and supporters:

Dear Friends,

It's rare that public humiliation and movement building come in one package, but my appearance on The Colbert Report last night was a bit of both.

The interview lasted all of four minutes, but I managed to make my pitch and survive the interview with at least 40% of my dignity intact. If you have friends who aren't necessarily inclined to earnest environmental preaching, this might be a good clip to send them as you try to recruit new activists for the big day of Climate Action on Oct. 24.

You can see my interview with Colbert--and pass it on to your networks--by using the link below:

http://www.350.org/billoncolbert

In the span of just a few years, Stephen Colbert and his Colbert Report have become institutions in the American media landscape. But interesting institutions--the show is comedy, and it's also slightly anarchic. Colbert is brilliant, and more than a little wild: it's not like going on normal, predictable television. That's the drama, and it's why people tune in.

It's also why I was a little more nervous than usual as my evening in the guest's chair approached. i can usually predict the questions I'll be asked--I've heard most of them before. But last night they were coming fast and furious, and out of left field. "What if I start 349.org?"

With a lot of help from friends who'd coached me and psyched me up, I got through just fine--and even made Colbert laugh when I inquired if his self-styled Nation wanted to join the 80 other governments that are backing our target. Best of all, it worked--our servers hummed with thousands of new colleagues.

We're enormously grateful to Stephen and his crew for helping us spread the word-now let's keep this movement moving!

Onwards,

Bill McKibben

P.S. My younger and more technologically adept colleagues assure me that if you click the links below you'll be able to share the video on Facebook and Twitter-give it a whirl:

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Boycott Tactic Used In International Solidarity Campaign

2009-08-12T15:54:00.003-05:00

In the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program's introductory course in "Organizing Social Movements and Campaigns," we spend time looking at a variety of campaign tactics, including organized boycotts and "buycotts." This tactic has been used effectively by such venerable nonviolent activists like Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez, as well by as more contemporary groups like Rainforest Action Network, Corporate Accountability International (formerly known as INFACT), and the international divestment movement that helped bring the Apartheid regime to its knees in South Africa.

While very controversial in some circles, this campaign tactic is now also being used as part of an organized international citizens campaign to end Israel's ongoing, illegal occupation and exploitation of the Palestine people in Gaza and the West Bank. The video news report below gives some background on the current corporate campaign against the AHAVA company, which receives Israeli tax and regulation incentives to locate their operations in the West Bank. This is just one campaign by the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campaign for Palestine(BDS Movement). Take a look at this report. It is worth debating whether such tactics might help move the Palestinian/Israeli conflict towards a genuinely just and lasting peace.

More On "Begging For Change" News!

2009-07-06T09:53:00.002-05:00

EAOP grad Peter Alexander was able to perform his "health care blues" song Begging for Change at a demonstration in our nation's capital several days ago. It was picked up on You Tube (see below) and was noted in an Associated Press news story.

EAOP Alum Writes Song For Union Health Care Campaign

2009-06-18T09:27:00.004-05:00

Last week, EAOP graduate Peter Alexander was asked by the SEIU "Change that Works" campaign to write a song about the broken U.S. healthcare system. They had been collecting photos of donation cans found in convenience stores and local markets throughout Maine, where local families were literally begging for change to help defray healthcare costs that they could not afford. His lyrics are based on those images and the song is now up on You Tube.

Yesterday SEIU also held a press conference in Portland and asked Peter to perform the song live. It was covered by Channels 6 and 13, and by Maine Public Broadcasting Network. You can read MPBN's report here. Background on the issue and the Change that Works campaign can be
found at: http://www.seiu.org/2009/06/begging-for-change.php.

Peter writes:

Whether or not you agree that we should have some kind of Public Healthcare option, I hope you'll enjoy the song. And if you're in or near Portland next week, I'm performing at Andy's Pub on Thursday night and at the St. Lawrence Arts Center on Friday. The St. Lawrence is probably the best performance venue in town (Ramblin' Jack Elliott will be performing there on August 20). The event is a benefit and I'll be sharing the bill with Zeili August, a local singer-songwriter. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased online.

Thank you for this great song, Peter, and for all you do for sustainability and justice.

Can Corporate Leadership Theorists Help Activists?

2009-05-30T08:43:00.004-05:00

One of my favorite activist writers is Audre Lorde, a very spirited and incisive African American, lesbian-feminist thinker. who in one of her essays makes the claim, "You can't take apart the master's house with the master's tools." Now, I agree with SO MUCH of what Audre has written over the years, but I've grown to disagree with this particular statement. I no longer rule out learning about various kinds of knowledge, skills, and wisdom developed by and for folks at the top of a power pyramid--such as management and leadership theorists focused on the corporate sector of the economy. I now think we need to be careful and selective, and be able to adapt such tools, skills, and knowledge for our own purposes, but I no longer rule out anyone's tools and knowledge because of where they come from.

This came home to me most strongly when I first read books by Daniel Goleman, a psychology professor and management researcher at Rutgers University. At first it bugged me that Goleman almost never uses examples from the nonprofit sector in his writings, let alone examples from the activist wing of the nonprofit sector. Almost all of his examples are taken from large corporations. Still, it is very interesting to me that the corporate sector is paying a lot of attention and providing a lot of the funding for Goleman's research as a way to improve the quality of their own leadership. I'm now thinking that they might be on to something very important that we would overlook at our peril. Reading Goleman over the years, I've really come to appreciate his theories, research, and application suggestions for folks who are in formal management positions--and those who are not. Given the nature of his theories, it is clear that everyone in an organization can act as an influential leader no matter what their position is in an organization.

I also like how he grounds the whole notion of emotional and social intelligence in our biology and in breakthroughs in cognitive science and psychology. This is interesting stuff--fully admitting we are more than just rational thinking machines and really getting that we are social and emotional animals. Anyway, this summer I'm having my students in our online Nonprofit Leadership and Management course start our readings with Goleman's book Primal Leadership. Here is a little taste of what Goleman is up to. How do you think these ideas and insights could improve nonprofit leadership and organizational effectiveness?

EAOP Grad on State House Garden Campaign

2009-04-29T07:40:00.004-05:00

From Carrie Abels in Montpelier, Vermont:

There’s something to be said for an advocacy group that is small, highly focused, and under an intense deadline. That’s what I discovered this spring, when I worked with five other Vermonters to win state approval for a vegetable garden on the Vermont State House lawn.

We met each other in January, at a gathering on ways to make Montpelier (Vermont’s capital) a more sustainable place to live. The six of us discovered that we all had the same idea – to create a State House vegetable garden that would inspire people to start food gardens of their own. So we decided to meet weekly to develop our idea – and meeting weekly was important, as a few of us once belonged to grassroots groups that met too infrequently to build momentum.

What’s more, we had a deadline. We wanted to start planting in May, but we only had three months to draw up a plan, create a polished presentation, and deliver our idea to the state commission that oversees the State House lawn. So we focused on tasks. It quickly became apparent that each of us had a particular skill that no one else in the group had; for example, I like to write, so I took the weekly minutes and wrote the proposal. All citizens’ groups should find out what each member does well and (just as importantly) what they like to do.

Early on, we also figured out who our key allies would be, and asked them for letters of support. We secured donations of seeds and supplies, making sure donors knew how they would benefit from the project. We also anticipated potential concerns and figured out solutions in advance.

When it came time for our presentation, we made sure each member of our group spoke – ours had been a team effort, and we wanted the commissioners to know that. They ended up voting unanimously in favor of our project.

My time in the EAOP certainly prepared me for an experience like this, and I’m grateful. Come visit the garden sometime!

An Action Appeal for the Western Shoshone

2009-04-14T16:17:00.011-05:00

Dear Friends of Antioch,

Antioch New England graduate students and faculty have been involved with the people of the Western Shoshone of Nevada for the past few years with practicum projects, Advocacy Clinic projects, and a field studies course.

We are writing to enlist your help in an urgentissue of social and environmental justice facing the Western Shoshone in northern Nevada. Next weekend April 17-19 Antioch Environmental Studies students, Jay Avis, John Lippmann, and Peter Saltanis will be heading to Crescent Valley Nevada to join together with other students, activists, and Western Shoshone tribal members from throughout the United States for the Annual Western Shoshone Spring Gathering. This is a celebration of traditional culture, coalition building, and the Shoshone connection to the land.

This year however, the Spring Gathering has another important meaning. The Western Shoshone are in the fight of their lives to protect their traditional sacred territory of Mt. Tenabo and the surrounding Crescent Valley from destruction by the Barrick Gold Corporation in their plans to expand the second largest gold mine in the United States.

View a short video about Mt. Tenabo and the proposed destruction made as an EAOP student project. For starters, this mine expansion would:

· Disturb 6792 acres of land.
· Blast a new mine pit approximately 8900 feet in length, 6400 feet in width to a depth of 2200 feet.
· Pump approximately 1.8 billion gallons of water per year out of the aquifer under this land causing water shortages and impure wells for miles around the site due to a drop of up to 1600 feet in the water table.
· Leave in the place of a mountain a 1000-foot deep pit lake with water containing arsenic and many other heavy metals toxic to human and wildlife.

Despite orders from the UN and the Inter-American Commission in favor of the Shoshone, the Interior Department has refused to stop this project or honor its treaty with the Western Shoshone people signed in 1863 to protect the land rights of the Shoshone.

We are writing to ask all the friends of the Antioch New England community and the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program to support the Western Shoshone in their fight for control of their land and spiritual practices involving the affected lands. As a start, we ask that you join groups such as Oxfam International, Great Basin Resource Watch and the Western Shoshone Defense Project. The WSDP has maintained a national and international legal and environmental and social justice campaign on behalf of Shoshone land rights issues for several years. We are also asking the following from you to help us in this urgent struggle:

1 Spread the Word: Send out this message far and wide to anyone you know, across the country about the Spring Gathering and the cause. Blogs, listserves, Op-Eds, and letters to the editors, anyone?

2 Attend the Gathering: For any of you who are able to join us in Crescent Valley to do so from April 17-19, please do! If you know of anyone who may be able to attend, please pass this on to them. The more people who can attend the gathering the better!

3 Donate to WSDP: Those who cannot attend, please consider supporting our efforts by sending donations to the Western Shoshone Defense Project. In the last week we have raised more then $400 towards our ultimate goal of $1000. This money will go towards staff, publicity and educational programming in the Western Shoshone struggle to protect their territory.

You can send donations to The Western Shoshone Defense Project at Western Shoshone Defense Project, P.O. Box 211308,Crescent Valley, NV 89821. For more information contact(775) 468-0230 Phone or (775) 468-0237 Fax, or check out the WSDP website

Thank you for your attention to this crucial economic and social justice issue,

Sincerely,

Jason Avis (Teacher Certification Program)
John Lippmann (Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program)
Peter Saltanis (Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program)

US Colleges and Israel's Occupation of Palestine

2009-03-03T18:50:00.005-05:00

Recently, a colleague of mine wrote to alert me that the Board of Trustees at Hampshire College has agreed to divest from six companies because of their involvement in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Hampshire is believed to be the first U.S. college or university to divest from companies tied to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine. The six companies are Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola, and Terex. The Board agreed to the divestment following a two-year campaign by the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine. 32 years ago Hampshire College became the first school to divest from apartheid South Africa.

I think this is heartening news--and hopefully the beginning of a trend within US higher education institutions. For decades, US tax dollars, arms deals, and corporate investment has made Israel the fourth largest military power in the entire world--and made our nation an enabler of the Israeli government's consistent rejection of a two-state solution based on international security guarantees, 1967 borders, the dismantling of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, allowing East Jerusalem to serve as the capital of Palestine, and paying some sort of compensation to the over 750,000 Palestinians who were not allowed to return to their homes and businesses in what became Israel in 1948. Interestingly, a settlement on these terms has been possible since at least 1976 (when it was finally accepted by the PLO, the surrounding Arab nations, and most of the rest of the world). The only two countries that have consistently opposed a peace settlement of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict along these lines has been the United States and Israel.

Still, while Hampshire College has done higher education proud by taking another principled stand for human rights and peace, Bard College recently violated its own policy of academic freedom and fired Joel Kovel, a distinguished professor because of his critical views of US foreign policy and the Zionist philosophy guiding the State of Israel. Now Kovel's own view outlined in his book Overcoming Zionism is much more "radical" than my own, in that he argues for the nonviolent shift toward a single, secular, multicultural, democratic state that constitutionally guarantees the equal rights of both the Jewish and Arab communities living in what is currently Israel and Palestine. But the point is, that under the norms of academic freedom, Kovel should not be fired for his criticism of core features of official US/Israeli policy and practice in the Mideast. Bard College has tarnished its reputation with this attack against academic freedom. For more information on this, here is a statement by Joel Kovel:

Introduction

In January, 1988, I was appointed to the Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies at Bard College. As this was a Presidential appointment outside the tenure system, I have served under a series of contracts. The last of these was half-time (one semester on, one off, with half salary and full benefits year-round), effective from July 1, 2004, to June 30, 2009. On February 7 I received a letter from MichËle Dominy, Dean of the College, informing me that my contract would not be renewed this July 1 and that I would be moved to emeritus status as of that day. She wrote that this decision was made by President Botstein, Executive Vice-President Papadimitriou and herself, in consultation with members of the Faculty Senate.

This document argues that this termination of service is prejudicial and motivated neither by intellectual nor pedagogic considerations, but by political values, principally stemming from differences between myself and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism. There is of course much more to my years at Bard than this, including another controversial subject, my work on ecosocialism (The Enemy of Nature). However, the evidence shows a pattern of conflict over Zionism only too reminiscent of innumerable instances in this country in which critics of Israel have been made to pay, often with their careers, for speaking out. In this instance the process culminated in a deeply flawed evaluation process which was used to justify my termination from the faculty.

A brief chronology

2002. This was the first year I spoke out nationally about Zionism. In October, my article, "Zionism's Bad Conscience," appeared in Tikkun. Three or four weeks later, I was called into President Leon Botstein's office, to be told my Hiss Chair was being taken away. Botstein said that he had nothing to do with the decision, then gratuitously added that it had not been made because of what I had just published about Zionism, and hastened to tell me that his views were diametrically opposed to mine.

2003. In January I published a second article in Tikkun, "'Left-Anti-Semitism' and the Special Status of Israel," which argued for a One-State solution to the dilemmas posed by Zionism. A few weeks later, I received a phone call at home from Dean Dominy, who suggested, on behalf of Executive Vice-President Dimitri Papadimitriou, that perhaps it was time for me to retire from Bard. I declined. The result of this was an evaluation of my work and the inception, in 2004, of the current half-time contract as "Distinguished Professor."

2006. I finished a draft of Overcoming Zionism. In January, while I was on a Fellowship in South Africa, President Botstein conducted a concert on campus of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, which he has directed since 2003. In a stunning departure from traditional concert practice, this began with the playing of the national anthems of the United States and Israel, after each of which the audience rose. Except for a handful of protestors, the event went unnoticed. I regarded it, however, as paradigmatic of the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel, one that has conduced to war in Iraq and massive human rights violations in Israel/Palestine. In December, I organized a public lecture at Bard (with Mazin Qumsiyeh) to call attention to this problem. Only one faculty person attended; the rest were students and community people; and the issue was never taken up on campus.

2007. Overcoming Zionism was now on the market, arguing for a One-State solution (and sharply criticizing, among others, Martin Peretz for a scurrilous op-ed piece against Rachel Corrie in the Los Angeles Times. Peretz is an official in AIPAC's foreign policy think-tank, and at the time a Bard Trusteeóthough this latter fact was not pointed out in the book). In August, Overcoming Zionism was attacked by a watchdog Zionist group, StandWithUs/Michigan, which succeeded in pressuring the book's United States distributor, the University of Michigan Press, to remove it from circulation. An extraordinary outpouring of support (650 letters to U of M) succeeded in reversing this frank episode of book-burning. I was disturbed, however, by the fact that, with the exception of two non-tenure track faculty, there was no support from Bard in response to this egregious violation of the speech rights of a professor. When I asked President Botstein in an email why this was so, he replied that he felt I was doing quite well at taking care of myself. This was irrelevant to the obligation of a college to protect its faculty from violation of their rights of free expression--all the more so, a college such as Bard with a carefully honed reputation as a bastion of academic freedom, and which indeed defines such freedom in its Faculty Handbook as a "right . . . to search for truth and understanding without interference and to disseminate his [sic] findings without intimidation."

2008. Despite some reservations by the faculty, I was able to teach a course on Zionism. In my view, and that of most of the students, it was carried off successfully. Concurrently with this, another evaluation of my work at Bard was underway. Unlike previous evaluations, in 1996 and 2003, this was unenthusiastic. It was cited by Dean Dominy as instrumental in the decision to let me go.

Irregularities in the Evaluation Process

The evaluation committee included Professor Bruce Chilton, along with Professors Mark Lambert and Kyle Gann. Professor Chilton is a member of the Social Studies division, a distinguished theologian, and the campus' Protestant chaplain. He is also active in Zionist circles, as chair of the Episcopal-Jewish Relations Committee in the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and a member of the Executive Committee of Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East. In this capacity he campaigns vigorously against Protestant efforts to promote divestment and sanctions against the State of Israel. Professor Chilton is particularly antagonistic to the Palestinian liberation theology movement, Sabeel, and its leader, Rev. Naim Ateek, also an Episcopal. This places him on the other side of the divide from myself, who attended a Sabeel Conference in Birmingham, MI, in October, 2008, as an invited speaker, where I met Rev. Ateek, and expressed admiration for his position. It should also be observed that Professor Chilton was active this past January in supporting Israeli aggression in Gaza. He may be heard on a national radio program on WABC, "Religion on the Line," (January 11, 2009) arguing from the Doctrine of Just War and claiming that it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel for human rights violations--this despite the fact that large numbers of Jews have been in the forefront of protesting Israeli crimes in Gaza.

Of course, Professor Chilton has the right to his opinion as an academic and a citizen. Nonetheless, the presence of such a voice on the committee whose conclusion was instrumental in the decision to remove me from the Bard faculty is highly dubious. Most definitely, Professor Chilton should have recused himself from this position. His failure to do so, combined with the fact that the decision as a whole was made in context of adversity between myself and the Bard administration, renders the process of my termination invalid as an instance of what the College's Faculty Handbook calls a procedure "designed to evaluate each faculty member fairly and in good faith."

I still strove to make my future at Bard the subject of reasonable negotiation. However, my efforts in this direction were rudely denied by Dean Dominy's curt and dismissive letter (at the urging, according to her, of Vice-President Papadimitriou), which plainly asserted that there was nothing to talk over and that I was being handed a fait accompli. In view of this I considered myself left with no other option than the release of this document.

On the responsibility of intellectuals

Bard has effectively crafted for itself an image as a bastion of progressive thought. Its efforts were crowned with being anointed in 2005 by the Princeton Review as the second-most progressive college in the United States, the journal adding that Bard "puts the 'liberal' in 'liberal arts.'" But "liberal" thought evidently has its limits; and my work against Zionism has encountered these.

A fundamental principle of mine is that the educator must criticize the injustices of the world, whether or not this involves him or her in conflict with the powers that be. The systematic failure of the academy to do so plays no small role in the perpetuation of injustice and state violence. In no sphere of political action does this principle apply more vigorously than with the question of Zionism; and in no country is this issue more strategically important than in the United States, given the fact that United States support is necessary for Israel's behavior. The worse this behavior, the more strenuous must be the suppression of criticism. I take the view, then, that Israeli human rights abuses are deeply engrained in a culture of impunity granted chiefly, though not exclusively, in the United States, which culture arises from suppression of debate and open inquiry within those institutions, such as colleges, whose social role it is to enlighten the public. Therefore, if the world stands outraged at Israeli aggression in Gaza, it should also be outraged at institutions in the United States that grant Israel impunity. In my view, Bard College is one such institution. It has suppressed critical engagement with Israel and Zionism, and therefore has enabled abuses such as have occurred and are occurring in Gaza. This notion is of course, not just descriptive of a place like Bard. It is also the context within which the critic of such a place and the Zionist ideology it enables becomes marginalized, and then removed.

For further information: http://www.codz.org; http://www.ameu.org/.

To write the Bard administration:

President Leon Botstein
Executive Vice-President Dimitri Papadimitriou

Antioch Hosts Awakening the Dreamer Symposium

2009-02-03T20:50:00.002-05:00

Awakening the Dreamer Symposium Scheduled for February 14, 2009

A day-long symposium to help New England residents respond creatively to pressing global issues, and promote more ecological sustainable, socially just, and spiritual fulfilling communities, will be held at Antioch University New England on February 14, 2009 from 10 am to 4 pm. This Awakening the Dreamer Symposium is co-sponsored by Antioch’s Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program and the newly formed Monadnock Pachamama Alliance. It will be led by EAOP Director Steve Chase and Monadnock Pachamama Alliance chair Katy Locke.

“What’s different about this workshop,” says Locke, “is that it allows people to look right into the heart of darkness of our deep cultural, economic, and social crisis, but also recognize that we have the opportunity and power to embrace a very different future and to live lives of great compassion, conviction, and wholeness.” Steve Chase adds, “In this workshop, we will encourage everyone to see how they can help foster new solutions for our communities from clean tech, local food, green collar jobs, to renewed citizen activism. This work involves nothing less than updating Martin Luther King’s dream for the 21st century.”

The Awakening the Dreamer Symposium is an international initiative of The Pachamama Alliance, a San Francisco-based non-profit whose mission is to preserve the Earth’s tropical rainforests by empowering the indigenous peoples who are its natural custodians, and to contribute to the creation of a new global vision of equity and sustainability for all. Asked by their indigenous partners in Ecuador to help them change the dream of the modern world, the San Francisco-based group created the Symposium in 2005. Currently, over 1,000 volunteers in over 22 countries have been trained to run this unusual and ever-evolving workshop in local union halls, community centers, schools, theaters, public libraries, and places of worship. The goal of the workshop is to generate a widespread awakening at the grassroots level about the power we all have to meet the challenges of climate change, economic crisis, social injustice, and a growing sense personal isolation and meaninglessness.

The workshop uses inspiring and informative videoclips, quiet reflection time, and dynamic group discussions and exercises. Over the course of the day, participants will hear from some of the world’s leading experts on topics as diverse as the current state of the Earth’s biodiversity, the reality of the socio-economic disparity throughout the world, and the growing movement around the globe to create a more just, sustainable, and fulfilling world. The interactive exercises also offer an unusual opportunity to share your concerns about the state of the world with other open-hearted members of your community, and offer support to each other in taking steps to effect the changes that you wish to see. Participants will leave the Symposium empowered to take clear steps to embody their vision for a better world, and will likely have established new connections to work with others on issues of common concern.

Pre-registration is required, and a donation of $10 to $25 is requested, though no one will be turned away for lack of funds. For more information, call 603-357-2626 or write Steve Chase at schase@antioch.edu. A short Internet trailer about the Symposium can be found at http://awakeningthedreamer.org/content/view/115/135/.

Some Thoughts on Despair and Powerlessness

2009-01-30T09:09:00.010-05:00

Recently, in an online bookclub discussion of Paul Kivel's book You Call This A Democracy, one of my students shared her personal feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness, which were widely shared by many of her Environmental Advocacy and Organizing classmates in our course on Diversity and Coalition-Building. Here is a section from her posting, followed by my response:

I started off this week's readings with this book because it got me so riled up last week. But I found myself sinking into depression as I read this week. I was really looking forward to reading some ways that we could break thru the circle of power, make some changes. Instead it's just more detail about how they own and control everything. I find myself thinking that nothing we do will make a difference, so why bother trying?? Unfortunately, this is exactly what they want us to think and feel.

Hi Folks,

I fully understand the anger, worry, and hopelessness that these readings might be triggering. The Kivel reading was chosen to be very challenging, to help us look at some of the deepest structural resistances to making positive change in our society, and, finally, to energize our sense of urgency about the importance of building stronger political clout through greater diversity competence and coalition-building. Looking at what we are up against is important... and realizing that it might well be a bigger obstacle than we first thought... is a sign of political maturity, I think. How can we start addressing a deep problem if we won't even face up to the fact that it exists. Knowing this material on power elite analysis thus feels hopeful to me--in the sense that it helps us move out of denial and ignorance, which is just not the best strategic place to be working from. If you think you have pneumonia, but actually have cancer, it is better to learn that you have cancer, no? Without knowing the nature of your disease, how can you formulate a cure?

Martin Luther King went through a very similar process that many of you seem to be going through now. This learning process began for King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott--his very first campaign. As he said of himself before the campaign started, "I had believed the privileged would give up their privileges on request" if he had the facts right and the moral argument on his side. However, after a failed negotiation early in the bus boycott, he "came to see that no one gives up his privileges without strong resistance." His thinking moved from a focus only on petitioning, lobbying, or even symbolic nonviolent protest towards organizing for power, training new leadership, and taking more powerful collective action through mass nonviolent non-cooperation campaigns. He was finally really starting to understand Gandhi's strategic thinking.

He also realized over the years that moving towards significant freedom often comes at a price. Certainly, the amazing demise of legal segregation and racial discrimination in this country--that only came about because of the rise and effectiveness of the civil rights movement--came at a steep price. During the King years in America, the domestic enemies of freedom and democracy attacked the civil rights movement with slander, propaganda, government spying, brutal beatings, attack dogs, fire hoses, and imprisonment, as well as with bombings and murders. While most civil rights activists were not killed, there were still several martyrs of the Freedom Struggle besides Martin, including the four little girls blown up in a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and dozens of voter registration volunteers like Keene, New Hampshire's own Jonathan Daniels, who was an seminary student shot at point blank range while protecting a black teenage girl being threatened by an armed white racist. (By the way, she is now a human rights lawyer in DC!)

This resistance to the civil rights reforms championed by King and the civil rights movement was certainly not limited to a relatively few "cracker" southern sheriffs and Klansmen. The so-called "liberal media" often turned on King and the movement. The 1963 March on Washington, now commemorated as a peaceful and patriotic event is a good example. At the time, reporters on Meet the Press suggested "it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly rioting." The Pentagon mustered 19,000 troops just in case. When the March was successful, several power elite centers began to panic. For example, the FBI stepped up its efforts "aimed at neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader," as one Bureau document put it a couple of months later. As it said, "We are most interested in exposing him in some manner of another in order to discredit him." In addition to planting agents in King's organization, tapping his phone, and bugging his hotel rooms, the FBI went so far as to send King disguised messages encouraging him to commit suicide. On at least one documented occasion, the FBI refused to warn King of death threats against him.

By the time that King had publicly denounced the U.S. invasion and occupation of Vietnam in 1967, he and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were placed on the FBI's list of "the most violent and radical groups and their leaders." The Bureau termed the nonviolent SCLC a "Black Nationalist Hate Group," and reaffirmed its intent to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize" King and the group. During this time, the elite, so-called liberal papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post viciously denounced him over and over again. Certainly, the obstacles to positive change came to be seen by King as far more challenging and difficult than he first imagined them in early December 1995.

King's issue analysis also deepened during this time. King initially felt that solving the racial segregation and discrimination problem for black folks would pretty much do the trick, rather than just be a first difficult step in a deeper and longer journey towards justice. As King said in 1956, "I saw further that the underlying purpose of segregation was to oppress and exploit the segregated, not simply to keep them apart." Remember Kivel's story (9-10) about how the ruling class in Jamestown carefully divided the potential coalition of women, indentured servants, slaves, and Native Americans during the 1600s. This insight is what King was slowly getting at in his own life.

As the years passed, King increasingly saw that what ails our country runs much deeper than he originally thought. Soon, he was saying things like the US government is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and "something is wrong with capitalism as it now stands in the United States." He also began calling for a "nonviolent revolution" in this country against the "triple evils" of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation. He increasingly started seeing the need to link the civil rights, economic justice, labor, and peace movements for, as he said, "the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together." Towards the end of his life, he was even building a multi-racial coalition of the poor, called the Poor Peoples Campaign, to push a very progressive antipoverty agenda. Indeed, he frequently called--as the liberal media increasingly ignored or bad mouthed him--for "significant and profound change in American life and policy," a change that he said needed to include "a revolution of values" and "a radical redistribution of economic and political power." He even said the Vietnam War was just a symptom of a deeper malady--one rooted in America's growing economic imperialism and our government's military aggression in "defense" of corporate access to markets, cheap labor, and natural resources around the world. (For more on this, read his "Beyond Vietnam" speech from April 4, 1967.)

This is certainly not how King framed or linked issues back in the 1950s. His own experience led him to greater political maturity and insight as he left behind ignorance and denial. By engaging with Kivel's power structure analysis, we are covering--in the safety of our classrooms and training programs--what King covered in his 12 years as a frontline organizer. Hopefully, this learning won't take as long for us and we can soon start pushing to link issues and constituencies in new ways (think Power Shift and Van Jones) and then build broad and powerful coalitions even more effectively than King was able to do toward the end of his life. Social learning, learning from the past, taking time to learn a little power elite analysis theory now may well help us be that much more effective in the future. Also, remember that by looking so deeply into power elite analysis, you all are in good company. We are walking in the footsteps of Martin Luther King!

Anyway, that is my hope in asking you all to grapple with Paul Kivel's You Call This A Democracy: Who Benefits, Who Pays, and Who Really Decides? Remember, too, we are not spending the whole semester focused on the power elite and what we are up against. Soon, we will be turning our attention to coalition-building and the demonstrated power potential of well-organized, social movements. We have many significant power dynamics on our side too.

BTW, for more on the evolution of King's political thinking, consider reading Vincent Harding's short book Martin Luther King: An Inconvient Hero. (All my quotes from King here are taken from this book.)

Democracy Now's MLK Special

2009-01-19T19:56:00.003-05:00

This January 19, 2009 Democracy Now special includes Martin Luther King's most far-reaching and radical speech. It was delivered at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967. In it, King called on all Americans to create a "revolution of values" that overcomes the deep structural evils of racism, militarism, and economic materialism. King's vision was a challenging and stubborn dream and this speech, called "Beyond Vietnam," is still powerfully relevant today. As King says, let's rededicate ourselves to "long, difficult, but beautiful struggle for a better world."

Sing A Song of Solidarity in the New Year

2008-12-31T10:32:00.005-05:00

Antioch New England's president David Caruso recently sent me a video clip of Playing for Change's globally-produced song "Stand By Me." I've embedded it below. I have to say I just love this inspirational New Year reminder about the power of globalizing culture, justice, and human solidarity instead of the damage caused by globalizing corporate rule, empire, or militarism. We all need to learn how to stand by each other. May we all rededicate ourselves to creating an ecologically sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling human community on this beautiful blue-green planet.

Let's make it a Happy New Year, folks!

A Call To Civil Disobedience Against Coal Power

2008-12-17T11:41:00.008-05:00

From Bill McKibben, a long-time climate protection activist and Wendell Berry, a farmer, man of letters and prophetic voice in American literature.

Dear Friends,

There are moments in a nation's-and a planet's-history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

We will be there to make several points:

1) Coal-fired power is driving climate change. Our foremost climatologist, NASA's James Hansen, has demonstrated that our only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe level-below 350 parts per million co2-lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity.

2) Even if climate change were not the urgent crisis that it is, we would still be burning our fossil fuels too fast, wasting too much energy and releasing too much poison into the air and water. We would still need to slow down, and to restore thrift to its old place as an economic virtue.

3) Coal is filthy at its source. Much of the coal used in this country comes from West Virginia and Kentucky, where companies engage in "mountaintop removal" to get at the stuff; they leave behind a leveled wasteland, and impoverished human communities. No technology better exemplifies the out-of-control relationship between humans and the rest of creation.

4) Coal smoke makes children sick. Asthma rates in urban areas near coal-fired power plants are high. Air pollution from burning coal is harmful to the health of grown-ups too, and to the health of everything that breathes, including forests.

The industry claim that there is something called "clean coal" is, put simply, a lie. But it's a lie told with tens of millions of dollars, which we do not have. We have our bodies, and we are willing to use them to make our point. We don't come to such a step lightly. We have written and testified and organized politically to make this point for many years, and while in recent months there has been real progress against new coal-fired power plants, the daily business of providing half our electricity from coal continues unabated.

It's time to make clear that we can't safely run this planet on coal at all. So we feel the time has come to do more--we hear President Barack Obama's call for a movement for change that continues past election day, and we hear Nobel Laureate Al Gore's call for creative non-violence outside coal plants. As part of the international negotiations now underway on global warming, our nation will be asking China, India, and others to limit their use of coal in the future to help save the planet's atmosphere. This is a hard thing to ask, because it's their cheapest fuel. Part of our witness in March will be to say that we're willing to make some sacrifices ourselves, even if it's only a trip to the jail.

With any luck, this will be the largest such protest yet, large enough that it may provide a real spark. If you want to participate with us, you need to go through a short course of non-violence training. This will be, to the extent it depends on us, an entirely peaceful demonstration, carried out in a spirit of hope and not rancor. We will be there in our dress clothes, and ask the same of you. There will be young people, people from faith communities, people from the coal fields of Appalachia, and from the neighborhoods in Washington that get to breathe the smoke from the plant.

We will cross the legal boundary of the power plant, and we expect to be arrested. After that we have no certainty what will happen, but lawyers and such will be on hand. Our goal is not to shut the plant down for the day-it is but one of many, and anyway its operation for a day is not the point. The worldwide daily reliance on coal is the danger; this is one small step to raise awareness of that ruinous habit and hence help to break it.

Needless to say, the two of us are not handling the logistics of this day. All the credit goes to a variety of groups, especially the Energy Action Coalition (which is bringing thousands of young people to Washington that weekend), Greenpeace, the Ruckus Society, and the Rainforest Action Network. A website at that latter organization is serving as a temporary organizing hub.

If you go there, you will find a place to leave your name so that we'll know you want to join us.

Thank you,

Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben

Antioch Librarian Honored by New York Times

2008-12-09T08:27:00.006-05:00

A full page ad in the New York Times congratulates Antioch University New England's librarian Jean Amaral and nine others today (December 8) as recipients of the Carnegie Corporation of New York/New York Times I Love My Librarian award.

Judges chose Jean, a reference librarian here at Antioch University New England, and her fellow award winners from 3,200 nominations from across the nation. Only two university librarians were chosen for the award, Jean and Iona R. Malanchuk from the University of Florida.

"Jean's efforts on behalf of the students and faculty here at Antioch New England are exceptional. Her enjoyable and energy-packed lectures, training sessions and consultations on the latest research techniques have been invaluable in their support of teaching and learning, " said ANE President David Caruso. "We are thrilled that she has received this honor."

In his nomination letter, Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program director Steve Chase said Jean "is a dynamo of energy, talent, humor, consideration, and has the most intense dedication to aiding students and faculty that I have ever seen."

Each of the ten award winners receives a $5,000 cash award. Jean is donating her cash prize to ANE student scholarships.

Jean travels to New York City tonight to participate in a ceremony and reception at The Times Center, hosted by The New York Times on December 9. (Read more here to learn about the award and download a pdf of Jean's nomination letter.)

The I Love My Librarian prize recognizes the recipients for exemplary service to their communities, schools, and campuses.

Jean summed up her work philosophy recently by saying "I love working at Antioch, and I love being part of the library profession, because they're about the same thing: winning victories for humanity, making our world a better place, a just place."

Jean joined Antioch University New England as a reference librarian in August of 2006. She received her master's degree in library and information science from San Jose State University, her master's in English and American literature from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, and her bachelor's degree in economics and English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Prior to working at ANE, she lived in the San Francisco Bay area working as a public librarian for the Santa Clara County Library system. Currently, she lives in Marlborough, New Hampshire.

Congratulations Jean!

Awaken the Dreamer Symposium

2008-11-17T11:59:00.003-05:00

Awakening the Dreamer Symposium Trailer from Pachamama Alliance on Vimeo.

I recently took part in a training to become a facilitator of the Pachamama Alliance's multi-media, popular education symposium. The goal of this international initiative is to help people deepen their commitment to help building a movement for an ecologically sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling human presence on this planet. The video above will give you a better sense of what is involved in this Symposium, which poses such questions as: Where are we? What is faulty in our thinking about the world? What is really possible for the future? Where do we go from here?

For more information on the Pachamama Alliance and the Awakening the Dreamer Symposium, check out this 12 minute online video.

An Open Letter to Cary Nelson, AAUP President

2008-11-15T13:15:00.003-05:00

"Cary Nelson, AAUP President" writes:
We invite you to join nearly 48,000 faculty colleagues in the AAUP—with a special introductory rate for new members.

Dear Cary,

I appreciate your invitation to join the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an organization with a long and useful history within academia. I have also appreciated your own work over many years and have gotten a lot out of your book Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. However, it is hard to get excited about joining the AAUP right now when you, as its president, recently made a public attack against me and the other idealistic and progressive faculty members working at Antioch University.

As I said in my recent response to your public attack on Antioch University in your September commentary on the website of Teachers College Record, I very much understand and share your heartbreak at the suspension of operations at Antioch College, a remarkable liberal arts college that has been struggling to stay afloat financially in the face of declining enrollments for over two decades--even with the help of annual subsidies from the five adult education campuses around the country that make up the rest of Antioch University. You are right that Antioch College has long represented something rare and precious within US higher education. Everything you say about Antioch College's "long-standing commitment to promoting social justice" and "educating students to be critical participants in a democracy" is true. You and I see absolutely eye-to-eye on this.

Like you, my own commitment to the ideals of Antioch College is also deeply personal. While I was not able to attend Antioch College as you did, my father, uncle, and many dear family friends all graduated from Antioch College and all of them have told me stories about their amazing time at the College. I was even accepted to go to Antioch College back in 1973--a plan that was only interrupted by my becoming a teenage dad and needing to go to work to support my new family. However, I have loved the vision, history, and innovative accomplishments of this groundbreaking institution of higher learning since I was in my early teens and first visited the campus with my dad.

You should know that it was therefore incredibly meaningful to me when, back in 1993, I was in a position to be accepted into the master's program in Environmental Studies at Antioch University New England's campus in Keene, New Hampshire. This life changing educational opportunity was only possible for me because of Antioch New England's special non-BA admissions process that recognized that not everyone with academic potential has had the privilege to attend a four-year undergraduate program. For them, the combination of my two years of printing trade school, my many years of volunteer activist work and being a trade union shop steward, as well as my recent paid work as an editor at South End Press warranted offering me the chance to go to graduate school. I seized this rare educational opportunity with gratitude and ran with it.

It was at Antioch New England that I completed an individualized environmental studies master's program in "Green Economics and Environmental Activism." It was here that I went on to complete my doctorate in environmental studies by creating a curriculum action research project to design a professional graduate program focused on educating environmental activists in an era of corporate globalization. The administration and faculty of Antioch New England then let me create this program--the only one of its kind in the nation--at their campus. For the last six years, I've had the good fortune to direct Antioch New England's Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program--a dynamic, but controversial program where we educate talented people seeking to become more effective public interest advocates and grassroots organizers working on issues of environmental sustainability, social justice, and the democratic control of corporations.

You can probably understand then why I was astonished to read your many unsupported and unfounded accusations against the five remaining campuses of Antioch University--that we do not "possess anything resembling traditional academic freedom," that we do not share Antioch College's mission "to produce informed and critical citizens who are ready to take up the struggle to make a better world," and that we "are effectively versions of the University of Phoenix." I think you owe me and the other faculty members at Antioch University an apology before you invite us to join the AAUP.

On the back of my business card, just like the other staff and faculty at Antioch New England, is the statement that our innovative graduate and certificate programs "reflect our dedication to activism, social justice, community service, and sustainability." Does this sound like the University of Phoenix to you? Similarly, every single academic department at Antioch New England has discussed and endorsed the Earth Charter, which calls all of us as faculty to support, respect, and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, social and economic justice, grassroots democracy, nonviolent action, and a peaceful foreign policy. Is this also true at the University of Phoenix?

Your public criticism of Antioch University's graduate campuses also ignores the quality and idealism of our students. For example, just this semester, Antioch New England students joined thousands of student organizers across the country and launched a campus Power Vote pledge campaign. Power Vote is a nonpartisan, voter education campaign sponsored by the Energy Action Coalition, which pushes an agenda supporting climate protection, alternative energy, a massive green jobs program to lift people out of poverty, and an end to US resource wars for oil. This student effort at Antioch New England was heartily endorsed by David Caruso, the President of Antioch New England, and unanimously endorsed by our Faculty Senate. Today, Antioch New England is listed among the top five student pledge-getters in Power Vote's entire national effort (by percent of school size). I also just checked the Power Vote website and there is not a single record of any students at the University of Phoenix organizing a Power Vote campaign among their students, faculty, and staff.

Anyway, I do understand that you are emotionally upset and justifiably heartbroken about the suspension of operations at Antioch College. I share many of your concerns and feelings about that. Yet, particularly because of your position as the head of the American Association of University Professors, I hope in the future that you will refrain from taking out your frustrations on the idealistic and hardworking faculty, students, and staff at the five Antioch University campuses that are still alive and kicking--and working against the tide to embody a meaningful and viable approach to progressive higher education in the 21st century.

Good organizing practice would suggest that you shouldn't publicly insult and disparage the people you are trying to recruit into your organization. Anyway, I wanted to let you know why I am reluctant to join your organization under the current circumstances. I currently doubt that you could fairly represent my interests as a progressive educator working within the contested terrain of American higher education.

All my best,
Steve Chase

Antioch Power Vote Meets With Success!

2008-11-05T07:30:00.011-05:00

Wow, what an election day and night! EAOP students worked hard on Power Vote and also assisted Keene State College's Power Vote campaign. Here is a short video by EAOP first year student Mike Goudzwaard about Keene State's final day of campaigning.

Antioch University New England was also in the top ten Power Vote pledge go-getters in the country. Not bad for an eight student service learning project in our "Organizing Social Movements and Campaigns" class.

Our special thanks also go to regional Power Vote Organizer Zo Tobi.

From Antioch Power Vote's November 5th Press Release:

Antioch University New England (ANE) students, who joined thousands of student organizers across the country and launched their Power Vote pledge campaign early this semester, are celebrating their accomplishments today. Power Vote is a nonpartisan, voter education campaign sponsored by the Energy Action Coalition. It sought to mobilize hundreds of thousands of new "climate voters" on campuses all across the country. As of 9:30 am on November 3, ANE was listed as seventh in Power Vote’s national Top Ten Pledges (by percent of school size) ranking.

At Antioch New England, student organizers collected close to six hundred Power Vote pledges, which represents over fifty percent of Antioch New England's students, faculty, and staff. Organizers asked for pledges by manning on-campus event tables, giving short presentations in individual professor's classrooms, and through internet postings and targeted emails. ANE President David Caruso, ANE’s faculty senate, the ANE Student Alliance, ANE's Department of Education, and ANE’s Environmental Studies Department have all endorsed the student-led Power-Vote efforts at Antioch.

According to Antioch Power Vote organizer John Lippmann, the 2008 election has been a rare opportunity to push for a new national agenda of clean energy, green economy and environmental justice. “Participation in Power Vote,” says Lippmann, “has also helped us gain organizing skills necessary to help make this happen both at Antioch New England and in our communities beyond the classroom.” The ANE Power Vote campaign was begun as a service learning project for professor Steve Chase’s "Organizing Social Movements and Campaigns" class. Steve is the director of ANE’s environmental advocacy program.

On October 29th at 8:30 pm, Al Gore also addressed ANE's Power Vote group and others across the country in a live web cast. He stressed the importance of young people and students taking action to halt the climate crisis and called for voters to hold “elected officials accountable for repowering America through our voice and our Vote on November 4.”

Today, the day after a historic election that mandated a significant shift toward support for national Power Vote goals, Antioch Power Vote stands ready for the next round of its work. Antioch Power Vote will soon begin working on designing a statewide accountability campaign to make sure that newly elected US Senator Jean Shaheen takes the lead on creating a green economy that is powerful enough to protect the climate and lift millions of people out of poverty.

The Power Vote Pledge

The pledge is just three sentences long: "Our generation needs a brand new vision for our future. We need to lead the world towards a just, clear energy economy that moves beyond dirty energy, creates green jobs for all, and secures our climate. I pledge to vote, hold our leaders accountable through my sustained involvement, and create a Power Shift!"

Obama's Bill Ayers Problem... And McCain’s

2008-10-10T13:32:00.002-05:00

The McCain-Palin campaign has made much of the charge that their opponent, Barak Obama, "pals around with terrorists." The "terrorist" in question is Bill Ayers, a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois who has written numerous books on education and school reform, as well as served on several Chicago charity boards.

Ayers is also a political progressive who once organized a house party for Obama during his first campaign for public office. Ayers even donated $200 towards Obama's campaign for the U.S. Senate. Obama, who has a long-standing interest in school reform, also served on two nonprofit charity boards in Chicago with Bill Ayers, a man who is considered one of the top experts in the field by many educators, politicians, and philanthropists. Indeed, in 1997, Bill Ayers was named “Citizen of the Year” by the City of Chicago.

What are we to make of this? One of the odd things I have in common with Barak Obama is that I've also met Bill Ayers. I had a long dinner with him at Luca’s Restaurant in Keene, New Hampshire, after he came to Antioch University New England to give a talk on school reform. Ayers was articulate, thoughtful, and deeply committed to improving the lives of all our nation's children, including poor kids and inner city students of color. He was also charming and witty at the dinner table. We even spent a fair amount of time talking about his complicated past during the 1960s and 1970s--an era when he and I shared similar concerns.

In the mid-1960s, for example, Ayers actively supported the nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King. Like King, Ayers also came to believe that the U.S. government's war against Vietnam was an unjust war of aggression in which the U.S. government committed horrendous war crimes everyday, year after year. After a time, as Ayers himself admits, he was increasingly traumatized by the U.S. government's relentless campaign of torture, imprisonment, assignation, mass defoliations and bombings, forced relocations of civilians, out-of-control massacres, and the systematic murder of over two million Vietnamese people.

His basic position on the war was simple and I think correct. The war was a monstrous evil and all the people of this country had a moral duty to stop it. To this day, Ayers wishes he had done more to stop the war. To his credit, Ayers actually engaged in countless nonviolent demonstrations, teach-ins, and citizen lobbying drives against the war. He also became an influential national student leader in the peace movement, which was growing rapidly in this country by the end of the 1960s.

Yet, just around this time, Ayers began to despair that nonviolent resistance would ever be sufficient to end America's immoral war of aggression against the Vietnamese people. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pacifist German Lutheran minister who ultimately joined an underground group that carried out acts of property sabotage and even attempted to kill Adolf Hitler, Ayers ended up co-founding a clandestine group called the Weather Underground. In the early 1970s, this group began to plan and execute bombings of public buildings like the U.S. Congress and the Pentagon, where decisions were being made daily that caused mass murder halfway across the world.

This was not Ayers' shining moment. In his memoir, Fugitive Days, he writes that his actions with the Weather Underground were understandable, but misguided acts of temporary insanity--even though no one was ever killed in any of the building bombings he planned and arranged. When reflecting back on his days with the Weather Underground, he’s said he is "embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way." This is a man who seems aware of the mistakes he made as a passionate young idealist gone awry in the face of a colossal evil.

I was also interested to hear that Ayers had even written an apology to the one person he ever injured, a lawyer caught up in the "Days of Rage" anti-war riot that Ayers helped organize in Chicago back in 1969 when the Weather Underground was just getting organized. Contrary to what McCain and Palin would have you believe, Ayers has also long condemned "all forms of terrorism--individual, group, and official." When quoted in a New York Times article in 2001 as saying "I don't regret setting bombs," a phrase the McCain-Palin Campaign trumpet over and over again in their speeches and television ads, he quickly wrote a letter to the paper and said that this was a "deliberate distortion" by the journalist and not what he believes at all.

As we sat together at dinner a couple years after this news report, Ayers talked soberly about leaving the Weather Underground in the mid-1970s and being surprised that all the criminal charges against him were soon dropped. He talked to me about how this allowed him to rebuild his career as an educator and a scholar, restore his ties with his family, raise his kids in a calmer setting, and find his way back to a nonviolent, progressive political outlook. This guy had clearly been through a lot, learned from many of his mistakes, and changed his life in profound ways. Frankly, I was impressed with his journey back from this very misguided and useless period in his early twenties.

Today, I think it is important to remember that Barak Obama was just an elementary school kid when Ayers was in the Weather Underground, and Obama has only known Ayers professionally since Ayers dramatically turned his life around and became a respected figure in Chicago school reform efforts. Furthermore, Obama has frequently said he finds Ayers actions with the Weather Underground 40 years ago "detestable." Given this, I just don't see how Obama's work on two charity boards with Ayers in the 1990s is a legitimate campaign issue.

My wish for the McCain-Palin campaign is that they immediately turn away from such guilt-by-association smears based on such half-truths. What I think this country really needs is a genuine debate about each candidate's future visions, goals, and policy approaches so we can judge which candidate has the better program to resolve the economic crisis, help the poor and middle class, create a good universal health care system, end the U.S. war of aggression in Iraq, deal with the real terrorist threat, and promote climate protection and the creation of millions of new green jobs for those who are currently unemployed or under-employed.

That was the campaign high road we were promised by McCain months ago. Unfortunately, we are just not getting that from either McCain or Palin. That's John McCain’s Bill Ayers problem.

Don't Just Vote!

2008-10-08T20:26:00.004-05:00

In the last week, I've received emails from several young people I know and each one includes a link to an online viral video called "Don't Vote." If you can stand a bit of swearing and silliness, get on the web and check it out. This little video is a celebrity-studded, get-out-the-vote ad, which uses reverse psychology to get its pro-voting point across. Frankly, I'm proud of the various celebrities who volunteered their time to help increase the percentage of young people voting in next month's historic election. Let's send a big shout out to folks like Leonardo DiCaprio, Halle Berry, Jennifer Annison, and all the others who took part in this project.

There is a lot to like in this off-beat civics lesson. Certainly, the young folks who sent me the emails all seem to think that this five-minute video clip, which is rapidly spreading through cyberspace, will help increase the number of young people who will register and vote this year. There is absolutely no question that this is work worth doing.

My only serious complaint with the video's message to young people is that it makes one important misstep when it describes voting as "your only power." Voting is an important civic act, of course, and it is a very important way to act powerfully with others to shape the future of our communities, our nation, and our world. If you want to live in a more ecologically sustainable, socially just, spiritually fulfilling, and peaceful world, you are going to need to become a thoughtful voter.

But, should our responsibility as citizens stop at the ballot box--with just voting every few years? The lesson of history answers this question with a resounding "No!" To create positive change, we'll need a nation of active and engaged citizens, not just occasional voters. Besides thoughtful voters, we also need charitable volunteers, community organizers, citizen lobbyists, and social movement activists--all the people who time and time again have made America a more just, democratic, and equitable place to live, work, and play.

I'm proud, for example, that my youngest son is doing more than voting this fall. In addition to reading up on the issues in preparation for his first vote in a national election, he just got a low-paid field organizer job for one of the presidential candidates, and he will soon be heading out to New Mexico and Colorado to do some of the last minute grassroots organizing that is required to make an electoral campaign successful.

I'm also very proud of eight of my students at Antioch New England who have recently formed a campus student group that is part the national Power Vote campaign. Have you heard about this campaign? It is an impressive, national, non-partisan effort spearheaded by the Energy Action Coalition. It seeks to elevate the issues of climate protection, clean and safe energy, and green jobs in the 2008 election by mobilizing one million "climate voters"--with a particular focus on young people, though not limited to them. To do this, the Energy Action Coalition and its more than forty partner organizations are organizing young people, students, faculty, staff, and community people across the United States to pledge their vote "for clean and just energy." These eight students are busy studying hard this semester and gathering on-campus endorsements from Antioch's President and the Faculty Senate, tabling in the lobby during lunch hours, giving brief "class raps," collecting online pledges, and asking tough questions of candidates who visit the Keene area regardless of their party affiliation.

Power Vote also doesn't intend to stop there. They are going to encourage the one million people that sign up to vote with the Power Vote platform in mind to keep pushing all those who are elected this time round to support creative policies that will quickly move our nation toward a clean energy future that will also create millions of new green jobs, reduce poverty, improve our health, and avoid future resource wars like the war in Iraq. I am proud to serve as a faculty advisor to these talented and engaged students. They clearly see active citizenship as meaning much more than just voting every few years--as important as voting is.

In their video, Leo DiCaprio and the others jokingly say, "Don't vote." I'm quite serious when I say, "Don't just vote!"

Get Your Power Vote On!

2008-10-07T19:47:00.006-05:00

Guest post by Mike Goudzwaard, a MS candidate in the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program at Antioch University New England. Mike is one of the eight student leaders of Antioch Power Vote:

Like hundreds of student groups across the country, students at Antioch University New England have recently launched a Power Vote effort, part of a non-partisan grassroots campaign working to get one million voters nationwide to pledge to make clean, just energy a top priority in their vote this election. Power Vote is targeting young voters and the "young at heart" to engage in the political process by voting, getting their friends to vote, and asking candidates direct questions about how they will bring about clean, just energy.

During this campaign, on Nov 4th, and throughout the next term, one million Power Voters will demand the following of our candidates and leaders: 1) make clean energy, 2) green jobs, 3) reduction of global warming gasses, 4) end our dependence on dirty energy, 5) reengage as a leader in the international community, and 6) take dirty money out of politics.

Antioch Power Vote's goal is to get at least 60% of all students, faculty, staff, and friends of Antioch New England to take the Power Vote pledge by Nov 4th. This week Antioch President David Caruso and the Antioch Faculty Senate both endorsed the efforts of our student Power Vote group. We are now tabling, doing online organizing, giving class raps, and attending campaign events pushing the Power Vote platform.

Elected officials are often blamed for conforming to public opinion around an election to gain votes, but this is part of our power. When politicians know that one million pledged voters stand together they will know that if they want to get the job, do the job, and keep the job, there will be no other choice than clean, just energy and green jobs now. That pressure holds true for blue, red, and green.

So, what can you do?

1) Pledge online and help Antioch Power Vote by putting "Antioch University New England" in the school field.

2) Share the Power Vote Platform with your friends and have them pledge online.

3) Ask tough questions of candidates, even the one's you don't plan to vote. Make climate protection, green jobs, and clean and safe energy core issues.

4) Remember on Nov 5th the next phase of Power Shift begins. We need to hold all elective leaders accountable to the Power Vote platform--no matter who gets elected.

Questions, comments or a note telling us you've taken the Power Vote pledge can be directed to powervoteane@gmail.com.

Get Your Power Vote On!

Constitution Day Reflections

2008-09-17T15:12:00.004-05:00

As Thomas Jefferson once said, the American Revolution is not really over. It hasn't been won for all time or for all the people in the United States of America. As he also put it, the greatest on-going struggle that still remains at the heart of the American Republic is the struggle between genuine democrats on the one hand who are committed to creating a participatory government of, by, and for the people and, on the other hand, the open or deceitful aristocrats committed to creating a government of, by, and for wealthy and powerful elites.

I don't know about you, but I believe that the vision of a fair, frugal, democratic, and peaceable republic is still the best part of what some have called the American civil religion. In the American history that I was taught in grade school, this democratic vision was associated with the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and, for many, the second US Constitution which was proposed 221 years ago to this day. Both the Declaration and the Constitution are considered the sacred texts of America's democratic civil religion. Interestingly, many populists and progressives, along with liberals and right-wingers all sing uncritcal praises of the Constitution.

Yet, I think it is a bit more complicated than this. In fact, I think it is important to look much more deeply at both the underlying attitudes of the Constitutional framers and the document itself--which actually has a much different spirit than the much more democratic orientation of the Declaration of Independence. We should remember, too, that there was a huge democratic opposition at the time against the many aristocratic features of the newly proposed US Constitution, which ultimately replaced the Articles of Confederation, the first and somewhat more democratic constitution of the United States of America.

Indeed, what most people say they appreciate most about our nation's second Constitution is the Bill of Rights, the ten amendments of the Constitution that were not put into the Constitution by the majority of the framers, and were actually only accepted by them when they realized that the core aristocratic features of the governmental structure that they wanted to impose on the relatively new federation of American states would be impossible to get ratified without the inclusion of a Bill of Rights. They did, however, manage to keep out of the Bill of Rights two of Jefferson's proposed Constitutional amendments--to outlaw a standing army in time of peace and ban all corporate monopolies. This would have gone too far in the eyes of the remarkably aristocratic framers.

Also, we should remember that when the second Constitutional framers met in Philadelphia their only legal charge from the US Continental Congress was to generate amendments to the Articles of Confederation that would need to be ratified by all of the states in the Confederation. Instead, they went well beyond their legal charge and crafted an entirely different Constitution for an entirely different governmental structure that they said would only require the ratification of nine states to go into effect. Interestingly, most of the framers were also among the wealthiest and most powerful business elites and slave owners in the new country. As James Madison ultimately reported, they even entertained the notion of creating a new American monarchy with George Washington as King, but decided against this because they believed that this would lead to massive, popular rebellion. Given this, they understandably held all their deliberations behind closed doors that were posted with armed guards, and the notes of their discussions were kept secret for over 50 years.

It is pretty eye-opening to see what they actually said behind closed doors. Here is just a sampling--taken from Jerry Fresia's Toward an American Revolution: Exposing the Constitutions and Other Illusions:

Alexander Hamilton of New York

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the Second... Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy... It is admitted that you cannot have a good executive upon a democratic plan... The people, sir, are a great beast.

George Washington of Virginia

We have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation. Experience has taught us that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures the best calculated for their own good, without the intervention of a coercive power... The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded. Their indiscriminate violence prostates for the time all public authority.

James Madison of Virginia

In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.

Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts

The evils we experience follow from the excess of democracy.

John Dickinson of Delaware

Beware the dangerous influence of those multitudes without property & without principle.

John Adams of Massachusetts

Men in general... who are wholly destitute of property, are too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent on other men to have a will of their own.

George Clymer of Pennsylvania

A representative of the people is appointed to think for and not with his constituents.

John Francis Mercer of Maryland

The people cannot know and judge the characters of candidates. The worst possible choice will be made.

Governor Morris of Pennsylvania

There never was, nor ever will be a civilized Society without an Aristocracy.

Charles Pinckney of South Carolina

Are you not abundantly impressed that the theoretical nonsense of an election of Congress by the people in the first instance is clearly and practically wrong? [I am] for stiff measures to restrain the urges of arrant democracy.

Edmund Randolph of Virginia

We should fear the turbulence and follies of democracy.

Roger Sherman of Connecticut

The people immediately should have as little to do as may be about the government.

John Jay, who became the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court under the new Constitution

The people who own the country ought to govern it.

I know that progressives like Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich like to carry a copy of the Constitution in their pockets and moderate liberals like Barack Obama describe the Constitution as a beacon of democracy in the rosiest of terms, but is it as simple and tidy as they would have us believe?

I think part of the problems that we face today are caused by the fact that the federal government now routinely violates the best, most democratic features of the Constitution--which were almost all driven into the Constitution by democratic social movements of ordinary people. Yet, I also think that a core part of the many problems we face today--of increasingly elite rule, corporate domination of government and media, and the immense power of the military-industrial complex--are actually rooted in some of the worst, most aristocratic features that were embedded, and still remain, in the Constitution, or in the Supreme Court's questionable interpretation of it, such as the bizzare legal doctrine of "corporate personhood."

Isn't it time for a more nuanced, critical, and balanced view of the Constitution?

EAOP Prof Pushes Publicly-Financed Elections

2008-09-09T17:54:00.004-05:00

I'm happy to report that my EAOP colleague Abigail Abrash Walton has taken a lead role, along with beloved activist Doris "Granny D" Haddock pictured to the right, in pushing the New Hampshire legislature ever closer to enacting voluntary public funding for elections for all major state offices. Indeed, Abi was just named to a new state commission recently convened by the NH state legislature to explore possible funding mechanisms for a system of publicly financed elections in New Hampshire. If this long-term effort is successful, it will help democratize elections in New Hampshire considerably, as it has in Maine and Arizon where similar state election systems have been put in place through active citizen advocacy and organizing.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the commission on which Abi sits held its first public hearing in Concord. The hearing, which lasted over three hours, was attended by dozens of organizational representatives, activists and legislators, many of whom shared ideas on how a system of publicly financed elections could be funded in New Hampshire. The commission must make its recommendations to the legislature no later than December 1 of this year.

State Senators Martha Fuller Clark and Jackie Cilley, both of whom spoke at the hearing, attributed rising campaign costs most directly to the cost of political advertising. Demonstrating their strong commitment to making public funding a reality in NH, the two senators also brought ideas for potential funding to the table. Among them were: a surcharge on political advertisting, fees for posting political signs on public lands, and fees paid by parties or others seeking to access town voter files. All who spoke stressed the importance of public funding of elections as a way to make public service accessible to all qualified candidates, not just those who can raise the most money.

"The growing expense of running for office effectively bars people without access to money from public service," said Linda Garrish Thomas of New Hampshire Citizens Alliance.

We in the EAOP are very proud of Abi's work to establish this commission and her work now as an appointed member of the commission. This is just another great example of how so many Antioch University New England faculty, students, and staff are active and engaged citizens in our local, state, national, and international communities.

EAOP Sending Ripples Out Into The World

2008-08-25T16:04:00.007-05:00

The first ripple is that EAOP professor Abigail Abrash Walton's article, which was recently published in the journal Environmental Management, is now available online. The piece -- which is based on the talk that Antioch University New England's Center for Tropical Ecology and Conservation invited her to present at their 2004 symposium -- is entitled “Conservation through Different Lenses: Reflection, Responsibility, and the Politics of Participation in Conservation Advocacy.” If you want to have a look, you can access the paper here.

Second, we just heard that a piece on faith and climate protection activism that I wrote for this blog has just been picked up and posted on the Jewish Israeli environmental blog called Green Prophet. This short essay was based on my remarks at Antioch's final Focus the Nation event last February. It focuses on emerging Jewish and Christian responses to global climate change.

Third, we are happy to announce that a hour-long interview I gave at a conference this summer at the University of Pittsburgh--Johnstown has just been released by a radio program called Spirit In Action produced by Mark Helpsmeet. The interview is now available online and it is also being distributed through the Pacifica Radio Network. The episode in question is called "Activating the Activists" and it is focused on my own activist history, the spiritual roots of my work, a short history of activist training in the US, the challenge of corporate rule, the need to transform the environmental movement in the 21st century, and lots and lots of information about the EAOP program and the ES Department at Antioch University New England.

Finally, we've posted a piece online from Morey Burnham, the EAOP's Summer 2008 Congressional Progressive Caucus Fellow who is clearly doing good work with US Representative Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ,), who chairs the house subcommittee on national parks, forests, and public lands. (Congressman Grijalva also serves as vice chair of the progressive caucus and heads its environment task force and has been recognized as a leader in environmental conservation by the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife.) To read more about the EAOP's US Congressional Progressive Caucus Fellowship, click here.

Two Groups to Check Out!

2008-08-25T14:35:00.012-05:00

Back in July, the Sierra Student Coalition invited me to one of their ten, week-long, Summer environmental activist training programs for undergraduates and highschool students. My job was to give these students a historical (and inspirational) context for understanding what they were engaged in and how activist training has long played a role in building successful social movements. It was a blast and I encourage every college or highschool student to check out their website and program. Plan on doing this next summer!

Happily, I was also invited back the next night by Zo Tobi, a lead SSC trainer, to be a participant in a motivational, 3 hour workshop developed by the Pachamama Alliance called the "Awakening the Dreamer Symposium." I was profoundly moved and impressed with the workshop and watched with great interest how it inspired the young activist trainees I was with that night. This is something I think we need in our movement.

For those of you who don't know, the mission of the Pachamama Alliance is to help inspire people to create a more ecologically sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just human presense on this planet. One way they do this is to supply funds, technical assistance, and solidarity with indiginous people in Equador and Peru to protect their traditional lands from oil drilling. However, their South American partners have told them that the only long-term solution is if the people of the industrial society wake up from our trance and dream a new dream for our own society. The "Awaken the Dreamer" workshops are one of the Alliance's answers to this request by their partners.

Now, my sister-in-law felt it was a little to "touchy-feely" when she went to a symposium in Philly on my recommendation. Yet, I think the combination of creating sacred space, using interactive exercises and small group dialogs, along with some very informative and inspiring multimedia material about where we are, how got here, how we can create a movement for fundamental social change, and why we should act with hope out of our own deepest senses of personal mission. My partner Katy and I will actually be spending a long weekend in October to take the Pachamama Alliance Facilitator Training for the Symposium somewhere in New York State.

Anyway, there are some webpages to check out if you are interested. First, go to the homepage of the Pachamama Alliance. One thing that I think is particularly helpful is watching the 15 minute online video called "The New Dream," which explains what they are up to and includes some information about their "Awakening The Dreamer Symposium." You can get even more information on the Symposium by going to its own webpage. Click on the green box in the upper right of the screen for more detailed information on the symposium and access to a link to where you can find a symposium in your area.

After our Facilitator Training in October my partner Katy and I are looking forward to co-leading some of these workshops for local community, educational, and faith groups. I will also be integrating certain elements into my teaching in the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program (EAOP).

I would love to hear what other people's experience with the Alliance or the Symposia have been.

At A One-Day Democracy School

2008-08-25T14:15:00.006-05:00

On August 17, I went to Nottingham, New Hampshire, for a one-day Democracy School co-led by EAOP graduate Ellen Hayes of Advocates for Community Empowerment and by Tom Linzey and Gail Darrell of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. It was a great experience--and it was just wonderful to meet the folks that led the effort to pass a local ordinance in Nottingham that outlaws corporations from making commercial water withdrawls from their town and also strips corporations of their so-called constitutional personhood rights within the boundaries of Nottingham. Very inspring.

There were also three other EAOP grads in the room as participants and three current EAOP students. I always focus quite a bit on this new "rights-based" organizing strategy in my "Corporate Power, Globalization, and Democracy" course in the Spring. But, I also hope all of my students get to take part in a weekend Democracy School before they finish their work here at Antioch.

Personally, I become more and more impressed with this "outside of the box" organizing strategy designed to challenge corporate rule and and build genuine, grassroots democracy in this country in the process. The box in this case is the conventional regulatory route embedded in most US activist approaches over the last fifty years or so. Now this conventional approach does sometimes mitigate the worst harms of some corporate activity, but it doesn't really scratch the surface of how judge-made law over the last 150 years has elevated corporate power and downsized grassroots democracy--perhaps the biggest obstacle facing those people working for serious environmental and social change today.

To get a better sense of the Democracy Schools, you can view this 15
minute introductory Democracy School video Also, for a look at the thinking of the leading figure at CELDF, check out this video of a talk by Tom Linzey.

Ellen and I will be working hard this week to write a grant proposal to the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation in support the effort by Advocates for Community Empowerment to help northern New England folks learn how to use this new organizing model--which helps local community by teaching them how to pass local ordinances and bylaws that challenge corporate "rights" and drive democratic citizen rights to decide their future into law. I'll be doing that--and getting ready for my Fall classes in "Organizing Social Movements and Campaigns" and "Patterns of Environmental Activism."

Coming Home From Knoll Farm

2008-08-25T13:45:00.004-05:00

From July 17 to July 23, 2008, I took part in a six-day "Whole Thinking Retreat" sponsored by the Center for Whole Communities at Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont. The twenty-plus participants and facilitators were a multi-racial group of environmental leaders from across the country trying to move beyond the limited thinking so often embedded within each of our particular sectors of the movement. My cohort now joins over 700 other alumni of similar Center retreats. The reflections below are adapted from some journal writing I did upon returning home.

Driving home from Knoll Farm reminded me of the last scene in My Dinner With Andre. In that movie, Wally Shawn is driving home in a cab through the streets of New York City--something he's done countless times before--and he is staring out the window transfixed, seeing everything again for the first time and with appropriate awe. All of life was sacramental to him after his amazing dinner with his friend.

That was also true for me during my quiet trip home through the sometimes cloud-hidden and rainy Green Mountains and hills of Vermont. I drove in silence (without my usual talk radio jabbering on and on) at 55 miles per hour--ten miles an hour less than the speed limit, and twenty-five miles an hour less than I usually drive. Not changing lanes, not passing anyone, and burning far less gas on this trip, I had time to look out the window more, to notice my breathing, to think deeply about my time at Knoll Farm and about all of my companions on the retreat journey, including the luminous green humming bird I saw in one of the flower gardens during one of the few sunny moments in the week.

In Jewish Scripture, the word for "sin" literally translates to the phrase "missing the mark." At the Farm, I tasted "the mark" with unusual vividness. I tasted being a part of a diverse, inspiring, and intentional community working to create a more environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just human presence on this planet.

For five of our days together, we walked up and down Bragg Hill--or rode in the "sun buggy"--though the Farm's gardens, grasslands, and woods. At the top of the hill, we sat in a circle in a giant yurt and shared our core visions and values and--very blessedly--took the time to talk honestly about race, power, and privilege in our lives and in our organizations. We did this even when it was painful, incomplete, and raw. All of us experienced moments of anger, hurt feelings, and misunderstanding in that yurt--as we sometimes did during the rest of our time together at Knoll Farm. Yet, we also shared many moments of profound forgiveness, repentance, and insight. We became imperfect, but powerful, allies during those six days.

Our time together also fed my tattered, middle-aged, Quaker soul. We spent from ten at night to ten in the morning in silence. We even meditated together several times during the "talking" part of our day. We told stories about our lives and about our work back home to help heal the world. There was one night of ecstatic dancing and chores everyday, as well as hot, outdoor, solar-heated showers early in the morning, sometimes taken in the rain. I mulched and picked blueberries, sorted wool, or shucked peas most afternoons. There was singing sometimes while we worked or did spoon carving--and some people read poetry before dinner. Don't even get me started about the food! There were also giant orange moons coming up over the mountains at least partially visible through the clouds to the southeast most every night. These moons were most frequently viewed from a fire circle where several people sat a while before heading off to sleep in their tents.

I found it hard to say goodbye to everyone at the Farm and drive home on our last morning. Yet, as well as one can driving alone in a car powered by gas and lubricated by oil, I came much closer to the mark than normal on that journey home. Inside that car, I drank water from the Farm that I carried in the metal bottle that I now usually keep clipped to my belt loop. On such a trip in the past, I would have stopped along the way and purchased six or seven plastic bottles of diet soda.

I also got hungry for lunch near Randolph and took the town's exit off Interstate 89 and drove right past the McDonald's at the end of the ramp. Usually, driving alone and with no one looking, I would have turned into that parking lot and indulged in some childhood/teenage comfort food, one of my private guilty pleasures that has had a huge addictive pull on me for decades. On this afternoon, however, McDonald's did not hold any allure or offer any pleasure to me. It was not just far from the mark, it was also far from my heart.

Instead, I drove into town and looked for a little, locally-owned restaurant that served me a handmade salad with a bit of chicken, a hard boiled egg, and some diced black olives on top of a mix of greens, romaine lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and carrots all lightly dressed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The Depot Restaurant owner brought it to me with a smile, along with a slice of homemade bread, and all of it in a glass bowl!

I ate slowly thinking of the single wooden bowl that I had eaten out of every meal for a week, the very bowl that was now sitting cock-eyed on the front seat of my borrowed car. I also thought of Helen and Jay, two long-time organic farmers that I now knew personally. I silently lifted my glass of local tap water and toasted them for their love of our soil and their ability to help the earth say beans or squash or blueberries.

I only wished that the owner had stood by the table before I ate and told me what farm every ingredient in the salad had come from. I also fantasized about someone standing up at the next booth and reading a poem by Rumi out loud and then another customer on the other side of the room offering a few passages from Wendy Johnson's Gardening at the Dragon's Gate. Gently letting go of that sweet image, I offered a silent prayer before I ate my lunch. "Stealth meditating" Wendy would call it.

Driving homeward again, I felt Dunking Donuts, Burger King, even the Olive Garden slipping away from me. As I munched one-handed on Knoll Farm organic blueberries for my dessert, I felt myself drawing closer toward the mark--closer toward farmers markets, roadside produce stands, locally-owned restaurants, and the organic section of my big chain supermarket until those precious folks in Keene, who are working on establishing a food coop in our town, succeed. And, yes, I thought I should send them a little money and a thank you note, right after I send a thank you poem to all the dear ones from my retreat week at Knoll Farm.

When I finally arrived in Keene, I picked up my computer from work and drove straight to my house, unlocked my backdoor--I hadn't had keys in my pocket for five days, let alone a computer nearby--and I began to put my stuff away. I laughed at a week's worth of unread newspapers dutifully piled on the dining room table by my partner Katy and I checked to see if there was any mail for me that had arrived while I was gone. I only opened one piece--the invitation to the upcoming September weekend celebration of the Center for Whole Communities' fifth year anniversary at Knoll Farm.

I drank some water from my own kitchen faucet and got back in my borrowed car to fill up its tank at a Citgo station--whose profits at least help some of the poor in Venezuela. I then returned the car to my friend and, by way of a small thank you, gave her my last unmolested box of Knoll Farm blueberries. She was thrilled. We hugged, chatted a bit, and then she offered me a ride home. Even with it threatening rain again, I said no.

Like my four hour drive home, I walked this final bit as Wally Shawn rode home in his cab--in my case, wide-eyed and delighted while walking by our Town Common, which sits across from City Hall and the big white United Church of Christ, then on down our Main Street dotted with small businesses on either side, past the Colonial Theater (an amazing nonprofit arts organization), and up the hill on Water Street to my little house surrounded by Katy's flowers. Walking through my community, I felt more committed than ever to fostering creative citizen action for climate protection, ecological sustainability, social justice, and the democratic control of corporations.

Still, on this day, I just sat quietly looking forward to Katy returning from work and hearing all about her week. I imagined her as a double rainbow over the Mad River Valley and waited.

On Blueberries and Hate

2008-08-16T10:18:00.005-05:00

I love community events like the Keene Pumpkin Festival and have often carved my share of pumpkins to make that event a success. So, why don't I support the recent Richmond Blueberry Festival? You would think I would love it. I adore blueberry pie, fiddle music, and hanging out with neighbors on a hot August evening.

The problem I have is that the Blueberry Festival is an annual fundraiser for the private school run by the Saint Benedict Center of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a controversial religious group based in nearby Richmond, New Hampshire.

I recently went to the group's website and, frankly, I was more than a little shocked. While the New Hampshire Catholic Dioceses of Manchester doesn't recognize the group as a Catholic order, the group identifies itself on its website as a militant crusader for the "traditional" or "conservative" or "right-wing" Roman Catholic Church, in contrast to "the heresy of liberalism" that they claim has afflicted the Catholic Church for sixty to seventy years. More chillingly, they also say that they stand firmly in the tradition of those "Catholics who fought in the Crusades" and "approved and upheld the Inquisition."

They even argue for the restoration of theocratic "Catholic states" around the world and they explicitly oppose "religious liberty," the "destructive program of ecumenism," and the "dangerous policy of opening up to the world through dialogue." Furthermore, in several places on their website, they identify the Jewish people as the arch-enemy of their faith, quickly adding, "This is not racism, bigotry, or prejudice. It is a fact of history, which is very documented."

The Saint Benedict Center is not just hostile to Jews though. On its website, the group describes its central article of faith--that only traditional, conservative Catholics like themselves can find salvation at the end of their lives--and that everyone else will be tossed "into the eternal fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels." In its list of those who deserve eternal punishment and torment, the group includes "the Episcopalians, the Quakers, the Unitarians, the Christian Scientists, and the Jehovah's Witnesses" and even the "the careless housewife who missed Mass on Sunday" and didn't confess her sin.

Why? Because all of these people are guilty of "contempt or even hatred of God." Indeed, the website says that anyone who doesn't share the Center's beliefs are the "personal enemies of God." They even add that every homosexual, and everyone who supports gay rights, deserves to die.

Furthermore, if you believe the Boston Globe, the core group even includes holocaust deniers. In a 2004 article, the Globe quoted the Center's Brother Anthony Mary, saying "There's a lot of controversy among people who study the so-called Holocaust. There's a misperception that Hitler had a position to kill all the Jews. It's all a fraud. Six million people... it didn't occur."

Nope. I'm just not going to donate my money to this group so they can teach such lessons to children. The Catholicism I admire is the Catholicism of Saint Francis, Thomas Merton, Ceasar Chavez, Dorothy Day, and Bishop Oscar Romero. I would happily pay to go to a Blueberry Festival that raises funds for a school that teaches their message of peace, justice, and compassion. The Richmond Blueberry Festival is not that. It is not even close.

The Dream Reborn?

2008-03-26T09:13:00.007-05:00

This April 4th is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. I was just 12 when it happened, but I remember vividly the heartbreaking day when King was shot down in Memphis while supporting striking garbage workers standing up for their dignity and labor rights.

I’m sure many TV news programs will mention the anniversary of King's death on the 4th, and some will even play a short sound bite from King's famous 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech. A few stations might even play a clip from the last night of his life, when King gave his speech about going up to the mountain top and seeing the Promised Land of an America finally and firmly dedicated to peace, economic justice, racial equality, and a real grassroots democracy.

Personally, I’m grateful for any attention paid to King and the meaning of his activism for us today. One of my favorite stories of people honoring King is from about twenty years ago. Back in the 1980s, a local coalition of churches, civic groups, and small business leaders organized a community organizing campaign in Seattle to get the city council to rename a street after King. At the time, the street they chose to rename, which was called the Empire Way, ran right through one of the city’s predominantly black neighborhoods.

After a few months of grassroots lobbying, they won their campaign and got the city council to agree to the name change. After the council’s vote, the organizers invited community members to a large Baptist church for a victory celebration. That night Vincent Harding, a long-time associate of King’s, spoke to the gathered community. He urged everyone there to fully embrace the deeper symbolism of what they had just accomplished. As he said to them, “You have now changed the road you travel from the Empire Way to Martin’s way.”

Isn’t that exactly the challenge we still face today—changing the road we travel from the Empire Way to Martin’s Way? As more and more people are coming to realize, we need to get active again in what King called “the long and bitter—but beautiful--struggle” to move away from an empire of lies, militarism, torture, illegal wars of aggression, uncontrolled corporate greed and power, growing inequality, and the trampling of the Bill of Rights. We need to get active in the effort to create the “Beloved Community” that King so often invoked as his deepest, long-range vision.

There are many signs that this shift is beginning to happen. One important indicator of renewed movement is the innovative new coalition of religious, labor, environmental, student, and civil rights groups called Green For All. The coalition is hosting a national conference called “The Dream Reborn” in Memphis on the weekend of April 4-6. The conference is a very direct example of expanding King’s vision of the Beloved Community to include the interests of “We the People” and the planet. As Green For All’s conference invitation says:

It's official: in Memphis from April 4-6, Green For All is bringing together the practitioners, activists, and communities at the center of the emerging green-collar economy. Join us on the 40th Anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. This historic event will celebrate his extraordinary life and present positive solutions from today's generation of visionary leaders. A bullet killed the dreamer, but not the dream. Together, we will create ecological solutions to heal the earth while bringing jobs, justice, wealth and health to all our communities.

Green For All’s mission statement goes on to say:

Green For All has a simple but ambitious mission: to help build a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. By advocating for a national commitment to job training, employment and entrepreneurial opportunities in the emerging green economy--especially for people from disadvantaged communities--we fight both poverty and pollution at the same time. We are committed to securing one billion dollars by 2012 to create “green pathways out of poverty” for people in the United States, by greatly expanding federal government and private sector commitments to “green-collar” jobs.

Now, isn't that a great way to honor King’s memory? I would go to Memphis, but I’m hosting an activist training session that weekend on Diversity and Coalition-Building right here in Keene, New Hampshire. We can’t all go to big national conferences, but we can all contribute to the movement for a Beloved Community wherever we live.

This short essay may be forwarded on to your friends, families, and colleagues, as well as to any listserves or blogs you think might be interested.

Jews, Christians, and Climate Activism

2008-02-01T13:06:00.000-05:00

This week, Antioch University New England joined with over 1,400 colleges and universities across America that offered a coordinated national teach-in on how to address global warming and move toward meaning climate protection solutions. I was very honored to have been asked by Antioch’s Focus the Nation Organizing Committee to host the week's final event, which took a close look at climate protection activism through the eyes of the Jewish and Christian faith traditions.

This is more than an academic concern for me. I come to my own work as an activist and as an activist trainer from the faith tradition of Quakers, also known as the Religious Society of Friends. In my faith tradition, we have long tried to follow the call of the Spirit, the early Jewish prophets, and Jesus to do God's will "on Earth as it is in heaven." For us, this not only means working hard to support peace and justice among people, but also to live in loving "unity with creation."

Right at the beginning of my talk, however, I had to acknowledge an elephant in the room. Over the years, there have been many in the field of Environmental Studies, and within the environmental movement itself, who have assumed that devout Jews and Christians either have nothing special to add to the environmental cause, or are actually a big part the problem.

The claim here is that the natural world is given very little moral consideration in the Jewiah and Christian traditions, or, even worse, that the natural world is actually seen as a God-sanctioned target of human domination, exploitation, and greed. When people try to make this case against both Christianity and Judaism, they usually point to a very specific passage in Genesis, which has God talking to the earliest humans. The verse goes like this:

And God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

What my colleagues often miss about this verse is that there are two very different intretations of the passage. One can interpret the word “dominion” as oppressive domination, which leads down one particular path of behavior, or one can interpret “dominion” as loving influence and stewardship, which leads down a very different path of behavior.

I personally believe that there is much to justify and recommend this second interpretation if we take into account the whole thrust of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. In many, many passages in the the Torah, for example, it says that the Earth is a gift from God, that it does not belong to any human being, that we can work the land for the benefit of all humanity, but only if we take loving care of it and respect God’s creation and God’s other creatures. People are often surprised when I point them to the many biblical passages that read like passionate love poems to the natural world, that clearly state that God dearly loves all of creation and calls on all human beings to love and be just stewards of the earth.

In my talk, I argued that if non-Jewish and non-Christian environmentalists can open their minds to this bigger picture, the possibility of new alliances begins to come into focus. Yet, I said that it is also true that many Jews and Christians have not fully embodied the creation care ethic embedded within their own faith traditions. The sad fact is that many Jews and Christians need to acknowledge and repent that all too many of us have missed the mark, both in how we think about humanity’s “dominion” and in how we treat the natural world--or let others treat it. There are some important germs of truth in the environmental critique of the Jewish and Christian traditions as we have lived them over the centuries. It is easy to miss the mark, to be guilty of the sin of abuse, exploitation, and selfish disregard for the Earth and all its human and non-human inhabitants. I believe that is all too easy to twist things around and say that God is on our side, when we should be seeking to be on God’s side and love what God loves.

One of the most hopeful things I’ve noticed in the last couple years is how the US evangelical community is now awakening to the moral and spiritual importance of addressing climate change in a very deep and repentant way. One of the breakthrough events in this great shift was in February 2006, when 86 major evangelical leaders calling themselves the Evangelical Climate Initiative came out with a powerful joint statement making the biblical case for fighting global warming. I think their four core claims open up the possibilities for powerful new political alliances and making real progress in climate protection activism in the coming decades.

The first claim is that human-induced climate change is real. As they put it in their statement:

Since 1995 there has been general agreement among those in the scientific community most seriously engaged with this issue that climate change is happening and is being caused mainly by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels. Evidence gathered since 1995 has only strengthened this conclusion.

Their second claim is that consequences of climate change will be significant and will hit the world’s poor the hardest. As they argue:

Even small rises in global temperatures will have such likely impacts as: sea level rise; more frequent heat waves, droughts, and extreme weather events such as torrential rains and floods; increased tropical diseases in now-temperate regions; and hurricanes that are more intense. It could lead to significant reduction in agricultural output, especially in poor countries…. Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors… (This is not even to mention the various negative impacts climate change could have on God’s other creatures.)

Their third big claim argues that one of the core biblical convictions of their faith is that any damage that we do to God’s world is an offense against God, God’s creation, and God’s people. Here they review the many biblical passages that provide the spiritual mandate for Christians and Jews to join the fight for climate protection. As they argue:

Noting the fact that most of the climate change problem is human-induced, [we] are reminded that when God made humanity he commissioned us to exercise stewardship over the earth and its creatures. Climate change is the latest evidence of our failure to exercise proper stewardship, and constitutes a critical opportunity to do better. Love of God, love of neighbor, and the demands of stewardship are more than enough reason for evangelical Christians to respond to the climate change problem with moral passion and concrete action.

Their final claim is also extremely important--that the need to act now is urgent; that governments, businesses, religious congregations, advocacy organizations, and individuals all have a role to play in addressing climate change—"starting right now." In this section, these religious leaders repent that their faith communities have been sleeping giants on this issue for so long and have now committed themselves to concerted individual and collective action for climate protection.

This is good news for the world. Whenever religious communities and institutions join social movements for positive change, the chances for success go up. Religious groups offer volunteers, meeting places, office space, funding, and, very importantly, a moral framework that can help spark the passionate feeling and concrete action among the general public that is always needed to drive successful social movements forward. This is one major way that people of faith can help foster what Martin Luther King so often called the Beloved Community. Environmentalists of whatever faith, of whatever religious belief or unbelief, can and should work together to protect this wonderous blue-green planet.

Some Creation Care Resources

2008-02-01T10:36:00.000-05:00

The theme of Antioch New England's final Focus the Nation presentation was looking at climate protection activism through the eyes of Jewish and Christian faith traditions. Below is an online version of the handout I prepared for the event. The first section offers some useful websites on Judaism, Christianity, and environmental activism and the second section offers some relevant quotations from Jewish and Christian scripture.

Some Useful Websites on Environmental Activism and Jewish and Christian Faith

Association for Religion, Ecology, and Society
Coalition for the Environment and Jewish Life
Episcopalian Ecological Network
Evangelical Environmental Network
Forum on Religion and Ecology
Green Faith
Jewish Environmental Perspectives
National Council of Churches’ Eco-Justice Programs
National Religious Partnership for the Environment
Noah Alliance
Presbyterians for Restoring Creation
Restoring Eden
Quaker Earthcare Witness
Unitarian Universalist Ministry for the Earth
US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Environmental Justice Program

Some Relevant Quotations from Jewish and Christian Scripture

Genesis 1:10-25: “God called the dry ground 'land,' and the gathered waters he called 'seas.' And God saw that it was good. Then God said, 'Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.' And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good… And God said, 'Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.' So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, 'Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.' … And God said, 'Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.' And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.”

Psalm. 24:1: "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it."

Psalm 96:1, 11-12: "Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth . . . Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea resound, and all that is in it; let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them. Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy."

Leviticus. 25:24: "'Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land.'"

Isaiah. 55:12-13: "'You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands. Instead of the thornbush will grow the pine tree, and instead of briers the myrtle will grow. This will be for the Lord's renown, for an everlasting sign, which will not be destroyed.'"

Hosea 4:1-3: "Hear the word of the Lord, you Israelites, because the Lord has a charge to bring against you who live in the land: 'There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land. There is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed. Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying."

Isaiah. 24:5: "The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth."

Jeremiah. 4:18-28: "'Your own conduct and actions have brought this upon you. This is your punishment. How bitter it is! How it pierces to the heart!'... Disaster follows disaster; the whole land lies in ruins . . . 'My people are fools; they do not know me. They are senseless children; they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil; they know not how to do good.'"

Micah. 6:8: “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God?”

A Washington Post Plug and a National Review Slam

2008-01-03T23:12:00.000-05:00

Over the winter break, Antioch University’s Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program got some free media attention. In a January 1, 2008 news story on the "first in the nation" primary, a Washington Post journalist quoted EAOP instructor Abi Abrash Walton on the political situation here in New Hampshire and went on to report that she “teaches advocacy and organizing at Antioch University in Keene.” It’s subtle, but this kind of earned media attention helps us get the word out about our one-of-a-kind environmental studies program.

Abi and I had to chuckle, however, when we learned that the EAOP was also featured in a December 27 story on the website of the extremely rightwing National Review magazine. In this National Review Online blog article, the author starts out by complaining that Antioch College administrators and alumni are working together to try to keep the College open and functioning—and that they might succeed! The article then falsely claims that during the recent effort to save the College, Antioch also started six other adult campuses across the country operating under the name of Antioch University. In fact, rather than being founded in 2007, Antioch University has been around since the early 1970’s and it has been offering an expanding number of cutting edge master’s and doctoral programs at its five other campuses across the country for nearly four decades. I guess the news is even worse than the poor readers of the National Review knew!

The really big whoppers only started rolling, however, when the National Review piece made the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program the centerpiece of its fiercest criticism of Antioch. The biggest lie they told was their claim that the EAOP “does not require any knowledge of markets” and then adding that, “in fact, knowledge of market processes is actively discouraged” within the EAOP. The only evidence that the author offered for his claim was the opening paragraph on our EAOP website:

Do you want to build a well-organized social movement that can challenge the downsizing of democracy and promote the common good? If so, check out our master’s program in Environmental Advocacy and Organizing where we train students for activist careers as public interest advocates and grassroots organizers working for ecological sustainability, social justice, and the democratic control of corporations.

It would appear that the National Review author believes that any university that runs a graduate program designed for people who want to work in the advocacy and organizing field--at least those in support of participatory democracy, the common good, ecological sustainability, social justice, and corporate accountability--is committed to keeping its students from gaining “any knowledge of markets” and will actively discourage their consideration “of market processes.” This is a huge leap of illogic and, in our case, it is patently false.

The study of both the strengths and weaknesses of markets and market processes--and the debate over how they might best be augmented and influenced by consumers, workers, socially-responsible investors, entrepreneurs, NGOs, and democraticly-run governments--is built right into the heart and soul of several EAOP courses and, I might add, in Antioch New England’s brand new Green MBA program. We believe that these issues of political economy are absolutely vital for people to consider if they want to effectively create more democratic, just, and sustainable communities in the 21st century.

From the National Review’s lens, the EAOP’s real crime seems to be that we refuse to indoctrinate our students into the National Review’s narrow ideological agenda like some business schools do and, instead, our students seek and are given an opportunity to explore and debate several different alternatives to the neoliberal agenda for corporate rule, including ideas by the likes of Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, modern pro-market economists like Herman Daley, and global justice activists like Vandana Shiva.

Now that we've been added to the National Review's rolling list of "nutty professors," I guess we should expect a call from FOX News soon. Perhaps they will want Abi and me to appear on air so Bill O'Reilly can yell at us to "Shut up!"

The Story of Stuff!

2007-12-11T14:47:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday I received five emails from different people telling me about a hot new Internet movie called "The Story of Stuff." Everyone claimed that this movie is a short, funny, easy-to-understand, and compelling look at why environmentalists need to work with other social change constituencies to fundamentally transform the world's economic system in a more just, democratic, and sustainable direction. I showed this 20 minute film to students in my Patterns of Environmental Activism course the next day--and was amazed at the intensity of their positive responses to it. It sparked a lot of aha moments and brought so much of our work this semester into sharper focus.

This movie essentially makes a great case that it is no longer sufficient—as John Muir once suggested—that environmentalists just work hard to protect public lands from industrial or agricultural encroachment and leave the rest of our political economy unanalyzed and unchanged. That is "old school" environmental thinking and we clearly need "new school" sustainability thinking about transforming the materials economy if we are to make meaningful change in the 21st century--a change process that public interest advocates and grassroots organizers need to help drive and direct.

Interested? Please go to the "The Story of Stuff" website, where you can download the film and find additional information on the six major themes addressed in the film (extraction, production, distribution, consumption, waste disposal, and alternatives). Also, check out this article about "The Story of Stuff" by Multinational Monitor editor Robert Weissman.

I agree with Weissman that this film is a great example of using new media to provide solid political education that can reach a lot of people--besides those of us who already see ourselves as social change activists.

Fellowship Opportunity for Activists of Color

2007-11-21T18:56:00.000-05:00

The Alston/Bannerman Fellowship program offers $25,000 to activists of color who have more than 10 years of community organizing experience. These individuals also must be committed to continuing to work for social change and live in the United States or its territories. There were a handful of winners last year, including Beatriz Maya, a student activist in the movement against the Argentine dictatorship. Despite what the Alston/Bannerman Fellowship program's website states, the next deadline, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, is Dec. 15, 2007. If you have further questions about the fellowship programs, the application process, or Alston/Bannerman, send an email to info@alstonbannerman.org.

For more general information, visit the Alston Bannerman Fellowship website.

Another Hate Act at Columbia

2007-11-02T01:22:00.000-05:00

A colleague just sent me a New York Times article. In it, it says:

A swastika was found spray-painted on a Jewish professor’s office door yesterday morning at Teachers College at Columbia University, the second time in less than a month that one of the College’s professors has been the target of bias.

The professor, Elizabeth Midlarsky, a clinical psychologist who has done studies on the Holocaust, said the college’s associate provost called to notify her of the swastika... “I see this as an attack of extreme hate and extreme cowardice by someone trying to make a point,” Dr. Midlarsky said yesterday. The police said they had no suspects. On Oct. 10, a noose was found on the office door of Madonna G. Constantine, a black professor at the college.

This news is heartbreaking. To have two such hateful acts of cowardly intimidation--one racist and one anti-semitic--in one month on one campus must be so painful for the students and teachers at Columbia University's Teachers College. My heart goes out to Dr. Elizabeth Midlarsky as it does to Dr. Madonna Constantine. I want them both to know that they are not alone, that people all across the country support them, and also support the basic principles of goodwill, decency, and justice. Like the price of liberty, the price of justice is eternal vigilance. It requires all of us to keep the faith, to not look the other way, to dream over and over again the powerful dream of leaders like Martin Luther King, and to do whatever we can--large or small--that builds community, that heals wounds, that stands in solidarity with the targets of oppression, and that resists the evil that may exist within our own midst and our own hearts.

I'm reminded of when I was six years old and first heard the word "Holocaust." I asked my mother what it meant. What a challenge for a parent. How do you tell your six year old about a murderous regime engaging in an insane, but very calculated extermination campaign that killed six million Jews and five million other people, including other ethnic minorities and oppressed nationalities, gays and lesbians, people with physical and mental disabilities, labor leaders and anti-Nazi resisters. My mom gave me the basic facts, but she also told me the story of how when the Nazi's occupied Denmark and decreed that all Danish Jews needed to sew yellow Stars of David on their clothes, as a way to stigmatize and demoralize the Jewish community, something amazing happened. Thousands and thousands of Danish Gentiles, including the Danish King, sewed Stars of David on their clothes in an act of solidarity with their Jewish neighbors. These Jews and Gentiles stood together as one community that day against a vicious, genocidal dictatorship and said we will not allow the Danish community to be divided. We will stand in solidarity with each other.

I can never thank my mother enough for telling me this story. Through it I understood, as well as a six year old can, the intense evil of the Nazi regime. Yet, I also was given a vision of human beings at their best--standing together for justice, even at great personal risk. My mom told me, "Honey, we are not Jewish, but we always have to stand up for justice with our neighbors who are, along with any other group that is targeted for hate or mistreatment. That's just what good people do."

I am a lucky man to have such a mom. I share this story because I think her perspective is exactly what is needed from all of us now in the face of the two recent hateful acts at Columbia University and in the face of evils such as our own government illegally invading and occupying a country that is no threat to us, displacing four million people, killing close to one million civilians, and wounding many, many more--all for oil and a desire for world domination.

EAOP Grad's Talk on Restoring Democracy Written Up in Brattleboro Newspaper

2007-10-23T00:58:00.000-05:00

Power to the people -- for a change
By BOB AUDETTE, Reformer Staff

Monday, October 15
BRATTLEBORO -- Power belongs to the people.

In the Declaration of Independence -- which came before the U.S. Constitution -- the signers were very clear in their intentions. "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," they wrote. And though a government shouldn't be changed or abolished "for light and transient reasons," when it has become "destructive of these ends," they wrote, it keeps people from their unalienable rights -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

While admitting that most of mankind would rather live with the evil they know "than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed," the signers of the Declaration gave Americans the right to stand up and be counted, said Ellen Hayes, of Advocates for Community Empowerment. With more than 25 people in attendance in the basement of Brattleboro Savings and Loan Saturday morning, Hayes said "democracy that the Declaration talks about has never been achieved."

"The Constitution is touted as one of the greatest democratic documents in the world," said Hayes. "It is not." Not only has the United States become an "empire state" in the tradition of the Great Britain it broke away from in 1776, she said, since the Civil War "the few have managed to institute laws backed by the armed might of the state to increase their control over property and commerce" at the expense of community and nature. You've been sold a bill of goods, said Hayes, and people need to learn the difference between what they've been told is the truth and what the truth actually is. Once you learn the truth, she said, communities can take steps to return decision-making authority to the people.

Corporations are able to manipulate the U.S. Constitution for their own means, and not for the public good, said Hayes, because the Constitution veered from the Declaration of Independence over the 11 years from 1776 to Sept. 17, 1787, when it was adopted by a group of landed elite, said Hayes. Over the years, corporate business interests have learned how to manipulate the law-making process to their advantage. The "corporate bill of rights," granting "personhood" to corporations, is another tool that businesses use, she said, "to get federal preemptive law to suppress everything else." But, she added, "there can be no supremacy clause for decisions that affect you directly."

Communities around the country are learning this for themselves and taking back control, said Hayes. "If you want to stop this problem at the root, here's what has already been done and upheld by the Supreme Court," said Hayes. By stepping back to the Declaration of Independence, you can force corporations to stay out, she said, adding nine states in the Midwest have laws banning corporate ownership of farms, said Hayes, excluding family-owned farms.

The corporations may have the legal decision on their side, "but do they have the legitimate decision on their side?" asked Hayes. For example, she said, in Barnstead, N.H., residents saw a battle being waged between a nearby town and a spring water company that wanted to bottle and ship its water to Europe. The towns have spent the last six years fighting the plan. Barnstead residents, wanting to avoid such a fate, realized the issue wasn't about water extraction, it was about who was making the decisions and were they in the best interests of the community. "If you define the problem as someone impeding your ability to self-governance, the answer is no longer parts per million or a funny definition of public good," said Hayes. "It's about who gets to make the final decision about something that directly affects my life, my family's life and future generations."

Residents of Barnstead banned corporations from extracting water in their town by reframing the debate as one about the right of self-governance and the rights of nature. By providing for rights for nature, she said, you give every citizen the ability to speak to issues in their community. "The only way this works is to build a majority and solidarity," said Hayes.

That's the only way to overturn policies that benefit corporations at the expense of consumers. By using the anti-discrimination laws and the guarantees of the 14th Amendment, corporations have been able to attain equal standing in the eyes of the law. "They are a fiction of our imagination to perform some kind of economic or public good and they're out of control."

Classes on democracy-based organizing are offered by the Daniel Pennock Democracy School, with its next session Nov. 16-18 in Bethlehem, N.H. The Democracy School is a 16-hour weekend dedicated to the study of American history, people's movements, how law is made, who makes the law, whose values the law serves and how real communities can use this education to change their organizing tactics and become more effective.

Advocates for Community Empowerment works with community groups to preserve democracy by using local law. The Saturday morning meeting was recorded by BCTV and will be scheduled for presentation at a later date. More information can be found at acene.org and celdf.org. The complete text of the Declaration of Independence can be found at ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm.

Antioch New England Addresses Racist Incident at Columbia University

2007-10-17T18:51:00.000-05:00

On October 9, a “hanging noose” was found on the office door of Dr. Madonna Constantine, a faculty member in counseling and clinical psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Constantine, who is African American, teaches about multicultural counseling and does research on racism and professional psychology. This abhorrent incident is a harsh reminder of the persistence of prejudice and racism in our culture, and of the effort we must make together to confront such hate-based behavior and develop and implement strategies to promote positive change. Below is 1) a letter sent to Dr. Constantine by Antioch University New England's President David Caruso on behalf of the faculty and staff at Antioch University New England and 2) a support resolution drafted by the director of the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program and unanimously passed on October 17 by the Antioch University New England Faculty Senate.

1) Letter sent to Dr. Constantine by President Caruso on behalf of ANE Community

Dear Dr. Constantine:

Please accept the heartfelt sadness and support of the Antioch University New England community for you and the faculty, staff, and students in the Counseling and Clinical Psychology program at Teachers College. We offer our support to you as you deal with the difficult reactions you must be experiencing after the abhorrent racist hate incident, and also our support for the important work that you do related to multicultural counseling and racism in professional psychology. We deplore such hate-based behavior rooted in racism and pledge to redouble our efforts to contribute to the development of a just society free of prejudice, discrimination, and racism.

Sincerely,

David Caruso
President

2) The Antioch University Faculty Senate Statement of Support for Dr. Madonna Constantine (Passed By A Unanimous Vote of the ANE Faculty Senate on October 17, 2007)

The Antioch University New England Faculty Senate stands in full support of Dr. Madonna Constantine and others at academic institutions who are being targeted for racist intimidation in overt or subtle ways. We believe that the core values of freedom, justice, mutual respect, and universal human rights--which should be at the heart of every academic institution—need to be defended. The struggle against white supremacy is not over. This was made clear to all of us last week by the ugly, racist act of someone putting a hanging noose on Dr. Madonna Constantine’s office door at Columbia University's Teachers College.

While two of our faculty members have worked closely with Dr. Constantine in the past, making what happened to her a very personal concern for us as a faculty, such an act should sadden and anger all people even if we do not have a personal connection with the person or persons being targeted. The ANE Faculty Senate hopes our statement of support for Dr. Constantine will be but a small drop in a much larger wave of support from academic institutions and professional societies all across the country and world. We firmly believe that an injury to one is an injury to all.

We also believe that this is a teachable moment at academic institutions across the country, one that could allow for deepened discussion and insight into the dynamics of racism and other forms of oppression--as well as an opportunity for all of us to learn how to support each other, be better allies, and stand up for justice and decent treatment for all. We urge all our students and faculty to find ways--in our respective spheres of influence--to reach out and support Dr. Constantine and the understandably upset faculty and students at Teachers College, while also building an ever stronger community of racial solidarity and trust right here at Antioch University New England.

Finally, we want to thank Dr. Gargi Roysircar-Sodowsky and the students of the Support Group for Ethnic and Racial Diversity in ANE’s Clinical Psychology Department for taking leadership in raising the issue of this painful, racist incident at Columbia's Teachers College for public dialog on our own campus. Their initiative has helped Antioch University New England keep our eyes on the prize of creating what Martin Luther King called the Beloved Community. As a faculty, we now rededicate ourselves to this vision.

YES! Magazine's Challenge to Corporate Power

2007-09-08T05:43:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to make a heartfelt plug for YES! Magazine for some time, but I can't avoid it any longer. First, I want as many people as possible to know about the magazine's Fall 2007 issue on how to "Stand Up to Corporate Power." Second, YES! is offering to provide 50 to 200 copies of "Stand Up to Corporate Power" to activist groups free of charge.

A Brief Introduction to YES!

If you're not already familiar with YES!, let me introduce you: YES! is an ad-free, independent, non-profit magazine with a national readership. The focus of each issue varies - from social justice, to sustainability, peace, economics, etc. - always with an ear to emergent solutions. Where are the possibilities? What's working in communities in this country and around the world that could be enhanced, expanded, or replicated elsewhere? The stories in YES! empower readers with knowledge, creative inspiration, and possibilities for action.

What's In The New Corporations Issue?

The current issue of YES! Magazine, "Stand Up to Corporate Power," takes an in-depth look at the grassroots movements to minimize corporate influence over our daily lives, our communities, our commons, and our democracy. From protecting control over local water sources, to keeping elections clean, activists share their innovative ideas and best practices for lasting change. Some highlights from the issue:

* Michael Marx and Marjorie Kelly, of the Strategic Corporate Initiative, look at the great power struggle of our time -- We the People vs. Corporate Giants -- and what's at stake.

* David Korten asks ... do we live in service to money, or to life? Our answer foretells the kind of world future generations will inherit.

* Doug Pibel shares the inspiring story of community members in Barnstead, New Hampshire who protected their town's water supply from corporate bottlers.

* Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, of Democracy Unlimited, gives a first-hand report of how Humboldt County successfully limited corporate influence over local elections.

* Charlie Grey on other citizen-led efforts to create truly democratic, corporate-free elections.

* Gar Alperovitz, Steve Dubb and Ted Howard look at "7 Cool Companies" that are changing the way we think about business.

The Free Copies Offer

Besides providing most of the articles from the Corporations issue on their website, YES! is able to send 50-200 free copies for you to distribute at events, to your membership, in mailings, etc. This opportunity is free of charge. Here's what they need from you:

* Shipping contact including name, phone, email and street address. They'll ship by UPS or FedEx Ground, neither of which can use P.O. Boxes.

* Quantity to ship, in multiples of 50; they're packaged 50 to a box.

* A quick description of how they'll be used or to whom they're being distributed.

* There are no charges involved with this offer unless expedited or international shipping is required.

If you would like to take YES!up on their offer, please send the above information to Susan Gleason, Media & Outreach Manager (cc'd here), and she'll ship the magazines out right away: sgleason@yesmagazine.org or call 206-842-5009 x217.

Please help spread the word about Yes! and their new issue, "Stand Up to Corporate Power." It is a great movement-building tool!

9-11 Controversy Continues

2007-09-02T06:56:00.001-05:00

Thoughts on a Painful Anniversary

Here we are, close to six years after the tragic events of September 11, 2001--a horrible day that saw two hijacked commercial airplanes slam into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the unprecedented total collapse of those two towers and WTC Building 7, a deadly air attack on the Pentagon, the dropping out of the sky of another hijacked plane, and a total death toll of close to 3000 people. I believe that we need to remember both the victims and the heros among the police and fire fighters who were the first responders that day. These are the people who died, were injured, who lost loved ones, or who helped at the risk of getting sick from the polluted WTC dust. I also think it is important to remember that there are still many unresolved questions about the September 11 attacks and the public is deeply divided on how to understand what actually caused or contributed to the success of these terrible events.

What Do Public Opinion Polls Reveal?

According to a 2004 national Zogby Associates public opinion poll, 42% of the American public believes that the Bush administration--and even the 9//11 Commission--have covered up, through various omissions and distortions, evidence that might suggest that the success of this Al Qaeda-related mission was facilitated by official US negligence, incompetence, or even complicity. Another 10% are not sure if this is true or not, which means that 52% of the American people are not confident of the 9-11 Commission truthfulness. Furthermore, a 2006 Zogby Associates public opinion poll indicates that half of New York City residents and 42% of New York State citizens believe that some elements of the US government were directly complicit in facilitating the success of the September 11 terror attacks on US soil. The motive, these respondents claim, was to create a pretext for pre-existing, but unpopular, administration policy goals--such as a desire to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, massively increase the military budget, dramatically expand US Presidential power, and increasingly stifle political dissent and curtail civil liberties long guaranteed by the Constitution. Interestingly, 62% of New Yorkers want a new, tougher, more independent investigation of 9-11.

What Are Some Of The Contending Theories Out There?

Any search of the web will detail many widely different theories about just what happened on September 11, 2001. Here is a quick overview of the key features of the major theories I've noticed in contention.

First, there is the original official conspiracy theory put forward by key leaders of the Bush Administration immediately after the attacks. This theory claims that 19 Al Qaeda operatives, with likely support from the Taliban and Iraq, engaged in a surprise attack on America of so dramatic a nature that it hadn't even been imagined by our government's counter-terrorism experts, that the plot left no warnings of any such attacks in the years and months before September 11, 2001, and that these surprise attacks could not possibly have been stopped by US intelligence agencies or the military. This theory also claims that the later US attacks against Afghanistan and Iraq were only contemplated after September 11 as a legitimate defensive response to eliminate the threat of Al Qaeda and its most likely state sponsors.

The more comprehensive official conspiracy theory, which was put forward by the 9-11 Commission appointed by President Bush, is that 19 Al Qaeda operatives engaged in an attack that had been envisioned by a few US government counter-terrorism experts, included some significant warnings that were never put together into a big picture, and was not thwarted because of some level of generalized bad luck and some poor bureaucratic design and procedures on the part of various government agencies. It blames every US government agency involved a little bit but, like the Bush Administration's earlier official theory, steers away from any claims about significant negligence, incompetence, or complicity on the part of any key players in the US government.

There is also the somewhat more critical theory put forward by some 9-11 Commission skeptics that says it wasn't just bad luck and poor bureaucratic design and procedures that enabled the attacks to succeed, but a level of near criminal neglect and incompetence on the part of several key Bush administration officials, US intelligence agencies, and the air defense system that didn't follow well-known and frequently practiced standard procedures for intercepting hijacked airplanes in US air space. Unlike the 9-11 Commission, these people also frequently believe that the Bush administration cynically took advantage of the successful attacks (facilitated through their own incompetence) by using them as a pretext for pre-existing, but previously unpopular, administration policy goals--such as a desire to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq for greater control of world oil supplies, win massive increases in the military budget, expand corporate welfare through military spending, dramatically expand US Presidential power, and increasingly stifle political dissent and civil liberties in the US and around the world.

There are also a range of even more critical theories put forward by people whose review of the available evidence suggests to them the strong possibility, if not a firm conclusion, that the fundamental problem causing the inability of the US government to stop these attacks is that key people in the Bush administration had some level of advance knowledge of the attacks and were actively complicit in facilitating the success of the attacks.

Theologian David Ray Griffin, is one such theorist and in one of his books he lists several increasingly dire levels of possible US government complicity ranging from 1) the theory that certain key people in the government knowingly interfered with normal counter-terrorism efforts in order to let the attacks happen, 2) the theory that some key government officials actually increased the destruction and psychological impact of the attacks on the US population by causing the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC Building 7 through a pre-planned controlled demolition using explosives, and 3) the even stronger complicity theory, which argues that Al Qaeda either wasn't involved in the attacks at all, or were only patsies, in a scheme almost entirely initiated, planned, and carried out as a covert "fakse flag" operation by key figures in the civilian administration, the military, and US intelligence agencies as a pretext for the administration's drive toward war, empire, and political repression.

My guess is that a survey of the faculty, staff, and student members of the Antioch New England community would reveal that, like America as a whole, there are people here that hold each of these contending theories. My question is how much actual research have we all done to come to an informed, credible, and plausible conclusion about which theory best fits the available facts? As someone who loves his country, as well as the values of peace and democracy, I feel that engaging in this kind of research and reflection is one of our duties as active, engaged citizens.

How Can We Become More Informed About 9-11?

There are a wide variety of books, articles, studies, and documentaries that explore these issues and try to make the case for a particular point of view or come to a conclusion about which theory most plausibly fits the available evidence. The single best and most objective source I've found so far, however, is the Complete 9-11 Timeline website, an ongoing project of the Center for Cooperative Research. What is great about this website is that its team of researchers led by Paul Thompson has already created thousands of short posts based on news stories from national and international mainstream media and government sources that relate to the 9-11 terror attacks. This ever-growing number of 9-11 postings is also well categorized, searchable, and includes live links to the actual articles, webpages, reports, and video newsclips that are referred to in the post summaries. You can go immediately to original sources with this powerful online research tool.

A Green Meeting Guide

2007-08-30T09:25:00.000-05:00

George Bernard Shaw once said, "Socialism will never work." His shocked radical friend asked, "Why not?" Shaw replied, "Too many meetings."

It is true that building power and organizing effective collective action for change requires a lot of meetings and conferences. (One of the books I recently got is Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements by Francesca Polletta.) Given this, one question facing many of us is, "How do we minimize the negative environmental impact of our activist meetings?"

Help has finally arrived with Environment Canada's Green Meeting Guide, which is hot off the press in August 2007. A PDF version of the Green Meeting Guide is also available for download.

Here is how the authors describe their book:

This guide is a practical reference tool for anyone faced with the task of organizing a meeting or conference with the aim of making the event environmentally responsible. It provides information on how to incorporate environmental concerns at every stage of an event... The up-front part of the guide has concise general information on the major steps for organizing a green event. Checklists in Appendix 1 provide detailed descriptions of specific tasks to ensure that you cover all environmental requirements at each of organizing and carrying out an event... Appendices 5, Further Information, describe relevant environmental programs and provide links to key Web sites.

EAOP Director Interviewed on ACT Radio

2007-07-30T16:07:00.000-05:00

Last April, I had the opportunity to do a twenty-minute-plus radio interview for ACT Radio, a bi-monthly half-hour program on KTEP--the NPR station in El Paso, Texas. It was broadcast as their Earth Day edition on April 22, 2007.

ACT Radio, or Animal Concerns of Texas, is broadcast by co-hosts Greg Lawson, Steve Best, and Elizabeth Walsh. Every other Sunday evening at 7:30, these radio activists offer a unique radio program in Texas that focuses on animals rights, human health, and related issues such as vegetarianism and the environment. I was very pleased when Steve Best called the EAOP office and asked if he and Greg could interview me on activist training in general and the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program at Antioch University New England in Keene, New Hampshire, in particular.

Well, I have now received the permission of KTEP's general manager to offer this Earth Day edition of ACT Radio as a downloadable audio file through Real Player to all of you. (If you don't have Real Player, you can download it for free right here.) My interview starts about 7 minutes into the program. You can jump to that if you like, but you might want to listen to the interesting news and commentary at the top of the show.

Once the program turns to my interview, I get to tell about my own journey to activism, the growth of my concern for environmental issues, two of the key educational inspirations behind the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program, some key elements of the EAOP curriculum, and the importance of increasing the number and quality of activist training programs within institutions of higher learning. I hope you enjoy the interview. I know I enjoyed doing it. Steve and Greg were great interviewers.

EAOP Grad Edits Magazine on Food Issues

2007-07-11T12:28:00.000-05:00

Three food activists have just launched a new quarterly magazine, called Local Banquet, to draw attention to the politics, economics, and cultural values around local food production and consumption in Vermont. Meg Lucas and Barbie Schreiber, who have attended extension workshops on Nonprofit Leadership sponsored by Antioch University New England's Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program (EAOP), are serving as publishers. They have hired Carrie Abels, a recent EAOP graduate, as the editor of the new magazine.

Carrie, a long-time newspaper journalist, became intenesly interested in food and agriculture issues during her master's work at Antioch University New England's EAOP. Indeed, Carrie met Meg and Barbie when she worked with them as an intern for the Genetic Engineering Action Group during her first year practicum project with the EAOP. She also did another EAOP internship on promoting local foods in the upper Conneticut River Valley.

In an Brattleboro Commons article about her new venture, Carrie explained how during her time in the EAOP, she "became more educated and slowly became more and more amazed about how gratifying it can be to buy locally and to know the people who grow your food: to actually shake their hand and thank them in person." She's also proud that each issue will have a "Seeds of Change" department that provides political and activist information on agriculture and food issues. She knows the power of conscious consumerism, but she also is aware of the strong role that citizen action for policy changes needs to play as well.

Carrie says inquiries from potential writers are very welcome. As she told the Brattleboro Commons, "We're looking for people who are passionate about the subject and have a unique perspective or personal experience they can share." You can write her at Caroline@localbanquet.com.

Avoiding Ethical One-Sidedness

2007-07-01T16:55:00.000-05:00

At the recent Psychology-Ecology-Sustainability conference at Lewis and Clark College, I attended a workshop on the ethics of deep ecology. The facilitator of this one-hour session distributed a one-page handout with the eight core principles of the deep ecology movement. He then posed the question of whether we found it easy or hard to accept each particular principle.

My own response in the group was that while I might have worded some of these classic principles a bit differently, I have been strongly influenced by all of them—and they have shaped my work in creating an environmental activist training program at Antioch University New England. I then explained that my one big worry about these principles is that there is nothing explicit in them that articulates a clear ethical commitment to social justice, human rights, and the humane treatment of other human beings. I said this could leave these great principles of deep ecology ungrounded or unconnected in practice to an appropriate social ethics. If individual deep ecologists make these connections between social and ecological ethics then this makes for a powerful ethical system. However, I worried out loud about the potentially nasty possibilities if a connection between social and ecological ethics was not made.

By way of example, I pointed out that a few Nazi leaders, and the many German environmentalists that ended up supporting the Third Reich, held to many if not most of the deep ecology principles--and clearly did not connect them to a humane social ethic. At this point, the facilitator interrupted me and said that his workshop on deep ecology principles was no place to raise such questions and that I was being disruptive. He might have a point there, though that was not my intent. Perhaps raising this issue was not helpful in an hour-long workshop among people who were mostly new to any consideration of the principles of deep ecology. That seems like a possibility to me upon reflection.

What disturbed me was that when the facilitator and I were talking afterwards, he argued that it was very important to keep the eight deep ecology principles completely separate from any clearly articulated social ethics. He said any attention to social ethics would detract from a commitment to working for the earth. He repeatedly said that people who care about social justice “can’t be good allies for the Earth.” He also said that trying to add some stated commitment along these lines to the deep ecology principles would take all the power and clarity out of them. He said it was his experience that no one resonates with a combination of social and environmental ethics and it had to be one or the other if your were going to inspire people and be an effective organizer.

Frankly, I was more than a bit dismayed by his claim that it would ruin the deep ecology and sustainability movement to help clarify a deep ecology position on social ethics. Nor did I agree with him that people would never resonate with such an integration of social and ecological ethics. In my keynote address the next day, I added a section right in the beginning of my talk that would help clarify my own integrative view of social and ecological ethics. To do this, I told a story about a small community organizing campaign in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Seattle some years back. The goal of this particular community coalition of churches, civic groups, and small-business leaders was to get the city council to change the name of the main street running through their neighborhood. They wanted to change the name of this street from the “Empire Way” to the “Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.” Here's what I said about this campaign during my talk:

After a few months, they got the city council to agree. The night after the vote, the neighborhood organizers invited community members to a large Baptist church for a victory celebration. That night, Vincent Harding, a long-time associate of King's, spoke to the assembled community. He urged everyone there to fully embrace the deep symbolism of what they had just accomplished. As he said, “You have now changed the road you travel from the Empire Way to Martin’s way.” That has always stuck with me. Isn’t that exactly the challenge we all face today—changing the road we travel from the Empire Way to Martin’s Way?

For me personally, this means doing whatever I can to help weave together the “Beloved Community” that King so often invoked as his deepest, long-range vision. My sense is that this is also the deep, long-range vision of almost everyone here at this conference. I’m guessing that most of us here want to create a beloved community that includes in its circle of moral concern all people alive today, all future generations, and the more-than-human world that makes up our larger biospheric community.

Interestingly, in contrast to the workshop facilitator's fear, this integrative ethical formulation resonated deeply with the participants at the conference and prompted a standing ovation at the end of my talk. This was very heartening to me. I urge us all to find a way to integrate a coherent, strong social ethic along with a profound commitment to deep ecological principles. I don’t want to pick one or the other. Nor do I think this either/or mentality is the best guide for our work in the future.

Nice Organizing Win in Maine!

2007-06-27T13:05:00.000-05:00

The following guest post is by Brian Hiatt, a graduate of Antioch University's Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program (EAOP) and an organizer with the League of Young Voters in Portland, Maine. This post was originally posted on the DMI Blog.

More than six bucks for a gallon of gas. That's what we'd be paying if the price at the pump increased at the same mind-boggling rate as going to college has over the last three decades. But if you are - or aspire to be - a student in Maine, the League of Young Voters and Opportunity Maine have your back.

That is, we just pushed through a groundbreaking initiative that revolutionizes how states can deal with the vexing problem of student debt. And low college enrollment.. and "brain drain"...and job loss...and a lagging state economy.

Our solution is simple: give any person who graduates from a Maine college or university - and then stays to work and live in state - a tax credit to help pay back their student loans.

And the result is a quadruple play for Maine - or other states that want to model the Legislation.

* It makes college affordable
* Encourages people of all ages to enroll
* Graduates are encouraged to stick around
* The now educated workforce attracts new employers

Oh, and it more than pays for itself: the new employers and higher paying jobs will benefit Maine's tax base by $14 million in 2018.

Maybe it's a quintuple play?

That's why the Maine Legislature acted decisively and did two things they don't normally do.

First, the Maine House unanimously - UNANIMOUSLY - approved the initiative 142-0. And when the Senate followed suit, passing the Bill 27-8, it was only the sixth time in the history of Maine's citizens' initiative process that the Legislature themselves approved policy instead of sending it to the voters - which was the campaigns initial goal.

With record high costs for pursuing a higher education, Opportunity Maine stands to be one of the most promising solutions to student debt this generation has ever seen. The Maine Legislature's lone World War II veteran, Rep. Walter Wheeler, who used a previous generation's solution - the GI Bill, agrees.

Stay tuned to the League of Young Voters over the next few weeks and we'll tell you more about what made this initiative successful and how we're going to roll it out beyond Maine.

* * * * * * *
Brian Hiatt organizes with the League of Young Voters in Portland, Maine. The Portland League has helped elect two twenty-something City Councilors in Portland, has passed innovative statewide energy efficiency legislation for renters, and formed a partnership with Opportunity Maine to get more Mainers in college and keep them in-state once graduated. Before making politics accessible to young people with the League, Brian helped the band Phish launch a national voter registration drive in 2003 and continued targeting concert-goers with HeadCount, in 2004. He holds a bachelors from Northern Arizona University and a masters degree in Environmental Advocacy and Organizing from Antioch University New England.

Great New Book on Organzing!

2007-06-16T17:17:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I was listening to NPR on my drive home from work. All of a sudden, the announcer mentioned that Hilary Clinton wrote a paper on Saul Alinsky while she was in college and Barack Obama had actually worked as a community organizer in Alinsky's old stomping grounds in Chicago. The announcer then conducted a 15 minute interview with Alinsky's biographer. OK, when was the last time you heard about community organizing as a profession on any of the mass media? This was a pleasant breakthrough.

Speaking of breakthroughs, there is a great new book on the organizing profession that has just been released. I've been reading it this weekend and am certain that I'll be using it in my fall course on "organizing social movements and campaigns." The book is called We Make Change: Community Organizers Talk About What They Do – and Why. It is written by veteran community organizer Joe Szakos and writer/editor Kristin Layng Szakos and the book helps to demystify the little-known profession of community organizing and offers a glimpse into the daily lives of the people who make changing the world their life’s work. It does this with fourteen in-depth profiles of different organizers as well as drawing on the stories and wisdom of the 81 organizers from across the United States whose voices are represented in chapters like “What is Community Organizing?,” “How I Started Organizing,” “Why Organize?”, “Achievements and Victories,” “Disappointments Are Inevitable,” and “Advice to Aspiring Organizers.” This book is so much more helpful than Saul Alinsky's fifteen minutes of fame on NPR--as lovely as that was.

Here is what other people are saying about We Make Change:

“Looking for a rewarding, meaningful career? In We Make Change, community organizers tell their own stories about one of the most adventurous careers available – grassroots organizing for social change. The pay is lousy, the hours are long, but, as these deeply engaging stories show, you won’t find better company anywhere.”

- Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

“The most wonderful thing about We Make Change is that it's so much fun to read. It's like a personal tour of America where you get to meet the most engaging, optimistic kind of citizens -- people who love this country's possibilities and are working to fulfill them. It is also a deeply informative portrait of community organizing -- how it works, why it is so important for our future."

- William Greider, author of The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy

"We Make Change is an inspiring, optimistic book about the people who are doing the hard, creative work to renew American democracy. It puts a spotlight on community organizers, who are the neglected and hidden heroes that are developing the capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things. In these difficult and dark times, this book provides hope for the future of America. It should inspire thousands of people to find their calling in organizing.”

- Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director of the Center for Community Change

Happy reading!

My "Creative Maladjustment" Talk

2007-06-16T10:08:00.000-05:00

As noted in my last post, I was recently a keynote speaker, along with Sarah Conn and Allen Kanner, at the Psychology-Ecology-Sustainability Conference held June 9-11 at Lewis and Clark College. I was the only non-psychologist among the keynoters, but my talk "Creative Maladjustment: Activism as a Way to Heal Self, Society, and Planet" was remarkably well-received and included a standing ovation by the 175 conference participants. I was very touched too when Allen Kanner, the founder of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, wrote to say, "I loved what you had to say in your talk, and how you said it."

For anyone who would like a write up of my talk, please write me and I'll send you a PDF version. Also, please free feel to pass it on to any friends, colleagues, or contacts you think might be interested.

Here's a section from the talk to whet your appetite for more:

I do hear many activists complain that even well-meaning, pro-activist psychologists often fall into a very unhelpful psychological trap. This needs to be addressed before we can move forward together. Let me give you one very specific example of this unhelpful perspective. I found this example in the Psychologists for Social Responsibility book on Working for Peace I just mentioned. In it, there is a very interesting, but confusing piece by Dr. Christina Michaelson, a clinical psychologist who practices and teaches in Syracuse, New York.

Michaelson’s research interests include Eastern psychology, meditation, and inner peace and her essay in the book is called “Cultivating Inner Peace.” There is so much that is useful in this essay, so let’s start with that. First, there is absolutely no question that Michaelson is maladjusted to the world of violence and imperial war. In her essay, she also lauds all peace activists who “invest tremendous amounts of time, talent, energy, and resources into changing the world.” She also wisely claims that this work can be made even more effective, and more soul-satisfying, if peace activists cultivate their own inner peace through such methods as meditation, nature experiences, counseling, and prayer. I am completely with her on all of this.

Yet, in just her second paragraph, Michaelson says something I think we need to question. According to Michaelson:

If you’re to bring peace to others, then you must first manifest peace in your own life. Your peace work in the world should begin with cultivating an inner state of peacefulness and then you truly can offer peace to others. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” If you want to see peace in the world, then you must “be” peace in the world.

Now this all sounds pretty good on the surface, but I sense in her repetitive first/then formulation that she is actually counseling would-be peace activists to delay their outward social activism until they have cultivated a deep inner peace. She explicitly says it twice and implies it a third time in just this one brief passage. Her advice to her readers seems to be: first cultivate inner psychological peace and then, and only then, think about investing your “time, talent, energy, and resources into changing the world.”

If this is true, then Michaelson’s linear “personal growth first and then activism” idea is not only a serious misreading of Gandhi’s strategy for ending British imperialism, but is also an unconscious call to social passivity and foregoing outward activism until some unspecified future. This is just not helpful. As Paul Rogat Loeb notes in his book Soul of a Citizen, many people already hold back from becoming engaged activists because they believe that they have to be saints before they begin. As he says:

Many of us have developed what I call the perfect standard: Before we will allow ourselves to take action on an issue, we must be convinced not only that the issue is the world’s most important, but that we have perfect understanding of it, perfect moral consistency in our character, and that we will be able to express our views with perfect eloquence… Whatever the issue, whatever the approach, we never feel we have enough knowledge or standing. If we do speak out, someone might challenge us, might find an error in our thinking or an inconsistency—what they might call a hypocrisy—in our lives.

As a result of believing in Michaelson’s version of “the perfect standard,” many people I know either turn away from activism altogether or work endlessly in personal growth workshops to prepare themselves for a day that rarely comes--when they finally feel that they have met the perfect standard and can actually become activists out in the world. This is disheartening to me because I haven’t seen much evidence that this approach does all that much to help people move towards greater empowerment and wholeness in their lives. I also can’t think of a time in history when it has ever led to social movement success. Time and time again, effective social movements have been made by people who don’t wait on perfection, but who just get active by hook or crook.

[To give folks an example, I told the story I've told on this blog before of Martin Luther King's messy journey to activism in 1955.]

Help for the "Creatively Maladjusted"

2007-06-02T12:21:00.000-05:00

Next weekend, I'm traveling to give a keynote talk at a major national conference on Psychology-Ecology-Sustainability at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. My presentation is entitled "Creative Maladjustment: Activism as a Way to Heal Self, Society, and Planet," I took the title from a phrase used in a talk given by Martin Luther King at the 1967 annual convention of the American Psychological Association. In that speech, King called on psychologists to help foster "creative maladjustment" to racism, economic injustice, religious bigotry, and militarism. I'm building on that and focusing my talk on how psychologists can offer their professional insights and tools to the sustainability movement of today.

One of the examples I'm going to offer the 175 people in attendance is a new activist manual edited by Dr. Rachel MacNair and several members of Psychologists for Social Responsibility. This anthology is called Working for Peace: A Handbook of Practical Psychology and Other Tools. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to do so.

The goal of the book is to provide a useful handbook of practical psychological tools and insights for anyone “who wants to find better ways to work for peace or otherwise improve the world.” In essence, the authors of this anthology are trying to help people become ever more creatively maladjusted to a militaristic world gone mad.

The introduction of the book offers a great snapshot of the kinds of psychological insights and tools that can help citizen activists in their work. For example, the authors write “if you are feeling overwhelmed” go to these chapters; “if you are wanting to improve your personal effectiveness” go to these chapters; “if you are wanting to help your local group work better” go to these chapters; “if you are having trouble dealing with one or more members of your group” go to these chapters; “if you are having trouble communicating your message to the public” go to these chapters; “if you are looking for ideas on how to make greater impact” go to these chapters; “if you are looking for ideas about conflict resolution and/or nonviolent action” go to these chapters.

The 34 essays in the rest of the book then deliver excellent tools and insights that can help people solve many common problems facing citizen activists working for peace and other important causes. I’m very proud that Susan Hawes, one of my colleagues in the Clinical Psychology Department here at Antioch, has an essay in this book. Her piece is called “Dialogues Across Difference.” I’ve told Susan, but I am going to tell the assembled psychologists in Portland how incredibly grateful I am for this kind of help from the field of psychology.

Moving Beyond Step It Up 2007

2007-05-18T09:13:00.000-05:00

Here's some good news. I've just heard of two climate action efforts that will pick up where the Step It Up national mobilization left off. The first is Climate Summer, an environmental activist effort modeled on the Civil Rights movement's student-led 1964 Freedom Summer. The new student-led effort on climate change is being sponsored by the Sierra Student Coalition, Sierra Club, Energy Action Coalition, Student Conservation Voters, and the Carbon Coalition.

The second effort is Focus The Nation, which is coordinating teams of faculty and students at over a thousand colleges, universities and K-12 schools in the United States, to collaboratively engage in a nationwide, interdisciplinary discussion on January 31, 2008 about “Global Warming Solutions for America.”

The opportunities to learn important activist skills by helping organize one or both of these efforts is huge. The Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program and the Department of Environmental Studies at Antioch University New England are already discussing how we can take part in these efforts. I hope students and faculty from many other colleges and universities will also grab this opportunity to become more experienced activists and help build an ever stronger movement to improve our ecological sustainability through climate activism.

As Bill McKibben notes, efforts like Focus the Nation and Climate Summer "are absolutely vital to building a movement strong enough to demand, achieve, and sustain the stabilization of the climate." I also agree with the Climate Summer website that finding creative solutions to global climate change "will create millions of new jobs and lift people out of poverty, help make our nation more secure by ending our addiction to fossil fuel, and allow us to be patriotic about something other than war."

Ms. Heide Goes To Washington

2007-04-27T13:24:00.000-05:00

Antioch University's Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program Launches Its New US Congressional Progressive Caucus Fellowship: I am very proud to announce that EAOP master’s candidate Crystal Heide will serve as the EAOP’s first Fellow with the U.S. Congressional Progressive Caucus. The Fellowship Program, the first of its kind with the Caucus, is open to EAOP alumni and second-year students.

"I'm very excited to be representing Antioch's Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program in Washington, D.C., this summer. I can't wait to put all the skills I've learned during the past two years into practice,” said Heide.

Ms. Heide will work with Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ, 7th Congressional District), who chairs the House Committee on Natural Resources’s Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands. Rep. Grijalva also heads the Progressive Caucus’s Environment Task Force and has been recognized as a leader in environmental conservation by the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife. “I am honored to participate with the Congressional Progressive Caucus in Antioch University’s Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program’s Fellowship, and I welcome this year’s Fellow, Crissy Heide,” said Rep. Grijalva. “With Ms. Heide’s contribution, we will develop a model for border community environmental protection and economic enhancement that can be replicated by many border communities.”

“The Fellowship is a tremendous opportunity for Antioch New England students and graduates to enhance their skills and learning through public service,” said EAOP faculty member Abigail Abrash Walton. “We are thrilled to launch this collaboration with the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

The co-chairs of the CPC are also excited about this new partnership with Antioch Univerity New England. "I am so pleased that we have established the very first fellowship program for Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus with Antioch University New England," underscored CPC Co-Chair U.S. Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA). "One of the CPC’s top priorities is strengthening environmental protection and achieving energy independence, and having graduate students like Ms. Heide from ANE's Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program will help us to achieve these goals."

"This is the start of a great, mutually beneficial collaboration between the CPC and ANE students and faculty," CPC Co-Chair U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) noted. “ANE’s Environmental Advocacy & Organizing Program graduate students will help CPC Members address a wide variety of environmental challenges from global warming to environmental justice."

Crissy came to Antioch’s EAOP after two years of working in the field of environmental education in rural New Jersey. During her graduate studies, she has organized Keene’s Earth Day Festival, the recent Step It Up Congress Rally in Keene, worked on Sierra Club’s Cool Cities Campaign, chaired Antioch’s Student Alliance, and has worked with Rhode Island’s Valley Alliance for Smart Growth to ensure wetlands protection on lands slated for big-box-store development. Crissy was raised in Indiana, where she graduated from Lafayette Jefferson High School and received a BS in Wildlife Science from Purdue University.

I am personally thrilled to announce Crissy's participation in this new partnership between the EAOP and the CPC. For those who don't know much about the CPC, a handful of members of the U.S. House of Representatives first established the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the early 1990s “to give voice to the needs and aspirations of all Americans and to build a more just and humane society.” Now numbering 72 members, the Caucus’s platform for action is The Progressive Promise -- Fairness for All, grounded in four core principles: 1. fighting for economic justice and security for all; 2. protecting and preserving civil rights and civil liberties; 3. promoting global peace and security; and 4. environmental protection & energy independence.

We wish Crissy great luck in this new endeavor!

Step It Up Rally Organized By EAOP Students

2007-04-27T13:09:00.000-05:00

It was a great pleasure to read the Keene Sentinel’s April 13th “Step It Up” editorial supporting the local and national effort to push Congress to cut carbon emissions 80% by 2050. It was even more fun seeing the brightly colored Step It Up banners in Keene’s Central Square, the great speakers and bands, and the over 200 citizens who came out on Saturday, April 14 to join the Keene Step It Up Congress Rally.

It was heartening to hear Mayor Blastos welcome everyone and read a resolution from the Keene City Council calling Congress to meet the Step It Up target for cutting carbon pollution. It was also heartening when New Hampshire State Senator Molly Kelly read a letter to the rally-goers from US Congressman Paul Hodes. He didn’t just say nice work, folks. He specifically committed himself to supporting two key pieces of climate change legislation that would meet the Step It Up target goals.

It was also great to have on display a low emission City Express Bus and a City of Keene truck that runs on biodiesel fuel, and have City Councilman James Duffy explain the significance of initiatives like this already underway in Keene. The importance of such initiatives was also really brought home when Antioch University scientist Rachel Thiet laid out the evidence for the growing problem climate disruption and Sue Hay from Mothers Uniting talked about the power of mothers to push for a peaceful and sustainable future for our children and grandchildren.

The weather also held. The three bands—the Pat Hardy Band, Rise, and Born Backward--wowed the crowd and got children dancing. Sherman Morrison was an awesome master of ceremonies. The crowd itself was high energy and ready for action. Step It Up Keene organizers had 120 postcards for each of our three federal legislators calling for support of specific legislation and these were all filled out before 2 pm. Over 200 people signed a general petition supporting Step It Up’s goal. People kept stuffing dollar bills in the decorated coffee cans to help pay for the rally’s expenses.

I also saw two little girls ask the organizers if they could wear volunteer name tags and help with tabling and handing out literature. They stuck with this for over an hour. With young children like this learning to embrace citizen activism, our future may be in better shape that we think.

It is amazing to me that local demonstrations like Keene’s were conducted by hundreds of thousands of people in over 1,400 communities in all 50 states. My thanks to all the organizers, volunteer helpers, co-sponsors, speakers, musicians, and citizens who made Saturday’s April 14 Step It Up Rally in Keene such a moving success. This is how successful movements for social change begin. If you want to see what other communities did, go to the Step It Up website.

What is perhaps most heartening to me is the the little known fact that the whole Step It Up Rally was a class project of the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program's Advocacy Clinic. The student organizers of this event were Crissy Heide, Hilary Frenkel, Dave Morley, Seth Long, and Brendan Banerdt. As Hilary wrote in a reflection paper: "The Step It Up 2007 Keene event that our Advocacy Clinic class organized proved to be a huge success. It turned out better than I could have imagined and I felt proud to be a part of the amazing result! And thinking about the other 1,400 Step It Up events that took place around the country made our rally a part of something massive and powerful. This experiment was a worthwhile one for me to take on and in the end, the event came off strong. It was well organized, inspirational and so much fun. I am proud and honored to have been a part of the team that organized our Keene rally, and I cannot wait to see how Congress responds to the biggest environmental demonstration in the US since Earth Day 1970."

2007 EAOP Environmental Justice Field Trip

2007-03-31T12:20:00.000-05:00

This March, ten students and myself completed our most recent two-week study trip to Louisiana's "Cancer Alley," the 87 mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that is home to one of the largest concentration of petrochemical plants in the country. We saw impacted communities and talked with a variety of community activists, labor organizers, journalists, public officials, chemical plant executives, public interest lawyers, biologists, and ecologists. This year, we also did two days of service work with the Common Ground Collective that has been doing grassroots hurricane reconstruction work since Hurricane Katrina. Here is a list of several of the people we talked with on our trip:

Marylee Orr

Marylee is the Executive Director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, a state-wide coalition of over 100 grassroots groups working on environmental justice issues, as well as more conventional environmental protection and hurricane relief. When we visited LEAN’s headquarters in Baton Rouge, Marylee told us about her own journey to activism about twenty years ago, gave some background on LEAN’s work, including its post-Katrina recovery efforts . She also had several people from the wider "LEAN family" to give us an overview or environmental justice and protection issues in Lousiana.

Wilma Subra

One of these members of the larger LEAN family was Wilma Subra, president of Subra Company, an environmental consulting firm founded in 1981. Since then Wilma has provided technical assistance to community groups on a wide range of environmental issues including oil and gas drilling, production and waste issues. She is also a founding board member of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project that works with communities to prevent and reduce the social, economic and environmental problems caused by oil and gas development. She currently serves on a number of Environmental Protection Agency national advisory committees, including the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

Willie Fontenot

Willie is often described as the grandfather of the environmental movement in Louisiana and has been a major player in helping grassroots groups organize around environmental justice issues in Cancer Alley. He is now semi-retired and working part-time for LEAN. For 27 years before that he was the Environmental Liaison from the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office. He was forced out of his job in 2005 for defending the legal rights of our students during the last field studies trip we undertook to Louisiana. Willie and his wife Mary hosted to us dinner at their house and offered us a broad historical overview of the environmental justice movement in Louisiana. Willie also attend various meetings with us while we are in Baton Rouge, took us on a tour of the River Road communities, and attended one of our meetings in New Orleans.

Bob Landry

Bob is the President of a Steelworkers Union Local that represents Exxon-Mobil workers in the Baton Rouge area. When we visited him at the Steelworkers Union Hall he served us gumbo and stories from his many years of experience working on environmental health and safety concerns.

David Wise

David is the plant manager for a major Shintech PVC manufacturing facility. Shintech was taken to the woodshed by LEAN and other community groups when it tried to locate a facility in the St. James Parish in the late 1990s. The Shintech corporation learned some lessons from this battle, which it lost, and has since tried to position itself as one of the most socially and environmentally responsible petrol-chemical production plants in Louisiana. Davd has even given presentations at environmental justice conferences. He talked with our students about the lessons his company learned in the first fight with grassroots activists, what they did differently when they built the plant we visited, and then answered our questions. He also took us on a tour of the plant.

Paul Templet

Dr. Paul Templet is a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University. He teaches environmental planning and management and conducts research concerning environmental management, risk assessment, energy analysis and systems analysis of economic and environmental systems. Paul was also Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality from 1988-1992 and has developed and implemented Coastal Management Programs in Louisiana and American Samoa. His most current research involves the connections between economy and environment and the resulting policy ramifications. He has authored over thirty papers in professional journals, 5 book chapters and has been an invited speaker at numerous meetings.

Ivor Van Heerden

Ivor is the cofounder and deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center and the director of the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes. He holds a Ph.D. in marine sciences from LSU and is the author of the hard-hitting book The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina—The Inside Story From One Louisiana Scientist.

Mark Schleifstein

Mark is a Pulitzer award-winning reporter for the Times Picayune, the major daily newspaper in New Orleans. He has covered several environmental justice struggles in Cancer Alley as well as written extensively about the loss of wetlands to the south of the city and the impact and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He recently co-authored the well-received book Path of Destruction:”The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms. Mark is also a member of the Association of Environmental Journalists.

Common Ground Organizers

The Common Ground Collective is a grassroots community renewal organization founded by Mailik Rahim, who visited our Antioch University New England to talk with Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Students last Fall. Common Ground utilizes volunteers from all over the country to help local people with hurricane reconstruction, community health, legal issues, and environmental justice concerns. We spent two days volunteering with Common Ground, took part in one of their free diners, and an evening political education session on solidarity against racism.

Adam Babich

Adam teaches environmental law and directs the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic. Before joining the Tulane faculty, Adam was a Chicago-based litigator whose practice emphasized environmental and insurance-related disputes. He has also served as an environmental enforcement lawyer for the Colorado Attorney General, as adjunct attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, as editor-in-chief of the Environmental Law Reporter, and as a judicial law clerk for the Colorado Supreme Court. He has taught at Georgetown University Law Center, American University, and the University of Denver and has an extensive publications record.

Clarice Friloux

Clarice is a Native American of the Houma Nation in Louisiana. She has worked with Wilma Subra on monitoring a series of open pit industrial waste dumps in her community. She took us to view the pits and then spoke to us of her impacted community near Houma and the community struggle to defend their health from the impacts of the dump.

Margie Richard

Margie is a retired school teacher who lived in Diamond, Louisiana’s black community right next to a Shell refinery outside of New Orleans. She lead the community fight that eventually compelled the Shell Oil Corporation to pay black residents money for their polluted homes so the residents could move away from a poisoned and dangerous neighborhood. For this effort, Margie has won the Goldman Environmental Prize. (Her story is also recounted in the book by Steve Lerner called Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor.) She took us on a tour of her former neighborhood and talked to us about her community's efforts to win justice from Shell in a playground directly adjacent to the plant.

Beverly Wright

Dr. Beverly Wright is the founder and director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University. For more than a decade, she has been a leading scholar, advocate, and activist in the environmental justice arena. Dr. Wright is an original member of the Michigan Coalition (an ad hoc group that advised William Reilly during his tenure at the Environmental Protection Agency). She was also a member of the National Advisory Committee for the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, and the Planning/Protocol Committees for the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences' Health and Research Needs to Ensure Environmental Justice National Symposium. She has directed numerous grassroots community-initiated health surveys, evaluated community buy-outs, and supervised community development initiatives around contaminated sites.

Darryl Malek-Wiley

Darryl is a veteran of the environmental justice movement in Louisiana. He has worked for over 30 years with communities along the Mississippi River to fight toxic pollution and protect peoples' health. Darryl joined the Sierra Club Environmental Justice Program in June 2004 to support the efforts of Louisiana environmental justice groups on issues including toxics, pollution and environmental health. Darryl was also key organizer of the Great Toxics March from Baton Rouge to New Orleans in 1988. This march defined the problem of toxic emissions in the "cancer alley" and launched the campaign for improvement that continues today. Darryl now does community organizing for the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association as well.

My sincere thanks to all of these busy people who made time to help our students learn about the science and politics of hurricanes and environmental justice issues.

Step It Up 2007 for Climate Stabilization

2007-02-15T10:20:00.000-05:00

Antioch's Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program students in this Spring's Advocacy Clinic are working hard on a group organizing project--mobilizing a series of local events in Keene as part of the April 14th national day of climate action coordinated by Step It Up 2007. This nation-wide effort to demonstrate the desire of concerned citizens for Congress to act now to cut carbon pollution emissions 80% 2050 has been initiated by Bill McKibben. Below is Bill's personal invitation to join Step It Up 2007. This is a great opportunity for local people, students, and activists to practice citizenship skills in a real life setting--and make a clear statement to Congress to move on climate stabilization now. We'll let you know how it goes in Keene.

From Bill McKibben:

Dear Friend—

I’m writing to ask your help. I know you’ve already made changes in your own life to deal with climate change; I’m guessing that, like me, you feel a little helpless about the scale of the problem. Some of us who are eager to do something more are organizing a day of demonstrations for April 14. We’re calling ourselves Stepitup2007.org, and we need you to be a vital part—to organize a rally in your neck of the woods. If everyone pitches in, we’ll have by far the largest action yet in this nation about global warming—large enough that Washington will notice and start to act.

It’s going to be an unusual day. People will be rallying in many of America’s most iconic places: on the levees in New Orleans, on top of the melting ice sheets on Mt. Hood and in Glacier National Park, even underwater on the endangered coral reefs off Key West and Hawaii. But we need hundreds of rallies outside churches, and in city parks, and in rural fields. It’s not a huge task—assemble as many folks as possible, hoist a banner, take a picture. We’ll link pictures of the protests together electronically via the web—before the day is out, we’ll have a cascade of images to show both local and national media that Americans don’t consider this a secondary issue. That instead they want serious action now.

We’re not an organization—we’re, in essence, a few people sending out invitations to a party. A potluck. This is going to be a homemade day of action. So go to our website at stepitup2007.org, and say ‘here’s where I live—I want to help organize.’ We’ll coordinate the responses, introducing you to others from your area, and give you everything you need to be a leader, from banners to press releases. You don’t have to have ever done anything like this—you’re not organizing a March on Washington, just a gathering of scores or hundreds in your town or neighborhood. We need creativity, good humor, commitment. If you are active in a campus group or a church or a local environmental group or a garden society or a bike club—or if you just saw Al Gore’s move and want to do something—then we need you now.

And by now, we mean now. The best science tells us we have ten years to fundamentally transform our economy and lead the world in the same direction or else, in the words of NASA’s Jim Hansen, we will face a “totally different planet.” We’re calling for 80 percent carbon cuts by 2050, which would be a good first step to warding off that future. But the exact numbers are less important than the underlying message to Washington: get serious. The recent elections have given us an opening, and polling shows most Americans know there’s a problem. But the forces of inertia and business-as-usual are still in control, and only our voices, united and loud, joyful and determined, can change that reality.

Please join us.

Bill McKibben
Stepitup2007.org

P.S.—It would be a great help too if you could forward this plea to anyone you think might embrace it.

An Online Climate Policy Game

2007-02-12T15:23:00.000-05:00

In emails to me, academic colleagues Timmons Roberts and Robert Brulle have recently touted the new online European Union Climate Policy Game. It looks very promising as a personal and classroom tool for exploring various alternatives in climate action policy. It is not for the faint of heart, however. Both Timmons and Bob "were pretty quickly voted out of office" for their climate policies. Can you do better at making meaningful changes in climate policy without courting a political backlash? As Bob Brulle notes, "It looks like an interesting program to use in a classroom situation" and it could stir up some engaging discussions and reflection on the choices ahead among climate change activists.

EAOP Launches "Make Your Vote Count" Radio Show

2007-02-03T22:00:00.000-05:00

What are you going to do with your vote in November 2008? Are you going to sit the election out? Are you going to take time to learn about the presidential candidates and make an informed decision? Are you going to roll up your sleeves and actively campaign for the candidate you decide is best for this country?

Well, Antioch University New England’s Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program is proud to launch a special new series of occasional reports on WKNH Keene, 91.3 FM, called “Make Your Vote Count.” In this series, we will take a close look at several of the Presidential hopefuls coming through New Hampshire looking for our votes, our dollars, and our volunteer time. The first installment of the “Make Your Vote Count” series was broadcast live this Saturday afternoon. In this inaugural show, the EAOP offered an in-depth look at the political perspective of six-term Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who is now making his second run for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President.

The show included a taped speech by the Congressman at Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project Conference held in New York on January 8, 2007; a commentary from Rahul Mahajan from the Pacifica Radio Network that questions whether political progressives should support Kucinich’s campaign; and a live twenty-minute conversation with Congressman Kucinich about why he thinks his candidacy is the best hope for what he calls the “New American Majority." We then ended the show with a short interview with local Kucinich supporter Bill Beardslee about why he plans to work hard for his candidate this year.

We hope to edit these locally-produced programs in the future and make them available nationally as podcasts on the EAOP's website, as well as uploads to the Pacifica Radio Network's Audioport distribution service for its over 100 affiliates across the country.

Saturday's March on Washington

2007-01-29T20:43:00.000-05:00

I am happy to report that we had representatives from Antioch New England's faculty, staff, students, and graduates at Saturday's peace march in DC--along with hundreds of thousands of other people from all over the country who made the trek to our nation's capital to urge Congress to represent the will of the both the American and Iraqi people and put an end to the Bush Administration's escalating aggression and occupation of Iraq. For those of you who couldn't make the trip, here are a couple of information sources to give you a sense of the event.

The first is a short video by Caleb Clark, a former ANE librarian. To watch his video journal, go to his video webpage.

The second is Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! radio program that ran today. It features interviews with some participants as well as recordings of some of the key speeches at the rally before the massive march around the US Capital. To hear the program, go to this webpage.

I hope this gives people some feel for the day's events. It was an excellent moment in civic participation around one of the most important issues of the day.

Green Corps Welcomes Applicants

2007-01-23T14:47:00.000-05:00

Green Corps is a full-time, paid Environmental Leadership Training Program for recent college graduates that offers a year of in-depth training and experience with leading environmental groups like the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, and Greenpeace.

Green Corps was founded by leading environmentalists in 1992 to identify and train environmental leaders. Their year-long program includes intensive classroom training, hands-on experience running urgent environmental and public health campaigns, and placement in permanent leadership positions with leading environmental and social change groups. The program begins in August 2007, with the Introductory Classroom Training in Boston, and concludes with graduation in August 2008. Campaign work is done all over the country.

They will invite 25 recent college graduates to join Green Corps in 2007-2008 and are looking for people who are serious about saving the planet, have demonstrated leadership experience, and want to work for change over the long haul. Salary of $23,750. Optional group health care coverage, paid sick days and holidays, two weeks paid vacation, and a student loan repayment program for qualifying staff. To apply for Green Corps' 2007-2008 Environmental Leadership Training Program, fill out our online application. Regional deadlines, campus interview dates, and online application are at www.greencorps.org. For more information, contact Jesse Littlewood, Recruitment Director, at jobs@greencorps.org, or 617-426-8506.

Martin Luther King's Journey to Activism

2007-01-20T06:34:00.000-05:00

For the last two years, the EAOP has sponsored a three-hour radio special during the Martin Luther King Holiday on our local community station. The show plays four complete speeches by King from the Pacifica Radio Archives and offers some commentary from me. The segment that gets the most listener comment every year is the little known story of how King became an activist, which only proves that activists are made, not born.

Before December 1, 1955, King had not met Rosa Parks. He was 26 years old and still new to town. His church was one of the smallest, wealthiest, and most conservative of the two-dozen Black churches in Montgomery. His professional ambitions at the time were to run a solid church program, be well paid for it, have a nice house for his growing family, perhaps write some theology pieces for his denomination’s magazine, and do a bit of adjunct teaching at a nearby college after he was better established. King’s long-term career goal was to become a college president.

King had simply never ever imagined himself as the most prominent activist leader in Montgomery, let alone America. Sure, he had experienced racism, and hated it, but all black folks in America had experienced racism and hated it. He had also read a bit of Gandhi and Marx at Boston University and written several thoughtful papers about theologians of the social gospel movement who challenged the Church to take up the fight for social justice. Yet, in December 1955, all these ideas were mostly academic concerns for King. His only act of activism up to this point had been to write a letter to the editor for the Atlanta Constitution back when he was seventeen.

It is hard to imagine now, but if it had been left up to King’s initiative, the Montgomery Bus Boycott would never have even happened. The real organizer of this effort was E.D. Nixon, an experienced civil rights and labor activist who created the Montgomery Improvement Association and launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott within the first four days after Rosa Parks’ arrest. As the president of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, Nixon knew Parks well. She had worked as his volunteer secretary at the NAACP office for over 12 years. He also knew most of the city’s black clergy, a couple of reasonably sympathetic white journalists, and all of the local black activists, including folks from his union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

It was Nixon who recruited a very reluctant King to the civil rights movement. After bailing Rosa Parks out of jail for refusing to move to the back of the bus, Nixon and she talked together for hours and decided to launch a city-wide boycott of the bus system until the city desegregated the service. Nixon then went home and started calling local ministers to line up their support for the idea. As Nixon explained to one interviewer: “I recorded quite a few names… The first man I called was Reverend Ralph Abernathy. He said, ‘Yes, Brother Nixon, I’ll go along. I think it’s a good thing.’ The second person I called was the late Reverend H.H. Hubbard. He said, ‘Yes, I’ll go along with you.’ And then I called Rev. King, who was number three on my list, and he said, ‘Brother Nixon, let me think about it awhile, and call you back.’”

When King finally agreed to come to a meeting, Nixon chuckled and told King, “I’m glad you agreed, because I already set up the first meeting at your church.” At the ministers’ meeting, King was very nervous about the illegal boycott idea and several other ministers soon began to side with King against the boycott idea. In his own memoir of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King recalls how Nixon finally exploded towards the end of the meeting and shouted that the ministers would have to decide if they were going to act like scared little boys or if they were going to stand up like grown men and take a strong public stand against segregation.

King’s pride was so hurt, he shouted back that nobody could call him a coward. Then, to prove his courage, King immediately agreed to Nixon’s plan for an aggressive, community organizing campaign to build up the boycott. With that decision made, the group began to discuss who should lead this effort. Everyone present had expected Nixon to become the president of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association. But when he was asked about serving, Nixon answered, “Naw, not unless’n you all don’t accept my man.” When asked whom he was nominating, Nixon said, “Martin Luther King.” Having just loudly declared his courage to the whole group, King felt that he had to agree to take on this responsibility. Then, Nixon told King he would have to give the main address at the mass rally scheduled for that very night to announce the boycott plan to the black community.

King rose to Nixon's challenge. Serving as the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott for the next twelve months changed King. Watching 42,000 poor and working-class black people stay organized and do without public transportation for a year, he discovered things about the courage and capacity of ordinary people to resist oppression and move toward freedom. Watching the conservative, rightwing city government finally cave in to the boycott, he discovered the power of mass nonviolent direct action campaigns to win real victories--even when they are opposed by powerful interests. By seeing his own power to inspire people to become active citizens for a noble cause, King discovered just what kind of Christian leader he wanted to be in this life. He now fully embraced his new mission as an activist leader for fundamental social change.

There is an important lesson here for all of us. We don’t have to be born leaders, we don’t have to know everything before we get started, we just have to get started.

Midwest Academy Summer Internship Opportunity

2007-01-20T04:36:00.000-05:00

The Midwest Academy, a 33-year-old national training institute for progressive direct action organizing, will hire community organizing interns for a paid ten week Summer 2007 program. The stipend will be $3000, and will be paid biweekly. The program will run from Monday, June 4 to Friday, August 10.

They are still determining the exact locations of placements. In 2006, interns were in Chicago neighborhoods from 95th and State to Brighton Park, Kenwood-Oakland, and Uptown, as well as in several suburban locations. Preference will be given to applicants from the Chicago area, or in school in the Chicago area. Details about locations will be posted as soon as available.

Interns will receive a week of training similar to the Midwest Academy five-day training using the organizing model developed in the Midwest Academy's book Organizing for Social Change. Students will learn how organizers choose issues, develop strategy, assess their own organizational power and that of their target/opponents, recruit constituents, and move into action. (Costs for the training, including room/board, are covered).

During the nine weeks in the field, interns will conduct community outreach and organize one or more public meetings. Interns will receive day-to-day supervision from their placement organizations, and ongoing training and mentoring from the Midwest Academy. For interns who are interested in pursuing a job in community organizing, we will provide job search assistance at the end of the internship or upon college graduation.

They are looking for young people who are ready to work hard and take on new challenges and responsibilities, who have a passion for social justice, and who want to learn solid skills in the field of organizing. They are particularly looking for people who want to explore a career in progressive organizing in Illinois. Fluency in Spanish or other languages relevant to recent immigrants will be a plus for some locations. Use of a car will be required in the suburbs! Mileage will be reimbursed.

To apply: Download and fill out the online application online. Review of applications will begin February 15 and continue until positions are filled. Likely candidates will be interviewed via telephone. Target date to complete hiring is March 31. Questions? Review the website, then email Judy Hertz.

EAOP Grad Becomes Newspaper Columnist on Grassroots Democracy

2006-11-29T08:26:00.000-05:00

EDITOR'S NOTE: Recently, EAOP grad Steve Kowal became a newspaper columnist for The New Hampshire Gazette, the nation's oldest newspaper. In his column, Steve offers his ideas about how local communities can defend themselves against unwanted corporate intrusions. The first piece in the series ran on November 13. His future pieces will be updates on Steve's work with Advocates for Community Empowerment, an organization that Steve co-founded this year with EAOP grad Ellen Hayes. I already reported on their work in a Well-Trained Activist post on October 23, 2006. However, I thought people might like to see Steve's first piece for The New Hampshire Gazette right here.

The Democracy Corner
by Steve Kowal
November 13, 2006

Every day, citizens throughout New Hampshire and elsewhere come face to face with the realities of corporate plans to enter their community with a polluting, toxic, extractive or noisy industrial project. But too often, even when a majority of citizens passionately oppose these plans, they lose – and the offending project becomes part of their lives.

This happens so often we’ve become used to the story. Alert community members foresee the negative impacts of what is being planned. A small group of “concerned citizens” bands together to stop it. They hire a lawyer, study the scientific and regulatory rules, create signs pleading for someone to “Stop the Project,” write letters to the editor, call their elected officials and go to countless regulatory meetings to beseech government officials to please consider their health and welfare.

All too often they fail. Yet, don’t we live in a democracy? And doesn’t it fly in the face of democracy when a handful of corporate executives can come into a community with an unwelcome project and trump the rights of thousands of citizens?

This happens because we are playing in the corporate-defined ball park, using their bats and balls and following their rules. For instance, even though corporations are fictitious entities that were originally chartered by state governments to serve the common good, over the past 200 years courts have endowed them with the same Constitutional rights that you and I have. Likewise, when we want to voice our concerns, we are channeled into the confusing government regulatory maze where the rules are saturated by corporate influences. We are required to follow a narrowly defined script written by agencies created to “permit” and “regulate” the destruction of our environment. Even so, we continue to fight within this system because we believe that it is the only thing we can do.

It’s not. A New England-based community activist group, Advocates for Community Empowerment (ACE), helps communities redirect the discussion away from confusing scientific details, reframing it around the rights of “we the people” to decide the future of our communities. Instead of getting quagmired in the regulatory run-around, ACE empowers communities to define their vision and enact it into fundamental local law, which by definition, disallows the offending project. These laws also strip corporations of their illegitimate rights to act as “persons” making them subservient, once again, to the will of the people.

ACE draws upon the innovative work and expertise of the Program on Corporations Law and Democracy and the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Democracy advocate Richard Grossman and attorney Thomas Linzey of CELDF utilize cutting-edge, enforceable, legal strategies based on law rooted in the Bill of Rights and the federal and state constitutions. ACE and CELDF educate people about these concepts and strategies through an intensive weekend Democracy School™ for citizens and local officials.

Using CELDF’s legal strategies, visionary communities have taken the initiative to reclaim their rights to determine their own future. On September 19th, Tamaqua, Pennsylvania became the first community in the United States to bestow enforceable legal rights on nature. Last March, Barnstead, New Hampshire became the first community in New England to protect their water resources from corporate extraction while stripping corporations of their rights as “persons.”

So often we have allowed our communities to be defined by the corporate value of “endless more” rather than declaring our own values, vision and rules. Now, citizens in communities are reclaiming their power and sovereignty. They are standing up for themselves and, just as Howard Beale implored us to do in the 1976 film, Network, they are shouting, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

Yet unlike a Hollywood movie, this is serious stuff. Now instead of just being “mad as hell” communities, at last, are choosing to use a new and powerful tool. This “new” tool is democracy.

For more information, call Steve Kowal at 603-431-9333.

EAOP Grad Savors An Environmental Victory

2006-11-17T12:57:00.000-05:00

Sarah Hincks, a recent graduate of Antioch New England’s Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program (EAOP), tasted victory this fall in her campaign to establish a conservation commission in Burlington, Connecticut. At a special town meeting, citizens overwhelmingly approved the commission, which will carry out a conservation and development plan, including the preservation of open space. When the entrenched first selectmen called for the vote “people literally yelled in favor,” Hincks reported.

Hincks, who has spearheaded conservation initiatives for years as a leader of the Farmington River Watershed Association, supported the findings of the original study committee that recommended the commission formation in 2001. When town officials dragged their feet for five years without securing voters’ approval, Hincks started her campaign with a simple letter to the editor of the local paper. Hincks and other activists then worked for months to place the decision before the town’s voters, holding the selectboard’s feet to the fire.

For assistance, she took the campaign to EAOP faculty member Abigail Abrash, and made it the thrust of her work in the program’s Advocacy Clinic. “Every week, I got feedback on my activities from students in my cohort and from Abi. It was extremely helpful in a real-world way,” Hincks said.

Although Hincks is quick to attribute the success to her fellow activists and supporters, Abrash says, “Sarah gets all the credit for making this victory happen. It stands as a perfect case study of what EAOP is all about.”

Hincks has lived in Burlington for nearly twenty years and may end up serving has on the soon-to-be-appointed commission. But this was not the driving force behind her effort. “It was more important to me just to get it started."

"I would really like to help other people, perhaps in other places, make changes where the environment wins,” she says. “Victory is delicious. I’m looking forward to another slice of it!”

EAOP Grad Writes Series on Winning Support for Your Cause

2006-11-11T11:20:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to let folks know about a useful series on strategic communications for environmental advocacy groups written by Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program graduate Peter Alexander, who now directs The Biodiversity Project. The series is published on the GrantStation.Com website. Here is the text of GrantStation's announcement of this series of articles:

How to Build Support for Your Cause: A Strategic Communications Primer is a ten-part series by Peter Alexander, Executive Director of the Biodiversity Project. Since 1995, the Biodiversity Project has helped hundreds of organizations throughout the U.S. and Canada develop strategic communications campaigns to raise public awareness, concern, and actions to protect vital natural resources. This series can help ensure that your organization’s valuable resources are used most efficiently and effectively to further your mission. The series is adapted from a “communications primer” created by Biodiversity Project staff for groups working on Great Lakes issues. A more in-depth online version, along with other communication strategy resources, can be found at the Project’s Communications Toolbox.

While you are at it, you may want to check out the rest of GrantStation.Com's website, because it has lots of useful material about fundraising for advocacy groups and other nonprofit organizations. I've only started exploring this site, but it looks very helpful.

"Accuracy in Academia" Group Slams Antioch's Advocacy Program

2006-11-04T11:36:00.000-05:00

During a recent round of web-surfing, I found an interesting piece written by Malcolm Kline, the executive director of Accuracy in Academia --a well-funded rightwing organization based in DC that regularly attacks academics it deems as “biased” (ie. academics that the AIA perceives as liberal, progressive, green, populist, feminist, multiculturalist--or even committed to the theory of evolution and the growing international consensus among scientists on global climate change.)

The piece, entitled “Environmentally Correct Again,” was part of a series of op-eds by Kline that challenges what AIA sees as the US Left’s overwhelming “exploitation of the classroom or university resources to indoctrinate students; discrimination against students, faculty or administrators based on political or academic beliefs; and campus violations of free speech.”

I found his piece particularly interesting because Kline opened the article by naming me as a prime example of a teacher guilty of violating academic freedom because I force my students to become unwilling "foot soldiers in environmental campaigns." As he put it:

Steve Chase of the Antioch New England Graduate School, for example, led some of his lucky students on an "Environment Justice in the Mississippi Delta” junket last spring. Chase described it as a “10-day field studies trip to Louisiana’s Cancer Alley—the 90-mile strip of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that houses more than 150 oil refineries and petrochemical plants.

He went on to add that this is just one of many examples where “students have been used as pawns of environmental activists when they should be in class.”

Kline, however, fails to mention a few important things to his readers. First, he neglects to mention the fact that the graduate students who participated in this field studies trip had voluntarily signed up for this elective course and even paid extra money to take it. Second, he neglects to mention that during the trip these students engaged in conversations with a wide variety of stakeholders, including elected officials, journalists, petrochemical industry executives, union leaders, scientists, EPA officials, environmental activists, and members of polluted communities--and then debated the validity of each of these people’s perspectives with each other.

Even more interesting, Kline neglects to mention Exxon Mobil's effort to suppress these students’ legal right to do research on pollution and public health issues in Louisiana, or that employees of Exxon Mobil pressured the Attorney General of Louisiana to force a staff member in the Attorney General’s Office out of his job after 26 years of distinguished public service—all because this staff member stood up for our students’ legal right to engage in research when they were being detained by Exxon Mobil employees.

Now, Kline knows all this, because he quoted me from an email I sent out in 2005, along with the press release that Antioch University immediately issued about this situation. It therefore appears that Kline and the AIA are actually against graduate students having the option to: 1) take field studies courses focused on environmental justice issues, or 2) explore a wide variety of perspectives about the issue, if it includes the viewpoints of people who are critical of corporate power and industrial pollution. For Kline, all of this is a serious attack against academic freedom.

Yet, Kline apparently has no problem with a giant corporation having off-duty police officers in its employ detain students for over an hour, lie about the law, and threaten students with being added to Homeland Security's "terrorist list" for engaging in the completely legal act of photographing an industrial facility from a public side walk. He also doesn’t seem to believe it is a violation of free speech for a giant corporation to pressure the Attorney General of Louisiana to force a courageous civil servant out of his job for defending the legal rights of students to do their academic research.

I’m glad Kline and Accuracy in Academia are not “biased” in any way--and that they are such ardent defenders of “free speech” and “academic freedom.”

"Democracy School" Workshops Challenge Corporate Rule

2006-10-23T14:04:00.000-05:00

Time to Learn A New Strategy?

Ellen Hayes and Steve Kowal, two graduates of the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program at Antioch University New England, have recently started a movement-building organization called Advocates for Community Empowerment (ACE). The mission of the organization is to help empower New England communities to go beyond conventional regulatory strategies and secure a truly democratic future by enacting enforceable by-laws and ordinances that place control in the hands of ‘we the people” while stripping corporations of their illegitimate power to usurp people's rights to a clean and healthy environment. This strategy has already been used to good effect in western Pennsylvania through the efforts of Tom Linzey and the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF).

As one of the activist training tools for learning to apply this new strategic model in various local communities, Ellen and Steve will soon begin offering the "Daniel Pennock Democracy School" weekend workshop developed by Tom Linzey of CELDEF and Richard Grossman, a founder of the Program on Cororations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD). The "Daniel Pennock Democracy School" was named after a teenage Pennsylvania boy who died as a result of corporate land-applied sewage sludge and teaches the hidden histories of corporate power in this country and outlines CELDF's promising new strategy for making our people's movements much more effective at securing real democracy.

"Democracy School Changed Our Lives"

Ellen and Steve both come from corporate sales and business backgrounds, but each independently sought out Antioch’s Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program because of their concerns about the social and ecological consequences of a political economy dominated by transnational corporations. This concern only deepened for them when Hayes and Kowal were exposed to the work of Richard Grossman and Thomas Linzey in the EAOP's course on "Corporate Power, Globalization, and Democracy." As Hayes observes, “I nearly fell off my chair when I heard Richard Grossman speak at an event I was attending as part of my class project. It seemed as if the knot in my stomach and the confusion in my head resolved into an overarching understanding of how our society has come to its present condition.”

Inspired by their own attendance at a Democracy School soon after, Hayes and Kowal soon included the Democracy School's teacher training program with CELDF as part of their EAOP master’s course work. Now, with the formation of ACE, Hayes and Kowal are bringing this “revolutionary” strategy to northern New England.

As Steve Kowal explains: ”When I decided to begin my studies with the EAOP program my goal was to find a methodology of activism that would be rooted in fundamental change rather than in the endless “hamster wheel” environmental efforts to 'Stop this' or 'Save that.' When Steve Chase introduced me to the work of CELDF, I knew immediately their's was a strategy that could make a difference. I hope our work in New England with ACE provides inspiration and real aid to communities who want to preserve their way of life and their environment. We hope to inspire citizens by pulling back the veil of corporate power and empowering them to take progressive steps to assert their rights as 'we the people.' We hope our new movement-building efforts and our partnership with CELDF can spread this new organizing model throughout New England.”

The first couple of Democracy Schools to be taught by Ellen and Steve, with assistance from Tom Linzey and Richard Grossman, will focus on the concerns of activists from communities facing the adverse effects of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) and incineration, particularly incineration of Construction and Demolition (C&D) debris. These Democracy Schools will be 16 hour intensive learning opportunities for community activists, selectmen and concerned citizens who want to enact positive, fundamental protection for their communities and environment. They will both explore the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and introduce participants to CELDF's new organizing model that helps empower citizens to confront the usurpation by corporations of the rights of communities, people, and the earth.

For more information on ACE, or bringing a Democracy School workshop to your community, visit ACE's new webpage. If you live outside of New England, you can also check out the webpage of CELDF as well.