Coal Graphic hits the Toronto Stock Exchange

Activists pose as the "speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil" monkeys in front of the coal banner, at a protest in front of the Toronto Stock Exchange. >
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Getting Ready to Ink

As our fall tour winds up, we've settled into our winter studio outside of Asheville and stocked up on firewood. We're testing out pens and brushes and washes, and putting in shading and details on every scene in the poster. Here's a teaser of how we're imagining doing the deep background..... >
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BREAKING NEWS: Blasting Started on Coal River Mtn.

The following is an excerpt from Jeff Biggers' article on the Huffington Post - read the full article here.

The Battle at Coal River Mountain has officially begun.

At the same time President Barack Obama invoked the "legacy of daring men and women" in our nation's quest for renewable energy initiatives, and as millions of concerned citizens rallied in support of 350.org climate change events around the world this past weekend, Big Coal bulldozers reportedly clear cut a swath of lush deciduous forests in the carbon sink of Appalachia and fired the opening salvos in the mountaintop removal mining blasting process to destroy the historic range slated for the Coal River Mountain Wind Project--the most symbolic clean energy project in the nation.

But not without a fight.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/exclusive-photos-battle-a_b_333000.html

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In the Final Stages of the "True Cost of Coal"!

We've finally completed the entire pencil sketch version of the "True Cost of Coal" poster. Now all that remains is to render the final drawing in graphite and ink and make it beautiful.

Click here for a higher-resolution version of the redraw. Or download it here.

We've also done a major update of our gallery with closeups and crops of new and revised scenes. Check it out!

We're in the final months of drawing and will be printing this winter once we raise $10,000. Excited? Want to help us? Prepay for a poster and get one hot off the press! Want to get a bunch of posters and educational materials to distribute to your own networks? Get your school or organization to collaborate with us on our print run! >
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Vote for the Beehive Online

The Beehive just applied for a poster-printing grant from a new clothing company that will make its decisions partially according to online voting. Help make the Coal Graphic a reality by visiting their site. Register and vote for us.

While we normally work anonymously under the Beehive label, we were required to choose two names for this grant application; but there is a whole team of artists and educators who've put in tons of work on this project.

Thank you for your support! >
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Collaborate with the Bees on the Coal Poster Print Run

We’ve been hard at work to bring The True Cost of Coal graphic illustration to life on the page. Grounded in the stories and suggestions our allies in Appalachia have shared with us over the last year, we have worked collaboratively to design a poster that can be a multi-tool for inspiring critical reflection and strategic action. We have tried to honor history, respect complexity, be real about our own relationship to the story, ask for lots of feedback, and depict every image - from the biggest dragline to the smallest ant - with care and accuracy.

We are nearing completion and are eager to bring the illustration to the world, distributing thousands of copies both within the coal fields and across the world. Please help us reach this goal by pre-purchasing posters at a highly discounted bulk rate. Your group can get 50-200 (or more!) posters “hot off the presses” and become an integral part of this popular education project by distributing them in your community.

Why collaborate with the bees on a print run?

Printers charge a hefty fee for every “run” of posters (because of the high cost of initial set-up), making it most economical to print posters in bulk. Unfortunately, to do so involves substantial up-front costs, more than we can muster on our own or secure in grants.

As an all-volunteer collective operating on a shoestring budget, we work our wings off to make sure that we squeeze all the potential out of every dollar donated to support this work. If we combine our resources to get this new graphic printed, we can all have posters to distribute for fundraising, organizing, and education. That’s why we’re asking our friends and allies who are committed to justice in Appalachia to help us pull together the final funds needed to make THE TRUE COST OF COAL GRAPHIC CAMPAIGN a reality!

Every day we are losing ground, literally, to mountain-top removal mining, and we need to work together to expose and educate as many people as possible, to help build the movement for grassroots resistance before more mountains are lost. By pre-purchasing a bulk package of posters at just above cost, you are becoming a part of this graphics campaign in two very important ways: you are helping us with the initial cost of printing, and you can become an integral part of the "pollination" process by distributing these posters throughout your community.

How can we use our share of the print run?

So many ways! You can:

• distribute posters as a fundraiser (we suggest a sliding scale donation of free to $10-20 depending on your community’s resources) for your organization and/or others engaged in justice work
  
  
• use the funds generated to bring the bees to your school or town for a presentation or workshop
  
  
• use the posters to fund the purchase of a beehive banner and do the presentation yourself!
  
  
• start a dialogue at your school or with your members (ask us for tools & ideas)
  
  
• donate posters to area high schools or other educational programs
  
  
• talk to your membership or community base for the best ways to use beehive posters to tell stories, catalyze or sustain dialogue, make connections between different struggles, and fight for justice in Appalachia!

Want more info? See more details on our website! >
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Coal Graphic on Tour: a Video

We just found out that somebody posted a YouTube video of one of the Bees presenting the coal poster at the Earth Day Duke Energy Cliffside Coal Action during spring tour. See a sampling of how we're already using the graphic-in-progress to share stories about coal and climate change. >
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BREAKING NEWS: Activists Risk Arrest to Stop Mountaintop Removal

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Thursday June 18th, 2009
Hi-Res Photos, B-roll and Video will be available,

www.mountainaction.org.

Activists Risk Arrest to Stop Mountaintop Removal

Scale 20-storey tall machinery to call attention to nation’s worst form of coal mining; This is the first time a dragline has been scaled on a mountaintop removal site



COAL RIVER VALLEY, W. VA.—Moments ago, four concerned citizens entered onto Massey Energy’s mountaintop removal mine site near Twilight WV and have begun to scale a150-foot dragline machine to drop a banner that says, ‘stop mountaintop removal mining.’ The climbers plan to stay on the enormous dragline, a massive piece of equipment that removes house-sized chunks of blasted rock and earth to expose coal, until police arrest them. Equipped with satellites phones and a web camera, the climbers will be available for interviews.

This is the first time a dragline has been scaled on a mountaintop removal site, and marks the latest in a string of increasingly dramatic protests in West Virginia by residents and allies from across the country. This act of protest against mountaintop removal comes just days after the Obama Administration announced a plan to reform, but not abolish, the aggressive strip mining practice.

“It’s way past time for civil disobedience to stop mountaintop removal and move quickly toward clean, renewable energy sources,” said Judy Bonds, Goldman Environmental Prize winner and co-director of Coal River Mountain Watch of West Virginia. “For over a century, Appalachian communities have been crushed, flooded, and poisoned as a result of the country’s dangerous and outdated reliance on coal. How could the country care so little about our American mountains, our culture and our lives?”

An increasing number of concerned Appalachians and environmentalists are calling for the end to mountaintop removal, a practice that harms the people and places of Appalachia, destroys the economic potential of the Appalachian Mountains for long term clean energy opportunities and jobs, and furthers the burning of climate-killing coal.

"I've written letters, attended hearings and called my congressman, so far they have done nothing to stop the disastrous and unnecessary practice of mountaintop removal,” said Charles Suggs, a 25-year old of Rock Creek, WV who is one of those climbing today. “It has come to the point when we must take direct action to abolish this practice that is immorally robbing Appalachian communities of their culture, their health and their future.”

Every day, mountaintop removal mines use more explosive power than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Mining companies are clear-cutting thousands of acres of some of the world's most biologically diverse forests. They're burying biologically crucial headwaters streams with blasting debris, releasing toxic levels of heavy metals into the remaining streams and groundwater and poisoning essential drinking water. According to the EPA, this destructive practice has damaged or destroyed nearly 2,000 miles of streams and threatens to destroy 1.4 million acres of forest by 2020.

“We are all complicit in mountaintop removal whenever we turn on our lights, and we are all responsible to stop it. Mountaintop removal, the world's worst strip-mining, is unacceptable. Period.” said Rebecca Tarbotton of Rainforest Action Network, a lead supporter of the action today. “This is not a practice that needs to be reformed. It is a practice that needs to be abolished. By sacrificing the Appalachian Mountains for the country's coal addiction, we undermine future investments in 21st century clean energy solutions that will protect our planet, produce more jobs and preserve our natural resources.”

Mountaintop removal coal provides less than seven percent of all coal produced in the United States, and could be replaced with energy efficiency initiatives or renewable energy sources, instead of permitting massive environmental destruction of historic mountain ranges and essential drinking water for a relatively tiny amount of coal.

Recent studies have shown that the Appalachia Mountains could support commercial scale wind energy facilities, which would bring long-term, sustainable jobs to the region – but only if the mountains are left standing. In West Virginia, jobs from mining account for just 3.3% employment in the Mountain State – that is less than 20,000 jobs total. A recent University of Massachusetts study found investing in clean energy projects like wind power and mass transit creates three to four times more jobs than the same expenditure on the coal industry. The wind power sector has grown to employ more Americans than coal mining as demand for clean energy has jumped over the past decade.

Just days before this action, the Obama Administration announced steps to end the fast-tracking of certain mountaintop removal coal mine permits and to add tougher enforcement in Appalachia. However, it remains unclear what, if any, improvements this will have on-the-ground in Appalachia or elsewhere. Without a significant change in policy, mining companies will continue to destroy historic mountain ranges and bury community’s drinking water in toxic waste.

Following this protest, on June 23^rd leading climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen, actress Daryl Hannah, Michael Brune, the Executive Director of Rainforest Action Network, and former Representative Hechler will join Coal River Valley residents in a second round of protests in West Virginia.

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For more information, video and photos, please visit www.mountainaction.org >
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Settled Into Our Asheville Studio

Drawing continues in our freshly-built studio in a former walk-in freezer in the basement of the Phil Mechanic Studios in Asheville, NC. Our satellite location here in the Southeast keeps us closer to coalfields activism as we push towards a completed poster. The Asheville community has been very supportive and welcoming and we're in a good spot to hunker down and draw, draw, draw.

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Southeast Tour Yields Valuable Feedback

In March and April, six bees crisscrossed the Southeast region with giant banners of the coal-poster-in-progress, talking to tons of folks about coal mining and gathering valuable feedback about our developing imagery.



In addition to college and university presentations, we also paid visits to community groups who are helping us get our story straight. In the photo above, we're consulting with elders from the Traditional Native Survival and Cultural Center about our depictions of Native experience in Appalachia.

During our tour, we found out what's making sense, what's still hard to read, and how best to tweak our drawing to make it most effective. After a week in Asheville sorting through piles of post-it notes and notebooks, we're well poised for the final leg of the drawing!

More images and sketches are viewable on our gallery.



Photo: Reunited touring bees share feedback from our audiences and allies >
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