FIRST ANNUAL NY LOVES MOUNTAINS FESTIVAL July 11-13th in NYC!
The weekend will include a Music for the Mountains benefit concert, a public gathering in Battery Park, and a reading of our new play Current Changes in Empire by Sarah Moon. Co-sponsored by the NYC Chapter of the Sierra Club, Rice Restaurants, The Neighborhood Energy Network, and The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, it is an event you won't want to miss!
You can visit http://www.nylovesmountains.com for location and ticket information.
Publicity and press release are attached.
If you would like to volunteer for the event please email Stephanie at nylovesmountains@mac.com.
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Monday, June 30, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Carpenter Ants
the Beehive studio space for the coal graphic is just about complete with our newly constructed 8x4ft drawing board! and we're piling up all of our books, notes, sketches and smokey the bear posters to build some character.
Be on the look out as we start sharing developing sketches and storyboard ideas with you in the near future. But in the meantime, be sure to take a look at the Bees newest poster release for the g8 convergence in Japan, here on our website.
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On the Starting Line
With most of us back in Maine, the Beehive gears are in motion. It's a bit chaotic as we try to mesh our ideas and working styles into an image that will make sense, not only to us, but (hopefully) to all the people we've worked with on our research trip and to the public at large. We just got our studio set up and are trying to reach some sort of agreement about how to organize all the concepts onto a single page. The whole thing's a bit overwhelming and even with our deadline extended a bit into September we're going to be hard-pressed to do justice to the subject matter.
We’ve been asked what we are trying to do with this poster: shut down the coal industry? If so, won't all the people with coal jobs be angry at us? It’s a big question we’ve posed to coalfield residents and ourselves. Coal IS the main economy in that region, even though jobs have dropped drastically with increased mechanization in the last fifteen years. That means anyone who speaks up against the environmental impacts of coal mining and burning risks ostracization at the very least and physical violence at the worst. Family members also risk retaliation.
In Appalachia, most of the people who are able to publicly question the coal industry are somehow independent of that economy, either because they are retired miners on pensions or are lucky enough to have other work. Even those who told us how unsustainable coal is as a fuel source would often temper their criticism by saying things like, "well, I wouldn't have been able to have the opportunities I do [going to college, having a job I love] if it wasn't for somebody in my family working a coal job."
Most of the ex-miner activists we talked to aren't interested in shutting down coal completely; they just want to shut down strip mining, which has stepped up in the last twenty years, employs less people than deep mining and is vastly more destructive. Only a few people are imagining alternative economic options for the region -- for instance, Coal River Mountain Watch is lobbying for a wind power farm on a ridge threatened by strip mining.
It's tricky to balance that reality with the bigger picture of how the coal industry affects the rest of the world. The US produces 50% of its electricity by burning coal, which is by far the dirtiest option even when it's so-called "clean" coal. We're all paying the price in the form of greenhouse gases, heavy pollution, the poisoning of the watersheds and the clearcutting of forests that produce the oxygen we breathe. Rural folks whose groundwater has been poisoned by coal slurry are getting sick, but so are city dwellers who get asthma from breathing particulates spewed by energy plants.
It's easy to describe the problem, but we are also challenging ourselves to depict alternative futures that people are working towards -- wind power, local economies based on the richness of the bioregion, etc. -- that suggest other ways for Appalachia and a fossil-fuel-addicted nation to survive without trashing the delicate webs that sustain us. We have to do it without being preachy or putting our agendas in other people's mouths. It's a lot to figure out in three months, and the poster won't be complete or perfect, but we hope it will get a lot of noggins thinking and more hands on task. >
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We’ve been asked what we are trying to do with this poster: shut down the coal industry? If so, won't all the people with coal jobs be angry at us? It’s a big question we’ve posed to coalfield residents and ourselves. Coal IS the main economy in that region, even though jobs have dropped drastically with increased mechanization in the last fifteen years. That means anyone who speaks up against the environmental impacts of coal mining and burning risks ostracization at the very least and physical violence at the worst. Family members also risk retaliation.
In Appalachia, most of the people who are able to publicly question the coal industry are somehow independent of that economy, either because they are retired miners on pensions or are lucky enough to have other work. Even those who told us how unsustainable coal is as a fuel source would often temper their criticism by saying things like, "well, I wouldn't have been able to have the opportunities I do [going to college, having a job I love] if it wasn't for somebody in my family working a coal job."
Most of the ex-miner activists we talked to aren't interested in shutting down coal completely; they just want to shut down strip mining, which has stepped up in the last twenty years, employs less people than deep mining and is vastly more destructive. Only a few people are imagining alternative economic options for the region -- for instance, Coal River Mountain Watch is lobbying for a wind power farm on a ridge threatened by strip mining.
It's tricky to balance that reality with the bigger picture of how the coal industry affects the rest of the world. The US produces 50% of its electricity by burning coal, which is by far the dirtiest option even when it's so-called "clean" coal. We're all paying the price in the form of greenhouse gases, heavy pollution, the poisoning of the watersheds and the clearcutting of forests that produce the oxygen we breathe. Rural folks whose groundwater has been poisoned by coal slurry are getting sick, but so are city dwellers who get asthma from breathing particulates spewed by energy plants.
It's easy to describe the problem, but we are also challenging ourselves to depict alternative futures that people are working towards -- wind power, local economies based on the richness of the bioregion, etc. -- that suggest other ways for Appalachia and a fossil-fuel-addicted nation to survive without trashing the delicate webs that sustain us. We have to do it without being preachy or putting our agendas in other people's mouths. It's a lot to figure out in three months, and the poster won't be complete or perfect, but we hope it will get a lot of noggins thinking and more hands on task. >
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Saturday, June 7, 2008
KFTC Members Return from Colombian Coalfields
"KFTC members Rully Urias of Island Creek in Pike County and Sara Pennington of Knott County have just returned from a powerful trip to the Colombian coalfields. The two were a part of a delegation of some 20 U.S. residents who visited Colombia with the non-profit Witness for Peace. The group was in Colombia to learn about the challenges faced by communities being sacrificed to the coal industry. Rully and Sara's presence on the tour helped to connect the destruction happening in Colombia with stories from Appalachian communities being devastated by mountaintop removal mining."Visit the entire KFTC Blog Entry, here.
>"It's made me 100% more committed to my work here. I'm not only fighting for my home, I'm fighting for Colombia, too."
-Rully Urias
-Rully Urias
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