About two years ago I heard the group Beyond Coal was coming onto Virginia Tech's campus, whose mission was and still is to shut down the Virginia Tech coal-fired power plant which distributes steam for heating in the majority of the buildings on campus. I immediately dismissed this idea and group as ridiculous and radical. The only way change will happen is if we go through the systems established.
Virginia Tech, as an institution, has a lot of bureaucracy, strict professional standards and expectations, various hoops, unspoken tests, and a lesser level of classism to deal with in order to get something that radical to actually happen. A bunch of kids without any resources or finances or training or experience will only be a public spectacle and laughingstock for the rest of the relatively conservative university community. After spending my entire collegiate career, including nearly every break in those years, investing myself in building up an amazing professional organization who was committed to working with our university in bringing resources together to "Invent the Future," I felt cut down to see this new radical mentality take over and erase what I and many others worked so hard on.
That was two years ago.
Today, though, I proudly call myself a radical and am in fact leading Beyond Coal for Colorado. Today I proudly see our campus organization was not cut down, but instead transitioned. A radical movement cannot be stagnant, which is exactly what happened and why things needed to change. We live in a world demanding radical change and it is only the few that will deliver. The Arab Spring was just the beginning, now the American Autumn will follow with so many different and evolving elements that it will adapt to the whims of producers loyal to national media owned by, indeed, corporations.
Several years ago I would have put my hand up, shook my head and walked away from myself if I had begun to go into a passionate rant about how corporate power is destroying lives and our hindering our way of life.
Today I literally found myself joining a passing anti-corporate march (#occupywallstreet) to the state capitol and spoke to the hundreds gathered about my experiences in the last year and why we must fight without a moment's hesitation.
Over four years ago there was a mass shooting at my school that left 33 dead and dozens more injured. The media frenzy that followed was overwhelming to our community and quite often abusive from reporters dressing up as clergy to Bill O'Reilly's Fox News staff rewriting and re-contextualizing an e-mail I sent that they put on air.
Now I see more than ever how the media are free to manipulate and shift stories to their leanings, or not tell them at all. Only now are the #occupywallstreet protests becoming front page news as the blockade of Brooklyn Bridge can't be easily ignored.
A year ago I was reluctant to embrace my first Green Corps campaign because it was anti-corporate (and ironically funded by a corporation), but what unfolded made me realize that the power corporations have is daunting....
[to be continued]
Showing posts with label Beyond Coal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beyond Coal. Show all posts
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Transitions
It has been over a year since my last blog post. Yesterday, I graduated Green Corps in what has surely concluded one of if not the most difficult year of my life. The challenges I've faced on a professional and personal level have pushed me more than I thought possible. I am a new person, someone who I am not ashamed to admit to having dreamed about becoming. I am skilled, confident and ready to take on whatever challenge lays out before me. I am sociable, outgoing, adventurous and a shameless romantic. I am political, engaging, and yes, even radical. I am not ashamed to say I am a progressive who wants to work with others to solve the entangled web of interconnected issues we are facing and have a lot of fun while doing it. This is said with it being noted that none of the aforementioned would I have been willing to confidently identify with just a year ago.
I'm about to transition into a new chapter of my life-- I have been hired to be the Associate Organizing Representative for the Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign in Denver, Colorado. I am so thrilled to be able to go out there and fully invest myself into a community and work directly in developing the leaders that will take us to a sustainable future.
The next few weeks to months are going to be a hard transition. A metaphor I found myself explaining the way I have felt the last few weeks is like that of a mirror-- in the last several months it has cracked in several places--- cracked by the challenges I faced with working on Green Corps campaigns, cracked by the growing disconnect from high school and college friends, cracked from life challenges of friends and family and finding a balance to be there for them while keeping up my needs, and the final, major crack, was the death of my father in June which has left me, as many who lose a parent, in a small existential crisis. It was all I could do to hold the mirror together for the last few months bearing the weight of these coming-of-age challenges to finally have it shatter altogether, completing a challenging chapter of my life. Now, though, comes the exciting and terrifying time to piece together the remaining shards into a new frame, a blank canvass. Through the reflection of these shards I will start to write out my thoughts of the last 13 months of my life in a series of postings over the next several weeks.
But before I start reflecting on this past chapter, I must head to sleep as the winds of a fading tropical storm Irene tussle the trees outside the screen door in the darkness of night. At last, though, I am at a place I can blog.
I'm about to transition into a new chapter of my life-- I have been hired to be the Associate Organizing Representative for the Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign in Denver, Colorado. I am so thrilled to be able to go out there and fully invest myself into a community and work directly in developing the leaders that will take us to a sustainable future.
The next few weeks to months are going to be a hard transition. A metaphor I found myself explaining the way I have felt the last few weeks is like that of a mirror-- in the last several months it has cracked in several places--- cracked by the challenges I faced with working on Green Corps campaigns, cracked by the growing disconnect from high school and college friends, cracked from life challenges of friends and family and finding a balance to be there for them while keeping up my needs, and the final, major crack, was the death of my father in June which has left me, as many who lose a parent, in a small existential crisis. It was all I could do to hold the mirror together for the last few months bearing the weight of these coming-of-age challenges to finally have it shatter altogether, completing a challenging chapter of my life. Now, though, comes the exciting and terrifying time to piece together the remaining shards into a new frame, a blank canvass. Through the reflection of these shards I will start to write out my thoughts of the last 13 months of my life in a series of postings over the next several weeks.
But before I start reflecting on this past chapter, I must head to sleep as the winds of a fading tropical storm Irene tussle the trees outside the screen door in the darkness of night. At last, though, I am at a place I can blog.
Friday, January 29, 2010
The Movement and Beyond Coal
In an hour I’m going to be on the road to Washington D.C. to have an interview with Green Corps. In the half decade I’ve been an active environmentalist I’ve learned that this essential movement is terribly complicated. You have differences in strategies from direct collaboration with community leaders to aggressive direct action. Within these strategies you have the idea of utilizing a step-by-step approach of outreach and cooperation which, if unyielding, may lead to aggressive direct action protests against leadership. Others idealize a tool-box method in which cooperation and aggressive direct action can be employed at the same time.
Then you have the movement itself producing friction between grassroot approaches and top-down induction of campaigns. Professional organizers, as we’ve been known to call them, come in with regional or national efforts and resources to get people involved locally with their issues. I’ve had experience in which professional organizing has been done what I would consider a right way, and a wrong way.
Last fall Green Corps partnered with the Sierra Club to kick off the Beyond Coal Campaign where dozens of universities across the nation with coal power plants are being asked to commit to transitioning away from coal to cleaner resources. Here at Virginia Tech a Green Corps member came in and helped seed a campaign that we’ve long been interested in. We’ve asked our administration to stop using mountain top removal coal within one year, commission a study of how we can do it (how about we actually start living up to our slogan "Invent the Future" for a change?) and be off coal by the year 2020. Between biofuels and natural gas for short term and as it becomes more feasible wind, solar and geothermal technologies, we aren’t having to reinvent the wheel here.
So far all of my experiences with Green Corps have related to it being done the right way of top-down organizing by empowering a local movement. The two organizers who I have worked with are nothing short of inspirational to me and motivated me to apply to Green Corps. Between my experiences of years of organizing and even a bid for Town Council, I’m cautiously optimistic for this interview.
I’ll leave this conversation here for now. Below is my letter to the editor to the Collegiate Times, with the original article here.
This is OUR challenge
Two years ago I had the opportunity to be a part of a student delegation that met with President Steger that led to the creation and passage of the Virginia Tech Climate Action Commitment and Sustainability Plan (VTCACSP). Since that meeting then, I’ve seen countless community members have a devoted part in the research and planning associated with establishing that commitment, and I am extremely proud of our university taking a step in the right direction towards a sustainable future.
Last week I had the honor to be present at another meeting with members of the university administration with Virginia Tech Beyond Coal; a campus group with a campaign that asks for our university to 1) stop burning coal from mountain top removal sites within one year, 2) begin co-firing as much sustainably sourced biomass without major retooling of our power plant’s boilers by 2015, and 3) to end our use of coal in the central steam plant by 2020, five years ahead of the planned boiler replacement. While administrators acknowledged that “[the university does] want to work towards that ultimate goal”, they said that this plan “aggressively evolves” the VTCACSP and goes against the work of those that were involved with it. Administrators claimed they would only continue this conversation if we, as students, work on changing our behavior regarding energy consumption.
Now, not only do I respectfully disagree with what was said of working against those involved with the planning of the VTCACSP, I also am disappointed with the fact that our administration, with the defined motto of Ut Prosim and slogan “Invent the Future,” have to rely on the students themselves to put forth such a challenge to our university community. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
We’re currently faced with enormous challenges in the world, and as a leading research institution I feel it is our duty to step up to these challenges and take them head on. West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, a long advocate for the coal industry, said in a recent speech: “To be part of any solution, one must first acknowledge a problem. To deny the mounting science of climate change is to stick our heads in the sand and say ‘deal me out’… The greatest threats to the future of coal do not come from possible constraints on mountaintop removal mining or other environmental regulations, but rather from rigid mindsets, depleting coal reserves, and the declining demand for coal…”
I have been heavily involved in the environmental movement and have seen it grow exponentially in the last several years. I know solutions aren’t as simple as flicking a switch, but Appalachia has already passed peak coal, meaning regional coal supplies will likely dwindle to nothing in the next few decades as costs continue to skyrocket. As companies begin to abandon already struggling communities, I find it the duty of our university community to advance alternative energies to create new green jobs, preserve the values of our land and work with communities as we pursue a carbon neutral and sustainable future.
President John F. Kennedy challenged our country to reach the moon in a decade, something deemed impossible. We did it. Now we are faced with another challenge with the same deadline, and we don’t have to go to the moon to achieve it. This is our challenge, and as a community let’s have newfound collaboration in our pursuing creative solutions. Let’s Invent the RIGHT Future. Let’s work together and move beyond coal.
Bryce Carter
Class of 2010
Humanities, Science, and Environment
Then you have the movement itself producing friction between grassroot approaches and top-down induction of campaigns. Professional organizers, as we’ve been known to call them, come in with regional or national efforts and resources to get people involved locally with their issues. I’ve had experience in which professional organizing has been done what I would consider a right way, and a wrong way.
Last fall Green Corps partnered with the Sierra Club to kick off the Beyond Coal Campaign where dozens of universities across the nation with coal power plants are being asked to commit to transitioning away from coal to cleaner resources. Here at Virginia Tech a Green Corps member came in and helped seed a campaign that we’ve long been interested in. We’ve asked our administration to stop using mountain top removal coal within one year, commission a study of how we can do it (how about we actually start living up to our slogan "Invent the Future" for a change?) and be off coal by the year 2020. Between biofuels and natural gas for short term and as it becomes more feasible wind, solar and geothermal technologies, we aren’t having to reinvent the wheel here.
So far all of my experiences with Green Corps have related to it being done the right way of top-down organizing by empowering a local movement. The two organizers who I have worked with are nothing short of inspirational to me and motivated me to apply to Green Corps. Between my experiences of years of organizing and even a bid for Town Council, I’m cautiously optimistic for this interview.
I’ll leave this conversation here for now. Below is my letter to the editor to the Collegiate Times, with the original article here.
This is OUR challenge
Two years ago I had the opportunity to be a part of a student delegation that met with President Steger that led to the creation and passage of the Virginia Tech Climate Action Commitment and Sustainability Plan (VTCACSP). Since that meeting then, I’ve seen countless community members have a devoted part in the research and planning associated with establishing that commitment, and I am extremely proud of our university taking a step in the right direction towards a sustainable future.
Last week I had the honor to be present at another meeting with members of the university administration with Virginia Tech Beyond Coal; a campus group with a campaign that asks for our university to 1) stop burning coal from mountain top removal sites within one year, 2) begin co-firing as much sustainably sourced biomass without major retooling of our power plant’s boilers by 2015, and 3) to end our use of coal in the central steam plant by 2020, five years ahead of the planned boiler replacement. While administrators acknowledged that “[the university does] want to work towards that ultimate goal”, they said that this plan “aggressively evolves” the VTCACSP and goes against the work of those that were involved with it. Administrators claimed they would only continue this conversation if we, as students, work on changing our behavior regarding energy consumption.
Now, not only do I respectfully disagree with what was said of working against those involved with the planning of the VTCACSP, I also am disappointed with the fact that our administration, with the defined motto of Ut Prosim and slogan “Invent the Future,” have to rely on the students themselves to put forth such a challenge to our university community. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
We’re currently faced with enormous challenges in the world, and as a leading research institution I feel it is our duty to step up to these challenges and take them head on. West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, a long advocate for the coal industry, said in a recent speech: “To be part of any solution, one must first acknowledge a problem. To deny the mounting science of climate change is to stick our heads in the sand and say ‘deal me out’… The greatest threats to the future of coal do not come from possible constraints on mountaintop removal mining or other environmental regulations, but rather from rigid mindsets, depleting coal reserves, and the declining demand for coal…”
I have been heavily involved in the environmental movement and have seen it grow exponentially in the last several years. I know solutions aren’t as simple as flicking a switch, but Appalachia has already passed peak coal, meaning regional coal supplies will likely dwindle to nothing in the next few decades as costs continue to skyrocket. As companies begin to abandon already struggling communities, I find it the duty of our university community to advance alternative energies to create new green jobs, preserve the values of our land and work with communities as we pursue a carbon neutral and sustainable future.
President John F. Kennedy challenged our country to reach the moon in a decade, something deemed impossible. We did it. Now we are faced with another challenge with the same deadline, and we don’t have to go to the moon to achieve it. This is our challenge, and as a community let’s have newfound collaboration in our pursuing creative solutions. Let’s Invent the RIGHT Future. Let’s work together and move beyond coal.
Bryce Carter
Class of 2010
Humanities, Science, and Environment
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Revitalizing the Website
Now that it has been a few months after the election I figure I need to stretch out my blogging skills. As you can see, I’ve been working on redeveloping my website to match my life as a community organizer and keep better track of all the activities I’m involved in. Check out the issues page to get an idea of where I'm headed with the design: http://www.brycecarter.com/issues/
I'll do my best to provide regular updates my final semester, especially with Earth Hour, Virginia Tech Move Beyond Coal campaign and the Wise County Project. This week I presented the Virginia Tech Energy and Sustainability Committee and the Blacksburg Town Council with a letter presenting Earth Hour. I've copied my letter to Town Council below:
As you know, climate change is happening all around us and its pace is accelerating. From melting glaciers to increasingly intense weather patterns, climate change is already impacting life across the globe.
To make a bold symbolic statement of collective concern for our planet, the World Wildlife Fund sponsored an event in 2007 in which active citizens in Sydney, Australia turned off their lights for one hour—Earth Hour. By 2009, Earth Hour became the largest event of its kind in the world with nearly one billion people from 4,100 cities in 87 countries turned out their lights, as well as international landmarks including theGolden Gate Bridge , Empire State Building , Eiffel Tower and Great Pyramids, and the city skylines of Las Vegas , Hong Kong , and Tel Aviv.
Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 8:30p.m. the world will send a powerful message that climate change is a priority that must be dealt with now. By turning off non-essential lighting during Earth Hour, hundreds of millions of people across the globe will show their support for lasting action to protect Earth’s natural resources, environment and climate, now and into the future. Earth Hour reminds us that by working together, we all have a working role to solve one of the most critical issues of our time. Earth Hour also provides an excellent forum for citizens to hold meaningful conversations about the ways in which all of us can act to be part of the solution.
With the Town of Blacksburg already demonstrating extraordinary leadership by signing the Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement, joining the ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability Program, and establishing the Mayor’s Task Force on Climate Protection and Sustainability, Earth Hour provides a new opportunity for the diverse communities of Blacksburg and Virginia Tech to come together to show support for action to save our planet for future generations. In potential partnership with Virginia Tech, our joint participation will show that we care as a community and send a powerful message to the world that theUnited States
As planning continues, it is our hope to utilize either the Drillfield on Virginia Tech’s campus and turn off the lights at Burruss Hall or utilize the newly renovated Market Square Park as a community gathering place for citizens and students to enjoy each others’ company in candlelight. With the assistance of Virginia Tech Electric, our electricity demand both on and off campus will be monitored during Earth Hour and the savings will be shared with the public.
With the assistance of Town Council, we hope that the Town ofBlacksburg
For more information about Earth Hour, check out www.earthhour.org or watch the video below.
I'll do my best to provide regular updates my final semester, especially with Earth Hour, Virginia Tech Move Beyond Coal campaign and the Wise County Project. This week I presented the Virginia Tech Energy and Sustainability Committee and the Blacksburg Town Council with a letter presenting Earth Hour. I've copied my letter to Town Council below:
To the members of Blacksburg Town Council,
As you know, climate change is happening all around us and its pace is accelerating. From melting glaciers to increasingly intense weather patterns, climate change is already impacting life across the globe.
To make a bold symbolic statement of collective concern for our planet, the World Wildlife Fund sponsored an event in 2007 in which active citizens in Sydney, Australia turned off their lights for one hour—Earth Hour. By 2009, Earth Hour became the largest event of its kind in the world with nearly one billion people from 4,100 cities in 87 countries turned out their lights, as well as international landmarks including the
Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 8:30p.m. the world will send a powerful message that climate change is a priority that must be dealt with now. By turning off non-essential lighting during Earth Hour, hundreds of millions of people across the globe will show their support for lasting action to protect Earth’s natural resources, environment and climate, now and into the future. Earth Hour reminds us that by working together, we all have a working role to solve one of the most critical issues of our time. Earth Hour also provides an excellent forum for citizens to hold meaningful conversations about the ways in which all of us can act to be part of the solution.
With the Town of Blacksburg already demonstrating extraordinary leadership by signing the Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement, joining the ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability Program, and establishing the Mayor’s Task Force on Climate Protection and Sustainability, Earth Hour provides a new opportunity for the diverse communities of Blacksburg and Virginia Tech to come together to show support for action to save our planet for future generations. In potential partnership with Virginia Tech, our joint participation will show that we care as a community and send a powerful message to the world that the
As planning continues, it is our hope to utilize either the Drillfield on Virginia Tech’s campus and turn off the lights at Burruss Hall or utilize the newly renovated Market Square Park as a community gathering place for citizens and students to enjoy each others’ company in candlelight. With the assistance of Virginia Tech Electric, our electricity demand both on and off campus will be monitored during Earth Hour and the savings will be shared with the public.
With the assistance of Town Council, we hope that the Town of
For more information about Earth Hour, check out www.earthhour.org or watch the video below.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)