Just the beginning

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]

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.

Green Corps 2011 - Day 3 of Training

I’m now in day three of Green Corps training, the ‘school for environmental organizing.’ They have likened it to a master’s degree in environmental organizing and honestly it is hard not to see the success of the program. With around 275 alumni since the early nineties, members have become executive directors across the board in some of the top environmental organizations in America. Just in the last few days we’ve had speakers such as Phil Radford, the executive director of Greenpeace USA. While I’ve always been skeptical of their tactics, Phil seemed to me to have a solid head on his shoulders. He discussed the ‘million dollar megaphone’ we’re up against with corporations willing to spend whatever they can to keep things easy for them. In terms of his organization having a radical public perception, he emphasized that ‘we should be radical and effective.’

Yesterday we had John Rogers, the senior analyst from the Union of Concerned Scientists talk about their report, Climate 2030: A National Footprint for a Clean Energy Economy. This report goes into if a cap-and-trade carbon program in conjunction with implementing local polices toward a clean energy future could not only save the country hundreds of billions of dollars but also can create millions of jobs and save tens of thousands of square miles of space in our country (mining efforts may take upwards of 80,000 square miles). Solutions like this make sense, but unfortunately the steps we need to take to have a just transition to a sustainable economy are blocked by strong corporate interests, that million dollar microphone. This is one of the main reasons why the cap-and-trade bill just fell in the senate.

I must run, but this has been an amazing experience already, meeting a great diversity of organizers (there are 21 of us in the class of 2011) from all over the country. We face extraordinary challenges ahead and we must put forth a tremendous effort to bring about a just and clean future for all.

Of course with the hard deadline of 80% reductions of carbon emissions by 2050 only having a 50/50 chance of being enough to stabilize climate change, we must always continue to push in this movement.

“50/50 shot for our kids’ future? I don’t think so!” said Phil Radford.

Returned Home, Green Corps in two weeks

I'll admit, I'm not the best blogger. I have my spurts of blogging energy and then find myself too engaged with life to take a moment to sit down and reflect (something I should be doing more of nowadays). I am always shocked to see that it has been a month or more since my last post!

We concluded our wonderful road trip adventure a few weeks ago in Blacksburg and as of last week I moved out of town back to my parents in Northern Virginia. I'm definitely going to miss all Blacksburg had to offer, but there are definitely exciting opportunities coming down the pipe.

Here are the pictures from the rest of our trip!
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2521270&id=6232754&l=bc9a65b814
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2522629&id=6232754&l=c4a72da1a2

I spent a good 28 hours on a really awesome ~30 minute video putting the entire trip together. Unfortunately there are several copyrighted songs in it so I cannot upload it to sites like Vimeo or YouTube. I threw a version of it on my website (don’t sue me!), but expect it to take a long while to load at 2.2 GB. The quality is regretfully lower than I would have liked, but I ran out of time to compress it appropriately.

A new chapter in my life will start in two weeks with the bound-to-be-quite-crazy adventures of Green Corps, a national non-profit environmental organizing training school. Out of thousands applying across the nation, only 25-30 get accepted... I guess running for town council didn't hurt my chances.

My training starts August 1st up in Boston. Halfway through training I’ll find out where in the nation I’ll end up for my first of several 3-month assignments. I’ve been pushing for Hawaii but I don’t think that’s likely, so I’ll settle (if I can) for something on the west coast. Either way after experiencing the U.S. through our road trip I’m pretty excited to be anyplace new!

Another exciting tidbit- our guest trainers for August include the Executive Directors / Presidents of the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice, Greenpeace, Environment America, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Quite a lineup!

My goal is to blog a bit more regularly over the next year, so keep your fingers crossed and / or yell at me!

Busy busy

Life, as usual, has ended up pretty busy. Since my last post I was accepted into Green Corps and will be starting my 13 month journey in August training and doing campaigns across the country. The shock is just beginning to wear off and I'm tremendously excited for this opportunity.

Since I am on the run, I'll keep it brief with some things to look forward to:

-March 26th: The Issue of Coal Debate (7pm, I think)
Basically it'll be a two sided discussion between members associated with the mining industry and the environmental movement. We're looking at two students, a professor and an expert in the field on each side. It looks like I'll be one of the students. Should prove to be a very engaging debate.

-March 27th: Panel on Solutions for the Future (3pm) & Earth Hour (8:30pm)
The panel is a working title... We'll be inviting Governor McDonnell, Representative Boucher, Dominion Power, Appalachian Voices and many others to sit down and talk about the future of various subjects including solving the climate crisis, the topic of coal, and the future of renewables in Virginia.

I'm currently outreaching to the Town of Blacksburg and Virginia Tech to participate in Earth Hour, this international event where communities turn off their lights to make a statement on climate change. I've talked with Virginia Tech electric and they said that they'll be able to keep track of how much energy we save. Ideally we'll be able to use the Drillfield or Market Square Park in downtown Blacksburg as a community gathering place and turn off the lights at Burruss Hall or Downtown.

-March 28th: Field trip to Larry Gibson's Kayford Mountain
I've met Larry Gibson on several occasions and he is truly a hero in the environmental movement and for standing up for what he believes in. He refused to give up his land to the destructive practice of mountain top removal and uses it to educate others about its process. Logistics are still being figured out, but I hope we can get several administrators and town officials out there to see the process firsthand.

April 15th: Free Hug Day
Purposely the day before the anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech, every year since then I've helped host Free Hug Day on campus as a way to show appreciation for our community and each other. In the hours and days after the shooting I can say that a hug from a friend, even strangers I just met, meant everything to me and gave hope in a hopeless situation. We don't need tragedy to have this appreciation for one another, so in utilizing facebook as an outreach tool I hope we can get 1,000,000 signed up by April 15th. If each person hugs 30 other people we would have hugged 10% of the American population in one day. I think we can do even more than that around the world. Stay tuned for this one.

Those are just a couple events I'm working on right now. This semester is quite an adventure already!

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