So, it's been a busy few weeks for me. I've been on the road a bunch and feeling a bit ragged - so apologies for being out of touch with many of you.

I spent a week up in Sonoma County with The Ruckus Society, at a training camp for their Indigenous People's Power Project (IP3). We were working with young leaders from Native communities across North America, helping prepare them for campaigns they are fighting trying to stop clear-cut logging, surface mining, and coal-power plant developments on their lands. Inspiring group of folks, and I'm very excited to keep working with them in the future.


I then flew to Charleston West Virginia, to spend a week working with folks in the Appalachian Coal communities. Seeing first-hand the destruction caused from mountain-top removal surface mining and the atrocities committed against these poor communities was gut-wrenching. It was part of Mountain Justice Spring Break - gathering college students from around the country to work alongside communities across Appalachia. We visisted mining sites, took water samples from neighborhood homes that were contaminated by decades of coal toxins, visited a school that sits alongside a massive coal silo a stone's throw from a 2.8 billion gallon toxic sludge reservoir and held all sorts of workshops and trainings. The issues facing Appalachia are appalling - such a blatant disregard for life, a once-beautiful environment, and people. PLEASE look at some pictures and videos at http://www.ilovemountains.org/


We had an excellent action where we occupied the governor of West Virginia's office for several hours. Over 100 people sang, chanted, danced and demanded that the governor take leadership in prioritizing the safety of kids at Marsh Fork Elementary over the profits of coal companies. See the story and video here: http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/1217 and video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8vYJhADxQ4

I got home, and then Monday on the anniversary of the Iraq War, Bay Rising  (an affinity group that friends and I started recently) organized a grassroots-led shutdown of Chevron World Headquarters in San Ramon. There's been a growing call nationally to "escalate" the costs of continuing the war - recognizing that 4 years of marches, rallies, polls, and petitions have yet to bring about substantial change. 

We picked Chevron as we wanted to "connect the dots" between the war and oil, and also around climate change. We wanted to draw attention to the fact  we are spending billions to fight a war to control resources that are ultimately leading to global warming and destruction - rather than spend billions for peace and responsible energy policy (and not kill anyone in the process). Chevron is also a primary profiteer with the newly proposed "Iraq Oil Law", which will essentially privatize their oil reserves to the benefit of corporate interests.

Considering the action we organized was on a weekday, early in the morning, hard to get to (45 minutes from San Fran), and competing with many other anti-war events, we had a great success. Excellent media coverage - some national  (NY Times), and also our event framed much of the general local media coverage about the war. Check out the story, pics and video below...

http://understory.ran.org/2007/03/20/end-chevrons-oil-crimes-from-richmond-to-iraq/

And of course, photos of all this and more are on my Flickr account.

-Matt