The Climate War by Eric Pooley

Author:Eric Pooley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2010-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

31

A Rebel Encampment

She wore her hair short—not so much cut as sheered off at the nape, because what does hair matter?—and her indifference to style made her all the more graceful. She walked across a clearing in the Virginia woods, a woman in her late twenties, smart enough to keep herself to herself—impassive eyes, nose stud, tank top, gray shorts, an artichoke tattoo on one calf—and ducked beneath a canvas tarp stretched between trees to block the August sun. A map of the eastern U.S. had been mounted on cardboard and leaned against a chair. Thirty-five young people sat cross-legged in the dirt: shirtless boys with scraggly beards, girls in peasant dresses and Birkenstocks or jeans and inside-out T-shirts, hair pulled back from sweaty, luminous faces. They swatted at the bugs, squinted in the sun, listened to Abigail Singer.

“Hi, I’m Abigail,” she began, “and we’re going to map out a power analysis of the coal industry and see how our allies and adversaries fit into that.” They were at the Southeast Climate Convergence, a gathering of 150 activists from around the region, put together by Singer’s group, Asheville Rising Tide, and a dozen other local climate action organizations with help from Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network (motto: “Environmentalism with Teeth”).* On the big map, Singer had attached thirty-five sticky blue tags to represent the biggest coal-fired power plants in the region, and twenty light green tags for proposed power plants. “That’s kind of like what we’re up against,” she said. They went around the circle, and people described their direct action campaigns while Abigail added the details to her map. Later, two Bay Area activists stood up. Ananda Tan was with the Rainforest Action Network and Matt Leonard was one of the Rising Tide pranksters behind the gloriously phony USCAP Web site; he would soon be arrested for hanging a huge banner on the carved face of Mount Rushmore, just to the left of Lincoln’s head. They filled a large sheet of white paper with names: their allies (Greenpeace, Earthbeat Radio), their enemies (Duke Energy, Citigroup), and those that fell in between, like the Environmental Defense Fund. “EDF has taken nonpositions on progressive issues but we may want to draw them to our side,” said Tan. “They have a certain amount of power and they speak to power.”

Singer’s group was among the hardest of the hard-core, the ones who had locked themselves to Jim Rogers’s bulldozers at Cliffside on April 1. They were part of Rising Tide North America, a loose-knit group dedicated to direct action; the Convergence was where they trained recruits. Singer and her friend Matt Wallace had driven up from Hot Springs, North Carolina, in his biodiesel pickup. In this clearing near a brackish pond behind a church retreat house in rural Louisa County, Virginia, she was trying to let them know they were part of a network that could…well, she was not one to make extravagant claims, and she was not feeling good about their

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