Here are three good activism stories I wanted to cover in more depth this week but never found the time to:
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met for annual meetings Tuesday in Washington, and while most of their talks likely centered on economic problems facing Europe and the United States, a delegation of activists from India called on the World Bank to follow through on proposed rules to cut funding for coal-burning power plants. And over the rest of the week, the Indian activists [traveled] to West Virginia to meet with activists who have fought coal plants and protested the use of mountaintop removal mining….
Delaware Riverkeeper, Food & Water Watch, Frack Action, New Jersey Sierra Club, Protecting Our Waters, United for Action and Energy Action Coalition held a rally and press conference [this week] outside a meeting of the Delaware River Basin Commission to protest a controversial form of gas drilling known as fracking along the Delaware River.
“If we lose the Delaware River to fracking we’ve lost one of our biggest drinking water supplies and one of our nation’s most precious natural resources. Once toxic fracking chemicals pollute this river, the ensuing public health crisis could impact millions from Delaware to New York, causing widespread and irreversible devastation,” said Jim Walsh, Eastern Region Director for Food & Water Watch….
Kumi Naidoo: The struggle for climate justice is not a popularity contest
Speaking at a Climate Week NYC event hosted by the Maldives, the TckTckTck campaign, and the U.N., Greenpeace International President Kumi Naidoo argued that the path to a sustainable future will involve peaceful, popular civil disobedience. “The struggle for climate justice is not a popularity contest,” he argued. He said the lesson of the Arab Spring, and the history of struggles from suffrage to civil rights to the end of apartheid, is that change only comes when decent men and women are willing to risk their lives and go to jail in peaceful protest.
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