Chief Rueben George Speaking at Break Free Indigenous March

/in , /by

March Announcer: We have here Chief Rueben George. He’s shaking his head, but this man has been around the world protecting Mother Earth. His mother is Amy Marie George, and she is the one that said- we call her “Tah”- she is the one that said, “Warrior up! It’s time to warrior up!” So we’re gonna ask him to warrior up and share a few words with us. (Native language spoken, good-hearted laughs in the background)

Chief Rueben George comes from the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, (Eastern Burrard Inlet, BC) and he’s fighting against Kinder Morgan and the pipelines. As a matter of fact, he just came back from Texas a few days ago. He went to the main office of Kinder Morgan in Texas, and he had a strong message to Kinder Morgan. And I’ll let you share that message, Chief Rueben George. (Native spoken) Please welcome, Chief Rueben George from the Tsleil-Waututh Nation!

chief-ruben-georgeChief Rueben George: (Native spoken) In Houston, Texas, you see some of these refineries right here, and you know, we’re only walking a distance of three miles. In Houston, Texas, right along the residential area, they have 51 miles of refineries. If you take a look on Google maps and look down here in Washington State, even, I bet there’s not even over 500 refineries that give out emissions. In Houston, Texas, in a 51-mile stretch, they have 21,000 emission plants. This is where these owners of these companies live. This is where they set up their camp.

So we went down to Kinder Morgan, (to) their AGM, their Annual General Meeting, after we went to New York and spoke at Wall Street. We ended up talking to 10 billion dollars of the 140 billion dollar company of Kinder Morgan. We talked to some of these shareholders, we told them that the tar sands are killing people. Read more

Earth Day – A Personal Insight

/in , /by

0501161038a-2This Earth Day, more than any other, was quite bitter/sweet for me. I have a fairly long history with Earth Day. I knew Denis Hayes, the first ED of Earth Day, when we were both students at Stanford in the mid-1960s. I was a supporter of Senator Gaylord Nelson when I was in graduate school in Politics at University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1966-67. And I was a supporter of Congressman Pete McCloskey throughout his legislative career,

I was respectful of Earth Day from the very beginning of its celebration, but I, I am chagrined to admit, actively participated in a celebration for the first time only in 2010. In 2010, I was Executive Director of Sustainable Business Alliance (SBA) in Oakland/Berkeley. That non-profit organization was and is focused on building a strong community of locally-owned and locally-operated businesses in the San Francisco East Bay. SBA had a table at that 2010 Earth Day celebration outside Berkeley City Hall, and I staffed that table throughout the day. Thousands of people streamed through the Earth Day celebration over the course of the day, and it was a great way to gather new recruits for SBA.

At the end of Earth Day, April 24, 2010, I got a call from my step-daughter who had just delivered identical twin grand-daughters. So my association with Earth Day very much includes that whole web of family, and particularly those grand-daughters. I have been fortunate to spend many hundreds of hours with them since 2010.

Read more

The Role of Images in Environmental Campaigns

/in , /by

Pembina Hearing Room_reducedOn February 21st, the Newspace Center for Photography, in collaboration with BARK, hosted a community discussion on the pointed usage of images in environmental activist campaigns. A range of questions included: Do images have the transformative abilities that photojournalists have long claimed? How do organizations and community groups utilize images to forward social change? How are they manipulated or staged to align with a campaign agenda? When does the image cross over to the realm of propaganda, and what are the implications to activists? Read more

Action Alert: Protest Today @ Oregonian

/in , /by
In response to the Oregonian’s articles and opinion pieces against the Healthy Climate Bill and the Coal Transition Bill, we (350PDX, Renew Oregon, OLCV, OEC) are doing a fun direct action this Friday (today).
WHAT: Visibility at the Oregonian, including dropping off coal, people and dogs in dinosaur costumes, waving signs and chanting, and having lots of fun!
WHEN: Friday, starting at 3:30pm, we will go until about 5pm
WHERE: The Oregonian office at 1500 SW 1st.  (we will be at the NE corner of the building – look for the big dinosaur)
BRING: Signs, dogs in dinosaurs costumes, more people in dinosaur costumes

Read more

A Tribute to our Executive Director: Adriana Voss-Andreae

/in , /by

Adriana - CopyIn this season of gratitude, we’ve been thinking about how thankful we are for our incomparable Executive Director, Dr. Adriana Voss-Andreae.

350PDX started with little more than a list of names and email addresses collected at Bill McKibben’s Do the Math Tour event in Portland in November 2012. But it took Adriana to get 350PDX going by hosting a showing of a 350.org webinar in the spring of 2013 and bringing together most of what would be the initial leadership. For the next two years—until this past June when we were finally able to open an office—she shared her home with 350PDX, hosting multiple meetings nearly every week. With both an MD and a PhD in neuroscience, Adriana has many other options, but feeling driven by the urgency of the climate crisis, and recognizing the unprecedented opportunity our movement offers for addressing climate justice, she has devoted herself to this cause.

Read more

The Need for Climate Action to END Displacement NOW

/in , /by

The Need for Climate Action to END Displacement NOW – by Adam Brunelle, a longtime volunteer organizer with 350PDX.

A little over a month ago, 350PDX endorsed Anti-Displacement PDX’s (ADPDX) 28 measures in the Comprehensive Plan. ADPDX is a coalition of over 30 organizations committed to halting displacement in the Portland area. Recently, soaring home & rental prices and gentrification have made the city unaffordable for low-income residents and many are being pushed out of their communities. A phenomenon once largely confined to N/NEPortland, displacement pressures have pushed east past I-205 and threaten vulnerable residents in the last remaining affordable neighborhoods with housing instability and the prospect of relocating to cheaper housing with fewer services, loss of community connections, longer commute times, and lower accessibility.

Want to help Anti-Displacement PDX in their mission? Contact your city councilors today!

Read more

Last Week of COP21

/in , /by

We are officially in the home stretch of global climate talks. The final ‘draft’ text has been approved by negotiators and handed to environment ministers to be decided in the next week.

08Blog-setup-jumbo

The draft text has some promising, and some very worrying parts. Here are the biggest issues 350.org sees about what’s currently on the table:

  1. The date for phasing out fossil fuels keeps being pushed back. Keeping warming to safe levels requires phasing out fossil fuels and moving to 100% renewable energy by 2050, a date which many countries have already agreed is feasible. But the earliest mentioned date in the draft text is “2060-2080,” and other proposals calling for a transition ‘over the course of the century.’ We don’t have another lifetime to wait for real action, and we will push for serious reductions in fossil fuel consumption and production on the fastest timeframe possible.
  2. Indigenous Rights have been removed from the text. Indigenous people are on the front lines of battles to keep fossil fuels in the ground over the globe, and respecting their rights is essential to a just transition to the energy economy we need. Our Indigenous allies are working on the strategy to re-include this section into the text and we will fight with them.
  3. The path to increasing ambition after Paris is unclear. A critical part of any agreement will be establishing regular meetings to check in on progress of enforcing the deal and increasing the ambition to match with new  developments. The means by which this will happen is still quite uncertain, and understanding that will be essential to whether the deal sends a real signal that the world is getting off fossil fuels.

With fossil fuel lobbyists, powerful governments and other people at the hands of big polluters pushing for a weak deal — it’s more important than ever that we make our demands clear. The solutions are obvious: we need to keep at least 80% of fossil fuels in the ground, finance a just transition to 100% renewable energy, and make sure communities on the front lines of climate change have the resources they need to respond to the crisis.

Can you help us tell governments what the solutions are? Click here to share on Twitter:

cop712_1024

Big fights are coming this week to cap warming at 1.5C. Here are a few articles that sum-up where we’re at and what’s to come:

** re-posted from Duncan Meisel, 350.org

Re-cap Paris Climate Talks Day 1

/in , /by

Yesterday was Day 1 of the Council of Parties (COP) 21 UN climate talks in Paris. It was the ‘Heads of State’ session, so it was a lot of speeches from a lot of politicians and designed to give a strong mandate for the talks through December 11th.

350.org delivered a petition calling for 100% renewable energy by 2050 and keeping at least 80% of fossil fuels under ground, alongside Avaaz, to Marshall Islands President Christopher Loeak. The Marshall Islands is one of the countries with the most to lose from rising seas, and who then went to the floor of the talks where he said this:

marshallislandscop2_copy
Read more

Been a little Bad? Do a little Good.

/in , /by

This year, 350PDX is featured in the Willamette Week’s Give!Guide, the easiest and most fun path to year end giving, and the theme couldn’t be more perfect: “been a little bad, do a little good.”

Sometimes we as climate activists have to be a little bad to do a LOT of good. From getting arrested to stop Keystone XL, blocking Shell’s icebreaker in our kayaks to end Arctic Drilling, or creatively applying pressure to the City Council to get them to oppose new fossil fuels, 350PDXers are pushing the bounds on what is possible and winning.

Read more