on the road

January 8th – January 26th, 2008

As a non-partisan non-profit organization, we were a little wary driving into South Carolina for primary season. Our understanding of our role as activists changed the minute we stepped off the sidelines and jumped into the game. By day 3, Andrew was dressed as a jellyfish and we were holding “Clean Energy“ signs next to activists in SCUBA gear and snowwoman costumes at the “Make a Splash“ rally. Seriously, check the slideshow on the On the Road page.

And here we are, travelling in and out of Columbia, South Carolina, working on a 10 organization coalition (and growing!) pushing the Environment America Clean Energy Pledge, in hopes that whichever candidate makes it to the White House will take on the full challenge of CLEAN energy independence. Our bus is parked behind the officespace which was donated to the cause, and we’re working as a team of 14 activists, working together to run this campaign in South Carolina.

Check out some of our coalition partners and their work in placing climate change at the forefront of the presidential primaries!

• the Heat is On!!, the League of Conservation Voters campaign
• One Sky, one climate, one future, one chance
• the Coastal Conservation League
• the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy
• the Carbon Coalition

As a bit of follow-up, Brenna and Jon attended the State Corporation Commission hearing regarding the proposed coal-fired plant in Wise County, Va. Expecting a small group of the powerful activists we worked with in Wise, we walked into the SCC building to find two courtrooms overflowing with the young and the old from all over the state. 176 people registered to make a public testimony before the judges and legal teams. For more information, check out the Richmond Times Dispatch article on InRich.com. It was a moving show of the conflicts and emotions inherent in these issues.

So, keep an eye out for our continued activities in South Carolina. Check out In the Press for the attention that we and this powerful group of activists are receiving in promotion of a Clean Energy Future for America!

December 10 – December 18, 2007

Appalachia, Virginia, located in the heart of Wise County, was covered by a cold, dark mist throughout our stay. The mountains surrounding the hillside town seemed to smoke day and night as a constant drizzle made sure the ground (and one’s shoes, and one’s vehicle) was covered in the black spray from the road. Every few seconds, whether you’re in the center of town or in a house on the hillside, you can hear a large black truck drive by, rattling all windows and doors, beating its path through a once lively and booming town. The population is diminished now; coal companies spent much of the nineties replacing their workers with machines and explosives, so many people have left for lack of jobs. Some stay, for a mining position that hasn’t yet been cut, for family, or because they’ve nowhere else to go. Others stay to fight the wanton destruction of the once lush Appalachian mountains and the culture that grew up around them. In West Virginia, coal companies have considered lobbying for forced depopulation to quiet their concerns.

Every so often, less frequently than the coal trucks but more powerfully than their enormous loads, a ray of sunshine would break through: one’s name was Matthew, one’s Mike, another’s Hannah, most of them tied together by a woman named Cathy and the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards.

Back Porch traveled to Wise in order to aid in the preliminary permit hearings regarding a new coal-fired power plant to be placed in Virginia City. This site would be 5 miles from the existing Carbo plant, one of the most environmentally threatening plants in the area, and less than 1 mile from the St. Paul Elementary and High Schools. The Department of Environmental Quality came to present on the initial air-quality permit, showing standards meeting the national requirements of the EPA, but failing to recognize the health and social justice concerns of the immediate regional community. We thought we’d come help Cathy and the community members involved in this process to really debunk the information and organize the community’s response to Dominion’s plans. Instead, we learned that energy conservation, just turning off your lights when you’re not using them, is deeply connected to the lives of our neighbors and the justice of our energy economy.

As we move into the 21st Century, as we work with eachother to create a sustainable life for ourselves and our children, and as we deal with various brilliant, moving, global concepts, we are also charged to remember that injustice still prevails in our own backyards. But there are rainbows. Cathy Selvage has put the entirety of herself into saving her life, her land, her history and OUR Appalachians. So have Hannah Morgan, and Bill McCabe, and countless others working with Cathy and SAMS, and the folks at Appalachian Voices, and the I Love Mountains campaign, not to mention the Sierra Club, CCAN, and the Southern Environmental Law Center.

There are many groups working for social and environmental justice in our Appalachian Mountains. So much information out there, such a call for help and awareness, so much work to be done. But we can do this. That’s what Cathy taught us as she cooked us breakfast our final morning in the area. From Cathy’s porch one can see the cold, dark mist rising off what used to be the Appalachian hillside and is now a bald, terraced moonscape. But what one hears is not the rattling of the trucks or the dynamite on the mountain, but rather Cathy’s soft, subtle voice calling for the power of equality, justice, and activism toward what is right and good in the world.

For more information and to sign the urgent petition, please see the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards website. In addition, ILoveMountains.org and the Appalachian Voices website, including their Front Porch blog, have a good deal of information regarding the issues and ways to get involved. Depopulation plan speech provided by Mountain Justice Summer.

The Back Porch Energy Initiative has been on quite a roll the past few weeks. Successes abound, with the general trials and tribulations of bussing around the country with a mission to promote an issue important to us all. We’re hitting all four corners of Virginia, three technically, bringing faces and feeling to energy conservation and sustainability issues in the United States.

But its not us witnessing the successes of our programs, its the Virginia community at present. We haven’t met a sad face yet. Everyone we’ve spoken to, literally, has been at least supportive if not active in transforming this issue into something genuinely positive, helping us help them to form a community network of invested partners in energy awareness activism. We realize this takes time and effort, and that’s what we’re here to donate.

An enormous honor was recieved by Virginia Walters, our Executive Director. Style Weekly, “Richmond’s alternative for news, arts, culture, and opinion,” awarded Virginia as one of the five “GREEN HEROES” in Central Virginia. Standing beside established professionals from around the region, Virginia accepted the award as a part of the whole. Style Weekly found it necessary and important to reward environmentally focused activities in the region, and we couldn’t be happier to be a small part of those activities. Together we can change the world.

Back on the road, we recieved an offer from Twin Oaks, an intentional community in Louisa County, to host us for the week. We pulled onto the farm and were immediately at home, eating local, organic and community grown foods, sleeping by the heat of a wood burning stove, and surrounding ourselves with passionate, involved and extremely warm people.

Which brings us to now. We’re on the road and heading south, a brief stop coming up in Wise County, Virginia where we’ll be volunteering on a strong environmental justice campaign in the area. Until then, you know where you can find us… (by jon)

Before taking a short break for the Thanksgiving holiday, we had two busy weeks in Fredericksburg and Petersburg, Virginia. In Fredericksburg, we initiated and facilitated with a handful of various projects, including helping the local Sierra Club chapter with their Cool Cities campaign. “Cool Cities” is a national Sierra Club campaign encouraging communities to fight global warming through local energy initiatives. For more information about this campaign, check out www.coolcities.us . In addition to assisting with this campaign, we conducted an energy audit of New Vision, a local non-profit, providing the organization with energy efficient supplies, eco-friendly cleaning products, and a comprehensive report and plan to reduce energy consumption in their beautiful new building. While in Fredericksburg, we also facilitated community-university partnerships through Mary Washington University, networking the environmental groups with other social justice groups to address environmental justice issues.

After Fredericksburg we headed to Petersburg, Virginia, where we truly delved into the various aspects of community organization entailed in our mission. From canvassing local businesses to working with Dr. Holvar Olsen on making CARES Inc. an energy efficient and environmentally friendly building, our team found Petersburg to be a vibrant and developing environmental community. (by Brenna)

Kicking off our tour in Williamsburg, Virginia showed us the value of and respect for what we’re working towards. The week was incredibly successful, heading out of our homebase having provided programming to hundreds of individuals, young and old. In addition, we left with a painted home, a waste vegetable oil pre-filter, and some beautiful memories. Williamsburg was home to most of us back in the day, and is currently home to all of our interns, and it welcomed us with open arms and warm hearts.

We began with an incredible kickoff concert at the Williamsburg Public Library. The Rock River Gypsies, our very own Gina Sobel’s band, opened for the incredibly talented Old School Freight Train, who performed with a passion rooted in their support for our cause. The show was an incredible success, leaving folks dancing in the aisles to the bootstomping tunes of OSFT’s newgrass styling.

Our interns threw us the party of a lifetime after the show, which ended up catching a good most of us under the tent in the backyard, listening to a moving jam session between the Gypsies and Freight Train. Dampening in the mist on the backporch, we listened to a musical rendition of what we’re working for.

While Liz and Brenna provided educational programming to over 200 middle schoolers (yeah, in one day), we had a public “paint-the-bus-by-number” event in the middle of the William and Mary campus. Mila Thomas, our good friend and artist, developed the concept for the bus, painted it out on the side, and trusted the community to fill in her work. The finished product carries us down the road in a personalized aesthetic, putting smiles on faces and drawing attention to our cause.

Other successes, such as a small business meeting, a community biofuels discussion, and the Sorority Court “greening challenge” kickoff linked our former interns and current groundteam with community projects to develop over the course of the year. And many more connections were forged for facilitating various changes in many different communities.

Williamsburg left us with great feelings of accomplishment and a perspective of the ups and downs we’ll be expecting as we kickoff this expedition. We took off for Powershift at the University of Maryland campus soaked to the bone in used vegetable oil, and arrived a few hundred miles north without paying a dime for fuel. (by jon)

In order to minimize our carbon footprint, the Back Porch crew piled in my car and headed up north to practice some programming and do a bit of fundraising. Oddly enough, the only two Back Porch board members not from the south, are from Connecticut. While Brenna and I cannot put us in touch with many southerners, we insisted that the crew headed up north to meet our friends and families.

Thursday began at 7:30am where we woke up groggy after a full nights travel to conduct nine hours of educational programming with my brother’s high school and Fairfield University. We spent the day chatting with Fairfield High kids about environmental justice and our project in general. Highlights of the day include: reuniting with my favorite and most inspirational teacher from high school, Ms. Wolfer (who bought us lunch – we love you!), students who approached us after our presentation to ask how they can get more involved, adding 40 new names to our Back Porch listserv, and of course talking all day about what we love: the environment and how to save it.

The programming day concluded with sessions about organizing, empowering student environmental groups to tackle big issues through our campaign training. Fairfield high school students are now aiming for climate neutrality in their school! Their first project is taking place the third week in October where the Earth Action club is hosting a “Lights Out“ event and the entire school will be turning off all lights for a whole day to raise awareness about excess energy consumption – Go Falcons!

Later that evening, the crew left Fairfield and headed up to Brenna’s old school, Connecticut College to host a benefit concert. Both Gina and Brenna played sets for the show making the event a perfect conclusion to the day.

Friday was spent cooking food, cleaning, and preparing for Saturday night’s big benefit party hosted by my dad. As Saturday rolled around we had a house full of southern food including fried chicken, jambalaya, cheese biscuits, sweet potato fries, and pulled pork – YUM! That night our friends and family members poured into my Dad’s house to enjoy his delicious cooking, more music played by Gina and Brenna, and even some Virginia wine.

All and all, it was a wonderful weekend and a huge success – we raised enough money to purchase our truck! It was so encouraging to witness all of the support and it instilled us with a new surge of motivation and positive thinking. Thank you to everyone who helped us out, words cannot express our gratitude! (by Liz)

the backporch blog was transferred from blogger to wordpress on 14 January, 2008 with 4 posts in tow.