Rocky
Anderson, and 350.org founder and Grist board member Bill
McKibben (who also bloggedabout Monday's action). Hansen,
McKibben, and Anderson were at the front of the action,
signaling their intention to get arrested.
It's
the rank-and-file protesters who gave the strongest sense
of how the anti-coal movement is growing. Among them was
Rory McIlmoil, campaign coordinator for Coal River Wind,
which is fighting to get wind power going in his home
state of West Virginia rather than letting more mountains
be destroyed by coal mining. He was arrested on Feb. 3 at
an action against coal company Massey Energy, which plans
to blow up Coal River Mountain, and he has since been
served a restraining order to keep him off all Massey
property.
"There's
a lot of solidarity. It's amazing to see the whole country
come together," said McIlmoil. "We need to stop
them all. We need to stop all the coal that's being pulled
out of Appalachia and poisoning our water."
Louise
Benally also came to the rally from her own fight against
coal back home, in the Black Mesa area of northern
Arizona. Members of the Navajo nation there have been
fighting coal mining for 35 years, concerned about both
property rights and the health impacts of mining on native
communities.
"We
don't need to kill Mother Earth for corporate greed,"
said Benally. "Coal -- keep it in the ground. We need
to survive."
Other
activists included Beth Henry of Charlotte, N.C., who is
organizing against the Cliffside Power Plant being
constructed in Rutherford County, N.C. Likewise, John
Blair of Evansville, Ind., who lives in the midst of the
largest concentration of coal-fired power plants in the
world, has been organizing with the group Valley Watch for
30 years. Abedin Jamal, an Afghani student studying
linguistics at Southern Illinois University, was rallying
despite an exam scheduled for the next day.
Protester
Gretchen Goldman, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech studying
environmental engineering, said, "I wanted to be able
to tell my kids that I did something about it. If there's
no polar bears in the world, I want to say that I did
something to try to stop it, I wasn't just apathetic about
the whole thing."
Organizers
hope protesters will take the momentum from Monday's
action back to their hometowns and local battles.
"We're
almost down one [coal-fired power plant]. We've got 634 to
go," said Brune of the Rainforest Action Network.
"Even though the event today didn't culminate in
actual arrests, I think what we're going to see is waves
of direct action across the country against coal plants
and the expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure."
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