Energy Justice Network

This social movement map from FracTracker on anti-fracking ordinances is very inspiring:

Click on it to zoom in and get the details!

This Earth Day, like so many others, we'll be invited to pick up litter, plant trees, be reminded to recycle, and countless other personal habits we can adopt to save the earth. Corporations pitching "green" products will bust out their "Lorax-approved" logos and encourage our "green" consumption.

This will be the first Earth Day since the Occupy Wall Street movement took form. How can we Occupy Earth Day – or as our Indigenous colleagues have urged us all to rename Occupy... how can we Decolonize Earth Day? To get to the root of this (in other words, take a "radical" approach), we need to look deeper into how Earth Day, and our broader culture, got colonized.

Part of this story starts with Keep America Beautiful (KAB). Formed shortly after the first Earth Day in 1970, KAB seems on the surface to be an innocuous litter-cleanup group. However, according to the Greenpeace Guide to Anti-Environmental Organizations, KAB is actually a sophisticated greenwashing operation that is funded and governed by the waste and packaging industries as well as the corporations most responsible for selling the disposables that become litter – companies like McDonald's, Altria (formerly Philip Morris), Nestle, Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola. KAB supports trash incineration (the dirtiest way to deal with waste) and opposes bottle deposit bills, which would increase recycling.

The authors of Toxic Sludge is Good for You! – Lies, Damned Lies and the Public Relations Industry also warn that Keep America Beautiful is a slick PR effort to get consumers to think that they are responsible for the trash that KAB's funders created. You get to pick up their trash, put it in disposable plastic bags, then have it sent to a landfill or incinerator that is probably owned by one of KAB's founders. In fact, the trash decomposes more quickly on the side of a road than in a landfill. If brought to an incinerator, the trash is turned into highly toxic air pollution and toxic ash. While none of us want to see litter, there are better approaches to helping the environment than picking up after the corporations who make disposables – such as challenging the use of disposables in the first place.

Denis Hayes, a national student coordinator for the first Earth Day in 1970, spoke passionately at the Washington, D.C. rally, shouting, "political and business leaders once hoped that they could turn the environmental movement into a massive anti-litter campaign." He stated that "we're tired of being told we are to blame for corporate depredations... institutions have no conscience. If we want them to do what is right, we must make them do what is right." These words still ring true today, yet corporations have been a little too successful at shifting the message and getting people to focus on picking up after corporate messes.

Older than Earth Day, Deeper than Litter

I once saw a pickup truck with two bumper stickers on it. One was some sort of pro-logging sticker, like "have you hugged a logger today?" The other said simply "Smokey Needs You." I was blown away – not only by how these two stickers could be on the same truck – but by the fact that the "Smokey Needs You" sticker didn't even have to tell me the message. The message was already in my head! The sticker was just there to trigger it. The advertising was so pervasive and effective that they no longer even need to say the message. Most anyone growing up in the U.S. knows who Smokey is and what he wants from us. Who is Smokey and what does he want? Of course, he's Smokey the Bear... and he wants us to prevent forest fires. Very good, boys and girls.

Obviously, it took a lot of money to put Smokey's message in everyone's heads. So, who funds Smokey the Bear? Who sponsors all of these ads? Here's a hint. The same organization that funds Smokey the Bear also funds messages that say "don't drink and drive," "buckle your seatbelt," "pick up litter," "wear a condom," "tutor kids after school," "feed the hungry" and many similar messages. They're the same ones who did such popular campaigns as "a mind is a terrible thing to waste," "take a bite out of crime," "friends don't let friends drive drunk," and "just say no" to drugs. You've seen and heard these ads in newspapers and magazines, on TV, radio, billboards, buses and bus stops.

These are all campaigns brought to you by the Ad Council. Most of us absorb the message without even noticing the sponsor. It's almost subliminal.

Around $2 billion a year in Ad Council public service announcements reach people in the United States with 123.4 billion media impressions in 2010 alone. That amounts to 400 ads per person for the year – more than one a day on average.

Who is the Ad Council and what are they trying to tell us? There is a common thread between all of their ads, and you can find it in Smokey the Bear's exact message: "Only YOU can prevent forest fires." The most important word in that message is the one they themselves capitalize: you. The common theme between all of these seemingly different messages is that individuals are the cause of social problems and that individual change is the solution. In case this isn't obvious enough, it's one of their five stated criteria for topics they'll take on: "the issue must offer a solution through an individual action."

The Ad Council and its funders are a Who's Who of major corporations in the United States, including at least half of the nation's 100 largest corporations. The idea for an Ad Council was conceived in 1941 to counter criticism of corporate advertising by showing that ads could also be in the public interest. Advertisers feared that legislation might tax corporate ads or regulate their content. Several weeks later, in 1942, with U.S. entry into World War II, it was founded as the War Advertising Council, to build U.S. support for involvement in the war, with "Rosie the Riveter," "Buy War Bonds" and "Loose Lips Sink Ships" campaigns. The Ad Council has persisted in supporting corporate and government / military objectives, even with anti-communist ads in the 1950s, a post-9/11 "Campaign for Freedom" and military recruitment ads in more recent years. Aside from these military ad campaigns, most of the Ad Council's history has been to use corporate funding to promote campaigns that distract from the corporate causes of social problems.

Only You...

The Ad Council strategy is a blame-shifting public relations tactic. These are the dominant institutions of our time saying that they are not the cause of social problems – you are... that they don't need to change to solve the problems – you do. The Ad Council and Keep American Beautiful exist to prevent such things as the McToxics Campaign, where high schoolers teamed up with community anti-landfill activists in the late 1980s to mail back the Styrofoam clamshells to McDonald's corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois to get McDonald's to stop using Styrofoam. This is a group activity getting an institution to change the packaging they use so that it doesn't end up as litter and in landfills and incinerators.

The Ad Council strategy is the scientific perfection of this divide and conquer strategy. Instead of dividing people into groups, it divides us into individuals, so that we don’t even see problems and solutions in terms of group identities.

The top 1% stays in power by keeping us divided. They divide us with racism, sexism, heterosexism, immigration status and wedge issues like guns and abortion. They'll divide us along every line except for class, for which they must keep the middle class fighting the poor. If the middle class and poor see past the manufactured culture wars and unite to fight the wealthy, the 1% is in trouble, because we outnumber them. Throughout the history of this country, racism has played an important role. In a book called A Different Mirror – A Multicultural History of the United States, the author spells out this history, showing how plantation owners, when their workers started to organize for better working conditions, would bring in other workers in order to racially divide their workforces, such as having Native Americans work along-side African Americans and paying one group less than the other so that they resent each other and fight each other instead of their bosses. In Hawaii, the sugar plantation owners did the same, paying the Portuguese more than the Japanese workers, and – once that differential wage system was abolished in response to Japanese labor protests – plantation owners brought in more Filipino workers and preferred a specific ratio of Japanese to Filipino workers. The expression "the shit rolls downhill" came from there, where the managers' houses would be on top of the hill, with sewage systems flowing down past the Japanese and Portuguese laborers housing to the Filipino workers' shanty houses at the base of the hill, reflecting the labor hierarchy. This history was very intentional and many sorts of division tactics continue to this day.

The Ad Council strategy is the scientific perfection of this divide and conquer strategy. Instead of dividing people into groups, it divides us into individuals, so that we don't even see problems and solutions in terms of group identities. It's designed to prevent organizing into groups to make change, which is why so many environmentalists start off seeing their options as doing litter cleanups, voluntary recycling, tree planting, adopting acres / cows / whales, etc. – tactics that don't challenge the power structure and which focus on individual changes, not institutional change.

Organizing for institutional change runs contrary to the American ideal of individuality, but social change is usually made by movements, not individuals working alone. Our culture hides this from us when our history books portray the "Rosa Parks effect" – where we learn about social change in the context of individuals who made it possible, not the organizations and entire movements of which these individuals were a part.

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."
– The Lorax

There is a paradox in the fact that we need to find bigger (institutional) ways to reach large numbers of individuals to get them thinking that individual changes aren't enough to solve social problems, and that their participation in movements to make change is vital (and not just voting for "change" every four years).

We need to wake people up to the public relations distractions around them and decolonize our minds. However, we don't have the reach to counter hundreds of billions of media impressions a year by trying to wake up one person at a time. This is the very weakness of individual change. So, how can we institutionalize systemic thinking, or the dismantling of PR distractions? Is fighting for media democracy enough, when Ad Council ads now appear on websites, without a counterbalance to encourage institutional change thinking?

Occupy has been incredibly successful at changing the narrative on group identity – putting class inequality into the mass consciousness, with the mass media helping perpetuate the simple "99% vs. 1%" framing. Can we come up with a similar meme that tackles the pervasive wave of you-are-the-problem-and-solution advertising and get people thinking in terms of group action to change institutions?

Mike Ewall is founder and director of Energy Justice Network (www.energyjustice.net).

Source: http://www.corporations.org/occupyearthday.html

by Alex Lotorto

This morning, I was sipping coffee and watching Sunday morning talk shows with my parents. We talked about the presidential election when my dad muted the commercial breaks that consistently included fossil fuel industry commercials.

My mom put it simply, "I made phone calls, put up posters, and worked at the [Obama] campaign office in 2008. I won't do that again if he supports fracking. He needs to protect our clean water, public health, and well-being."

Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", is used to extract the gas from a rock layer called the Marcellus Shale and in at least 32 states in the country. The biggest corporations in the world have their sites on shale gas plays and the gas trapped in them, including Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).

The vast grassroots organizing efforts to stop fracking, despite being largely unfunded by traditional Big Green environmental groups that have promoted natural gas as a bridge fuel to a clean energy future for years, have carried their weight in the pitched battle against drilling and are going to play a major part in 2012 kingmaking in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The fracking process requires up to 15 acre well sites, one to nine million gallons of water per well per frack, pipeline right of ways, smoggy compressor stations, processing facilities, thousands of truck trips, and fracking fluid cocktails made of up to 596 different chemicals. Thousands of violations related to environmental health and safety have been documented by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, the head of which, Secretary Michael Krancer, is admiittedly pro-drilling. An analysis from 2010 by the Pennsylvania Land Trust Association puts these violations in perspective:

DEP records show a total of 1614 violations of state Oil and Gas Laws due to gas drilling or other earth disturbance activities related to natural gas extraction from the Marcellus Shale in this 2.5-year period.  The Association identified 1056 violations as having or likely to have an impact on the environment.  

There is no such thing as "safe" fracking. See the movie Gasland to learn more.

Stephen Cleghorn, an organic farmer from Jefferson County, PA, has been speaking out for a moratorium on drilling in Pennsylvania, most notably after his wife Lucinda Hart-Gonzalez' lost her battle with cancer in November with a powerful speech at the DRBC protest the day of the canceled vote. From his recent TruthOut piece:

 

Her joy was in sustaining our farm against the threat of fracking. After Lucinda's ashes become a part of this piece of the good earth, it becomes sacred ground to me, and the company that owns the so-called "rights" to the gas in the shale below our farm is advised to keep their hell away from this place.

 

This morning, I asked Stephen for a comment on Obama's campaign this year. He responded, "Lucinda and I hosted campaign workers in our farm home for three months. I am very disappointed that he cannot see the need to stop fracking, but the Republicans will be even worse. I will vote for Obama, to be sure, but I am not as likely to have campaign workers here this year."

The grassroots organizing the Obama campaign relied on for the 2008 campaign is waning as rural Pennsylvanians like my mom and Mr. Cleghorn lose enthusiasm.

This situation poses a problem for the Obama for America campaign, especially regarding the latest news reported by the usually-Obama-friendly liberal blog, Daily Kos:

 

Situation Normal, All Fracked Up: Obama embraces fracking

 

Last week, the Obama administration gave what may be its first formal statement favoring hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of natural gas in a report, Investing in America (pdf).

[From the Obama administration:]

"Since the mid‐2000s, however, the discovery of new natural gas reserves, such as the Marcellus Shale, and the development of hydraulic fracturing techniques to extract natural gas from these reserves has led to rapidly growing domestic production and relatively low domestic prices for households and downstream industrial users. Appropriate care must to be taken to ensure that America's natural resources are extracted in a safe and environmentally responsible manner with the safeguards in place to protect public health and safety. Provided these precautions are taken, the potential benefits to the U.S. economy are substantial.

Of the major fossil fuels, natural gas is the cleanest and least carbon‐intensive for electric power generation. By keeping domestic energy costs relatively low, this resource also supports energy intensive manufacturing in the United States.  In fact, companies like Dow Chemical and Westlake Chemical have announced intentions to make major investments in new facilities over the next several years. In addition, firms that provide equipment for shale gas production have announced major investments in the U.S., including Vallourec’s $650 million plant for steel pipes in Ohio.  

An abundant local supply will translate into relatively low costs for the industries that use natural gas as an input.  Expansion in these industries, including industrial chemicals and fertilizers, will boost investment and exports in the coming years, generating new jobs. In the longer run, the scale of America's natural gas endowment appears to be sufficiently large that exports of natural gas to other major markets could be economically viable."

 

President Obama has a very important question to answer about fracking before Pennsylvanians like my mom, and Ohioans turn away from working his campaign in 2012. Namely, the old coal miners' union slogan, "Which side are you on?"

 

The future isn't very bright for us. President Obama has had an opportunity to halt the practice of hydraulic fracturing every single day of his presidency. Instead he has pursued the following pro-fracking policies that must be ceased immediately:

- President Obama initiated the Global Shale Gas Initiative under his State Department “in order to help countries seeking to utilize their unconventional natural gas resources to identify and develop them safely and economically.” Through this program, Obama has met with leaders of at least India, Poland, and China to speak in favor of fracking, making his administration the largest lobbying firm for shale gas drilling in the world.

- President Obama has ordered his Army Corps of Engineers representative on the Susquehanna River Basin Commission to repeatedly authorize water withdrawals from the basin by natural gas drillers, enabling the expansion of drilling in rural Pennsylvania that has caused thousands of environmental violations.

- President Obama has remained silent on the Delaware River Basin Commission’s ongoing effort to authorize fracking in the Delaware River Basin, drinking water for 15.6 million people, including my high school.

- President Obama’s Department of Interior office in State College, PA, under authorization of the Endangered Species Act, regularly permits gas drilling operations and infrastructure without sending government surveyors to identify endangered species habitat at the sites, instead relying on the paid contractors of the gas industry and the outdated, incomplete, Pennsylvania National Heritage Program.

- President Obama’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has authorized the construction of numerous natural gas pipelines, upgrades, and compressor stations that enable further development of gas drilling by moving the produced gas to market.

 

In Ohio, “Seventy-two percent of voters polled said there should be a halt in hydraulic fracturing, or simply fracking, in Ohio until more was known about the impact of the process, Quinnipiac found,” according to a recent Reuters report.

Ohio has been watching fracking expand at an exponential pace, with 156 permits issued for drilling in the Utica shale that underlies portions of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia. Ohio issued 80 of those permits during the last three months of the year, including 32 in November.

Ohio has also been the recipient of fracking waste sludge, hosting controversial Class III injection wells where drillers come from out of state to dump. The big problem? They are suspected of causing earthquakes. Activists young and old have been rallying against and even blocking access to the injection wells. 

Here in Dingmans Ferry, PA, in Pike County where gas leases have been signed within a few hundred feet of the Delaware River and in Promised Land State Park, with thousands more leases upriver in Wayne County, natural gas drilling is on our doorstep.

The river is the drinking water supply for 15.6 million people from New York to Delaware.

Industrial-scale drilling hasn't started here yet because the Delaware River Basin Commission has yet to pass a set of regulations that would permit the use of fracking. A handful of exploratory Marcellus wells in the river basin have already yielded one well casing failure in Wayne County at the Davidson well in Scott Township. Well casings are meant to protect aquifers that provide well water to rural homes from contamination.

The industry states that they are seeking to drill 10,000 to 20,000 Marcellus wells in the Delaware River Basin.

The DRBC is a federal commission made up of President Obama governors of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware and requires a majority vote to allow drilling.

In November, thousands of brave people planned to protest the final vote on the regulations in Trenton, NJ, causing a last minute dissent of Governor Markell of Delaware. Governor Markell's decision to vote "no" on the regulations was based on his concern that New York has not issued their state's regulations for the process. President Obama remains silent.

In a worse case scenario if New York issues their regulations this spring, the DRBC could vote to approve drilling on the Delaware River as shale gas development scales up quicking in New York as well. That is, of course, if President Obama allows that to happen.

Long story short, the Obama campaign can expect further protests, like the one we held in Scranton when he dropped in for a visit in December.

 

The anti-drilling protesters were the most numerous, as well as the most visible and the most vocal.

Dingmans Ferry resident Alex Lotorto, an organizer with the Energy Justice Network, said he expects the president to protect rural Pennsylvanians from the harms caused by drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking - a point that will be driven home at every campaign stop he makes in the state next year.

"He needs to keep his promises about clean air and clean water," Mr. Lotorto said.

 

I expect that anti-fracking activists will visit his campaign offices, campaign stops, and campaign websites to encourage his supporters join in the call, "No Fracking Way!"

It is President Obama’s decision alone whether or not he will lose the key states of Pennsylvania and Ohio by remaining supportive of the gas industry that is pillaging us here. Please inform him of this, starting with his Facebook page. It would do him good to pay attention, act on fracking, and fix what's already broken.

Tags: Obamafrackinghydraulic fracturing

It is amazing to look at Texas in Google Earth or another satellite mapping program. Parts of Texas are covered in oil and gas wells. Texas has over 100,000 wells.

This is what the map looks by Sonora, Texas.

The white specks are all wells.

After a year of work with numerous grassroots leaders throughout the U.S., our network of activists fighting "biomass" incinerators has put together a bold and comprehensive platform to guide and unite our work. Since so-called "biomass" incineration cuts across many issues, including energy and waste policy as well as agriculture and forestry issues, it makes sense that this came out of that network. The platform is in solidarity with those who are fighting other forms of dirty energy and seeks an end to nuclear power and all fossil fuels as well. We do not wish to see one form of dirty energy solved by promoting another, which we often see when nuclear power, natural gas or "biomass" are proposed as alternatives to coal. It is urgent that we move beyond all of these. Since many of us fighting "biomass" incinerators are also engaged in protecting communities from these other threats, we see this as one inter-related struggle for clean energy. We urge our colleagues -- both grassroots, regional and national organizations -- to join us in adopting this strong platform and to recognize that natural gas and biomass are not "transition" fuels.

Please view our platform and consider signing you or your organization onto it.

  
CLICK TO ENLARGE REGISTRATION FORM

For some, the concept of food co-ops may conjure up images of leafy greens, and granola, with members sharing the work. Although this model still works in some areas, the co-op of today is just as likely to be a modern storefront offering a full range of groceries, with an emphasis on the healthful, locally grown, organic, economically conscious, and/or fair trade.

It's clear that the co-op model is still an attractive one, as evidenced by seven new start-ups in Eastern Pennsylvania, from Chester to Doylestown and an eighth in Scranton, in addition to the six established ones in the Philadelphia Metro area. From Virginia to New York, 31 co-ops have organized into the Mid-Atlantic Food Co-op Alliance.

"People are becoming savvier about food," says Glenn Bergman, general manager of the Weavers Way Co-ops. "They like to know where their food is coming from and where their money is going. By shopping at a co-op, they know they are keeping their money local and reinvesting in their own community."

The current burst in co-op development is only a small part of a larger dynamic -- the same dynamic that brought First Lady Michelle Obama to Philadelphia as part of her "Let's Move" program, stating, "we want to replicate your success here in Pennsylvania all across America."

After having had the second-lowest number of supermarkets per capita of major cities in the United States a decade ago, Philadelphia has... [ READ MORE ]

I entered our Energy Justice Communites Maps as a submission to "Apps for the Environment".

You can Vote for Us and help us promote our cause!

Energy Justice will be participating in the Shale Gas Outrage protest on Sept 7 and the one-day conference on Sept 8.

We will be giving a workshop (from 10:45-12) and tabling. Drop by and say hello!

Our workshop:
Mapping and Fighting Demand for Natural Gas: Power Plants and LNG Exports
Mike Ewall, Aaron Kreider & Amy Wilson

read more

I just did a short introduction video to our EJ Communites Map website.

Watch the Video

I'm happy to announce a redesign of the facility layers system which makes it faster and easier to use.

This affects the National Map, Community Map, State Map, and Global Map.

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The Vulcan Project has done extensive research into US CO2 emissions. They've broken down the US into small grid squares (10 km by 10 km) and estimated *hourly* emissions for an entire year (2002)!

Now that data set is crazy huge (5 GB)! Fortunately, they've released the results for the entire year by county.

We have converted this data into KML layers which you can download and add to your own maps.

read more

We can meet all of our electricity needs with wind and solar. But what about when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining? Coal, nuclear and natural gas make up 88% of the U.S. electricity mix. There are several answers to the myth that intermittent energy sources like wind and solar can't replace these dirty energy sources. One of the most exciting is flywheel energy storage, now being pioneered on a commercial scale in New York and soon Pennsylvania. Check it out...

Frictionless future for energy

By Scott Stafford, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Monday July 11, 2011

STEPHENTOWN, N.Y. -- The technology contained in a new, first-of-its-kind 20-megawatt flywheel energy storage facility has the potential to make renewable sources of power such as wind and solar even more viable in the coming decades.

Located on seven acres within a couple of miles of the Massachusetts state line, the 3.5 acre storage facility consumes no fuel and creates no emissions by using flywheels housed in nearly frictionless containers. Using kinetic energy, the flywheels absorb or inject electricity to relieve the grid of excess electricity or to pump up power in the grid during high-usage times.

The storage facility’s function has traditionally been filled by fossil fuel-burning plants. The new energy storage facility, due to be inaugurated during a ceremony in Stephentown on Tuesday, eliminates the need for 10 percent of New York’s 200 megawatts of capacity required for grid stabilization. And it is able to absorb and inject power at a much faster rate than traditional plants -- in seconds rather than minutes.

The $69 million dollar project, owned and developed by Tyngsborough-based Beacon Power Corp. and backed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency (NYSERDA), was completed in January and ramped up to full capacity last month for the first time.

According to Bill Capp, president and CEO of Beacon Power, the flywheel technology makes this the first
such energy storage facility in the world.

It is considered green energy technology because it uses momentum rather than fossil fuel to stabilize electricity levels in the grid. And because it can react so quickly to power supply changes, it makes the use of inconsistent sources like wind and solar more palatable to the overall power grid.

"It allows for the deployment of more renewable energy by quickly adjusting to meet variations from wind and solar," Capp said.

The flywheel, suspended between two magnetic fields to reduce friction, is set spinning at 16,000 revolutions per minute by electricity pulled from the grid during periods of low usage. When more power is needed in the grid, the momentum of the spinning flywheel engages a generator to produce electricity and inject it back into the grid.

Several of these operations happen from one minute to the next and are controlled remotely by grid operators. There are a total of 200 flywheels in use at the new facility.

Figures provided by Beacon show that a 20-megawatt flywheel plant can reduce coal-fired plant CO2 emissions by more than 300,000 metric tons over a 20-year span, which is the equivalent of planting 660,000 trees.

The facility works at 90 percent energy efficiency, makes very little noise and is, for the most part, underground, said Beacon Power spokesman Gene Hunt.

The plant will likely operate for a minimum of 20 years without maintenance, he added.

A $43 million conditional loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy and a $2 million grant from NYSERDA formed an essential part of the project’s financing formula, Hunt noted.

"We provided $2 million because we do feel it holds a lot of promise and we’re hoping it will provide us with a more stable, reliable and efficient electric grid," said Dayle Zatlin, associate director of communications for NYSERDA. "We are always looking for new ways to provide clean energy and, in this case, clean energy storage. And we are certainly interested in any projects like this in New York State."

The company is now planning a second flywheel energy storage facility in Hazle Township, Pa. with completion anticipated for late in 2012, Hunt said.

Capp noted that in the future, Beacon Power will likely leave development of flywheel energy storage facilities to others while the company produces and sells the flywheel storage hardware to other developers.

Tags: clean energy solutionsenergy storage

I added biomass potential layers from the NREL biomass 2008 data set.

You can see them on our National Map.

For instance you can see a map of Forest Residue (dry tons per square mile).

You can click on the layer to get the underlying data value.

Burn that residue before the forest gets a chance to grow back!

I created a page to share our data in KML.

KML is a good format for sharing data. You can use a KML file in Google Maps API or you can import it into your own map with the (easier to use) Google - My Maps.

You can also view the KML in ArcGis Explorer (free), Google Earth, Quantum GIS (powerful open source GIS software), and other programs.

We hope to release our facilities data in KML at a later date (in layers and also allow you to export search results).

(Screenshot of ArcGis Viewer)

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Check out This American Life episode 440: “Game Changer.” <–link

I redesigned the homepage for the Map making it more dynamic.

If you aren't logged in, you will see New Facilities (the last ones added or edited), a Featured Facility (randomly selected from our list of opposed facilities), and several charts that track the general status for our campaigns.

There is also a link to our Charts page. On that page you can print and save charts. If you have any suggestions for what charts I should make - let me know!

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You can now filter a facility search to show all facilities, unopposed facilities, or opposed facilities.

Thus you could search for proposed biomass facilities with opposition

Note: you must login if you want to see all the details about the opposition! (For privacy reasons, we hide a lot of information about people and groups if you aren't logged in).

Friday, July 15, 2011
By TINA JOHNSON
Times Guest Columnist
On Aug. 29, 2005, almost 1,300 miles away from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, I recall sitting in my apartment and watching the suffering of people I had never met in a place that I had only visited once. And I wept.

My heart ached for those who had lost their lives, but my tears were for the helpless and desperate that had survived — those without the resources or ability to leave. And the fact that the many faces staring back at me through the television were brown and were poor made a powerful impact upon me.

Katrina in her wake left me in a state of greater awareness. It made me think about Chester — the place where I was born and currently live. No natural disaster had hit the first city in Pennsylvania and yet there still existed a shell-shocked community, as if the levees in Louisiana broke and reached up to the Delaware River, swallowed up the city and its promise for better days made to the people decades before. Just like the survivors in New Orleans, the survivors in Chester are waiting for someone to save them.

My awakening inspired me to do something that motivated the community to do something for themselves, to rely upon the ability and talents of like-minded people who may not have access to millions of dollars, but who had a desire to share skills, to learn new skills and who had a drive to create a sustainable community-owned and operated business that would benefit the community and impact people for generations.

In essence, I hoped they would learn to save themselves and begin the journey toward creating prosperity. Being able to provide one of the most basic, yet essential, needs of the human body — food — became more important.

The Chester Co-op is a business working toward providing access to food that is affordable and high in quality. More importantly, it is a business co-owned by the people who choose to work, invest and shop at the co-op.

The overall goal of our community-owned grocery is to have access to foods that are fresh, healthy and affordable. Our members are shareholders in the business and with ownership comes responsibility.

Just like any market, people have to buy the food on the shelves in order for it to be viable. The major difference is that we exist solely for... [ READ MORE ]