International coal resistance sprouting up in different ways. Check out the Coal Free Future Project, an artists project working to inspire action around clean energy and climate justice.
Coal Free Future Project
Incorporated as a fiscally sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization, the Project is a unique collaboration of award-winning American artists—writers, actors/theatre director, filmmakers and musicians—who have come together to combine their long-time experiences in the clean energy, anti-strip-mining and mountaintop removal and climate justice movements to create performances and workshops that inform and inspire action around a simple but basic truth in our lives: It’s time to envision a coal free future and work toward clean energy independence. In effort to draw attention to the national scandal of strip-mining and mountaintop removal mining, and the grave health impacts of coal mining and coal-fired plants, and the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate destabilization trigged by CO2 emissions, the Coal Free Future Project has launched a 20-state tour in 2010 with performances of “4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire,” a multimedia production, and follow-up workshops with nonprofit citizen groups and environmental and student organizations on coal, mountaintop removal, climate change and clean energy options. Project members include Jeff Biggers, Christa Faulkner, Ben Evans, Ian Hinz. ABOUT THE PLAY Inspired by Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, written by Project member Jeff Biggers, “4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire” is an original and groundbreaking multimedia production that brings a national audience into the frontlines of the coalfields and mountaintop removal issue today. The play draws from real-life experience and documentation, and seeks to recover forgotten history in our nation’s dark legacy of coal mining. Based at the home of Marie and Hovie, a young couple living in the mountain holler of Eagle Creek, the play chronicles their attempts to come to grips with their conflicting fates, when their family’s 150-year-old homestead is threatened by a planned mountaintop removal operation. With a backdrop of film montages and historically-based satirical faux-mercials by filmmaker/actor Ben Evans, “4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire” is a rare journey into the lives of those on the coalfield frontlines, and an entertaining, informative and illuminating theatrical production on the true cost of mountaintop removal and coal mining to our land and citizenry. Read more and view the trailer: www.CoalFreeFuture.org Support the Coal Free Future Project with a tax-deductible donation: http://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/fiscal/profile?id=2799