Category: Featured News

Best of the Rising Tide website, things formally featured on the scrolling slider on the front page or on the old front page.

Maine Activists Target Portland Law Firm for Role in Commodifying Maine’s Groundwater

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Maine Youth Give Pierce-Atwood something to think about...

Maine Youth Give Pierce-Atwood something to think about...

Maine Activists Target Portland Law Firm for Role in Commodifying Maine’s Groundwater

 

People from across Maine brought trash bags full of empty plastic water bottles to Pierce Atwood Law Firm’s office in Portland, ME on the morning of Friday, November 14 to demonstrate the physical ramifications of the corporate bottling industry for Maine’s landfills. The law firm represents both Nestle’ Waters North America and the Nature Conservancy in their water acquisition projects throughout Maine. Nestle’, the Nature Conservancy, and Pierce Atwood share both financial resources and leadership in order to pursue an agenda of commodifying Maine’s groundwater. Young Maine residents and their allies gathered in Portland to protest against Pierce Atwood’s role as the legal liaison in the corporate theft of Maine’s water. In particular, those gathered were concerned about Nestle’s continued legal action against the people of Fryeburg as well as the Nature Conservancy’s refusal to remove commercial water extraction from the development easements attached to the Plum Creek development plan for the North Woods.

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Ecuadorian human rights / environmental Rising Tide activist Leonardo Cerda on tour in Oregon and Washington

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Leonardo Cerda is an Ecuadorian youth climate, energy and sustainability activist studying International Relations and Political Sciences at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador.  He’s also starting up organizing Marea Creciente / Rising Tide and a Climate Camp there!

Leo’s been involved in resistance movements against the oil industry in Ecuador since he was fourteen years old. He and others in his community starting doing workshops around the Amazon at that time, in different indigenous villages, discussing the causes and the future consequences of the oil industry, it’s relationship to climate change and the many other devastating consequences to people and the environment. Continue reading

RTNA in TIME Magazine: Taking on King Coal

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Activists don?t want more coal plants, like this one near a Pennsylvania playground.

Read original article on TIME.com [HERE]
Wednesday, Nov. 05, 2008
Taking On King Coal
By Bryan Walsh

Nothing could sway the Dominion 11 from their mission–not the cops and certainly not the prospect of free food. Early on the morning of Sept. 15, activists from a range of environmental groups formed a human barrier to block access to a coal plant being built by Dominion in rural Wise County, Virginia. As acts of civil disobedience go, this wasn’t exactly Bloody Sunday. The police took a hands-off approach and even offered to buy the protesters breakfast if they unchained themselves. (They declined.) But the consequences were far from trivial. The activists who had formed the barrier to the construction site were arrested and charged with trespassing, and they eventually paid $400 each in fines. That’s nothing, of course, compared with the punishment the Dominion plant will inflict on the environment. If completed, the plant will emit 5.3 million tons of CO2 a year into the atmosphere, roughly the equivalent of putting a million more cars on the road.

The future of coal will dictate the future of the climate. Plants in the U.S. that burn this low-cost, high-carbon fuel account for about 40% of the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions, not to mention other air pollutants. Right now there are about 600 coal power plants in the U.S., and an additional 110 are in various stages of development. Without ways to capture the carbon burned in coal and sequester it underground, new plants all but guarantee billions of tons of future carbon emissions and essentially negate efforts to reduce global warming. “Business as usual can’t continue as long as coal is destroying the climate,” says Hannah Morgan, 20, one of the Dominion 11. “We are not going to back down.” Continue reading

RTNA, EF! Challenge the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Facility

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Nov.4, 2008-Montpelier, VT

Citizens Demand Certificate of “No-Good” for Vermont Yankee!

Demanding the closure of Vermont Yankee, Green Mountain Earth First!, RTNA, and other citizens challenged the Vermont Public Service Board at their state office in Montpelier-Vermont’s capital-Monday morning. Dressed as elves and Santa Claus, the group entered the offfice and insisted that the Public Service Board (PSB) revoke Entergy Vermont Yankee’s Certificate of the Public Good and instead sign a large cardboard Certificate of the “Public Bad.” “We’ve talked with Santa Claus and clearly Entergy Nuclear has been up to no good,” said one of the elves entering the office. The group held photographs of Vermont Yankee’s 2007 cooling tower collapse and 2004 transformer fire as well as a giant banner reading ‘Do the Public a Service: Closer Vermont Yankee!’ The suddenly, an unforecasted “snowstorm” enshrouded the entire office-bringing an early (nuclear) winter to the annoyed PSB office personnel.

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