U.S.: Coal to action: Join us March 2

Take the train. Dial down your heat. Write your senator. Taking those individual steps surely helps in the battle against global warming. But, scientists and advocates warn, it's no longer enough to fend off climate disaster. Get ready, some of them say, to hijack oil-lease sales (like a college student did in Utah), to climb smokestacks in protest (like Greenpeace activists did in England), to trespass at power plants (like demonstrators plan to do in Washington, D.C.). It's time, these environmentalists say, for some good, old-fashioned civil disobedience -- the types of nonviolent acts proven effective by the famous (Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks) and the faceless (students at Tiananmen Square, anti-war protesters on college campuses, women suffragists in street marches). At a recent Environmental Ministry meeting at Salt Lake City's First Unitarian Church that drew more than 300 people, Tim DeChristopher, the 27-year-old University of Utah economics student who disrupted a December drilling-lease auction, called for an "uprising." DeChristopher didn't use the word lightly, he said, yet "anything short of that will not get us where we need to go." Heeding such calls, organizers are mobilizing for a mass act of nonviolent civil disobedience March 2 to protest coal-fired power plants and the damage industrial pollution has caused to the planet's climate. "We're hoping and preparing for thousands," said Matt Leonard, the Greenpeace coordinator for the event. "It will certainly be the largest such action on climate change in U.S. history. We hope it will be the first of many." Protesters will gather at the Capital Power Plant in Washington -- source of heat and refrigeration for the entire Capitol complex -- walk on to the property, sit down and thereby break the law. "Enough is enough. Action needs to be taken," Leonard said. "But to really meet the climate crisis, we need collective action. You can't do that by buying light bulbs and hybrid vehicles." » Gore's plea: The March 2 demonstration will be the first major protest since former Vice President Al Gore, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, in September called for moral lawbreaking. "If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," Gore told the Clinton Global Initiative gathering to loud applause, according to Reuters news service. Since then, author and environmentalist Bill McKibben and poet Wendell Berry have chimed in. Last month, they wrote an open letter, which has circulated widely on the Web, urging mass civil disobedience against coal in March. "We will cross the legal boundary of the power plant, and we expect to be arrested," they wrote. "The worldwide daily reliance on coal is the danger; this is one small step to raise awareness of that ruinous habit and hence help to break it." But the thought of moving beyond conventional acts -- voting, lobbying, giving up cars -- stumps or scares some would-be activists. Others would never dream of breaking the law. After the First Unitarian Church meeting, Robert and Amy Matheson said they felt more aware of the enormity of climate disruption but were unsure what to do next. They didn't know what civil disobedience looked like and were wary of it -- given the risks. "I'm kind of a chicken," Amy Matheson said. "I wouldn't be willing to sacrifice my family, my freedom, my life." Maybe if he were emotionally invested, Robert Matheson reasoned, he would be less afraid. » Personal stake: All humans are invested in coal, activists say, even if they don't recognize it. Coal-industry advocates point out that the United States gets about half its electricity from coal; nearly all of Utah's electricity is coal fired. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates domestic coal could last for over 250 years at current-use levels. The countries where coal is the primary energy fuel are polluting everyone's lives. Some of the evidence: unprecedented asthma rates in children, the enduring drought in the American Southwest, the worst drought in Australia in 1,000 years, crop failures in Africa, the filthy air on the Wasatch Front, the cheat grass on the Western range and the fires that feed on it. Growing awareness of coal's downside led a British jury in September to acquit Greenpeace activists who climbed a 650-foot coal-plant smokestack in an attempt to shut it down. The jury reasoned that global warming is causing greater harm than Greenpeace. DeChristopher saw his own transgression as a step toward Earth's salvation. With climate chaos looming, he said, "How could I not do this? How could I sit by and be complicit in my own destruction?" The U. student could face federal felony charges and even prison for his protest. Still, he urges more people to do what he did: If an opportunity presents itself, find your voice and stand your ground. But don't go all out without cause, warned Daniel Kessler, a Greenpeace spokesman in San Francisco. "There's no reason for civil disobedience if another [measure] is more effective."

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"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical world." - Thomas Jefferson

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