Emily13
Registered: September 2011
City/Town/Province: Burke
Posts: 1
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I’ve always felt that as a human being, I have had a responsibility to take care of the environment, not because I identify as a tree-hugger, but because I identify as a member of humanity. This philosophy of mine which I had never been able to articulate well was summarized into one word in the first ten minutes of my college experience at the University of Mary Washington. My gen-ed Environmental Science 101 professor, also now my academic advisor, began her first lecture explaining that one word: stewardship. I guess those ten minutes didn’t resonate with everybody as strongly as it did with me (because not everyone in the class changed their majors as I did) but since then, environmental stewardship has become my passion.
I had an amazing chance to explore further the lengths I was willing to go to be an environmental steward during the summer of 2011. I started my summer fellowship at Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) thinking that I would be spending my time there working on their wind campaign, but when they offered me a chance to work on their anti-Old Dominion Electric Co-op Coal Plant Campaign, I gladly accepted, as my hatred of coal is one of the things that lead me into the advocacy side of the environmental movement.
After a brief meeting with my supervisor I was sent to my desk with a long list of links to facts and figures for the proposed coal plant and link after link provided me with facts that baffled me more than the last. Why on earth would anyone think this is acceptable? ODEC proposed that a coal plant be built in Hampton Roads. What’s worse is that the site of the proposal is just thirty five miles away from the Chesapeake Bay meaning not only will the air be polluted, but the water as well. Straight from the proposal was the estimated amount of emissions: 110,000 lbs of toxins every single day. This undoubtedly means mercury poisoning, heart disease, and an increase in asthma rates, not to mention to degradation that it will have to the ecosystem and its contribution of carbon. What’s worse than that is the proposal came to a sum total of $6 billion, which is the most expensive that this country has ever seen. And to top it all off is that the coal would come directly from Mountain Top Removal.
One look at the words ‘Mountain Top Removal’, and no more had to be said, the angry fire was burning inside of me and there was no way that I would be devoting anything less than my undivided attention to this campaign. The area that ODEC covers is divided into sections and smaller electric cooperatives jumped on board with the proposal. There were environmental organizations in each of those areas working, as I was, to put a stop to this. The area that I was given was the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative which covers counties in Central and Southern Virginia.
I started off by writing letters to the editor of local papers. I would spend hours digging through county newspapers and if an article had just one mention of the cooperative, a letter was submitted about how awful the proposal was. Not all of my letters were published, but two of them were, and people from around the state got word of it. In fact, the last one published because a ‘trending topic’ on the paper’s website. People were commenting from outside the county as well as within and the word was being spread like wild fire.
I also spent a lot of time looking for county events that I could attend to pass out our post-card petitions: Keep Coal Out of the Bay, where members could sign a pre-written letter to be sent both to the cooperative board as well as to the Army Corpse of Engineers who will be initially passing or rejecting the permits for the plants. Unfortunately, I only had the funding to make it to just one event, which was a Farmers’ Market in Central Virginia, but the response was unbelievable. Most people hadn’t even heard of the proposal, although when I filled them in on the details, 90% were enraged that the proposal even existed. I got people lining up to get more information and to fill out our petition.
It wasn’t until after that Farmers’ Market that the real resource that I had left untapped during my campaigning became apparent: the individuals in the community. My supervisor had been pushing me to phone bank to the community and ask for their support, but I had overlooked its potential until I realized how important the individuals really were. After that weekend at the market I left work early everyday to get home in time to phone bank. I was making about 40 calls a night asking people to come to the cooperative meeting and voice their opinion against the plant, or write their own letter to the editor of their paper and get their neighbors involved.
As I was having conversations with these people, I realized a common theme: their gratitude for my work. These people cared a lot about the environment, but they had never been reached out to like this and asked to take action in any organized campaign. They were more than willing to get involved and they were happy to go above and beyond my requests to make this campaign mean something.
This all came together the day of the meeting. Myself and three other people from CCAN stood outside in the parking lot to pass out information. People that either my supervisor or myself talked to on the phone came up and introduced themselves, and again thanked us for the work that we were doing. People that we hadn’t called came up to thank us for our work and volunteered to get involved on the spot. People were taking our stickers and t-shirts and fact sheets and everyone was interested.
After the meeting they came poring back out to talk with us about how much of a success we had been. The question and comment period had been dominated by our campaign, and only questions that were asked concerned the coal plan and the community (not the people from CCAN or me) had mobilized themselves and demanded answers from the board. People who had been on the fence about whether or not to support us before the meeting came back to sign our petition or ask how they could get involved after the meeting. We got names and e-mails of people that wanted to submit letters to their papers, call their board members, or get their neighbors involved.
I have never been so proud of a small group of people in my life. This particular group of people didn’t have to worry about their health or their environment; the plant’s construction site is miles away from them. They cared not for their own benefit, but because they knew that this proposal was wrong. This wasn’t a case of ‘Not In My Back Yard’, this was a case of standing up based on stewardship principles alone. This small community had just been waiting for someone to reach out and give them a way to get involved, but the passion to protect the environment had resided in that community all along, and now that it is released, who knows what wonders they will do.
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