This article originally appeared in Waging Nonviolence.

One of the great metaphors of justice and peace is the feast: the abundant banquet where all are welcome, where none is excluded, and where our interconnectedness moves from a vague concept to a concrete reality. When we eat together we literally become one body.

This was the powerful challenge and opportunity of the civil rights movement’s lunch counter sit-ins in the 1960s—or the banquet in San Francisco, Calif., that some of us created in the mid-1990s, where nearly a thousand homeless and non-homeless people broke a city-wide law by feasting together with linen table cloths, china dishware, goblets, cut flowers, and succulent courses. We shared a meal with the hungry in a public space that was most prohibited: Civic Center Park, in front of City Hall.

Just as the sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South dramatically sparked the long-term process of shaking the table until all could sit at it, so the San Francisco banquet—organized by Religious Witness with Homeless People—jarringly revealed both the injustice of the city’s attack on the homeless and a counter-image of how we actually should be: living together, being together, and — perhaps most importantly—eating together.

In both cases—and in many other movements struggling for justice and peace—food is at the heart of the matter: its availability, its access, and with whom we will share it. But, increasingly, the social conflict over food has been compounded by the question of what food is, how it is produced, and who controls the supply. These questions, while ancient, have taken on a dramatically new form with the synergy of radically new bio-technologies, a relatively small number of corporations producing most of the food we eat, and pliant political cultures. Supported by the U.S. government, this synergy is making genetically modified food the default in the United States and elsewhere and locking in control over how food is grown, distributed and consumed.

No corporation epitomizes this trend more than biotech giant Monsanto. Consequently, a growing movement with its own synergy has been building over the past two decades. Now it may be ready to take the next step. On Saturday, May 25, the global March Against Monsanto will take place on six continents, 36 countries, and 250 cities. It is being promoted by a range of organizations and networks, including Occupy Monsanto.

This concerted action comes not a moment too soon. The company that brought us Agent Orange, Dioxin, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), and the bovine growth hormone has been increasingly locking in the food supply by patenting and selling genetically modified (GM) seed worldwide. These have included “Roundup Ready” seed that theoretically allows farmers to apply Monsanto’s Roudup weed killer without killing the produce. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans are now grown on 90 percent of all soybean farms in the United States. Though the company claims both this genetic modification and the application of Roundup is safe, scientists have challenged this. Other critics confront Monsanto on ecological and economic fronts, including the fact that genetic modification techniques and organisms are subject to intellectual property law, forcing farmers to buy seed from Monsanto indefinitely once they have begun to use the company’s “property.”

Being contractually bound to using genetically modified seed can have enormous impacts, especially when its effectiveness declines. This appears to have been the case in India, where innumerable farmers using Monsanto cotton seed (Bt cotton) have seen their yields drop. Based on a recent report, the Indian government has warned that cotton-producing states have seen cotton crop yields decline “after the first five years of production.” Problems have included “growing parasite and pest infestations and the need for greater pesticide use, higher costs tied to both the GM seeds and the greater pesticide use, [and] Bt cotton’s heavy water demands which are twice those of traditional cotton crops.”

According to one news account, this has lead to a staggering number of suicides among Indian farmers. The Indian Ministry of Agriculture has stated that “more than 1,000 small farmers kill themselves each month, most of them because of their massive GM-generated debts.”

It was the question of intellectual property that was at issue in a ruling this week by the U.S. Supreme Court that found in favor of Monsanto in a case of an Indiana farmer who planted a second crop in one year without paying Monsanto. This decision came down just weeks after President Obama signed into law H.R. 933, which includes a provision that “prohibits federal courts from banning the sale and planting of genetically modified organisms, even if they are proven to be dangerous to human health.” The law has been dubbed by food organizations the “Monsanto Protection Act.” On top of this, it was revealed this week that the U.S. State Department and its embassies in more than 100 nations “actively promoted the commercialization of specific biotech seeds, according to the report issued by Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit consumer protection group.”

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In Monsanto’s world, the banquet will be a highly regulated and commodified affair, where the entrees are genetically designed and counted, where there’s no sneaking organic fruits or vegetables onto the table, and where there’s no coming back for seconds. There will be as many feasts as people are prepared to pay for, over and over again, but the ingredients will be prepared and delivered by Monsanto, no exceptions. Its party division will be promoted globally by the government and its intellectual property will be assiduously protected by the courts.

Even at this late date, I’m holding out for a different kind of revel. The banquet of freedom, variety, and an unregulated abundance of organic food that has not been disciplined into transgenic shape. How do we get there? There are petitions to sign at Avaaz.org and Change.org. You can also download a new “ethical shopping” app called Buycott that can be used at the supermarket to find out where your groceries come from and to participate in consumer campaigns. Of course, we can all join the global march on May 25. And, if we’re up for it, we can get to work organizing a more organic, inclusive, and unregulated banquet than the one Monsanto has planned for us.

Ken Butigan wrote this article for Waging Nonviolence. It is reposted here with permission.

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• California Soccer Moms Face Off Against Monsanto
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Melina Laboucan-Massimo stands next to logs from clearcuts at a proposed tar sands site north of Fort McMurray, northern Alberta, Canada. Photo by Jiri Rezac.

There’s a remote part of northern Alberta where the Lubicon Cree have lived, it is said, since time immemorial. The Cree called the vast, pine-covered region niyanan askiy, “our land.” When white settlers first carved up this country, they made treaties with most of its original inhabitants—but for reasons unclear, the Lubicon Cree were left out. Two hundred years later, the Lubicon’s right to their traditional territory is still unrecognized. In the last four decades, industry has tapped the vast resource wealth that lies deep beneath the pines; today, 2,600 oil and gas wells stretch to the horizon. This is tar sands country.

In 2012 testimony before the U.S. Congress, Lubicon Cree organizer Melina Laboucan-Massimo, then 30, described witnessing the devastation of her family’s ancestral land caused by one of the largest oil spills in Alberta’s history. “What I saw was a landscape forever changed by oil that had consumed a vast stretch of the traditional territory where my family had hunted, trapped, and picked berries and medicines for generations.”

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“When we’re at home, we feel really isolated,” says Laboucan-Massimo, who has spent her adult life defending her people’s land from an industry that has rendered it increasingly polluted and impoverished. The Lubicon are fighting a hard battle, but their story—of resource extraction, of poverty and isolation, and of enduring resistance—is one that echoes in indigenous communities around the world. Today, Laboucan-Massimo and others like her are vanguards of a network of indigenous movements that is increasingly global, relevant—and powerful.

This power manifests in movements like Idle No More, which swept Canada last December and ignited a wave of solidarity on nearly every continent. Laboucan-Massimo was amazed—and hopeful. Triggered initially by legislation that eroded treaty rights and removed protection for almost all of Canada’s rivers—clearing the way for unprecedented fossil fuel extraction—Idle No More drew thousands into the streets. In a curious blend of ancient and high-tech, images of indigenous protesters in traditional regalia popped up on news feeds all over the world.

A history of resistance

To outsiders, it might seem that Idle No More materialized spontaneously, that it sprang into being fully formed. It builds, however, on a long history of resistance to colonialism that began when Europeans first washed up on these shores. Now, armed with Twitter and Facebook, once-isolated movements from Canada to South America are exchanging knowledge, resources, and support like never before.

"When you destroy the earth, you destroy yourself,” says Melina Laboucan-Massimo. This is “the common thread in indigenous people all over the world.”

Idle No More is one of what Subcomandante Marcos, the masked prophet of the Mexican Zapatistas, called “pockets of resistance,” which are “as numerous as the forms of resistance themselves.” The Zapatistas are part of a wave of indigenous organizing that crested in South America in the 1990s, coinciding with the 500th anniversary of European conquest—most effectively in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico. Certain threads connect what might otherwise be isolated uprisings: They’re largely nonviolent, structurally decentralized, they seek common cause with non-natives, and they are deeply, spiritually rooted in the land.

The connections among indigenous organizers have strengthened through both a shared colonial history and a shared threat—namely, the neoliberal economic policies of deregulation, privatization, and social spending cuts exemplified by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization. Indigenous organizers see these agreements as nothing more than the old colonial scramble for wealth at the expense of the natives. In a 1997 piece in Le Monde Diplomatique, Marcos called neoliberalism “the totalitarian extension of the logic of the finance markets to all aspects of life,” resulting in “the exclusion of all persons who are of no use to the new economy.” Many indigenous leaders charge that the policies implemented through organizations like the World Bank and the IMF prioritize corporations over communities and further concentrate power in the hands of a few.

Uprising in Ecuador

The mid-1990s saw a massive expansion of such policies—and with it, an expansion of resistance, particularly in countries with significant indigenous populations. In 1990, CONAIE, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, staged a massive, nonviolent levantamiento—an uprising—flooding the streets of Quito, blocking roads and effectively shutting down the country. Entire families walked for days to reach the capital to demand land rights, fair prices for agrarian goods, and recognition of Ecuador as a plurinational state, made up of multiple, equally legitimate nations. In the end it forced renegotiation of policy and created unprecedented indigenous representation in government; many hailed CONAIE’s success as a model for organizing everywhere.

CONAIE’s slogan, “Nothing just for Indians,” invited participation from non-indigenous allies around larger questions of inequality and political representation, creating a political space that was big and inclusive enough for everyone. Dr. Maria Elena Garcia, who studies these movements at the University of Washington, says that non-indigenous support has been “crucial” for success across the board. In the case of CONAIE, she says, there came a tipping point when “most Ecuadorians … said, ‘Enough. This organization is speaking for us.’”

Idle No More clearly exists in the Zapatista tradition, but it goes further in incorporating the language of climate justice. In December as many as 50,000 masked Mayan Zapatistas marched into cities across Chiapas. Differing from the 1994 armed indigenous uprising, this one was done in complete silence.

The Zapatista Army

Meanwhile, in Mexico, the Zapatista movement was busy building a different kind of revolution. On January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army took its place on the international stage. It was day one of NAFTA, which Subcomandante Marcos called “a death sentence to the indigenous ethnicities of Mexico.” More than any other movement, they linked local issues of cultural marginalization, racism, and inequality to global economic systems and prophesied a new movement of resistance. The media-savvy revolutionaries used their most potent weapon—words—and the still-new Internet to advocate a new world built on diversity as the basis for ecological and political survival. Transnational from the beginning, the Zapatistas made common cause with “pockets of resistance” everywhere.

Then, a curious change occurred: for nearly 10 years following their initial insurgency, the Zapatistas maintained a self-imposed silence. The world heard little from Marcos, but the autonomous communities in Chiapas were very much alive. They had turned inward, building independent governments, schools, and clinics. As journalist and author Naomi Klein observed, “These free spaces, born of reclaimed land, communal agriculture, resistance to privatization, will eventually create counter-powers to the state simply by existing as alternatives.” Embodying, here and now, the society they seek to create is a powerful manifesto; for those who cared to listen, their silence spoke volumes.

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Victory in Bolivia

Most of these movements have used nonviolent tactics, including blockades, occupations of public space, and mass marches—combined with traditional political work—to varying degrees of success. In Bolivia these tactics yielded an extraordinary outcome: the election of Evo Morales, in 2005, as Bolivia’s first indigenous head of state.

Five years later, Morales convened 30,000 international delegates for the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. A response to the repeated failure of international climate negotiations, the gathering was rooted in an indigenous worldview that recognized Mother Earth as a living being, entitled to her own inalienable rights.

The resulting declaration placed blame unequivocally on the capitalist system that has “imposed on us a logic of competition, progress, and limitless growth.” This unrestrained growth, the declaration says, transforms “everything into commodities: water, earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of peoples, and life itself.” Significantly, the declaration also extended the analysis of colonialism to include climate change—calling for “decolonization of the atmosphere”—but it rejected market-based solutions like carbon trading. It’s a holistic analysis that links colonialism, climate change, and capital, a manifesto for what has come to be called “climate justice.”

Idle No More

Fast forward to December 2012, and two things happened: The Zapatistas staged simultaneous marches in five cities, marking a resurgence of their public activism. Anywhere from 10,000–50,000 masked marchers filled the streets in complete silence. The march was timed to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar—and the beginning of a new, more hopeful era—and demonstrated the Zapatistas’ commitment to the indigenous cosmology of their ancestors.

That same month, a continent away, Idle No More emerged on the scene. While it began as a reaction to two specific bills in Parliament, it has gained strength and momentum in opposition to the network of proposed pipelines that will crisscross North America, pumping tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries and ports in Canada and the U.S. These pipelines will cross national, tribal, state, and ethnic boundaries and raise a multitude of issues—including water quality, land rights, and climate change. The campaign to stop their construction is already unifying natives and non-natives in unprecedented ways.

Dr. Garcia, whose own ancestors are indigenous, believes that indigenous movements offer something vital: hope, and what she calls “the importance of the imaginary. Of imagining a different world—imagining a different way of being in the world.”

“We’re a land-based people, but it goes further than that. It’s a worldview. When you destroy the earth, you destroy yourself,” says Melina Laboucan-Massimo. This is “the common thread in indigenous people all over the world.”

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It is this thread that goes to the heart of our global ecological crisis. While indigenous cultures differ widely from one another, what they collectively present is an alternative relationship—to the earth, to its resources, and to each other—a relationship based not on domination but on reciprocity. Any movement that seeks to create deep, lasting social change—to address not only climate change but endemic racism and social inequality—must confront our colonial identity and, by extension, this broken relationship.

Laboucan-Massimo has spent a great deal of time abroad, studying indigenous movements from Latin America to New Zealand and Australia, feeling the full weight of their shared history under colonialism. These days, though, she’s more likely to be on the road, educating, organizing, and building solidarity among natives and non-natives. It was understanding the connections between movements, she says, that gave her “all the more fervor to come back and continue to do the work here.”

Recently, she traveled from Alberta  to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where she and her elders stood at the forefront of the largest climate change rally in history. And she’ll keep organizing, armed with a smartphone, supported by a growing network of allies from Idle No More and beyond, connected in every possible way to the rest of the world.

Kristin Moe wrote this article for Love and the Apocalypse, the Summer 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Kristin is a writer, farmer, and graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. She writes about climate justice, grassroots movements, and social change.

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Fracking takes place just a few hundred feet from an Ohio apartment building. Photo by People’s Oil and Gas Collaborative.

As rural deposits of fossil fuel grow fewer and farther between, extractive industries are increasingly siting their operations over the next best location: suburban neighborhoods. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, the Marcellus shale formation beneath parts of the Midwest and Appalachia contains literally trillions of cubic feet of natural gas—the most accessible of which often lies beneath residential neighborhoods.

Environmental injustice has come as a shock for many of Broadview Height’s mostly white, middle-class population.

Broadview Heights, population 19,400, is just south of Cleveland. The small town seems to typify Midwestern suburbia: tree-lined streets, vaguely familiar housing developments of recent vintage, and a median household income of over $70,000—significantly more than the state average of $45,000. Residents include former Clevelanders seeking a more peaceful place to live, where raccoons, deer, and wild turkey can be seen in their backyards.

But Broadview Heights is in the midst of a transformation. In 2004, the Ohio legislature passed a law effectively stripping local municipalities of their right to regulate the permitting, spacing, and location of oil and gas wells. This led to a spate of small fracking operations cropping up inside neighborhoods, which in turn has led to the flight of some residents. More than 70 gas wells have been drilled here since 2005—in some instances without the notification of residents living just 600 feet away, according to Truthout.

“I think this is a bold move for these companies, to drill in suburbs, but they feel empowered to do it,” says Elisa Young, founder of the anti-coal activist group MeigsCAN in Meigs County, Ohio. “The landmen quietly come in, get all their ducks in a row, and then they tell you, ‘This is a done deal. You can’t do anything about it.’”

Young notes that environmental injustice has come as a shock for many of Broadview Height’s mostly white, middle-class population. For many of them, she says, “It’s their first experience at seeing how these industries really operate.”

New shared experiences

All of this means that Broadway Heights residents are now sharing an experience with the marginalized poor and with the residents of Indian reservations, where people have been dealing with similar situations for decades.

But, not least because the people of Broadway Heights have the means to leave, there are some important limitations to that comparison. “Most native communities really maintain a connection to their land, and there isn’t the ability or desire to just pick up and move when things change,” Young says.

“All it’s going to take is for the energy companies to pick on the wrong person.”

That’s not to say that a connection to the land is unheard-of among non-native people. As a “ninth generation Appalachian,” Young says she was raised with the idea that “every nook and cranny of our family’s land is our history, our heritage. It’s not so easy to walk away from that.”

It’s not just participants in Ohio’s anti-fracking movement who are talking about the new shared ground between indigenous people and middle-class whites. Anna Willow, an anthropologist at Ohio State University, is currently working on an ethnographic study that explores the social and cultural implications of fracking in suburban neighborhoods.

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Based on a series of interviews conducted in 2012, the study focuses on how fracking affects Ohio residents’ feelings about their livelihood and community. While compiling her research, Willow—whose previous work was with Canadian tribal people familiar with industries like mining and logging on their ancestral land—noticed an interesting trend.

“A lot of the statements coming from these interviewees,” she said, “sounded similar to what we’ve been hearing from indigenous groups for hundreds of years now: expressions of fear, vulnerability, and disempowerment as the industries move in.”

New alliances

The spread of fracking into suburbs might seem like a source of despair, but some are hoping that it could lead to bigger and better things by linking groups together into unusual alliances.

Geraldine Thomas-Flurer of the Yinke Dene Alliance, a coalition of tribes from British Columbia that formed in opposition to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline, says that the widespread push against exploitative resource extraction in North America— such as the Tar Sands Blockade, protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline, and movements to stop fracking—has forged collaborations unlike anything that had existed before.

“[The majority of] British Columbia is opposed to the pipeline—indigenous and non-indigenous together,” she said, citing a February poll by Insights West that found 61 percent of adults oppose the project. “It’s the first time in my history that I’ve seen these communities working side by side, and I’m happy about that—we’re not alone in this.”

What’s happening in British Columbia is unprecedented, she says, and bodes well for other parts of the world where similar clashes are taking place. “It’s clear that to fight these industries, everyone needs to speak up and support the movement. It’s not a First Nations issue. It’s a human issue.”

Kari Matsko, director of a grassroots initiative in Ohio called the People’s Oil and Gas Collaborative, agrees. The more people who are directly affected by fracking, she says, the stronger the resistance becomes.

“Regardless of status or demographic, people are experiencing firsthand the effects of this industry,” Matsko says. “All it’s going to take is for the energy companies to pick on the wrong person.”

Peter Pearsall wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Peter is an online reporting intern at YES! and a freelance science writer.

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September 12, 2013
Town Hall
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We are delighted to announce that Vandana Shiva will be coming to Seattle for YES! Magazine’s 3^nd annual celebration and fundraiser. Tickets are on sale now.

The world-renowned Indian biodiversity and global justice activist will share her insights on developments from around the world that will determine the future of food.

The event starts at 7:30 p.m. at Town Hall in Seattle. A reception will follow with local drinks, delicious desserts, and live music from Mercy Crow.

Buy your tickets now, and tell your friends. We’ve sold out before, and expect to do so again.

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All Donations to YES! given on the week of Sept 12^th will be matched.

YES! Magazine is nonprofit and reader-supported. We only exist because of you. That’s why a group of generous supporters have challenged us to raise $25,000 on September 12^th by promising to match every dollar, up to that amount.

Give online or at Town Hall that day, and your tax-deductible donation will go twice as far!

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Photo by spirit of america / Shutterstock.com.

I was invited recently to sit in on animal science class at a college that has a strong agriculture program, about 10 miles away from my house. This week, the class was discussing the farm bill, and the students were supposed to be exploring what it meant to them.

Anyone who shops at a conventional grocery store for factory farmed meat or processed foods is taking a government handout.

The discussion was led by my friend Paula, who recently made the choice to return to school and get an agricultural degree. She talked about some of the major points of the farm bill, about how the direct commodity subsidies feed agribusiness, but how small farms such as Sap Bush Hollow derive very little (if any) direct benefit from them. She talked about how, because the Farm Bill didn't pass in 2012, there was a temporary extension on it as part of the fiscal cliff package. The subsidies that aid corn syrup processors and ethanol blenders stayed in place. The programs that benefited small producers—such as new farmers, minority farmers, healthy food markets, renewable energy, and sustainable farming efforts—were suspended. The classroom remained quiet. Passive. Disinterested.

Paula attempted to shake them up. "Guys! This is about you! About us! About what we’re here for!" The room stayed quiet.

She moved on to the next controversial part of the Farm Bill—Food and Nutrition Assistance, which encompasses the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as Food Stamps. Several students began to shift in their seats. Paula put forward some numbers about the amount of money allocated to SNAP. The classroom began to writhe. Tongues clucked. I heard hissing. Paula then mentioned how many people were dependent on SNAP (in 2011, one out of every seven people in this country was getting some form of food and nutrition assistance). And with that, save for a few quiet exceptions, the classroom sprung to life:

"Welfare mothers!"

"They're using food stamps to buy cigarettes!"

"I'm not paying for lazy people!"

"Users!"

"They just waste that money!"

Wow. So many golden educational opportunities....where to begin?

Let's start with ...

1. The meaning of hypocrisy: From the dictionary: The semblance of having desirable or publicly approved attitudes, beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not actually possess. It seems increasingly popular, in these hard economic times, to toss around accusations about who is draining the public resources. And the people who get public funds most directly under the umbrella term of "welfare" are the first ones to get pelted with stones.

Yet anyone who has driven by the farmers market on their way to buy pork chops for $1.99 a pound at the grocery store, when the local farmer can't produce them for less than $11.00, is dipping from the same pot that holds the food stamps. The farm bill encourages factory farming by making sure feed can be purchased for less than the price of growing it, giving factory farms billions of dollars in cost discounts every year.

A portion of this savings gets passed along to the American grocery-shopping public in the form of artificially cheap food that real farmers (those of us who have to pay for the true costs of production) simply cannot compete with. Anyone who shops at a conventional grocery store for factory farmed meat or processed foods is taking a government handout, not just the "welfare mothers."

2. The meaning of irony: From the dictionary: A figure of speech in which the words express a meaning that is often the direct opposite of the intended meaning. The first farm bill was enacted on the heels of the Great Depression, with the goal of supporting America's farmers and ranchers. That's still the intent. Yet today, farm bill commodity subsidy payments have contributed to such an unequal distribution of market share between corporate and family-scale agriculture, that the only way many small farmers could benefit from the farm bill is through the very nutritional assistance programs that these young agriculturists were spurning. There’s no shortage of small farmers who qualify for “welfare” programs.

3. The meaning of self-defeating behavior: From the dictionary: behavior serving to frustrate, thwart, etc., one's own intention. Here was a group of students training to be farmers and food processors. Many of them will likely want to open their own farming-related businesses some day; or they will return to family farms to pick up where their parents and grandparents left off. Some of them, unable to sustain themselves financially among the land and livestock that nourish their spirits, will have to go and work for agribusiness. If the current economy is any indication, many of them will find themselves with college debt, low wage jobs, and in need of food.

Any way you slice the pie, the Farm Bill affects these students, either because:

• it sponsors (or fails to sponsor) programs that might help them get started on the land or in a food-related enterprise;
• or because the policies of the bill greatly benefit agribusiness, thus making it tougher and tougher for family-scale farms to compete;
• or because it results in a proliferation of processed, crappy foods that pollute our bodies as well as our soil and water;
• or because it provides a food benefit that a number of them will likely need in the near future.

These kids need to understand the Farm Bill. It can help them and it can hurt them. But the only reaction they could muster was venom toward any human being who might have need of food assistance, thus the only action many of them might take would be to cheer if the food and nutrition assistance programs were cut. They're hurting themselves with their apathy and venom.

As we seek to create a workable Farm Bill, we cannot forget that the uncertainty of our neighbors will affect our own well-being.

For that matter, apathy and venom hurt all of us. The food problems, the farm problems, and the poverty issues, effect all of us. Propaganda infuses our daily lives, encouraging us to hate those in need, to judge them as irresponsible leeches on society. This hatred has become a cancer in our culture, poisoning us from the inside, making students like the ones in this classroom, who should be concerned about our nation's food policy, content to see it fail rather than reformed, and to see more people go hungry.

By fixating on the notion that a fellow human in need is threatening to their well-being, these students are playing an active role in promoting the very social inequality that impairs their own futures. As social epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson have shown, no matter whether we are rich or poor, the more inequality there is in our culture, the greater our rates of anxiety, depression, and countless other social problems from crime to illness—for everyone.

(For those of you interested in learning more about how inequality contributes to widespread social problems across the classes, I recommend Kate Pickett and Richard G. Wilkinson’s book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.)

...Which leads me to the final, and most important, educational opportunity...

4. The meaning of compassion: From the dictionary: A feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another's suffering or misfortune, accompanied by a desire to alleviate the pain or remove its cause. In truth, I suspect that the venom that came forth from these young people's mouths wasn't truly their own. They probably learned it from someone else. Most of them were too young to have come by such opinions honestly. And I can only assume that it came from people in their lives who are truly fearful, who worry that the resources they need  will be commandeered for someone else's benefit.

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Three provisions in the bill would make it more difficult to regulate the safety of genetically modified crops. Consumers fight back with a flurry of organizing.

We are living in times when the worry about resources, financial or ecological, is very real. And the Farm Bill, for all its inconsistencies and controversies, represents our nation's policy on these fears. As we seek to create a workable Farm Bill and a workable life, we cannot forget that the uncertainty of our neighbors will affect our own well-being. If we are going to be truly resilient, then we must be compassionate about the suffering of those around us, and we must seek ways, both through policy and through our daily individual actions, that will help to rectify this suffering.

That is simply part of being a community. And if we lose that, then we agree to a life of depredation for all and happiness for none, where only a few will survive, and no one truly thrives.

But if we can embrace compassion, then it becomes the foundation for true community resilience; where being a caring citizen and neighbor fuel a way of life where everyone has good, clean healthy food; where they come by it honestly; and where young agricultural students are able to plan a future where they can produce it freely and joyfully.

Shannon Hayes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Shannon is the author ofRadical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, The Grassfed Gourmetand The Farmer and the Grill. Her newest book is Long Way on a Little: An Earth Lover's Companion for Enjoying Meat, Pinching Pennies and Living Deliciously. She is the host of Grassfedcooking.com and RadicalHomemakers.com. Hayes works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York.

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One of Lopi LaRoe's designs that uses Smokey the Bear to promote environmental action. Image courtesy Lopi LaRoe.

Smokey the Bear thought he smelled a fire in the woods. But as he approached the clearing and saw a giant derrick jutting out into the sky, he realized that what his nose had picked up was the scent of hydrocarbons. It was another piece of evidence suggesting that the increasingly widespread method of oil and gas extraction known as fracking was poisoning the environment. He decided something must be done.

“This is Smokey waking up and saying, ‘Oh you didn’t do that to my environment.’”

At least that’s the way that artist, Occupy Wall Street veteran and environmental activist Lopi LaRoe sees it. But last week she received a letter threatening her with jail time and thousands of dollars in fines for enlisting Smokey to the anti-fracking cause.

In the fall, LaRoe created an image of Smokey that altered his famous invective “Only you can prevent forest fires” to “Only you can prevent faucet fires”—a reference to the phenomenon of flaming taps that occasionally occur near where fracking takes place. The adjustment seemed to her in line with the message of conservation Smokey has come to embody.

One of LaRoe’s designs that features Smokey the Bear. Image courtesy Lopi LaRoe.

“This is the radicalization of Smokey the Bear,” said LaRoe. “This is Smokey waking up and saying, ‘Oh you didn’t do that to my environment.’ Smokey wants to fight the corporations and protect the air and the water and the plants and the animals and the people.”

Her parody went viral. She began printing T-shirts at the insistence of friends on Facebook, but demand quickly surpassed those in her immediate circle of contacts. Soon she was packing Smokey in FedEx envelopes and sending him off to Australia and other far-flung terrains. There are also tote bags and patches with the Smokey meme available at LaRoe’s website. (The tote bags, she advertises, are “great for dumpster diving.”) LaRoe says she’s not out to become rich and the money she charges customers goes toward covering her costs so that she can keep spreading the message of faucet-fire prevention far and wide.

“It spread like wildfire,” she said, grinning ear to ear.

Not everyone is amused. LaRoe received a cease-and-desist letter from the Metis Group, which serves as legal counsel for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service division. The letter informs LaRoe that Smokey, his character, and his slogan are property of the U.S. government and warns that she has until May 2 to halt the use of Smokey on her “products” and to stop distributing electronic copies of the meme. Otherwise, she faces up to six months in prison and a penalty as high as $150,000.

“Any time anybody uses Smokey’s image for anything other than wildfire prevention,” said Helene Cleveland, fire prevention program manager for the Forest Service, “it confuses the public. What we’re trying to do is keep Smokey on message.” Cleveland added that the 1952 Smokey the Bear Act takes the character out of the public domain and “any change in that would have to go through Congress.”

Despite the warnings in the cease-and-desist letter she received, LaRoe has not ceased or desisted.

Two other entities besides the Forest Service claim joint rights to Smokey. The National Association of State Foresters—a nonprofit organization consisting of directors of U.S. forestry agencies—and the Ad Council.

Remember “This is your brain on drugs”? Or the Indian weeping over pollution? They were the Ad Council’s handiwork. A nonprofit, it describes itself as a promoter of “public service campaigns on behalf of nonprofit organizations and government agencies” with a focus on “improving the quality of life for children, preventive health, education, community well being and strengthening families.” Smokey the Bear was born at the Ad Council, on the desk of abstract expressionist and Marx-influenced art critic Harold Rosenberg, who had a part time job there in the mid-1940s.

The Ad Council’s board of directors is a conflagration of representatives of the world’s wealthiest corporations, including such companies as General Electric, which announced plans last month to spend $110 million on a research lab devoted to the study of fracking, and finance giants such as Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. On its website, Citibank advertises an “extensive array of deposit, cash management and credit products” for oil and gas drillers, while a JPMorgan Chase subsidiary boasts its “Oil & Gas Investment Banking group covers the complete oil and gas value chain, which includes exploration and production, natural gas processing and transmission, refining and marketing, and oilfield services.”

LaRoe believes that those who claim to own Smokey “don’t care that I’m selling a few T-shirts. They’re out to crush the meme.”

Both the Ad Council and the Metis Group declined to comment for this story.

Despite the warnings in the cease-and-desist letter she received, LaRoe has not ceased or desisted. Instead, she enlisted the help of her own legal counsel, who fired back with a letter to the Metis Group on Friday. In it, attorney Evan Sarzin argues that LaRoe ‘s culture-jam appropriation of Smokey is permissible under the fair-use exemption to exclusive copyright ownership and chides the the Forest Service for attempting to infringe on LaRoe’s First Amendment rights.

Sarzin also points out that this is not the first time the Forest Service has sought to silence environmentalists for appropriating Smokey’s image. In the early 1990s, the Forest Service demanded reparations from the Sante Fe-based conservation group LightHawk after it used Smokey’s likeness in ads critical of the agency’s practice of auctioning off land to timber companies. (The Forest Service, as part of the Department of Agriculture, makes its land available for commercial use.) Unlike LaRoe’s Smokey, LightHawk’s black bear appeared angry and wielded a chainsaw. “Say it ain’t so, Smokey,” read the ads.

Smokey the Bear T-shirts are printed in LaRoe’s studio. Photo courtesy Lopie LaRoe.

With legal funds provided by the Sierra Club, LightHawk sued the Forest Service in 1992 for infringing on its freedom of speech. The court eventually sided with the plaintiffs, noting that “the satirical use of Smokey the Bear to criticize Forest Service management techniques is unlikely to cause confusion or to dilute the value of Smokey the Bear to help prevent forest fires. Thus the Forest Service cannot have a compelling interest in prohibiting such use.”

Sarzin also calls attention to the fact the Forest Service’s own research points to environmental degradation caused by fracking. A 2011 study published in the Journal of Environmental Quality by Forest Service researchers linked frack fluid to the death of 150 trees in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. Despite their findings, the Forest Service is considering approving fracking leases in the nearby George Washington National Forest. The Southern Environmental Law Center, which opposes the plan, says it represents a threat to local wildlife—including the black bear.

“When we were little kids we were taught that there is this bear out there that wants to protect our forests.”

A report released last month by the the National Parks Conservation Association warns that fracking for oil is decimating the ecosystem surrounding Theodore Roosevelt National Park, named after the Republican president who founded the Forest Service. “Unless we take quick action,” the report warns “air, water and wildlife will experience permanent harm in other national parks as well.” Thus, Sarzin writes, LaRoe’s Smokey meme “is a message that the Forest Service should endorse.”

LaRoe hopes that by gaining publicity she can force the Forest Service to take a stand against fracking. In order to continue the fight, however, she says she needs the support of groups whose mission it is to defend civil liberties or protect the environment to provide legal defense funds—just as the Sierra Club did for LightHawk.

“This about more than me as an artist,” LaRoe said. “This is about everybody’s right to freedom of speech and a healthy environment.”

Her childhood memories of Smokey, she explains, are compelling her to keep raising faucet-fire prevention awareness despite the threat of jail time. “When we were little kids we were taught that there is this bear out there that wants to protect our forests. Smokey is our bear. He belongs to the people.”

Peter Rugh wrote this article for WagingNonviolence, where it originally appeared. Peter is a writer and activist based in Brooklyn, New York.

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A 700-member time bank in Central Vermont from Olivier Asselin on Vimeo.

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Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History
by Florence Williams
W.W. Norton, $25.95, 338 pages

When Florence Williams was nursing her second child, she had her breast milk tested: It was a cocktail of synthetic chemicals, from flame retardants to BPA. This experience started her research into what exactly is in a breast and how that body part connects us to our children, our past, and our surroundings. The result is her compelling, highly readable, often funny, but also deadly serious book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History.

The human breast—unique in nature for its size and shape—developed early in our species’ life, for the suckling of infants with bigger heads and flatter faces. Now its augmentation is the number one plastic surgery, and breast milk is sold online for 262 times the price of oil.

The breast is the organ most sensitive to chemicals, especially to the synthetic endocrine disrupters present almost everywhere—in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the cars we drive. As a result, breast cancer is the number one fatal cancer in women worldwide—and it’s increasingly becoming a problem in men. Rather than responding to these dangers with fear, Williams inspires us with thoughtful, well-researched consideration of what others may only want to ogle or avoid thinking about altogether.

Williams adds her strong voice to two connected and important, growing movements: for the regulation of chemicals, and for cancer prevention, not merely treatment. This book is an impassioned cry for a more holistic vision and more collective action to safeguard not just body parts, but the whole body—not just the individual, but also the species and the world that supports us.

Editor's note: This story initially claimed that Florence Williams' breast milk contained "inorganic" chemicals. Alert reader djanick pointed out in the comments that toxins such as BPA are, in chemical terms, organic. The word has been changed to "synthetic" to correct this error.

Nadia Colburn wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Nadia is a writer and teacher of writing living in Boston.

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Volunteers staff a free store where residents can access free food, clothing, and information about the neighborhood's environmental problems. Photo by Tar Sands Blockade.

The playground in Manchester, a neighborhood on Houston’s east side, is empty much of the time. Children who play for too long here often start to cough. They go back inside, leaving an empty swing set in the shadow of a nearby oil refinery.

For the residents of Manchesters, the effects of the Keystone XL pipeline will be right next door.

Yudith Nieto, 24, has lived in Manchester since her family came from Mexico when she was a small child. While it’s OK to visit the playground, she says, it’s not OK to bring her camera. On several occasions, security guards from the Valero refinery next door have appeared and ask her to leave, claiming that taking pictures in the park was “illegal.” They’ve even brought in Houston police as reinforcements. Valero, one of the major oil companies operating in this industrial part of Houston, keeps its security busy: Nieto says that they have harassed documentary filmmakers and journalists. And when college students participating in an “alternative spring break” program came to the park to talk to her about the neighborhood’s problems, a guard drove up in an unmarked vehicle and took video of the meeting on his cellphone.“I'm not afraid of the attention I'm getting from these people,” Nieto says, “because we want people to know that we're aware.”

Children from the Manchester neighborhood in Houston play within sight of an oil refinery smokestack. Photo by Tar Sands Blockade.

Manchester, one of Houston’s oldest neighborhoods, is surrounded by industry on all sides: a Rhodia chemical plant; a car crushing facility; a water treatment plant; a train yard for hazardous cargo; a Goodyear synthetic rubber plant; oil refineries belonging to Lyondell Basell, Valero, and Texas Petro-Chemicals; as well as one of the busiest highways in the city. Industrial development continues uninterrupted down the Houston Ship Channel for another 50 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. The refineries around Houston have been called the “keystone to Keystone” because they’re expected to process 90 percent of tar sands crude from Alberta if the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is completed.

It’s one of the most polluted neighborhoods in the U.S., one where smokestacks grace every backyard view. But it’s taking on a new significance as the terminus of Keystone because the pipeline is at the center of the highest-stakes environmental battle in recent years. As international pressure builds, residents are beginning to organize, educate themselves, and speak out for the health of their families.

For them, the struggle over Keystone not a political game. It’s not even about climate change, at least not exclusively. The effects of the pipeline will be right next door.

A grassroots movement begins to grow

Manchester is in some ways typical of low-income urban neighborhoods: it’s almost entirely Latino and African American, with a large number of undocumented immigrants. A full third of residents live below the poverty line. Drugs, unemployment, and gangs are a problem. And there’s a strange smell in the air: sometimes sweet, sometimes sulfurous, often reeking of diesel. The most striking thing is that people here always seem to be sick. They have chronic headaches, nosebleeds, sore throats, and red sores on their skin that take months to heal.

It took a groundbreaking study by the Houston Chronicle in 2005 to reveal for the first time the extent of the air pollution here. It identified five human carcinogens ( a 2010 EPA study identified eight), including enough benzene that one scientist told the Chronicle that living in Manchester was “like sitting in traffic 24/7.” Toxin levels “were high enough that they would trigger a full-scale federal investigation if these communities were hazardous waste sites,” the Chronicle wrote.

Given this, it’s easy to understand why there are so many chronic respiratory problems. But the health risks go beyond asthma: for children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel, chances of contracting acute lymphocytic leukemia are 56 percent higher than for children only ten miles away. “Children are being bombarded with toxins every day of their lives,” Nieto says.

Nieto, like many others in Manchester, grew up with asthma. Now an after-school teacher at Southwest Elementary, she spends her spare time working to organize this community, which has long been paralyzed by poverty, language barriers, and lack of access to information about exactly what is making them sick. But the business of grassroots organizing is a slow one. It’s family to family, house to house. Many residents have reasons to resist taking action. They’re preoccupied with earning a living, fearful of authorities—often because of their legal status—and hesitant to accept just how bad their air might be.

The free store is tiny, but represents an alternative to the feelings of helplessness that have long been dominant here.

Most people, Nieto says, just want to get out of Manchester. But they can’t afford rents anywhere else, and it’s impossible to sell. After all, who would buy a house with an oil refinery in the backyard?

So far, government representatives have been unwilling to act on behalf of residents who live along the Ship Channel. Juan Parras, a community organizer who founded Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, or TEJAS, says that a major goal is simply holding public officials accountable and enforcing the laws already in place under the Clean Air Act. But in a state where oil is king, he says, “our elected officials are more responsive to industry than they are to community needs.” Fossil-fuel companies—and the politicians whose campaigns they fund—stand to profit enormously from projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, Parras says. “They have our elected officials in their back pockets.”

Where grassroots meets DIY

But residents of Manchester are finding ways to take action that don’t depend on those representatives. Alongside two organizers from the group Tar Sands Blockade, Nieto, her partner Emmanuel, and a few other young people have set up a “free store” with regular hours. It’s an outdoor community space based in a neighbor’s yard, a tent and some tables crammed with information and arts-and-crafts materials for children. The store offers free donated clothes, food, information on air pollution, meetings of local government officials, and trainings in skills like talking to the media and filing pollution complaints with the city.

A man holds a sign as residents peruse the free store in Manchester. Photo by Tar Sands Blockade.

The free store starts to address some of the immediate, daily needs for things like clothing and healthy food, which might prevent residents from engaging politically. It seems tiny in comparison with the industrial behemoth that’s so close. But it represents a critical shift towards mutual aid and self-sufficiency, an alternative to the feelings of helplessness that have long been dominant here. By creating a space where neighbors can come together to take control of their own needs, organizers hope they’ll pave the way for deeper empowerment.

After a small rally and march last year, two activists from the Gulf Coast locked themselves to trucks entering a Valero facility in Manchester and launched a 45-day hunger strike, demanding that Valero divest from the Keystone XL pipeline. For now, the people risking arrest in these actions remain outsiders—U.S. citizens with greater access to resources and support. For many locals who struggle with supporting families under already difficult conditions, civil disobedience isn’t an option.

For Nieto, though, it’s about “building the support from people that I’ve known all my life.” Residents are mistrustful of even the most well-intentioned outsiders. That puts Nieto and the small handful of other young people from Manchester in a unique position to create change from the inside.

A critical position

The Alberta tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline have taken on a monumental significance for the North American environmental movement. It’s not just another pipeline; former NASA climate scientist James Hansen famously referred to it as “the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” In February, it was a rallying point for the largest demonstration on climate change in U.S. history. Over 60,000 people have already signed a pledge to engage in civil disobedience should the final leg of the pipeline be approved.

If that happens, almost all of the tar sands crude that flows through Keystone will be processed at refineries in East Houston. Activists from Tar Sands Blockade say that Valero has contract rights with TransCanada, which will allow them to purchase up to three-quarters of Keystone’s capacity. Tar sands crude oil is much more toxic than regular crude, and contains 11 times more sulfur and nickel, and 5 times more lead.

That puts neighborhoods like Manchester in a critical position not only to affect the future of the pipeline—and by extension the fight against climate change—but to raise environmental justice issues around race and class into the national conversation. After decades in the shadow of the refineries, Ship Channel residents have the potential to play a major role in the debate. The political pressure around Keystone might be just big enough to catalyze both residents and public officials to change the composition of the air in East Houston and the carbon in our atmosphere.

Will Tar Sands Drain the Rocky Mountains Dry?
A centuries-old cycle has been interrupted by the tremendous volume of water required to extract oil from the Alberta tar sands.

What’s more, East Texas is the belly of the beast: the heart of America’s oil country and the seat of power for the fossil fuels industry. Juan Parras of TEJAS says he tells national environmental groups concerned about climate change to get involved in Manchester. “Because if you can fight them here,” he says, “and beat them to the punch, it’s going to have a huge impact on the rest of the nation.”

But Parras also worries that spotlighting Keystone will allow the media to forget the myriad other issues faced by residents of Manchester—that even if the pipeline is stopped, public attention will move on, and local people will still be dealing with polluted air, cancer and asthma, and the poverty that makes it impossible to leave.

Yudith Nieto, through her activism, has started to travel. She has met organizers from places all along Keystone’s path, including indigenous people from the Alberta tar sands.

Meeting them only deepened her sense of shared destiny, she says, the sense that she and her neighbors are not alone. “It put everything else into perspective,” she says. “This has been going on for such a long time. I became an ally to those people, and they became allies to me.”

Keystone is a threat to the health of communities along its path, from the source in Alberta to the terminus in Texas. But it also presents a challenge, and an opportunity, for those communities to realize what they have in common and make their voices heard. What’s at stake is not only the air quality in East Houston, but the stability of the climate across the planet.

Kristin Moe wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media project that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Kristin writes about climate, grassroots movements and social change. Follow her on Twitter @yo_Kmoe.

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The Bullitt Center in Seattle. Photo by Ben Benschneider.

Peering down Seattle’s Capitol Hill, the Bullitt Center appears to be just another high-end commercial building—until you look up and notice the roof, which is overlaid with shiny silver photovoltaic panels that extend far beyond the building’s exterior walls. Even in the cloudiest of cities, the panels generate all the electricity the six-story structure requires.

The building is a project of the Bullitt Foundation, which calls it “the greenest commercial building in the world.” The foundation, which was founded in 1952, has focused since the 1990s on helping to create cities that function more like ecosystems. Its new building provides office space for eco-conscious tenants, but also functions as a learning center that demonstrates how people and businesses can exist in harmony with nature.

The Bullitt Center was built according to a demanding green building certification program called the Living Building Challenge, which lists net zero use of energy and water among its many requirements. The standards specified by Living Buildings far surpass those of the better-known Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program, which even at its highest level still produces buildings that harm the environment.

Jason McLennan, the founder of the program, says the goal of the Living Building Challenge is to create a structure that is in harmony with nature. “Even when buildings are promoted as 10 to 30 percent greener than the traditional code, the building is still extremely harmful to the environment.”

A tour of the world’s greenest office building

It turns out that making a building beautiful can help to make it green. In an effort to encourage people to take the stairs instead of the elevator, the architects of the Bullitt Center created an “irresistible stairway” encased by floor-to-ceiling glass walls that allow for an abundance of light and offer captivating views of Puget Sound and the Olympic mountains.

Office spaces are airy and bright, so the center requires no artificial illumination even on the dreariest Seattle days. And since most of the walls are made of glass, employees can see straight through one side of the building to the other, creating a feeling of community and openness.

What do tenants think of the space? “Everybody seems to be wildly enthusiastic,” says Bullitt Foundation president and CEO, Denis Hayes. “Psychological studies show that people perform better when they have the diorama going by outside—they are happier, healthier, take less sick leave, and are more productive.”

With no on-site parking for cars, tenants are encouraged to ride bikes to work and park them in a space the size of a three-car garage. And for those who arrive sweaty from the bike ride in, rainwater-fed showers are available on every floor.

While some developers may argue that it is too expensive to build this way, the Bullitt Center’s initial costs were only one-fifth above average for an office building of its class. And that’s not mentioning savings from energy and water bills, which will amount to zero when measured across 12 months.

The sewage bill is also zero because the building requires no hookup to the city’s sewer system. Composting toilets produce biologically pure waste, which is mixed with King County’s compost facility to produce agricultural grade compost.

The Bullitt Foundation hopes others will replicate their building. Bankers, developers, appraisers, insurance companies and government officials are invited to visit the center to learn more about building and investing in sustainable buildings.

McLennan concludes by suggesting that the Bullitt Center demonstrates the viability of taking a stronger approach to sustainability. “Washington is the least sunny state in the United States, and this building is still able to obtain 100 percent solar,” he says. He hopes that the Bullitt Center’s example will help to encourage others to build more enjoyable, sustainable, and affordable buildings around the world.

Samantha Thomas wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Samantha is Project Consultant for DreamChange, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a better world for future generations, by building cultural bridges between people, societies and corporations. She is also a freelance writer, green business consultant, and eco-fashion model based in New York City.

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Tim DeChristopher reacts to his supporters upon his exit from the court house after the first day of his trial, 28 Feb 2011. Photo by Ed Kosmicki.

Yesterday, after 21 months in federal custody, climate activist Tim DeChristopher approached the pulpit at his church in Salt Lake City, Utah, as a free man. The First Unitarian congregation rose in uproarious applause, tears streaming down more than a few faces.

This Earth Day, we thank Tim DeChristopher for steering our movement toward the path of courage.

“It’s good to be home,” DeChristopher told the crowd.

During his sermon, he said that he had never expected to change the oil and gas industry alone. “But I thought that I could change people like you, and I knew people like you have a lot of power.”

The story of how DeChristopher landed in prison is well known. On December 19, 2008, he walked into an oil and gas auction in Salt Lake City, where the Bureau of Land Management was auctioning off leases to drill on public lands. When asked if he had come to bid, DeChristopher, somewhat startled, said yes. He took a paddle, labeled “Bidder 70,” and without any plan as to what he would do with it, entered the auction. But then, when he saw a friend across the room break down in tears over the potential loss of wild lands, an idea came to him. He began raising his paddle to bid. By the end, he’d amassed a total of 22,500 acres at a price of $1.8 million.

Tim DeChristopher visits with Salt Lake City bookseller Ken Sanders after his release on April 21. Photo by Beth Gage.

Although the Obama Administration later declared the auction illegal and DeChristopher eventually raised enough money to buy the land he had bid on, two of the felony charges against him stuck. After a trial delayed nine times by the prosecution, he finally received a two-year sentence in July 2011.

But that's the Tim DeChristopher story you already know. What often gets overlooked in this folk hero tale of a man who went to jail for his principles is that DeChristopher didn't want to be the only hero. And so he became one of the most consistent and strongest voices for direct action and civil disobedience in the movement, urging environmental groups to use personal sacrifice as means of becoming more effective.

By showing that people who don’t hold positions of authority can successfully confront injustice, his example helped to build the climate-justice group Peaceful Uprising, changed the tactics of the nation’s most established environmental organizations, and helped shape the mass climate movement, which turned out nearly 50,000 people on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in February.

The time to act is now

It’s important to remember how much things have changed over the past few years in the climate justice movement, which emphasizes the effects of climate change on human rights—particularly on the world’s most marginalized people. When DeChristopher began speaking publicly about his action, the most popular approach in the movement could be described as “Let’s wait until we’re big enough, and act then.”

DeChristopher saw things differently, and he wasn’t afraid to say so. He thought the movement already had the numbers it needed to succeed, if people would step up and act—with the belief that their actions would propel more people into motion and build the movement’s numbers. He began to argue that groups like 350.org needed to stop waiting and start using civil disobedience now.

Bidder 70: This Is What Hope Looks Like
A new documentary about Tim DeChristopher opens today around the country. Click here for more info.

"We hold the power right here to create our vision of a healthy and just world, if we are willing to make the sacrifices to make it happen,” he said at the 2011 Power Shift conference in Washington, D.C. “Mountaintop removal, and climate change, and all the other injustices we are experiencing are not being driven solely by the coal industry, solely by lobbyists, or solely by the failure of our politicians. They’re also happening because of the cowardice of the environmental movement.”

Shortly after the Bidder 70 action, DeChristopher founded the climate justice group Peaceful Uprising, or PeaceUp, with his friend from the University of Utah, Ashley Anderson. Their intention was to radicalize the movement by making civil disobedience more the norm than the exception. “Peaceful Uprising realized something was building,” Anderson said, referring to public understanding of climate change. But the group’s members believed that taking full advantage of that was “going to require revolutionary change.”

PeaceUp aimed to push people to sacrifice their own comfort and take bolder action for the sake of a livable future. That may sound a little austere, but the group managed to make it rejuvenating and joyful by cultivating a supportive community.

Before his imprisonment, DeChristopher continued to speak publicly about the need for escalation. While he didn’t berate 350.org or other climate justice groups, his message was clearly aimed at them. He criticized the movement for focusing on mass gatherings that resulted in statements rather than action.

A movement transformed

Little by little, DeChristopher’s message was catching on, resulting in a series of actions—each one larger than the last—that used civil disobedience. In April 2011, more than 350 climate justice supporters staged a sit-in at the Department of the Interior, and 21 were arrested. Among the participants was 58-year-old University of Utah librarian Joan Gregory, a founding member of Peaceful Uprising who remains active to this day. It was her first arrest.

The demonstrators stormed the building despite a line of guards attempting to block the entrance. Police threatened them with felony charges, but Joan refused to leave. “I knew I couldn’t get up, no matter what it was,” she said. “I couldn’t not take action at that point.”

Get the poster: We Have More Than Enough Power

According to Peaceful Uprising director Henia Belalia, the Department of the Interior action stemmed from frustration over the movement’s lackluster response to the BP oil spill in 2010, as well as Tim’s impending imprisonment. “People were outraged and heartbroken,” she explained, “and they were going to do something about it, rather than just sit with the pain.”

A few months later, in August 2011, DeChristopher’s message came to life in a monumental way. During two weeks of sit-ins launched by the 350.org-affiliated Tar Sands Action, 1,253 people were arrested while protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. It was not only the largest civil disobedience demonstration by the climate movement, but also the largest in decades for any environmental issue in the United States.

“Tim's act helped break civil disobedience out of the domain of radicals and marginal activist culture,” said Tar Sands Action coordinator Matt Leonard. “That openness is a big part of how we mobilized the 1,253 people that were arrested in the Tar Sands Action, and a part of the near-daily actions that have happened on the Keystone pipeline this past year.”

350.org founder Bill McKibben agreed, saying that DeChristopher “was and is a complete inspiration to all of us. His courage permeated everyone's thinking.” While McKibben’s current work does not revolve solely around civil disobedience—350.org has been building a successful divestment campaign over the course of the past year—the mass civil disobedience actions have demonstrated the campaign’s resolve.

In turn, those actions likely provided the inspiration for the Sierra Club’s recent reversal of its 121-year-old ban on civil disobedience. Soon after, club leaders cuffed themselves to the White House gates, again over the issue of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Not just peaceful, but joyful

Peaceful Uprising’s emphasis on community-building is another testament to the lasting impact of DeChristopher’s work. The group strives to maintain an attitude of joy and resolve, with the goal of drawing new members and keeping them in the movement for the long haul by fostering a supportive, fun, community-centered culture.

As DeChristopher often said, “We will be a movement when we sing like a movement.” PeaceUp members have taken those words literally. At actions, its members can always be found singing upbeat, folksy songs, from “If I Had a Hammer” to “Have You Been to Jail for Justice?” Through song, colorful art like its giant paper mache puppets, and the deep sense of camaraderie its members share, Peaceful Uprising has been successfully building a nurturing culture.

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New Sierra Club policies on civil disobedience present an opening for radical groups to experiment with their tactics.

Maintaining a joyful presence is part of Peaceful Uprising’s strategy of merging resilience and resistance. Instead of getting bogged down in campaigns that do nothing but oppose unwanted things, PeaceUp goes a step further and tries to embody the world its members want to create. For example, group members select a “hot spot” and “cool spot” for every campaign—the hot spot representing an injustice members want to stop, and the cool spot representing a positive change that they want to create or bolster.

Peaceful Uprising also models how a small group of committed people with little background in activism can quickly become a powerful force for change. Members have gained experience in legal observation, media relations, jail support, and other elements of direct action, and now serve as a valuable resource for the local community by providing trainings in nonviolent direct action.

The continued influence of Peaceful Uprising in Utah and within the broader climate justice movement testifies to the significance of Tim’s closing statement at his sentencing in July 2011: "You can steer my commitment to a healthy and just world if you agree with it, but you can’t kill it. This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow."

And that is precisely what happened, which is why the celebration yesterday and today is not just about one man's release from prison. It's also his influence on the powerful movement that transpired in his absence.

Already, others are taking his place in prison. As Tim mentioned in his sermon yesterday, biologist and author Sandra Steingraber and two other activists were just imprisoned for 15 days after blocking access to a fracking gas storage site in New York to protect drinking water.

This Earth Day, we thank Tim DeChristopher for steering our movement toward the path of courage. With countless lives on the line, it's the path we need to take.

Melanie Jae Martin wrote this story for a special Earth Day collaboration between YES! Magazine and Waging Nonviolence. Melanie writes on environmental justice and transitioning into a sustainable future. Follow her on Twitter at @MJaeMartin.

Gotham Greens from Dark Rye on Vimeo.

Brooklyn may not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of gardening. The dense population and high cost of land means there is precious little space for agriculture. But that didn't stop the urban farm company Gotham Greens from creating a hydroponic greenhouse there. They just had to do it on a roof.

Increasing demand for local food sources has created a market for locally grown greens in dense places like New York City. Gotham Greens was started in New York City, and they are the country's first commercial scale rooftop hydroponic greenhouse.

Gotham Greens’ plants are organic, free of genetically modified organisms. and about as local as you can get for nearby restaurants and groceries. The farm is currently working on a partnership with Whole Foods to create a rooftop garden at the store’s new Brooklyn location. Watch the video to find out more.

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Goldman Prize recipient Nohra Padilla at a recycling facility. Photo by the Goldman Prize.

There is a growing global movement to significantly reduce the amount of trash we produce as communities, cities, countries and even regions. It’s called the zero-waste movement, and it received a major boost this week as two of its leaders were awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.

Nohra Padilla and Rossano Ercolini are two of the winners of this year’s Goldman Prize, which awards $150,000 to each of six grassroots environmentalists who have achieved great impact, often against great odds. On the surface, Padilla and Ercolini seem to have little in common. Padilla is a grassroots recycler—also known as a waste picker—from the embattled city of Bogotá, Colombia. Ercolini is an elementary school teacher from the rustic farmlands of Capannori, Italy.

Though their experiences are different, they share a common cause: organizing to reduce the amount of trash—everything from cans and bottles to cell phones and apple cores—that ends up buried in landfills or burned in incinerators.

What is zero waste?

Here in the United States zero waste is often thought of as a lifestyle choice, if it’s thought of at all. Blogs like Zero Waste Home and The Clean Bin Project attract a readership of thousands through tips on how to buy less, reuse more, and recycle and compost in the home. The popularity of these projects, along with the success of Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff, show a growing interest in reducing what we throw into dumpsters.

Zero waste systems are designed with the goal of eliminating the practice of sending trash to landfills and incinerators.

Padilla and Ercolini’s stories show that zero waste is not only a personal choice, but also an organized system that works at multiple levels including the community, municipality, nation, and region. Zero waste systems include:

• composting, recycling, reuse, and education on how to separate materials into these categories;
• door-to-door collection of recyclable and compostable stuff; swap meets, flea markets or freecycle websites to exchange reuseable goods and encourage people to buy less;
• policy change, including bans on incineration and single-use plastic bags, and subsidies and incentives for recycling;
• regulation of corporations to require them to buy back and recycle their products once they are used by consumers (glass soda bottles and tires are examples of products subject to this regulation in some countries).

Zero waste systems are designed with the goal of eliminating the practice of sending trash to landfills and incinerators. Not only is this possible, it’s already beginning to happen. Ercolini’s hometown of Capannori, Italy, has already achieved 82 percent recycling and reuse and is on track to bring that figure to 100 percent by 2020.

Taking on Europe’s incineration industry

Rossano Ercolini is an elementary school teacher. He began organizing against incinerators in the 1970s, when he learned of a plan to build one in Capannori. Concerned for the health of his students, Ercolini began a campaign to educate his community on the dangers of incineration, including how the burning of garbage releases particulates linked to asthma and other respiratory problems.

Rossano Ercolini. Photo by Goldman Prize.

Over the course of the next 30 years, Ercolini led a David-versus-Goliath struggle, with education as his slingshot. In the 1990s, waste incineration was embraced by the Italian government as well as by big environmental organizations, all of whom bought into the premise that it was a safe and effective technology. Big business and the mafia also supported incineration because of the 20- to 30-year lucrative contracts and large government investments it involved.

The conjunction of economic and political interests behind incineration left citizens alone, not only to fight against incineration but also to develop sustainable alternatives. Ercolini worked for several years as a grassroots educator, inviting scientists and waste experts to give workshops to residents on the health effects of incineration and potential alternatives.

As a result, when the residents of Capannori succeeded in defeating the incinerator proposal, they also had gained the knowledge necessary to develop a better way of handling garbage. Ercolini himself was tapped to lead a local, publicly owned waste management company and began implementing a door-to-door waste collection system that maximized the quantity and quality of the recyclable materials recovered.

Soon after, Capannori became the first Italian municipality to declare a zero waste goal for 2020. Since then, Ercolini has helped to defeat 50 proposed incinerators and has also helped the zero waste movement to spread across Italy. Thanks to the Italian network Legge Rifiuti Zero, or the Zero Waste Alliance, and with the support of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, there are now 117 zero waste municipalities in Italy, with a population of about 3 million people.

“Incineration is no longer wanted or needed in these areas,” Ercolini says. “Instead, they have established comprehensive recycling and composting systems guided by zero waste goals. This has helped improve community health and has sparked strong collaborations between communities and local governments.”

Grassroots recyclers unite

Nohra Padilla is a third generation recycler. For decades her family has survived by salvaging plastic bottles, aluminum cans, paper scraps, and the like from dumps, curbside trash cans, and collection centers. They made a living by reselling these materials to junk shops and also to businesses, which used them as raw material to create new products ranging from blue jeans to paper.

In the 1980s, Padilla began organizing her fellow recycling workers, creating the first grassroots recycler cooperative in Bogotá. Since then she has helped to form the Asociación de Recicladores de Bogotá, or Bogotá Recyclers Association, where she now serves as executive director. The association includes 24 cooperatives representing 3,000 people. She also played an important role in forming and leading Colombia’s National Recyclers Association.

“Grassroots recycling is a key component of a zero waste system,” Padilla says. Through their network of cooperatives, grassroots recyclers in Bogotá recover 20 to 25 percent of all material thrown away by city residents. This amounts to about 100 times more recyclable material than is collected by the city’s large private recycling companies.

Padilla has shown how recycling can incorporate workers into unionized labor, with a clear agenda to reduce trash and carbon emissions.

In March the association won a milestone victory: Grassroots recyclers are now city employees. They will be paid $48 per ton of material they deliver to collection centers, and will be eligible for government pensions and health coverage.

“After years of battling for recognition from the Bogotá government, we will finally be treated as dignified workers and paid just like any large company would be,” Padilla says. “I believe this is a victory that can be replicated across Latin America.”

Padilla has achieved this success in the face of powerful political opponents, a violent environment for worker organizing, and climate subsidies that cut recyclers out of the picture. In 2009, for example, the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism awarded carbon credits to the Doña Juana landfill gas project. This project threatened the livelihoods of Bogotá’s 21,000 informal recyclers by making it more profitable to landfill waste than to recycle it, and by limiting access to recyclable materials.

Padilla and the Grassroots Recyclers Association worked to mitigate the impact of the project, but faced many challenges in making sure that their community benefits agreement was implemented. In contrast to large landfills like Doña Juana, Padilla and the association have created infrastructure to recycle waste instead of bury it. They raised nearly two million dollars, about 75 percent from outside funds and 25 percent co-financed by the association, to build the biggest grassroots-run recycling center in Latin America.

A future without landfills

The stories of these two organizers show how zero waste movements from around the world share common problems and goals, as well as a need to confront powerful opponents with a vested interest in the business of trash.

Both stories also demonstrate the potential of zero waste organizing to bring people together across issues and sectors. For example, Ercolini has organized at the intersection of food sovereignty and trash reduction, advocating for a “Zero Miles, Zero Waste” approach to promoting local food. Meanwhile, Padilla has shown how zero waste approaches, and recycling in particular, can incorporate previously excluded workers into unionized labor, with a clear agenda to reduce trash and carbon emissions.

Padilla and Ercolini’s work has created a model for building viable zero waste alternatives to landfills and incinerators. The struggles of the Colombian recyclers’ movement, and the Bogotá Recyclers Association in particular, serve as an inspiration to recyclers throughout Latin America and beyond.

Meanwhile, the example of the Zero Waste network in Italy is being copied in many other places in Europe, decreasing the popularity of and need for incineration and sparking the creation of a continent-wide organization that advocates for zero waste.

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The Food Project not only grows good produce, it grows good people. Based in the Boston area, The Food Project works with more than 125 teens and thousands of volunteers each year to grow over a quarter-million pounds of chemical-free food— donating thousands of pounds of produce to local hunger relief organizations and selling the remainder through community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm shares and farmers markets.

Just as important, The Food Project is a resource on sustainable communities. Their wisdom and experience are accessible to organizations and individuals worldwide. This venerable organization’s wealth of information and knowledge is available through materials, workshops, videos, and more.

EXPLORE THE FOOD PROJECT WEBSITE

Here are just a few of The Food Project’s resources. Classroom teachers, informal educators, and community organizers, be prepared to be inspired!

Manuals
The Food Project's manual series captures the nuts and bolts of each of its acclaimed programs and address the fundamental principles, structures, and philosophies vital to the success of any youth-based program. Manuals include how to run a sustainable production farm while integrating thousands of youth and volunteers; how to engage young people throughout the school year with community-based programs; and how to establish food lots in urban areas.
EXPLORE The Food Project Manuals

Activities
How do you successfully establish trust and rapport with teens and thousands of volunteers? From ice breakers to team building, The Food Project shares its tried-and-true games that build reliance and camaraderie in any group of youth and adults. Activities to introduce groups to specific issues, such as food systems and hunger, are also offered.
EXPLORE The Food Project Activities

Curriculum on Sustainable Agriculture

Teen participants with The Food Project not only are taught to plant seeds, they are also taught the science and merits of sustainable agriculture. The eight-part series is an accumulation of years of experience, with units that cover the principles of sustainable agriculture and food systems; the importance of compost and fertile soil; the role of insects in farming; and—my favorite—weed   management (if only …).

EXPLORE Curriculum on Sustainable Agriculture

For additional resources, visit The Food Project’s official website

Since 1991, The Food Project has built a national model of engaging young people in personal and social change through sustainable agriculture. Each year, they work with over a hundred teens and thousands of volunteers to farm on 31 acres in rural Lincoln, Mass. and on several lots in urban Boston. They focus on identifying and transforming a new generation of leaders by placing teens in unusually responsible roles, with deeply meaningful work.

• New Crop of Farmers: The Food Project's Jessica Liborio
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• Brower Youth Award Winner Diana Lopez
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The above resources accompany the April 2013 YES! Education Connection Newsletter

READ NEWSLETTER: Why cooperatives rock :: TEDTalk for the bullied and beautiful

Photo by Shutterstock.

The solar era has begun: the industry is booming, prices are dropping, and solar energy at last seems poised to help topple the climate-altering dominance of fossil fuels. But bringing it to the masses won’t be as simple as just soaking up the sun.

Hawaii is solving problems today that other states may encounter tomorrow.

To gain a better picture of the challenges to come—and of some possible solutions—electric companies and solar developers throughout the nation are watching Hawaii, which derives a larger fraction of its electricity from the sun than any other state. Homeowners and businesses have led the charge here, something that distinguishes Hawaii from other states at the forefront of solar, like Nevada and Arizona, which depend more heavily on large-scale installations.

The reasons for Hawaii’s solar boom are many. The Polynesians who inhabited the Hawaiian islands before the arrival of Europeans were entirely self-sufficient. But in 2010 it was a different picture: the state generated 86.1 percent of its electricity from imported petroleum. The high price tag on that energy, along with a heightened awareness of the islands’ isolation, has led the state to set an ambitious goal: to derive 40 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2030. It reached 13 percent in 2012.

Hawaii has roughly doubled its solar power capacity every year since 2007, and in 2012 installed more solar than in the last six years combined. It’s not hard to see what’s behind the solar frenzy: With the average electric bill stacking up to roughly $230 per month, Hawaii has the highest electricity rates in the nation by far—nearly twice as high as the second-most expensive state.

Solar has the potential to decrease a homeowner’s electric bill to zero, except for a monthly $18 service charge. Those kinds of savings, combined with federal and local tax credits, mean a Hawaiian homeowner can recoup the cost of a solar investment in just 3.1 years. Even if all the tax credits were removed, it would still take only 8.9 years for a Hawaii solar installation to pay for itself.

But so much solar has also created problems. Each island’s electric grid is isolated from the others, and therefore less stable than a typical mainland grid, particularly when unpredictable solar energy enters the picture. But solutions are beginning to emerge. Better energy storage systems and weather-prediction technology are being developed to stabilize those grids. Meanwhile, the Hawaii legislature is poised to reduce solar tax credits, which some say are too expensive. In short, Hawaii is solving problems today that other states may encounter tomorrow.

Hawaii’s high rate of solar adoption makes it a likely picture of California’s future, according to Elaine Sison-Lebrilla, renewable energy program manager at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. The district is collaborating with the Hawaiian Electric Company to develop solutions to many of the obstacles it’s encountered.

“They’ll see these problems much sooner than us,” Sison-Lebrilla said, “and the hope is that there will be lessons learned from them and we’ll be prepared.”

Obstacle 1: More power than the grid can handle

“What about cloudy days?” That’s the perennial question for an industry striving to improve the efficiency of solar technology. But it’s too much power, not too little, that’s the problem in Hawaii.

“The system was not designed originally to have energy flowing two ways,” explained Peter Rosegg, spokesman for the Hawaiian Electric Company, or HECO, which provides electricity to 95 percent of the Hawaiian population. “Now all of a sudden you have rooftop solar and most of them are sending power back over these [lines] during much of the day because they’re producing more than they can use.”

Traditionally, a human operator at a centralized system operations center tracks power generation to ensure that it stays exactly equal to demand. But solar power generated by individual homes or businesses is invisible to these operators. This increases the risk of a sudden spike or drop-off in power, which can damage generation or transmission equipment—even home appliances—and cause outages and instability across the grid.

Solution: Grid upgrades, meters, and batteries

Ultimately, infrastructure upgrades—probably massive ones—will be essential. HECO and several solar industry and advocacy groups have developed a plan for rolling out these upgrades, which they presented to the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission for review in January. They recommend what they call a “proactive approach,” and advise utilities to prioritize grid upgrades in areas where they anticipate seeing the most demand for solar.

The technologies that will be used to redefine the grid are under development. Among these are “smart meters” that would make solar power generation visible to system operators. The Maui Smart Grid Project will be collecting data from smart meters it’s testing throughout 2013.

Short-term battery storage systems are further along, with experiments using 1-megawatt batteries now underway on three islands. Such batteries could store excess power to smooth out power spikes and lulls.

These batteries are expensive, but if they’re proven to work, Rosegg says it’s reasonable to expect demand to go up and prices to go down. And lower prices for a proven technology could pave the way for other grids around the country.

Hawaii is an ideal place to test these technologies: Unlike on the mainland, where power companies can draw electricity from surrounding areas if they run into problems, each island has its own grid that is unconnected to the others. That’s why Hawaii is in such a precarious situation in the first place, but it also makes the success or failure of any technology that’s being tested immediately visible.

Obstacle 2: The unpredictable politics of solar tax credits

Hawaii is doling out more solar tax credit dollars than ever, and now state legislators are seeking to reduce that spending. But some argue that the expenses have been overestimated, while the benefits have been overlooked.

The solar industry now accounts for 26 percent of the state’s construction-related spending.

In September 2012, the state’s Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism projected that Hawaii would spend more than $173 million on tax credits for solar by year’s end—five times as much as in 2010.

But one solar industry leader, Mark Duda, contends that those projections were overestimated by more than $56 million, according to actual year-end figures. Duda is principal and founder of Oahu’s top solar company, RevoluSun, and president of the Hawaii PV Coalition.

It’s a staggering difference, and an important one, considering how closely the state legislature is watching these numbers. In the next month, the legislature is expected to vote on a measure that could gradually decrease the state’s 35 percent capped tax credit—which solar adopters receive in addition to a 30 percent federal tax credit.

How the tax credit should be handled is just one piece in a puzzle of controversies. Also on the table is a Department of Taxation administrative rule, effective January 1, which aimed to cut down on the widespread practice of claiming multiple tax credits for a single project.

Nonprofit law organization Earthjustice is now representing the Sierra Club in a lawsuit over the rule, pointing to past releases from the department that defend the practice it’s now trying to eradicate.

Such policy changes create uncertainty that hits the solar industry hard, said Isaac Moriwake, an Earthjustice attorney. “That’s the exact wrong message you want to send the market: ‘We support renewable energy. No, just kidding.’”

Solution: A more stable tax policy

Cutting back on the tax credit may look like a sure way to save money in tough economic times, but Moriwake and others in the industry say uncertainty is the problem, not the tax credit.

Hawaii Solar Energy Association’s Executive Director Leslie Cole-Brooks says that when legislators worry about high tax credits, they’re overlooking a wealth of benefits and revenues.

Aside from the environmental benefits of clean energy, increased economic independence means that Hawaii’s energy prices won’t spike when oil prices do—which is what happened after the Japanese tsunami in 2011. Cole-Brooks also points to the increased income and sales tax revenues from local and mainland companies riding the solar wave. After all, the solar industry now lays claim to 26 percent of the state’s construction-related spending.

The economic benefits Hawaii is experiencing are promising for any state, at least according to a January 2013 report from the Blue Planet Foundation, a Hawaii nonprofit.

The report estimates that for every dollar spent in solar tax credits for residential installations, the state receives $1.97 in additional tax revenues. That number bumps to $2.67 for commercial installations. And the benefits don’t end there: over its lifetime, a 5.27-kilowatt residential system creates more than three jobs—and a remarkable 81 jobs are created over the lifetime of a 118-kW commercial system.

Despite these benefits, the Hawaii Solar Energy Association and Duda now support a gradual ramp-down of the tax credit. The association views this support as a compromise, but Duda says that in the context of Hawaii’s high energy prices, the credit is “unnecessarily generous.” His main goal is eliminating uncertainty in the solar industry, and for that Hawaii needs a stable tax policy.

Obstacle 3: “The 15 Percent Rule”

Power companies have long been concerned about too much solar energy overloading the grid. Too much can pose a danger by suddenly powering lines which, during a power outage, utility employees don’t expect to be electrified. So for several years, Hawaii adhered to “The 15 Percent Rule,” which prohibits the owners of solar installations from producing more than 15 percent of the maximum energy demand in a given day.

Because of the 15 percent rule, some homeowners who wanted to install solar were required to undergo “interconnection studies” to test whether their installation would overload their part of the grid.

Rosegg says that 29 commercial and residential studies were required in 2012. It doesn’t sound like much, but the studies have raised a lot of controversy about whether the 15 percent rule is too strict—and with the help of that popular pressure, the rules are changing.

Solution: Lift excessively cautious limits

As Moriwake sees it, electric companies arrived at the 15 percent rule somewhat arbitrarily. He believes that percentage can be increased safely, while stimulating the industry along the way.

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That’s just what happened last year: Hawaii raised solar’s maximum allowable contribution to 75 percent of minimum daytime demand, or about 23 percent of maximum daily demand. Actual minimum demand generally occurs in the middle of the night when most people are sleeping, but there’s no risk of too much solar power at night, so minimum “daytime” demand is looked upon as a fairer approach.

The Hawaiian Energy Company also refunded the cost of any studies conducted on systems 10 kW or smaller.

The “proactive approach” proposal recommends increasing the allowance all the way to 100 percent of minimum demand. The Public Utilities Commission will need to review the report’s recommendations, but Moriwake hopes for a decision in the next several months.

California raised its limit to 100 percent of minimum last year without major problems, and if Hawaii, too, can handle that amount, it may encourage other states to skip overly cautious maximums that limit solar potential.

Obstacle 4: The unpredictability of the sun’s power

Hawaii’s weather is a lot more complex than the cloudless skies and unblinking sun most of us imagine. And with complex weather comes unpredictable solar power generation. That’s one reason many utilities hesitate to adopt solar.

“If you’ve ever been to Hawaii, their cloud cover comes in much more quickly and goes out and is a lot less predictable,” Sison-Lebrilla said. And it’s not all sunny: parts of Hawaii log some of the highest rainfall averages on Earth.

So to stabilize its grids in the face of unpredictable weather, Hawaii needs better weather prediction technologies—if utilities know when the sun will be shining and when it won’t, they can plan ahead and adjust for spikes or dips in solar power generation.

Solution: Better solar prediction

Solar forecasting aims to predict levels of sunlight and the level of solar power generation that will result. This requires predicting the cloud cover in specific areas, which the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research calls “one of the greatest challenges in meteorology.”

Developing solar forecasting tools is one of the primary goals of the collaboration between the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and the Hawaiian Electric Company, and they’ve already begun testing such technologies.

“We’ve put up a network of sensors in [the District’s] territory, and Hawaii has done that also,” Sison-Lebrilla said.

The Sacramento and Hawaii utilities aren’t the only organizations working on such a project, but Hawaii’s variety of microclimates could make data there more broadly applicable than if the test were conducted in a lower-penetration and more interconnected grid such as Sacramento’s.

Their research is already paying off on a national scale: The two utilities are now partners in a three-year effort, announced in February, to develop 36-hour forecasting for solar energy. The project is headed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Hawaii’s high demand for new solar installations is expected to slow down in 2013, but one thing is certain: solar is here to stay. All eyes are on the Aloha State as it overcomes these obstacles, one by one, to pave the way for solar nationwide.

Erin L. McCoy wrote this article for YES! Magazine, national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical action. Erin worked as a newspaper reporter and photographer in Kentucky for almost two years. She is now a Seattle-based freelance writer specializing in education, environment, cultural issues, and travel, informed by her time teaching English in Malaysia and other travels. Contact her at elmccoy [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter @ErinLMcCoy.

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