While many folks have been taking a break during this holiday season, our Marla Marcum has not been one of them. Over the last week Marla has been jumping between lawyers and dozens of defendants who are before multiple courts defending their acts of conscience and moral imagination. 

Will you support Marla’s incredible court-support work with a donation?

The Climate Disobedience Center arose out of a need to deal with court cases after someone has taken action. I’m sure many of you know how we’ve spearheaded efforts to bring the climate necessity defense into courtrooms across the country. But legal strategy isn’t the only thing that happens when activists enter a courtroom; it can be a place to build community, build the disobedience muscles of those around us, and build power we can use in the next phase of action.

Defendants from the 2019 mass action to remove coal in Bow, New Hampshire fill the room in Concord District Court February 14th, 2020.

This weekend across two states, a community of climate activists stopped 10,000 tons of coal in its tracks in three successive train blockades. This is the next step in a campaign that started in August to shut down the Merrimack Generating Station in Bow, New Hampshire - the last large coal-fired power plant in New England without a shut-down date. There is no justification for burning coal in 2019: it’s far too late for that. And taking responsibility in 2019 means taking action.

There was fresh snow on the ground when the train, which was 80 cars long, rolled into Worcester, MA at 9:30 AM on Saturday, December 7th. It sat there almost a full day before it started rolling north again at 7:30 PM. Before the train had moved more than a couple miles, it was stopped by a small but determined group of activists who had been standing in temperatures well below freezing all day. A rotation of students from Clark Climate Justice (Clark University), with support from members of 350 Central Massachusetts and the Central MA climate disobedience praxis group, had been keeping themselves warm enough and ready to act throughout the many hours of waiting. 

ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, MEMBERS OF THE WORCESTER COMMUNITY BLOCKADED A COAL TRAIN EN ROUTE TO THE MERRIMACK PLANT IN BOW, NH

Worcester, MA -- Currently, more than 20 members of the Worcester community’s student climate justice groups are blocking a Coal Train heading to the Merrimack Plant in Bow, NH. The students blocking the train are protesting the continued usage of the coal plant. This protest stands against the burning of coal that continues to destroy the climate, and the harm upon frontline communities that the fossil fuel industry inflicts, especially in the global south. This direct action is an important element to larger movements towards climate justice. 

I have spent the past week reveling in the beauty of the climate strikes mingled with many ongoing grassroots fights for justice. I feel deeply connected to and grateful for the energy that is rising. I am also conscious that this one moment didn't achieve the transformation we need – not yet.

This is for all of you who have been building the world you are certain we need, doing it sometimes quietly and sometimes very loudly. I see you. Your long work has created the conditions that made this week possible.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 20, 2019

Press contact: Jay O'Hara, 774-313-0881
[email protected]

Concord, NH - On Saturday, August 17th 2019, eight determined New Englanders, supported by a team of more than a dozen others, removed over 500lbs of coal from the fuel pile at Merrimack Generating Station in Bow, New Hampshire. This facility is the largest coal-fired power plant in New England without a shutdown date. Says Tim DeChristopher, co-founder of the Climate Disobedience Center: “With the global climate crisis having advanced this far without a dramatic change in US carbon emissions, we have a responsibility to remove this fuel from the fire. Indeed, it is now a necessity to take matters into our own hands and safely shut down this facility.”

This weekend on the South Coast of Massachusetts we're going to get to witness the end of an era in the state, when a controlled demolition implodes the huge cooling towers on Saturday April 27th. Providence's Extraordinary Rendition Band will provide the soundtrack for a jubilant dance party in Fall River's Kennedy Park at 8AM that morning. (I hope you'll join us!) This moment is both an important moment for our movement to reflect, as well as a personal point for me.

I got into climate disobedience in earnest in 2013 when Ken Ward and I anchored our little white lobster boat, the "Henry David T" in the shipping channel in front of the coal plant, and demanded that the plant be shut down immediately. We remained there for a day, blocking the unloading of 40,000 tons of Appalachian coal from a hulking black ship which has traveled up from Norfolk, Virginia, to supply what was then the largest single source of CO2 emissions in New England.

That act of disobedience lit a fire in the climate movement to focus on direct action and hone in on that massive coal plant. That summer, there were hundreds of people at the gates of the plant demanding it's immediate closure, dozens were arrested at the gates, and a long march kicked off later that summer from Fall River to the proposed site of Cape Wind.

And it's precisely here that we see the catalytic work of climate disobedience: to set a narrative, grounded in the moral imagination of what is necessary, rather than what is thought to be politically possible. Prior to the lobster boat action, advocates were proposing that the plant be shut down by 2020. But on Saturday the plant will have been shut down for nearly two years and the huge monuments that tower above the skyline of Fall River (let alone Somerset) will come down forever.

IT WAS NOT CHEAP GAS

But why, you might ask, have a dance party celebration for the climate justice movement when it was cheap fracked gas that really shut down the plant? It's conventional wisdom to say that this plant was shut down because the cost of coal couldn't compete against cheap fracked gas flowing into New England. And we're going to dance because we believe that premise is utterly false - or at least incomplete.