Chase Funding Mountaintop Removal

STOP CHASE FROM FUNDING THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA
Social Media Can Move Mountains, Or Keep Them In Place

Today, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) hosts PUT CHASE ON THE RUN, a social media day of action, to convince Chase bank to stop funding mountaintop removal coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains.

JP Morgan Chase is the biggest U.S. financier of Mountaintop Removal (MTR). Mountaintop removal is the highly destructive mining practice that blows apart the tops of mountains in order to access coal in the cheapest way possible. MTR has buried over 2000 miles of rivers and streams and destroyed nearly 1.2 million acres of the Appalachian range. MTR has severely contaminated the air and drinking water, causing increased rates of mortality and disease for local people in the mountains of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia.

Join dozens of organizations and thousands of online activists in convincing Chase to stop destroying American mountains. Take a simple action on your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blog or email to end mountaintop removal in 2010. Go to www.DirtyMoney.org for instructions and PUT CHASE ON THE RUN!

This is the kind of environmental destruction that gets me fired up about renewable energy. I love the mountains and even though I don't live in Appalachia, the people there deserve to have their mountains left intact and not destroyed by companies like Chase Bank. Take action. Do something to save our mountains for today.

New and Different

Instead of an update on skiing I have an update on the activism side of my life (oddly enough just as I started writing that an ad for Exxon-Mobil just came on the TV in my hotel room in DC) Currently, I'm in DC for a CC training for the week, we kicked off the week by participating in a protest outside the state department demanding that the major emitters sign a treaty to reduce global warming emissions at a conference in Denmark at the end of this year. I'm always inspired by being here in DC and being around the GP CC crew for the next couple weeks. Seriously, it always reminds me of whenever I feel world weary or getting old and crotchety I need to place myself around people who honestly believe that they can make change and have the insane yet invigorating energy to do it. I think that there must be something distinctly different in the chemical makeup of those who set out to be activists. Something in the brain says, "Fuck it, I can do it." rather than, "Eh who cares, I can't change the world". I always wonder what that is, in those moments where I'm kicking my ass to do something and thinking about how much more money I could make doing something else or how I could be a total ski bum, it makes me wonder how I ended up with that chemical makeup. No matter what I'm glad I have it. It's what drives me to want to change the world and climb mountains at the same time, it's what drives me to lead a different life and to believe it's possible. So I'm glad I have it, I think.
Anyways, I can't find any pictures of the actual protest online but I can find a picture of the banner dropped off a crane that faced the state department. Sexy right?