5-9PM, Thursday, November 17th, 2011
Noble Hall Room 130, Fort Lewis College, Durango, CO
$3-$15 sliding scale suggested donation. No one will be turned away due to lack of funds. All donations (and 50% of all patch and poster sales!) will go to benefit the Black Mesa Indigenous Support (BMIS) Fall Caravan.
In 2008, the Beehive Design Collective allied with Appalachian grassroots organizers fighting Mountain Top Removal Coal Mining, a highly destructive practice that blasts ancient mountains into toxic moonscapes to fuel the ever-growing global demand for electricity. This graphic reflects the complexity of the struggles for land, livelihood, and self-determination playing out in Appalachia, while honoring the tremdendous history of organized resistance and the courage of communities living in the shadow of Big Coal.
Our team of volunteer illustrators and educators have collaborated with hundreds of grassroots groups and folks from around the world to create this visually stunning graphic multi-tool for activists and ordinary people seeking real solutions to energy extraction and climate change!
The True Cost of Coal is dense with metaphors drawn from the natural world. It is rooted in history, grounded in the grinding urgency of MTR, fueled by the looming threat of climate change, and guided by the robust, grassroots resistance of everyday Appalachians. It is populated by characters from the mountains- plants and critters under siege, and fighting back! It is a love letter to the resilient, sustainable world that has quietly endured in the hills and hollers all the while, despite the horrors of displacement, the abuses of the powerful, and the onslaught of industrial scale extraction. It is about the better world our communities are envisioning, building, and defending every day, in a million ways.
You are a part of this story. So are we. From our dependence on coal-powered electricity to our collective ability to organize for climate justice, we are each implicated in the struggle for the mountains, which is really the struggle for all places. Though we cannot pretend to speak for the daily lived realities of the coalfields of Appalachia, we are listening to the wisdom of those that do, and are striving to create a tool to help us all decipher these overwhelming times we are living through. Each of us has a unique piece of the story, and each of our communities has a different kind of power. As we harness that power- and leave the coal in the ground- we are remaking the world.
Teeming with biodiversity and nourished with abundant fresh water, this world is home to generations of plants and animals who are seen enacting the cycles of birth, life, death, and regeneration. Growing, gathering, and preparing food; sharing stories, songs, and skills; producing, exchanging, and reusing goods and tools; and transmitting historical memory, they are intimate with the land and rooted in economies of place.
More: www.beehivecollective.org
Southwest Earth First! 