THIS AUGUST: Convergences 4 Climate Action -- Down w/ the Fossil Fuel Empire & Up w/ Life!

COME CO-CREATE AN ALTERNATIVE TO AN ENERGY-DEPENDENT WORLD!
Just under a month from now -- August 8-14th -- regional North American Convergences for Climate Action will bring hundreds of social justice and environmental activists together to fight the fossil fuel empire and create truly sustainable, bio-regionally appropriate and community-based responses to climate change. The events on the West Coast and in the Southeast are modeled after the inspiring 2006 Climate Camp in the UK, which will reemerge this year at Heathrow Airport from August 14th-21st.

Part networking and activist skills training, part community sustainability demonstration site, the Convergences aim to invigorate the Climate Movement by pulling together communities of resistance. We aim to inject an anti-oppression, justice-focused agenda, and to demonstrate examples of truly sustainable, less energy-intensive lives that don't depend on the oppression, thievery, and destruction attached to fossil fuel extraction.

With extreme weather, massive species extinctions, and melting ice caps becoming a more dire reality each day, it is high time for us to come together to take firm actions against the root causes of climate change.

The Convergence for Climate action aims to promote a just, rapid transition away from fossil fuels; promote environmental justice by supporting communities that are fighting dirty energy developments in their backyards; encourage direct action as a means for challenging dirty energy and empowering the movement to stop climate change, and to increase networking and strategizing amongst the diverse social justice and environmental movements fighting climate change and the energy industry.

Each convergence location has been strategically chosen to empower and work in solidarity with surrounding communities already fighting the fossil fuel industry. A day of mass direct action against adjacent industry targets is planned for Monday, August 13th at both the West Coast Convergence in Southern Washington, and the Southeast Convergence near Asheville, North Carolina.

The West Coast Convergence for Climate Action will be situated near a community that is fighting a proposed Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminal on the Columbia River. Currently, LNG development is being met with local, community-based resistance due to the immense safety risks, environmental destruction, local economic impact, and social injustice related to this foreign fossil fuel. We are working with and supporting many of the local residents in their campaign against LNG, as well as with activists resisting dams, highway expansions, nuclear and other forms of dirty and unjust energy.

The Southeast Convergence for Climate Action, near Asheville, North Carolina, will bring together activists across the region who are fighting mountaintop removal mining and coal and nuclear power plants. Mountaintop removal coal mining is currently devastating the ecologically diverse southern Appalachian Mountains. The coal companies have literally flattened hundreds of square miles of mountains, destroyed thousands of miles of our life giving streams, and terrorized countless communities in the process. Meanwhile southern utility companies are planning a blitzkrieg of new dirty coal plants, despite our regions already dismal air quality. To add insult to injury these same utility companies are using climate change as a justification for building a new fleet of dangerous nuclear reactors.

The convergences will be spaces for celebration, for kids and families, a place to socialize with friends old and new. The organizers intend to show that less energy intensive, less 'stuff-centered'; living is not just more environmentally friendly, but that less can be so much more FUN!

Please join Rising Tide and other organizations for this exciting week of learning, networking, fun, and action. See you in August.

In order to adequately provide food and lodging, the organizers ask that you please pre-register for the convergences on-line.

To register, for more information visit, or to participate in various pre-convergence festivities, please visit: www.climateconvergence.org
U.S. West Coast contact: westcoast@climateconvergence.org
U.S. Southeast contact: risingtide@mountainrebel.net
U.K. contact: info@climatecamp.org.uk