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On the Front Lines of the Climate Change Movement: Mike Roselle Draws a Line

St. Clair, Jeffrey; Frank, Joshua
http://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/08/on-the-front-lines-of-the-climate-change-movement-mike-roselle-draws-a-line/

Publisher:  CounterPunch
Date Written:  08/02/2019
Year Published:  2019  
Resource Type:  Article

An excerpt from the book The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank. An account of environmental activists fighting massive industries to save the environment.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

As a result of the ongoing destruction of this forgotten region of Appalachia, Roselle and others affiliated with his latest group, Climate Ground Zero, have set up shop and vow not to end their actions until this mining practice has been outlawed. But the West Virginia media, long in the pockets of Big Coal, has not depicted Roselle as a nonviolent activist who has been pushed to act because his conscience has forced him to. On the contrary, Roselle has been portrayed as a potential eco-terrorist and a threat, not only to jobs in the region but to human life as well....

Federal and state governments have long targeted the civil rights of environmentalists. In the mid-1980s, swaths of new laws were passed that targeted the acts of direct, action-oriented, environmental protests. The laws followed a tree spike incident in Sonoma County, California, during the height of the battles to save the ancient redwood forests. As a worker thrust his blade into the trunk of a mighty tree, the blade hit a spike, snapped and flung back only to strike the logger. The media and logging industry called it eco-terrorism. But it wasn't an environmentalist that hammered that spike into the tree; it was a furious local right-wing landowner who had no part in the protests to end logging of the redwoods in the state. He was just pissed it was happening in his own backyard. Nonetheless, the tree spiking opened up attacks by the media, treating the incident as legitimate terrorism. The timber behemoths lobbied hard and the result was a series of laws that were meant to deter activists from targeting the logging industry in any way in any form.

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