Earlier this month, New Yorkers won a nine-month moratorium from the state Senate on the dangerous and highly-polluting drilling practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The inspiring story of civic action that led to this decision is told by Maura Stephens in a recently published piece by Yes! Magazine.

Many fighting this battle had never before been involved in political issues. But after seeing the impacts of fracking around the country or in their own daily lives, they got active.

They organized and attended forums, panels, meetings, and rallies—sometimes alongside public figures like actor Mark Ruffalo and singer-songwriter Pete Seeger. Day after day, thousands of people called state senate and assembly offices to pressure for the moratorium. Achieving it was a first-round victory beyond expectations—a small but important win.

With their air, water, land, properties, communities, and health on the line, residents have made the campaign a priority, often sacrificing family time, leisure time, and sleep to keep abreast of developments and share information. “The petrochemical-industrial complex is stealing our land and our health,” says New York resident and architect Joe Levine. “Life as we know it will change forever if we don’t stop them.”

Levine has a home near the New York State border in Damascus, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Jane Cyphers, and their two daughters. The family has turned over their lives to this issue since they were first approached by gas companies wanting to lease their land. They soon realized that their beloved Delaware River would be imperiled by drilling. Levine cofounded Damascus Citizens, a grassroots group made up of people who are fighting to keep the Delaware safe from fracking. Their influence, and the experiences of the town of Dimock, Pennyslvania, inspired Josh Fox to make the documentary Gasland.

Sullivan County, New York, resident Larysa Dyrszka, a retired pediatrician, has also taken on the role of state-level activist for the first time.

“Nobody thought drilling would really come here, to a populated area, with technology that couldn’t ensure against harmful effects to our drinking water and health,” says Dyrszka. “Little did we know it was already happening in Texas and Colorado and in other populated areas.”

Together with her friends and neighbors, Dyrszka started SACRED—Sullivan Area Citizens for Responsible Energy Development. On January 25, Dyrszka joined hundreds of New Yorkers from all corners of the state to lobby their representatives in Albany—many, like Dyrszka, for the first time.

“I was hooked,” Dyrszka says. “Now, whenever Roger [Downs, of the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter] or Katharine [Nadeau, of EANY] or any fellow foot-soldier groups suggest a lobby day, I’m there.”

For months, Dyrszka and her fellow activists continued building relationships by phone, e-mail, and in person with legislative staff, sending them scientific, health, legal, economic, and other information on fracking.

Those involved in the organizing, however, also credit the release of the powerful anti-fracking documentary Gasland with influencing the moratorium decision.

Filmmaker Josh Fox brought his award-winning Gasland to many New York cinemas in early summer. Fox, who’d traveled to 24 states to document the heartbreaking human stories behind the industry hype about a “safe, clean fuel,” has appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and other national shows. Gasland has been showing on HBO since debuting there in June. Its scene of a man lighting the water coming from his kitchen tap on fire has become iconic of fracking’s dangers to drinking water. Everywhere it shows, more people join the antifracking movement.

Having recently watched this film, I can attest to its action-stirring message. The devastating effects fracking has incurred on many rural American communities—from explosions to undrinkable water and disease—leaves little doubt that the fight must go on until a permanent moratorium is installed. Thankfully, the movement to do this seems to be growing.

n September, the New York Assembly will vote a similar moratorium bill. Activists are working to ensure it gets to the floor for a vote. Another focus is on educating outgoing Governor David Paterson, whom they expect to sign the moratorium bills (he had threatened to veto, but that’s now unlikely, given the huge majority Senate passage).The incoming governor will be the focus of attention post-election. Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins has called for a total ban on the practice. Democrat Andrew Cuomo and Republican Rick Lazio say they are in favor of “safe” drilling. Activists are already showing up at Cuomo’s statewide rallies to let him know that fracking isn’t safe.

Antifracking advocates believe their multifaceted approach—based on educating themselves, the public, and legislators—will work. They’re optimistic that their concerns about their health, homes, and drinking water won’t be ignored.

“Cooperation from around the state made us succeed in the Senate,” says Dyrszka. “None of us are being paid. Nobody’s offering us money, now or in the future. We’re just fighting for our lives, and that ‘s why we’re winning these little battles.”

• Men wearing face masks of British Prime Minister David Cameron gathered in London on Friday to call for a ban on the cloning of cattle for human consumption, following the discovery of a cloned U.S. cow that was slaughtered and eaten in Britain.

• Two members of the environmental group Six Degrees climbed onto the roof of Queensland parliament house in Australia last week to display an anti-coal mining banner that read: “Don’t undermine our farms.” Meanwhile, hundreds of farmers and green activists staged a peaceful protest outside parliament.

• The “We Are Guahan” coalition in Guam gathered at a major intersection in Tamuning on Friday to protest the use of historic and ceremonial lands for military buildup.

• Some 150 protesters gathered outside a federal prison farm in Kingston, Ontario this morning to protest its closure. They say the government is ignoring the rehabilitative and healing effects that farming offers low-risk inmates.

• Up to 60 people have been camping out in front of the county government building in Santa Cruz since July Fourth to protest the city’s camping ban, which prohibits sleeping on public or private property from 11 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. But deputies rousted the homeless protest camp just after midnight Saturday, arresting five people and handing out 17 other misdemeanor citations.

• Workers who were fired by a Brooklyn kosher food producer after demanding overtime pay have been protesting outside the owner’s house and a supermarket this summer, and preparing for a return to the National Labor Relations Board this fall.

• Baristas and community supporters shut down a Starbucks in Omaha last week demanding that management reverse all cuts to healthcare, staffing, and benefits that have been imposed during the recession. The baristas claim that executives have no justification to squeeze working families with Starbucks raking in profits of $977.2 million in the past four fiscal quarters.

Last week, Corporate Ethics International launched a multi-year ad campaign – including an online video (above), ads on Google and tourism websites, and billboards in Seattle, Portland, Denver and Minneapolis – calling on tourists to boycott Alberta over the province’s oil sands. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Tourism is important for Alberta, which attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists every year to its wilderness parks and resorts in Banff and Jasper, and to the annual Stampede rodeo and outdoor show in Calgary.

Alberta officials and members of the oil sands industry were angry at the ad campaign. Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach said in a press conference Wednesday that the campaign “does, of course, anger me to a large degree because it’s an attack on about a hundred thousand Albertans whose lives depend upon the tourism industry.”

In an interview with CTV News Channel,  executive director of Corporate Ethics International Michael Marx explained the motivation for the “Rethink Alberta” campaign and why the characterization of the the effort as an “attack” isn’t accurate:

“We think the Alberta government has been pretty arrogant in ignoring the concerns of environmental groups in the U.S., in Europe and in Canada, as well as First Nations, and that it’s been deceptive in its public relations in claiming that they’re greening the tarsands,” Marx said.

“We felt like we needed to be more aggressive in calling the government out.”

He added that his group doesn’t wish to harm tourism businesses but hopes they will get involved in oilsands issues.

“Ultimately we think that the tarsands industry, by contributing to global warming, actually endangers the tourist industry,” he said.

Whether that message will resonate with Albertans is yet to be seen. Next week the group is rolling out a similar ad campaign in the UK.

In other tar sands news:

Another campaign has been growing in the U.S. that hopes to block TransCanada from building the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry crude from Alberta to refineries in Texas. Henry Waxman, a prominent congressman, and 50 other legislators stated their opposition to the project.

• More than a thousand nurses wearing red scrubs gathered outside California Republican gubernatorial nominee and nurses union foe Meg Whitman last Thursday to protest her vow to cut the state’s nurse-to-patient ratios and fire health workers.

• More than 100 indigenous activists and supporters marched past the Ministry of Forests offices and the Ministry of Environment office in Smithers, British Columbia on Friday to protest plans for a pipeline that will carry tar sands crude to ports off the west coast of Canada.

• Members of the Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN gathered on the Independence Square in Kiev where they stripped down and bathed in a public fountain to protest hot water cut offs in the capital and rising tariffs for housing and utilities services.

• A fenced-in lot at 7th and R Streets in DC has become home to a tent city as local residents protest the building of high-income apartments, where the city had once promised to build affordable housing.

• A team of seven Washington women and men reached the summit of Mount Rainier on Friday to demand that Governor Chris Gregoire close the largest source of pollution in the state—a coal-fired plan in Centralia—by 2015.

• An estimated 2,000 farmers gathered in front of the Presidential Office Building in Taiwan on Saturday to protest the government expropriation of their land. They turned part of the wide road into a field by rolling out patches covered with plants while also paying their respects to farming deities.

• Former employees of the closed Amonsito factory in Egypt ended their sit-in, following last Wednesday’s tentative agreement for overdue early retirement payment.

• 300 people gathered at Queen’s Park in Toronto ono Saturday to call for a G20 police inquiry and the right to blow bubbles. The latter was in response to an officer caught on tape threatening to arrest a G20 protester for blowing bubbles.

• Strikes spread across eastern India yesterday to protest a rise in fuel prices, shutting down markets, schools, airports and businesses.

• Activists dressed as Founding Fathers stormed the foyer of a powerful downtown Washington lobbying firm last week, demanding that members of Congress stop meeting behind closed doors to raise money from corporate lobbyists and instead spend their time working on laws to help the American public.

• Demonstrators blocked a Vancouver intersection on Sunday to protest the arrest of hundreds of people during the recent G20 summit in Toronto.

• Conservationists in Malaysia protested a plan to build a coal-fired power plant on Borneo island yesterday, alleging authorities and companies ignore the rights of indigenous tribal communities and cause environmental harm by cutting down swaths of jungle.

• About 50 protesters from several Jewish organizations picketed outside the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan on Friday while Israeli Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni spoke inside. They protested Livni’s role in Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon and the winter 2009 attack on Gaza.

• About two dozen members of the Baltimore police and firefighters unions protested the city’s slashing of their pensions last week.

• More than 1,000 Italian journalists gathered in Rome last week to protest a law that curbs police wiretaps and imposes fines on news organizations that publish transcripts.

• US dairy farmers participated in a nationwide protest on Sunday against price drops by dumping a days worth of milk.

The environmental destruction – for nearly two months oil has gushed into the Gulf because of BP’s government-endorsed “error” – has reached epic proportions. And once again, it is the poor and the marginalized – those not welcome or unheard in the halls of power and privilege – who will suffer the most: people of color, the uneducated, the developing world, the winged and four-legged creatures, the hills, the water. The mountains of Appalachia are being blown up with amounts of TNT comparable to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Over 500 of the world’s oldest mountains in one of the most diverse bioregions have been blown up. They are gone forever. It has been five years since Hurricane Katrina and now the people of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast residents are faced with devastated shorelines and economies. And yet where are the voices of outrage? Where are the people and the mass action? Who is denouncing our insatiable appetite for oil and coal that kills the very Earth that gives us our life?

We will not win the war we are waging against the Earth as we seek to conquer and control all of its resources. We can fight the Taliban in Afghanistan and de-stabilize countries like Iraq and Pakistan to secure access to oil-rich areas. Even as we outspend the all the combined military budgets of the world, we cannot outspend, overthrow, or even intimidate the Earth. We will lose. We may think we are winning, and in the short-term it might even appear that way. But there will come a time when the peoples of the Earth, probably from a country with nuclear weapons and a capitalist ethos, will make the world an inhabitable place. The Earth, over time, with the incredible resiliency of creation that can be observed by just watching the emergence of a Sequoia tree or a mustard plant from the tiniest of seeds, will go on. Its people may not.

What is needed is a revolution. This is not a call to arms. It is a call to the heart. Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement and communities known for its hospitality to the poor and its pacifism, proclaimed that “what is needed is a revolution of the heart.” It is a revolution that begins with each one of us, but not in isolation. The revolution of the heart takes place in community. And it is only through being in community that the revolutionary vision that Dr. King called for – the radical transformation of values as he denounced the giant triplets of “racism, militarism, and consumerism” – can be embraced and waged. And this revolution is already underway. It is happening on the margins, in oppressed communities, in the abandoned places of Empire like Detroit and Philadelphia, on the borders, the inner cities and the rural farming towns. All over this country, people are coming together to build community. The state has abandoned them. The promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are virtues extended to the proud and the rich, not the humble and the poor. But it is in the humble and simple work of local family farmers committed to organic production practices and land stewardship that true life, liberty and happiness is found.

The Land Stewardship Project (LSP) in Minnesota is a widening community of small-scale, organic farmers committed to building an educated and capable network of regional farmers and resisting policy that promotes an industrial, oil-based agribusiness model. Communities are emerging that are transforming the way people see the world. It is giving birth to imagination and a moral formation in a lifestyle that considers the land ethic, as Aldo Leopold referred to it. In Appalachia, hope springs eternal from communities like Coal River Mountain Watch that, through education, organization, and research, are advocating for sustainable environmental and economic alternatives to mountaintop removal such as the Coal River Wind project. Other communities like Climate Ground Zero that engage in nonviolent direct action to stop mountaintop removal exhibit tremendous courage in a society built on fear and show a willingness to suffer persecution, arrest and jail for being the voice of the mountains.

It is in places like LSP, Coal River Mountain Watch and Climate Ground Zero that the American conscience is being forged in the burning fire and struggle for social change. The communities that are built consist of strong-willed, principled individuals who have the capacity to make moral judgments and discern a course of right action. They are not distracted or dissuaded – although they are at times disillusioned and often depressed – by the empty promises of corporate-backed politicians. But the resiliency of these American people, closely connected to the life of the Earth, is what will save the people from the self-destructive war abroad in search of oil and at home in search of coal. There are many ways to resist what are termed the works of war, of which include the destroying crops and land and contaminating water. The alternative models that the aforementioned communities promote ween us from our dependency on a broken, violent system toward one of communion and sustainability.

In an epoch such as ours, where postmodern skepticism runs deep of authority figures and leaders of any sort, the force for moral transformation will not come from the likes of Day or King (we’ve seen where the Obama hope has left us). Instead our hope is in the bottom, in the communities on the margins doing the work themselves. Leaders already exist in these networks and will continue to emerge. But it is in community that we will be propelled into the revolution of the heart and our conscientization needed for peace, social change, and ecological justice.

The French Young Farmers (Jeunes Agriculteurs) union turned Paris’ Champs Elysées into a giant farm on Sunday by covering the capital’s busiest road with 8,000 plots of earth, 150,000 plants and 700 fully grown trees, as well as pigs, cows, horses and sheep. According to the BBC:

The union, which represents some 55,000 farmers under the age of 35, wants to impress on the public – and the government – the efforts required to produce what goes on the table.

“It’s about re-establishing contact with the public about what our profession is and what they want from it,” William Villeneuve, president of the Jeunes Agriculteurs, said on Friday.

“Do they want the cheapest products in the world or do they want products that pay producers?” he added.

For the Parisians who last year witnessed farmers blocking traffic and setting fire to piles of hay and tires on the Champs Elysées, this bucolic sight is no doubt a welcome approach to one of France’s most enduring issues. At the same time, however, it cost 4.2m euros to stage. But that isn’t stopping the organizers from promising to take their concept overseas.

“We want to take “Nature Capitale” to New York (to work with) the farmers and woodmen of New York state, to Istanbul with their farmers, Berlin and other cities who want to welcome us,” Gad Weil, who created the concept, told France Info radio.

Despite the cost, there certainly is a lot to be said for raising awareness among city folk about the food process. It will be interesting to see if the reaction in Paris justifies its expense and whether such an undertaking can be replicated in other parts of the world.

• Activists have put up tents and opened a protest camp they are calling Democracy Village in London.  They are mainly protesting problems with the recent election, as well as the war in Afghanistan and British capitalism, but the police have told them to leave before Parliament opens next week.

• Greenpeace activists climbed BP’s London headquarters yesterday to hang a flag accusing the company of polluting the environment.  The flag read, “BP: British Polluters,” a play on British Petroleum.

• 20,000 Greeks marched to parliament in Athens yesterday in continued protest of severe austerity measures.

• Tens of thousands of people gathered in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, on Wednesday to protest incipient wage cuts planned by the government.

• Thousands of nurse-anesthetists staged a sit-in at a Paris train station yesterday and demanded greater professional recognition and higher salaries.  The blockade halted rail traffic.

• 250 students and workers at the University of Illinois in Chicago protested high administrative salaries and tuition increases as they gathered outside a Board of Trustees meeting yesterday.

• 160 United Steelworkers members gathered in Washington, DC yesterday to protest Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s visit to the U.S.  Ralliers denounced Calderón’s treatment of workers in his country and referred specifically to the Cananea mine workers, who have been on strike since 2007.

• Dairy farmers gathered with milk cans and cows in towns across Colombia on Wednesday to protest a new trade accord with the EU; they say they cannot compete with subsidized European farmers.

• Inmates of a Japanese immigration center have been on hunger strike for more than a week after recent deaths of fellow residents.  They are also demanding to be released.

I raised this point last month after coming across an article in the Jakarta Globe that said farmers were prepared to boycott Nestlé products and block all exports of crude palm oil to the US and the EU in an effort to save their jobs. While it doesn’t seem like anything came of these plans, the crisis facing a country with millions of low-wage workers dependent on a single crop that is no longer desired by a global food giant remains.

On the flip side, their silence could be evidence that Nestlé’s decision doesn’t have as dramatic an effect on palm oil production as we in the West would like to believe. For starters, Nestlé buys less than one percent of the global production of palm oil, which means there is still plenty of demand for the product. Secondly, Sinar Mas Group weathered an even greater loss in 2009, when Unilever, the world’s biggest consumer of palm oil, canceled its contract after learning about a dossier of evidence to be published by Greenpeace. As Media.Asia recently reported:

The two largest producers of palm oil globally – Indonesia and Malaysia – have been relatively unaffected by the controversy, with no serious protests covered in the local media or in the social media space. And although Nestlé has been forced to bow to international online pressure, the incident has so far had little impact on palm oil production or indeed government legislation in these two countries.

These are points Greenpeace shouldn’t shy away from addressing. While it is certainly important to celebrate victories, it is also important to build on them. Greenpeace has said it plans to go after HSBC for funding Sinar Mas. This is a good step, but again, there is more at play than just Western corporations and Western environmental concerns. Media.Asia spoke to this phenomenon as well:

While the incident has inflamed online passions in the West, it does not seem to have affected the average Asian consumer too much… This could be due to the overall immaturity of consumer activism in Indonesia, as well as a lack of high-profile environmental NGOs in the country. At the same time, it could be argued that the average Indonesian consumer is somewhat apathetic to the palm oil issue.

Other media experts and analysts quoted in the piece say that Greenpeace has failed to reach out to Indonesians both at the local level and via social media—the latter of which wouldn’t be hard considering Indonesia is a fast growing user of such technology. If Greenpeace were to focus some of its efforts on reaching an Indonesian audience it could help raise the level of environmental concern.

Ultimately, though, the core of the problem is that Indonesia is heavily dependent on palm oil production (thanks be to the British). And the only way to effectively bring an end to such production and not hurt Indonesians in the process is to replace it with a more sustainable industry—like how American tobacco farmers have transitioned to organic vegetable farming thanks in large part to training paid for by the tobacco settlements of the late 90′s.

If Greenpeace can make corporations like Nestlé own up to its complicity in rainforest and habitat destruction, then perhaps it can make them pay for a stake in a better future.

After successfully pressuring many of the largest fast food corporations – such as Taco Bell, Subway, McDonald’s and Burger King – to increase wages, improve benefits and follow new guidelines to protect the safety of the farmworkers that pick tomatoes over recent years, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has a new target: Publix Supermarkets.

Even though CIW signed an agreement with foodservice giant Aramark at the beginning of the month, Publix has refused to meet the demands of these exploited workers. In response, as Peter Rothberg at The Nation writes:

…the CIW has organized what is expected to be its largest action ever — a twenty-two mile march from Tampa to Lakeland, where Publix is based. The march is broken up into two distinct daily segments, and will culminate in a rally and concert on Sunday, April 18. The actress and activist Gloria Reuben will join Kerry Kennedy, founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, and Stetson Kennedy, Florida’s premier folklorist and longtime human rights champion, as rally hosts…

For all the many of you who aren’t able to join the march, please send Publix CEO Ed Crenshaw an email politely expressing your “support for the Farmworker Freedom March and your hope that he’ll begin working with the CIW to address the sub-poverty wages and abuses faced by the farmworkers who pick Publix’s tomatoes.

Check out the CIW’s site for more information on the Farmworker Freedom March, which begins this Friday, and instructions on how to register to participate.