What's worse? Public nudity or dirty fossil fuel?

In the U.S. we have lots of prohibitions about dirtiness and a lot of that is related to sex and body image. I remember listening to an interview with the philosopher Peter Singer about ethics and the interviewer asked him about morality and he talked about the ethics of eating animals and harming the environment. Sex or sexual "dirtiness" were not much of a concern.

Well what is dirty? Coal. Natural gas. Oil. At least, that's what EcoAction said in a protest yesterday at Penn State's University Park campus. The Daily Collegian reports:

Eco-Action members said they are concerned the university is not seriously considering using renewable energy.

“The West Campus Steam Plant consists of 95 percent of all campus heat and hot water. We want the university to do more extensive research on all of the different types of renewable energy like wind, thermal or geothermal energy,” Eco-Action Vice President Stefan Nagy (junior-economics) said.

One month ago, the club marched to Penn State President Graham Spanier’s office to voice its concerns. A coalition was formed between the students, faculty and administration to create goals for reducing carbon emissions, Nagy said.

“The march was a big success, but we don’t want our progress to be forgotten in the public’s eye so we came up with the idea for this protest,” he said. “A lot of issues still need to be resolved and we don’t want our voices to fade out.”

That's one way to keep attention up.

Pittsburgh says "No!" to fracking

This was a landmark occasion. The city council of Pittsburgh, Pa unanimously voted for an ordinance banning natural gas drilling in the city. Yes! Magazine reports:

The ordinance sponsor, Pittsburgh Councilman Doug Shields, led the charge to ban drilling, and was later joined by five co-sponsors. During the months leading up to today’s vote, Shields passionately advocated for the ordinance, saying that the city is “not a colony of the state and will not sit quietly by as our city gets drilled.” He sees this fight as about far more than drilling, saying “It’s about our authority as a community to decide, not corporations deciding for us.”

Drafted by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), Pittsburgh’s ordinance elevates the rights of people, the community, and nature over corporate “rights” and challenges the authority of the state to pre-empt community decision-making.

These issues have come up elsewhere and will likely escalate. We can expect that more local governments will take up this CELDF ordinance to resist corporate encroachments on their communities and their environments. A lot of the outrage in Pittsburgh has been the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that has granted corporations more rights than its citizens. Corporations are individuals with more legal and procedural power, freedom, and rights than you and your neighbors (image courtesy of Yes!). The Pittsburgh ordinance confronts that face-on:

As Councilman Shields stated after the vote, “This ordinance recognizes and secures expanded civil rights for the people of Pittsburgh, and it prohibits activities which would violate those rights. It protects the authority of the people of Pittsburgh to pass this ordinance by undoing corporate privileges that place the rights of the people of Pittsburgh at the mercy of gas corporations.”

Provisions in the ordinance eliminate corporate “personhood” rights within the city for corporations seeking to drill, and remove the ability of corporations to wield the Commerce and Contracts Clauses of the U.S. Constitution to override community decision-making.

So what do you think? Should people press these onward at multiple levels? Or should there be some more moderated approach through stricter or more efficient regulation?

Sustainable Politics

Given the recent state and national election results, today's show was timely. Perhaps not timely enough given the highly charged atmosphere and the anti-climate change mood in much of the country, but timely in talking about what sustainable politics could be.

It was our good fortune to host three pretty engaged women. For the first few minutes talked with Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor (Assoc. Professor of Women's Studies) who has arranged the TEDxNorthPacificGarbagePatch event being aired at the Berg Auditorium in the Life Sciences Building at Penn State's University Park campus. You can get a sense of the problem by watching the following TED Talk and checking out the plasticpollutioncoalition.org.

Then we talked about sustainable politics with Rosa Eberly, a self-described free-range rhetorician who teachers Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State and deals with civic engagement each and every day. We also were joined by State College mayor Elizabeth Goreham. What is a sustainable politics? Well, it involves engagement, good information, alertness, and staying engaged.

Listen to the show HERE.