Green Corps Organizer Mary Nicol, left, learned grassroots organizing skills during Green Corps’ Introductory August Training. Currently, Mary is using these skills to educate and activate citizens in New Hampshire to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling. (Photo: Staff)

Green Corps believes that it takes leadership and, above all, proven skills, to protect public lands, improve air and water quality, curb global warming, and preserve biodiversity. We also believe that leaders are rarely just discovered—they are identified, recruited, trained and nurtured. Thanks to your support, Green Corps has trained a new generation of leaders that is winning concrete victories for the environment and public health. In this newsletter, I am proud to report on a few recent campaign achievements of our trainees and alumni.

Last spring, Green Corps organizers won an important victory protecting southeastern forests from destruction by the paper industry.

The Cumberland Plateau—extending from West Virginia and Kentucky through Tennessee to Alabama—is a remote forest ecosystem that is threatened by unsustainable logging by large paper companies. These corporations are harvesting or buying timber and paper pulp made from millions of acres of this hardwood forest in order to manufacture toilet paper, newsprint and office paper. Clear-cutting these forests and replacing them with vast plantations of nonnative pine has destroyed crucial habitat and food sources, wiping out the region's species and devastating local songbird populations.

Partnering with the Dogwood Alliance to launch a campaign to protect the Cumberland Plateau, Green Corps trainees worked in South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama to generate public pressure on Bowater, the largest newsprint manufacturer in the U.S., to stop the destruction of these native forests.

In Greenville, South Carolina, the location of Bowater’s headquarters, Green Corps’ Eva Hernandez educated and activated students and professors at Furman University, including associates of Bowater’s CEO, Arnie Nemirow. As student interest in the campaign increased, word of Eva’s campus rally reached executives at Bowater.

In a quick response, Bowater officials agreed to negotiate with Dogwood Alliance and the Natural Resources Defense Council. After several months of negotiation, Bowater agreed to substantially alter the way it does business by ending its conversion of native forests to pine plantations—a victory that will increase protection for hundreds of thousands of acres of southern forests.

For more than 10 years, the oil and gas industry has lobbied to exploit this pristine wilderness area—and now, with allies in the Bush administration, the industry is pushing to include drilling in the Arctic Refuge as part of the federal budget. Drilling proponents are using this back-door strategy to avoid drawing public attention because they are well aware that the majority of the
American public supports protecting the Refuge.

Last spring, Green Corps organizers worked on behalf of the Alaska Coalition and the Alaska Wilderness League to expose this plan and educate the public about protecting the Arctic Refuge. Utilizing important media skills learned in classroom training, Green Corps organizers garnered national media attention around the issue and mobilized public support in the states of Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Iowa, Oregon and Ohio.

In Minnesota, Green Corps organizer Jacek Pruski used his media skills to strengthen the support of previously wavering Sen. Norm Coleman. Jacek found a story from a small local newspaper in Fairbanks, Alaska, in which Sen. Coleman declared his commitment to vote to protect the Arctic Refuge. Pitching this story to the leading newspaper in Minnesota, Jacek generated a front page article painting Sen. Coleman as an up-front champion of the Refuge, thus publicizing and securing an important vote.

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