SALON

Tuesday, Oct 25, 2011 7:58 PM UTC

The environmental movement takes on coal country

Activist Flavia de la Fuente talks about why it's crucial to combat climate change in politically hostile areas

By

Topics: Grist, Alternative Energy, Environment,

The environmental movement takes on coal countryFlavia de la Fuente(Credit: Fiorenza Comunian)
This article originally appeared on Grist.

There are probably easier things one could do than to organize against the construction of a coal-powered electricity plant near the Gulf Coast refinery town of Corpus Christi, Texas. But Flavia de la Fuente wouldn’t want to be doing them. After the life-long Californian graduated from UCLA in the spring of 2010, she applied for a job as an organizer with the Sierra Club. She was offered her pick of three options — San Francisco, Washington D.C., or Texas.

The choice was easy. “I firmly believe in going to the trenches and being where the fight is,” says de la Fuente. That meant Texas. In the 1960s, she points out, the civil rights movement flourished where it was “hardest” — in the Deep South. The same, she hopes, will be true for the environmental movement.

“If we can turn things around on climate change where things are the hardest, then we can win,” she says. “And there are a lot of people in Texas who really, really want to win.”

The decision to focus on climate change was bit of a switch from her days as an undergraduate working with undocumented immigrants and organizing support for passage of the DREAM Act. The daughter of parents who were forced by desperate economic conditions to emigrate from Chile in the 1970s, de la Fuente had always believed that she would continue to focus on immigration reform after college.

“But I started to think on a bigger level about what real immigration reform is, and I realized that what motivates me is that I hate it when people are forced to leave their homes due to circumstances beyond their control,” says de la Fuente. “And the biggest driver of that in the future is going to be climate change.”

“I’m probably never going to meet all the people that I want to support, like refugees in Pakistan or farmers in Africa,” says de la Fuente. But she’s convinced that, by organizing volunteers to push for a renewable energy mandate in Texas and to oppose proposed coal-fired power plants, she’ll be doing what she can to ease their hardships.

“It’s hokey,” she says “but John Muir’s famous quote is that when you pick something out of the universe it’s hitched to everything else. The fact is, we’re all connected.”

Combine Muir’s sense of interconnection with Cesar Chavez’s commitment to grassroots organization and you’ve got Flavia de la Fuente. While some environmentalists have been driven to despair by gridlock in Washington, or the pace of greenhouse gas-spewing industrial development in China, or President Obama’s failure to deliver on their hopes, de la Fuente, describing herself as a “happy warrior,” exudes a sense of undaunted confidence.

“I read an article in Grist a few weeks ago that said environmentalists are depressed. But you can’t let this stuff get you down, or else you will hide in your living room and never get active.” Instead, de la Fuente draws strength from the enormity of the challenge before her — and all of us. “I draw a lot of energy from the bigness of this fight. I kind of thrive on it. What could be more exciting than taking on the biggest, most complicated problems that humanity has ever faced?”

Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 4 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Salon is proud to feature content from Grist, a non-profit site that's been providing  environmental news and commentary with a wry twist since 1999.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations