To the board and staff of 1Sky,

We are grassroots and allied organizations representing racial
justice, indigenous rights, economic justice, immigrant rights, youth
organizing, and environmental justice communities actively engaged in
climate justice organizing.
Given the very necessary discussion spurred by your recent public letter
(Aug. 8, 2010), we wanted to share with you some of the work we have
been doing to protect people and planet, as well as our reflections on a
forward-thinking movement strategy. Your honest reflections on the
political moment in which we find ourselves, alongside the open
invitation to join in this discussion, are heartening.

Organizing a powerful climate justice movement
:
Like you, we recognize climate disruption as a central issue of our
time. With the right set of strategies and coordinated efforts, we can
mobilize diverse communities to powerful action. Our organizing strategy
for climate justice is to: 1) Organize in, network with, and support
communities who have found their frontlines^[1] of climate justice; 2) Organize with communities to identify
their frontlines of climate justice, and 3) Coalesce these communities towards a common agenda
that is manifested from locally defined strategies to state and
national policy objectives through to international solidarity
agreements.

Community-led climate justice has been winning

In assessing the broader landscape of climate activism, it is
critical to recognize that despite the failure of D.C. policy-led
campaigns, there have also been significant successes on the part of
grassroots climate justice campaigns across the U.S.

Frontline communities, using grassroots, network-based, and
actions-led strategies around the country have had considerable success
fighting climate-polluting industries in recent years,
with
far less resources than the large environmental groups in D.C. These
initiatives have prevented a massive amount of new industrial carbon
from coming on board — here are just a few examples:

Stopping King Coal with community organizing: The Navajo Nation, led by a
Dine’ (Navajo) and
Hopi grassroots youth movement,
forced the cancellation of a Life of Mine permit on Black Mesa, Ariz.,
for the world’s largest coal company — Peabody Energy. Elsewhere in the
U.S., community-based groups in Appalachia galvanized the youth climate
movement in their campaigns to stop mountaintop removal coal mining,
and similar groups in the Powder River Basin have united farmers and
ranchers against the expansion of some of the world’s largest coal
deposits.

Derailing the build-out of coal power: Nearly two thirds of the 151 new coal power plant proposals from the Bush Energy Plan have been cancelled, abandoned, or stalled since 2007 — largely due to community-led opposition. A recent example of this success is the grassroots campaign of Dine’ grassroots and local citizen groups in the Burnham area of eastern Navajo Nation, N.M. that have prevented the creation of the Desert Rock
coal plant, which would have been the third such polluting monolith in
this small, rural community. Community-based networks such as the
Indigenous Environmental Network, the Energy Justice Network, and the
Western Mining Action Network have played a major role in supporting
these efforts to keep the world’s most climate polluting industry at
bay.