Weyerhaeuser, by way of its iLevel brand, has been broadcasting the construction of a new house in Reedley, CA live over the Web.

Quick background: In northwestern Ontario’s stretch of boreal forest, Weyerhaeuser owns and operates a major mill which obtains wood from the traditional territory of the Grassy Narrows First Nation. The community has not consented to logging on their territory and has backed a moratorium but lacks the ability to enforce it.

So we sent two our finest out to Weyerhaeuser’s construction site to use a bit of their own technology against them. Annie and Adrian found the site yesterday and deployed a large banner reading “Wake up Weyerhaeuser; American Dream Home, Native Nightmare” directly in front of the company’s auotmated webcam.

Ten minutes later, the image made it to Weyerhaeuser’s site.

But why stop there?

Back at home base, we noticed a great feature of the site, an archive:

But it’s password protected:

Luckily, our folks are a bit smarter than their folks:

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Talk about “direct action at the point of decision.” Mini-mobilizations and actions around the 2008 shareholder season has been quite lively. Especially around the issues of coal and climate.

Three weeks ago, Citi and Bank of America’s CEOs got earfuls about their investments in the coal industry inside and outside their meetings in New York and Charlotte. Last week, Duke’s CEO Jim Rogers got more of the same about the company’s Cliffside plant in North Carolina.

On Wednesday, the Clean Up Dynegy Coalition (I heard carloads are going from Georgia to raise some hell over the Long Leaf plant) will be holding Dynegy to account inside and outside their shareholder’s meeting in Houston.

Over the years, I’ve done my fair share of inside and outside actions at the shareholder meetings of Exxon, Halliburton and Wells Fargo. It’s an exciting set of tactics that have reminded me of the mass mobilizations that occurred at the beginning of this decade around corporate globalization (ex: Battle in Seattle).

These “mini-mobilizations” have the potential to not only send a message to corporate and media decision-makers about a company’s wrongdoing, but also help build a grassroots movement and direct action community that make a living revolution possible.

I am glad the climate movement is on it!

Ever heard of Corporate Watchdog Radio? It’s a weekly radio show and audio/video podcast on issues that you most likely care about (since you read the Understory).

Last week the Business Ethics Network offered RAN a Commentaries spot on the Corporate Watchdog Radio show. I recorded a short piece on biofuels - a timely week for it in light of the global food crisis and riots in many countries. Listen here.

I’m in a pool hall in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, about 1,800 miles north of my home in San Francisco. The only road that extends this far north is made of ice that’s passable just three months a year. Any other time, you have to fly in. That’s how I arrived yesterday, on the invitation of community leaders, to learn about one of the most destructive and least known industrial projects on the planet, the Canadian tar sands.

The geographic isolation of Ft. Chip has helped to preserve a relatively traditional way of life for its 1,200 residents—mostly Cree and Dene native peoples—for generations. Hunting, trapping and fishing remain a central part of the culture, providing most folks here with dietary staples.

I’m listening to stories from those in the pool hall about how the tar sands is changing all that. Ariel, a young woman who grew up here, explains that “I drank from the lake when I was a kid but today we’re not even supposed to swim in it because it’s too toxic.” Another new father is more blunt. “All my relations are dying,” he says “If we don’t do something soon, just living in Ft. Chip will be a death sentence.”

Aside from health, people are also concerned about their culture. Fishing, hunting and trapping have been at the center of seasonal community celebrations here for as long as anyone can remember. With the decline in water quality, however, populations of fish and muskrat have become too toxic to eat. “I don’t know what we’re going to leave our children or our grandchildren” says mother and traditional chef in the community, “It’s scary, really scary… I hope we can find some solutions. It just looks so bleak.”

This afternoon we’re gathered at the pool hall to begin laying the groundwork for solutions. Tom Goldtooth of Indigenous Environmental Network starts with a presentation on environmental justice and the power of spiritual practice. George Poitras follows with legal strategies being deployed by Mikisew Cree First Nation. Macdonald Stainsby and Dustin Johnson paint a picture of the developing continental grassroots resistance among indigenous and other historically marginalized communities from the perspective of TarsandsTruth.org and North Coast Envirowatch.

Tonight we feast with community Elders. Tomorrow it’s back to the pool hall to begin building an organizing framework and developing strategy for the coming months. “This is the start of unification in the community” says a new father and community leader “this is going to be the start of a big thing.”

Check out our new page at theproblemwithpalmoil.org. Demand for palm oil is on the rise, and pristine rainforests are being clear-cut and burned to make way for palm oil plantations. You can help us find out which supermarket products contain rainforest destruction by writing down their UPC codes and submitting them online. Click here to start adding UPC codes! See some more videos after the jump.

[UPDATE: For a complete listing of all the products found so far, click here.]

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So this morning at the Carbon Capture and Sequestration conference I had the opportunity to hear the infamous Fred Palmer, Sr. Vice President of Peabody coal do his ‘I love coal’ rap. And jeez louise does that old boy know how to lay it on thick. I had been promised that he was likely to actually rub his hands together with glee when talking about his favorite black rock, but today he opted for the more measured ‘all the other fuels are going to run out except coal and that’s good because coal doesn’t just keep the lights on it also grows trees, teaches our children, gives us healthcare, makes the sky blue and the grass green’ approach. Not terribly convincing, but certainly amusing so long as you don’t think too hard about Peabody’s severe climate impacts and human rights violations.

Oh yes and Fred thinks we need to burn more coal, not less. He’s very excited about new coal-fired power plants, as you can probably imagine. I think his exact words were: “We’ve got 250 billion tonnes of coal that we’re gonna gasify, liquify and burn. When I get an anxiety attack about our growing energy needs I wrap myself in the security blanket of our coal reserves”.

At question-time I challenged Fred on Peabody’s treatment of coal-field communities and asked him how in the world he thought that any new coal-fired power plants were going to be built when coal and construction costs are rising exponentially (even without CCS), 60 plants have been canceled in the last year alone and 75% of the American public supports a moratorium on new coal development.

Fred almost sputtered with indignation at my assertion that Peabody doesn’t have a squeaky clean human rights record - but then he started rambling on about public coal-fired power plants and completely lost me in what seemed to be an effort to argue that the fact that he’d worked in civil service for a couple of years nullified the devastating impacts of Peabody’s mining operations.

But what really amazed me was this choice line:
“We’re going to put SNG in the pipelines, send it to California and they won’t even know they’re USING coal”.

I kid you not, he actually said that. He then followed up with another doozy: “If you go to the Powder River Basin you don’t see any scars - the land is better than it was before”.

Apparently so is Appalachia.

My sense listening to Fred’s reply to my question was that here is a man who is fighting for his industry’s life. Just like Ken Lewis at Bank of America when I questioned him about his coal investments - Fred Palmer knows that the writing is on the wall, that coal is over. That’s why he and the entire coal industry is clinging so desperately to the CCS life-raft. Trouble is, the thing doesn’t float.

I think the first time I ever heard the word ‘greenwashing’ was in the late ’80s or maybe early ’90s after I saw a flier from McDonald’s about how they didn’t use beef from the Amazon. I brought the flier home to show my mother, an environmentalist, because I was so proud to show her that even big giant companies were doing good things and that her work was really making a difference.

She looked at it for about three seconds and told me “that’s greenwashing.” She explained the word to me and although I was sad to see my evidence of the mainstream adoption of environmentalism debunked, I realized for the first time that in a lot of ways claiming to “go green” when you’re not can be worse than just doing bad stuff in the first place.

Well, I’ve obviously come a long way since then and you may have already seen one of our “Greenwash of the Week” posts.

You’d think I would be pretty aware of the scope and quantity of greenwashing out there. I thought I was too.

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Now that bank shareholder season is over (BOA, Citi), I wanted to put something out about coal and coal finance campaigns going into the summer. Since, we’re all part of this KICK ASS decentralized massive movement against coal and coal finance, we need to continue to put pressure on them.

The coal finance campaign that I work on at Rainforest Action Network (RAN) has been pressuring Citi and Bank of America to end their financing of coal from the cradle to the grave since October. With the help of lots of friends and allies, we’ve done lots of actions and encouraged, inspired and facilitated lots more actions against these banks and the coal industry in general. We support and work in solidarity with communities fighting strip mining and mountaintop removal and those impacted by coal-fired power plants.

BUT, RAN can only do so much and people don’t need us to start their own coal and coal finance campaigns. If you live in place that is impacted by coal extraction or coal combustion, or headquarters coal and utility companies, than by all means keep up what you are doing! If you live in a place without coal or utility operations or offices, please look towards the financiers of coal.

The two most heavily involved banks are Citi and Bank of America. Citi has over 1000 branches around the country. They also have hundreds of Citi Financial and other branded business. Bank of America has 6,000 banking centers in almost every state. These banks depend on a customer base to provide capital to finance their earth destroying friends in the coal sector (amongst others).

More simply, there is most likely a Bank of America or Citi in your community and they, and their customers, could use a little “education” about what exactly the corporate headquarters is doing with all the money.

Every local action and campaign against Citi and Bank of America is an action and campaign against the coal sector.

Why Citi and Bank of America?
-Citi is the biggest financier of coal from the cradle to the grave in the world, here’s some details on that
-Bank of America is banker to some of the worst extraction companies on the planet (Massey, Peabody.

Check out ALL the details here

If you want a guide to starting a local campaign, check out these toolkits:
-No New Coal Campus Toolkit
-No New Coal Toolkit
-Signs, Brands and Banners

Our campaign has not been going at this alone. We work with a network of radical environmental networks, student networks, Appalachian community groups, native community group and non-profits in this campaign against coal and coal finance. Since October, various groups have worked with us on a variety of actions and campaign activities. RAN is not able to be everywhere all the time. It’s far from being just one group’s campaign or movement.

Check them out:
-Rising Tide North America
-Mountain Justice Summer
-Earth First!
-Student Environmental Action Network (SEAC)
-Southern Energy Network
-Coal River Mountain watch
-Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
-Appalachian Voices
-Kentuckians for the Commonwealth

Tactically, we use non-violent direct action and other creative communications techniques to let the coal barons and their friends on Wall Street know that we mean business. Some are low level, some are high level. We are ALL non-violent cultural and political insurgents against the fossil fuel empire.

Some of these include the following:
-petitions
-call-ins to bank offices
-viral online actions
-shareholder activism
-demonstrations
-film screenings
-occupations
-lockdowns
-street theater
-mass direct action

BUT this is just a few examples, check out a much larger list put together by Gene Sharp

Right now there is a vibrant diverse decentralized multi-level multi-strategy GLOBAL movement around coal and an even bigger, more diverse and more decentralized one around global warming.

Taking on the coal companies, the coal plants and the coal financiers is one part of it. Keep the slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally” in mind when organizing your campaign.

Form your own group, collective or affinity group to start organizing in your own community.

We’re all agents for change against the fossil fuel empire and it begins at home.

I woke up this morning to the sight of a coal train rumbling below my window and the image of a shiny new ‘clean coal’ billboard fresh in my mind. I’m here in Pittsburgh for the 7th Annual Carbon Capture and Sequestration conference to present RAN’s perspective on CCS - which, for those anyone with any remaining doubt, is that CCS is too expensive, dangerous, experimental and energy intensive to be a real solution to the climate crisis and that we have better options. My panel was moderated by NRDC’s David Hawkins who set the tone by summarizing Greenpeace’s fantastic report on CCS: False Hope (released today) - David’s message to the industry reps and academics crowding the room was that although he doesn’t agree with most of the report conclusions himself - they had better damn well get to know the environmental arguments because they’re going to have to deal with us whether they like it or not. Faint praise indeed, but to his credit I was set up nicely for my own presentation.

You see, the striking thing about this conference is how the proponents of CCS are, how can I say this delicately, their own worse enemies. More or less every presenter has agreed that the technology is expensive, that there are tremendous uncertainties, that liability is an issue, leakage is likely and safety is a concern. So my talk was nothing new until the part where I said that my team and I wake up every morning thinking about how to shut down all the remaining coal plants on the books. Because here’s the thing: CCS proponents look at the long list of problems with the technology and see it all being overcome by massive taxpayer subsidies to cover R&D, liability and increased electricity rates. We look at the long list of problems, and we add the oft overlooked fact that (surprise!) the coal itself has to come from somewhere and we see: a dead end.

ADM, Bunge, and Cargill can’t hide any more: www.TheProblemWithPalmOil.org just went live.

There is no secret about what US Agribusiness companies are doing in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific: They are forcing communities off their land, destroying the last remaining habitat for endangered species like the orangutan, and burning the remaining forest stumps, all so that they can plant their massive palm oil plantations.

And where is that palm oil going? Our supermarkets.

On www.TheProblemWithPalmOil.org, you can enter the barcode numbers of the products that contain palm oil—and their palm oil free alternatives. This will give us a list of companies that we need to hold responsible for using this destructive oil.

Here’s what we need you to do:

• Go to www.TheProblemWithPalmOil.org and download the Supermarket Sleuthing form.
• Tell your friends about Supermarket Sleuthing, and get them to go sleuth with you.
• Take your team of sleuths to the supermarket and enter the 12-digit or 13-digit barcode numbers of the products you find on the Supermarket Sleuth form. Get creative and have fun!
• Go back to www.TheProblemWithPalmOil.org and enter the 12- or 13-digit barcode number of the products you found. The more new products you find, the more points you will earn!

Here’s what the RAN staff found when we went sleuthing:

Plus, you will be helping us take the first step in a vital path towards holding ADM, Bunge, and Cargill responsible for the rainforest destruction they are sneaking into our food. This is the first step of a long term retail strategy campaign…