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Coal-Free Bellingham Initiative Campaign Kickoff

Coal-Free Bellingham will “officially” begin our signature gathering campaign on Saturday, March 10th.  We need other concerned citizens to help us collect enough signatures to place our initiative on the November ballot.  Please join us (see below) and bring along others who are interested in helping us collect signatures, too.

Go to the CONTACT page and sign up for our email newsletter to stay informed as the campaign moves forward.

Hope to see you Saturday!

Signature-Gathering Kickoff Saturday, March 10

9:30 a.m. – Meet downstairs in the Bellingham Public Library for a brief training and to pick up packets and petitions

10:00 a.m. – Group photo and sendoff in front of Bellingham City Hall

 

What’s Our Initiative Campaign About?

More and more people are becoming aware that the promise of an American democratic republic is not being met. Instead of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”, we have government “of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations”.

At the same time, corporate projects continue to attack the well-being of communities and the environment. Our system of laws continues to allow these attacks to succeed, even when on their face these laws claim to be there to protect communities and ecosystems.

Across the United States, communities are beginning to say that they have had enough. By passing local ordinances that ban harmful corporate practices, these communities are protecting themselves and the local ecosystems. They are doing so even when the projects have been “permitted” under state or federal law. And in doing so these communities are succeeding in turning away the projects that threatened them!  Beyond protecting communities from the immediate corporate threat, these ordinances increasingly are addressing the structure of laws that has arisen to give corporations superior rights to the communities in which their projects are being carried out.  The Coal-Free Bellingham campaign has prepared a local ordinance for the people of Bellingham to adopt through the initiative process. The ordinance will:

  • Protect Bellingham, surrounding communities, and their ecosystems from the coal trains, and
  • Confront the underlying structure of laws that currently prevent communities from protecting themselves from corporate threats.

Because of coal’s implications for global climate change, adopting a local ordinance in this way will also mean that we are preventing our own territory from being used to cause ecological harm worldwide.

For more information about Coal-Free Bellingham and our campaign, please contact us here. For an example of a local ordinance that is protecting the people of Pittsburgh and the local ecosystems from natural gas fracking and from the underlying structure of laws that threatens them, visit here.