We speak with Courtney White, author of “Grass, Soil, Hope” who has traveled the world and experimented on his own ranch to find ways to sequester carbon that are sustainable and also solve other problems related to the climate crisis, water management and food security. Though the evidence for these solutions is very strong, they are not widely known yet. And we speak with Dr. Sean Sweeeney, director and founder of the Global Labor Institute, about the new international coalition Trade Unions for Energy Democracy. This coalition of unions is turning the decades-long narrative of market-based extreme energy extraction on its head.
Listen here:
New Initiatives to Really Address the Climate Crisis with Courtney White and Sean Sweeney by Clearingthefog on Mixcloud
Relevant articles and websites:
Book: Grass, Soil, Hope: A Journey through Carbon Country by Courtney White
Article: Grass, Soil, Hope by Courtney White
Resist, Reclaim, Restructure: Unions and the Struggle for Energy Democracy by Sean Sweeney
Earth to Labor: Economic Growth is no Salvation by Sean Sweeney
Trade Unions for Energy Democracy
Guests:
Courtney White is a former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist who dropped out of the “conflict industry” in 1997 to co-found the Quivira Coalition, a non-profit dedicated to building bridges between ranchers, conservationists, public land managers, scientists, and others around the idea of land health (www.quiviracoalition.org). Today, his work with Quivira concentrates on building economic and ecological resilience on working landscapes, with a special emphasis on carbon ranching and the new agrarian movement.
Sean Sweeney is the Director and founder of the Global Labor Institute, a program of the Cornell School of industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) based in New York City. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Industrial Relations from the University of Bath, England, in 1991. Dr. Sweeney has been involved in college-level trade union and worker education since 1987 as full time faculty with Hofstra University’s pioneering program with the United Auto Workers, District 65. He served as the Director of the Queens College Worker Education Extension Center from 1995-1999 before becoming Cornell’s Director of Labor Studies. In recent years Dr. Sweeney has deepened and broadened Cornell ILR’s work with the international labor community around economic alternatives, environmental sustainability, and climate protection.
In 2007 Sweeney and the Global Labor Institute team worked with the Steelworkers and other unions to organize the North American Labor Assembly on Climate Crisis, the first major conference on unions and climate change. Sweeney and GLI then worked with the AFL-CIO and Change to Win to build U.S. labor’s presence at the UN’s climate talks in Bali for COP 13, and he serves on the International Trade Union Confederation’s climate working group. Sweeney and the Cornell GLI team also convened the Global Trade Union Task Force on Development Alternatives in 2006. Sweeney c-authored the UN Environment Program’s 2008 report, Green Jobs: Towards Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low-Carbon World that was sponsored by the ITUC and the ILO. Most recently (September 2011), Sweeney co-authored a report that challenged the jobs claimed by the oil industry pertaining to the Keystone XL pipeline, titled Pipe Dreams: Jobs Gained, Jobs Lost in the Construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Sweeney has written for the Los Angeles Times and appeared on National Public Radio and is a frequent contributor to New Labor Forum