What: March to challenge ALEC and corporate power, Climate Justice Bloc
When: Feb. 29th, 11am to 5pm
Where: Meet under the Burnside bridge on the West side at 11am, look for the huge wave!

Occupy Portland calls for a national day of non-violent civil disobedience targeting corporations who are members of ALEC, one of the most successful mechanisms that the 1% uses to control legislation. We are asking people around the country to choose members of ALEC in their home towns and SHUT DOWN BUSINESS AS USUAL.

Portland Rising Tide will be putting together a Climate Justice Bloc to call attention to ALEC’s role in propelling us further into climate chaos while stalling efforts to help slow climate change. ALEC is a friend to energy companies, corporate polluters, factory farms and their political allies. Among many other climate crimes, ALEC has helped to: Forbid local governments from limiting pesticide use, streamlined siting for nuclear and other power plants and prohibited local efforts to oppose genetically modified (GMO) crops.  Join us for this huge national day of action!

RSVP on Facebook for f29!

Rising Tide will be forming a Climate Justice Bloc for the Feb. 29th Shut Down the Corporations day of action. Help us construct a giant wave to crush corporate power! We will be sewing, painting and using hot glue!

RSVP on Facebook!

Sunday, February 19, 2012
2:00pm until 4:00pm
Basement Room, St Francis of Assisi
1131 Southeast Oak Street, Portland, OR

The Occupy Movement has not often engaged environmental destruction, climate change, or other related issues. How can we infuse the economically-dominated messaging of Occupy with an environmental perspective? This conversation will be grounded in a discussion of climate justice, the work of Portland Rising Tide and coal in the Pacific Northwest as an example of the destructive practices occurring in our region.

Join us to find out how the world’s dirtiest fuel is traveling through our backyard and strategize how we can stop coal in its tracks and keep it in the ground!

The workshop, which Portland Rising Tide organized and hosted on Sunday, January 8^th, brought together about 35 folks for a 4-hour exploration of group social dynamics and our place within them. These types of explorations of course have intrinsic value…but what made the day really special was the amount of fun and illumination T.O. brought to the task. Just to be clear, this wasn’t a get-together exploring Rising Tide’s group dynamics. Rather this was an open workshop for everyone, teaching a broad range and diverse range of tools known collectively as Theater of the Oppressed: group activities examining (often invisible) social structures through the lens of theater and interactive games.

We started with some new and interesting ways of doing group introductions and getting familiar with everyone’s name, my favorite being a game where everyone stood in a big circle and someone in the middle had to call out someone else’s name 3 times in rapid succession before the person being called out said their own name once. If the person being called on failed to do so, they’d be tossed in the middle themselves. Simple enough, but it was a much more fun way to get to know everyone’s name and loosen things up than the usual: pretending we all memorized 30 names in a row from a huge group go-around.

We did about six T.O. “games” in all so I’m only going to cover two of my favorites here. I really loved the exercise called “Complete the Image.” In this one we set up a frozen pantomime scene and then took turns, one at a time, removing ourselves from our frozen poses and “evolving” the scene in some way that felt compelling, or that we felt progressed the “story” in some way – all with no verbalization of exactly where the little play we were acting out was headed. It’s hard to describe in words, but it was really remarkable seeing this group story telling exercise: how we respond to and inspire each other, how some people add depth, others add breadth, and still others add direction to a communal narrative.

The most interesting game for me called “Carnival of Rio.” In this one we teamed up in groups of 3 and spent a moment strategizing for the most compelling sequence of sound and motion we could think. We then brought it back to the whole group with a goal (which all of the many groups of 3 shared!) of convincing the entire group to get on the same page with us. At the same time, we were encouraged to strive toward some sort of group consensus, to try out each others sound/motions if we felt moved to do so, and gravitate to the one(s) we found most compelling. By the end of the exercise, some sound/motions had died out, a few had grown to a dozen or more adherents and still others ebbed and flowed in numbers.

Besides being a ton of fun, the game made for fertile ground for a very “real” – and at times very personal – conversation about peer pressure, conformity, feelings of uncertainty and even abandonment, how we are effected by physical contact in group interactions, and when and how to compromise in the context of group settings. It may sound hard to believe that a bunch of people sighing in a hug amoeba or croaking like frogs while doing squats would have inspired such a serious conversation, but there it was, and this was really the magic of Theater of the Oppressed.

I wanted to thank Teryani immensely for the work she did. Her website about her Theater of the Oppressed work – where you can find out more about T.O. and also about booking Teryani’s trainings is http://lebendig.org/to/to.htm.

Friend Portland Rising Tide on Facebook or get on our email list for updates on future workshops of all sorts.

3 minute video about coal export terminals!

Faced with declining profit and image across America, Big Coal is courting the seemingly insatiable overseas energy markets. Nearly every deep water port in the Northwest is being pursued to export coal. The first two such projects are seeking permits for infrastructure that would allow close to 110 million tons of coal export annually-roughly equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of 40 million cars.

1:30-3:30 @ People’s Co-op community room (upstairs)

3029 Southeast 21st Avenue  Portland, OR 97202

come prepared to move, play, and have fun

free! open to all ages!

Theater is a channel for knowledge; it is the art of looking at our selves and can be a means of transforming society. Brazilian theater activist, Augusto Boal, created Theater of the Oppressed (T.O.) in the 1960′s out of a belief that “we can make this world a place where we can be happy in rather than just a vast market place in which we sell our goods and our souls”. In Theater of the Oppressed there are no spectators. The fourth wall of traditional theater is abolished and spectators become ‘spect-actors’. The spect-actors are the participants in the creation of the drama – it is their conflict, their worlds, and their life experiences that we wish to address.

By giving the participants power in the creation of the action, they are being transformed and prepared to participate in the theater of life. Using the various techniques and activities outlined in the Theater of the Oppressed doctrine, spect-actors uncover the root causes of problems and what internal and external factors block them from effective action. They are able to “see” their problem, “analyze” it and “act” to change the situation.

More about Theatre of the Oppressed and our workshop presenter: http://lebendig.org/to/to.htm

Portland Rising Tide, a direct action environmental group confronting the root causes of climate change resurrected the first ever undead zombie army against coal. On Monday October 31^st, the zombie army against coal marched from Occupy Portland at 3:00 PM to two Bank of America branches in downtown Portland. One protestor, Tim Swenson, was arrested in the protest for allegedly putting red corn syrup on the exterior of the Bank of America on 2^nd and Morrison.

Twenty police officers in partial riot gear arrived at the Bank of America as the protestors were leaving. Police grabbed Swenson as the protestors were leaving the site.

A spokes-zombie for Portland Rising Tide, David Osborn, stated, “The connections between Bank of America, coal and climate change are too strong to ignore and too devastating to our future to not act against. We call for the immediate release of Tim Swenson and for Bank of America, the true criminal, to be held to account for its actions.”

Currently, the cities of Longview and Cherry Point, Washington, are facing proposals to export up to 140 million tons of coal annually. Six other ports across the Northwest are in talks with coal export companies. If constructed, the export terminals will bring up to 26 mile-long trains through the Columbia River gorge, releasing 500 pounds of coal dust per car.  Bank of America is the highest lender to coal companies across the nation. Portland Rising Tide will continue to oppose any coal export terminals in the Northwest and other destructive fossil fuel projects.

High resolution photos available here:

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