Rising Tide is an international, all-volunteer, grassroots network of groups and individuals who organize locally, promote community-based solutions to the climate crisis and take direct action to confront the root causes of climate change.
Direct Action Storytelling fundraiser at Laughing Horse Books
Portland Rising Tide is the loud relative who boisterously denounces dysfunction when the rest of the family would rather just hope it goes away. We combine long-term strategic campaigning with educational events to raise awareness and build capacity in our community to stop the plunge into climate chaos.
Tabling at Last Thursday with a tripod!
The Portland chapter of Rising Tide has existed for about five years, and in that time we have been instrumental in the battle to keep LNG out of Mount Hood. We have teamed up with student groups to smear banks that fund mountain top removal coal mining. We have joined with groups such as Columbia River Keeper, The Indigenous Environmental Network and the American Indian Movement to protect the Columbia river from becoming another industrial highway to ship tar sands equipment. We have held teach-ins, movie screenings and workshops ranging from urban bee keeping to road blockades. Most importantly, we have turned many of what would otherwise be everyday moments of hum drum complacency into raging, colorful dance parties.
Who We Are: Rising Tide International
Rising Tide was born out of the conviction that corporate-friendly “solutions” to climate change will not save us and that most government efforts are half-measures at best. We organize through decentralized local groups that support one another with shared resources, ideas, fundraising, training and collaborations. Our activities include grassroots community organizing, publishing educational materials, organizing creative direct actions and protests, and holding public education events in order to further the struggle for climate justice.
Rising Tide is committed to stopping the extraction of fossil fuels and preventing the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure. Equally important, we must make a just transition to sustainable livelihoods that foster local autonomy and self-sufficiency.
Rising Tide’s tactics are diverse and creative, taking a bottom-up approach to connecting the dots between colonialism,
Rising Tide Australia shuts down all coal loading operations in Newcastle for 9.5 hours.
corporate power, climate disruption, social justice, and biocentrism. The systems that are destroying the planet are systems rooted in oppression; combating climate change is therefore not just a matter of carbon emissions, but of confronting the institutions that destroy communities, cultures and the Earth.
We aim to support communities in making a “just transition,” in which social and ecological needs are prioritized in the shift to a low-carbon society. This means opposing policies that cause collateral damage to communities or strengthen existing inequalities. Real solutions to climate chaos are local in nature and come from communities themselves, not from the institutions that got us into this mess.
The international Rising Tide network now spans four continents. We know that whatever we achieve in our local struggles is amplified by the energy of the growing global movement for climate justice.
