The Fossil Fuel Resistance: Meet the New Green Heroes

James Hansen: The Voice

The most famous words in the history of the global-warming fight came one June day in 1988, when a middle-aged NASA climatologist named James Hansen testified to a Senate committee that the planet was warming and that our carbon emissions were the cause. "It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here," he said that day, and in doing so demonstrated the two reasons he's been so crucial.

One is the evidence: He had among the biggest computer models of the climate, and among the most extensive sets of global-temperature data; their power gave him the quiet confidence to speak and to keep speaking when he became a center of controversy.

The second reason is the way he spoke: straightforwardly, without technical jargon. If Paul Revere had said, "We can say with some confidence that some portion of the imperial forces stationed in Boston may have mobilized," the Minutemen would have taken days to arrive. It's a good thing he and Hansen both spoke plainly.

He plans to speak more plainly still. He announced his retirement from NASA on April 1st: "I've served my country for many years at NASA, but leaving the federal payroll will make it easier for me to take on all governments, including our own, that are dropping the ball on climate change." Expect to see him in court, and expect him to make more history.

Tim DeChristopher: The Political Prisoner

Tim DeChristopher has been hailed as both the Rosa Parks and the Henry David Thoreau of the climate movement. But the act of resistance that sent him to jail is less straightforward than the flat refusals of those protest icons. In December 2008, DeChristopher – the founder of the climate group Peaceful Uprising – walked into a federal Bureau of Land Management auction and submitted $1.8 million in bids on oil and gas leases. For throwing a paper monkey-wrench into a federal auction he deemed illegitimate and immoral — "obstruct[ing] lawful government proceedings," in the words of the prosecution — the feds decided to make an example of the activist, who was then 29 years old. They indicted him on one count of violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act, and one count of making a false statement. After a high-profile trial that generated protests across the country, a Utah judge delivered a sentence of two years out of a maximum of 10. Before being taken into custody, DeChristopher issued a statement that instantly entered climate activism lore. "Until our leaders take seriously their responsibility to pass on a healthy and just world to the next generation, I will continue this fight," he told the court. "The reality is not that I lack respect for the law; it's that I have greater respect for justice." The judge later admitted that DeChristopher's defiant courtroom vow to continue his activism contributed to his harsh sentence. DeChristopher will emerge from a Salt Lake City halfway house on April 21st, as a powerful voice for confrontational direct action. "It's no longer acceptable for us to stay in the stands," he says in Bidder 70, a film about his trial. "It's time to rush the field. It's time to stop the game."

Maria Gunnoe: The Mountaintop Warrior

Big Coal awoke a monster when they fucked with Maria Gunnoe. In 2000, a coal company opened a mountaintop removal mine on the ridge above her home in Boone County, West Virginia. Virtually overnight, her quiet hollow became a war zone, with explosions, flying rocks and dust. The mountain stream beside her house was polluted with heavy metals. One night after heavy rains, a flash flood nearly swept away her family while they slept in their beds. The coal company told her the flood was an "act of God." "Mountaintop removal mining is against everything America stands for," says Gunnoe, who's now a community organizer for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. "They say it about jobs and the economy, but it is not. It is about exploitation and greed." Since she declared war on the coal companies, she's been assaulted, harassed and threatened (a few years ago, she was arrested for battery after shoving a six-foot-tall strip miner who pushed her at community meeting). But Gunnoe, who packs her grandfather's antique Colt 32-20 pistol when she travels around Appalachia, refuses to be silenced. In 2009, she was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, known as the "Green Nobel," for her activism. Her message these days is that most activists play too nice. "Working with corporate America is a waste of time," she says, pointing out that despite all the fights over mining permits she's been involved with in Appalachia, she's seen only one denied. "Companies are going for the jugular now. They know they are running out of time and will be replaced – eventually – with renewable energy. It's time to go get 'em. We need to show the world we are serious about this."

Tom Steyer: Daddy Greenbucks

"The goal here is not to win. The goal here is to destroy these people." That sounds like the credo of an environmental radical – in fact, it's the war cry of one of the Resistance's most unlikely new leaders. Tom Steyer retired last fall from the San Francisco hedge fund he'd built into a $20 billion leviathan – with a $1.4 billion net worth that puts him on the Forbes list of the country's richest people. Now he's pledged to spend what it takes to put the heat on politicians who don't take climate change seriously.

He waded into the Massachusetts Senate primary last month, spending heavily against a Democrat – Stephen Lynch – who'd voted for Keystone; he will likely target a noted climate denier headed for the GOP nomination in the Virginia gubernatorial race this year. A seasoned political player (Steyer ran two successful ballot initiatives in California, and this month President Obama showed up at a fundraiser he hosted), he brings the climate movement the big-money political firepower that helped catalyze the success of the gay-rights movement. Plus he almost looks presidential, which, if climate turns out to be the key issue . . .

Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr.: The Minister

The Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. is the only pacesetting climate activist who might casually begin a day talking to Biz Markie and end it chatting with Al Gore. "We need to break down the silos that segregate activism – with police brutality here, gay rights there, immigration over there," says the 43-year-old minister. "I founded the Hip Hop Caucus to bridge the gaps so we can fight poverty and pollution at the same time."

As a student at the University of the District of Columbia, he organized a massive 10-day student sit-in against budget cuts and campus relocation in 1990. He later emerged as a leader across the worlds of community organizing, anti-war activism (his 2007 peace tour was called "Make Hip Hop Not War") and voter registration (in 2008, the caucus set a world record when it registered 32,000 voters in a single day). He got involved with climate issues through his Gulf Coast Renewal Campaign, which he set up to advocate for the rights and well-being of Katrina victims. It all came together when he MC'd February's 40,000-strong Keystone protest rally. "What we're seeing now – young people willing to get arrested – it's our lunch-counter- moment for the 21st century," Yearwood says. "Which is what we need, because the situation is critical. For me, if that means literally putting my body against the gears of the machine to stop the madness, that's what I'll do."

Jane Kleeb: The Keystone Killer

Without Jane Kleeb, the Keystone XL pipeline might be a done deal right now. The 39-year-old former MTV correspondent and founder of Bold Nebraska, a grass roots activist group, staged a brilliantly subversive campaign to galvanize opposition to the 1,700 mile pipeline which would carry dirty tar sands oil from Canada down to Gulf Coast refineries. Instead of trying to convince red-staters to care about climate change, she found a telegenic Republican rancher named Randy Thompson who had been butting heads with TransCanada, the Canadian company that wants to build the pipeline, and let him do the talking. "I know what my folks went through to get a piece of ground. And these sons of bitches come along and they tell me we're going to take this land away from you whether you want us to or not," Thompson told one reporter, "and they got a fight on their hands." The campaign, which played out on billboards, t-shirts, and TV spots across the state, turned Thompson into a folk hero, rallied thousands of Nebraskans around the cause and forced President Obama to call for further review. Kleeb's latest challenge: keeping Nebraska ranchers cool if Obama approves the pipeline later this year. "They are very angry," Kleeb says. "I tell them, 'You can not take up arms. A gun is not going to solve this." What should they do instead? "Run for office themselves."

Michael Brune: The Insider

For 120 years, the Sierra Club has hewed to its charter to "use all lawful means" to defend the environment. But under the leadership of 41-year-old executive director Michael Brune, the Club is suddenly flirting with the creed of Malcolm X: "By any means necessary." On the day after president Obama's February State of the Union speech, Brune zip-tied himself to the White House gates – the first sanctioned, illegal, act of civil disobedience in the Sierra Club's history. The action was intended to provoke the president to use his full executive authority in confronting the climate crisis – "to have his ambition meet the scale of the challenge," says Brune. "There remains an enormous amount of authority that the president could use, that is just lying on the table."

Despite the newly confrontational tactics he's brought to the nation's oldest environmental group, Brune is no firebrand. He's a sober, strategic environmentalist who came to the Sierra Club in 2010 after seven years running the Rainforest Action Network, where he made his mark mixing in antagonistic direct action and good-faith negotiation. "Confrontation just because you're angry with something doesn't get you very far," he says. "Confrontation combined with a commitment to find solutions can be transformative."  Brune promises that the Sierra Club will continue to pressure not only lawmakers and but citizens to get off the sidelines and join the climate fight. "People can take action as consumers and voters. They can take action through civil disobedience," says Brune. "What we want is for people to be a part of this movement and to do something."

First Nations on the Front Lines

Nowhere has the scramble to tap the continent's new sources of dirty energy been as devastating as in indigenous communities. From Alaska to Alberta's tar sands to the coastal waters of British Columbia and down into the heartland of the United States, native-led activism has emerged as one of the most potent and organized forces opposing the petrochemical industry. "In the past, indigenous communities and environmental groups did not work so closely on these issues – however, it is inspiring to see this changing," says Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a Lubicon Cree and Greenpeace organizer. "Our communities have no running water, and yet we see billions taken out in oil and gas revenues. So we have an urgency to speak out."

Last fall, as Canada's right-wing government launched attacks on environmental protections and First Nations sovereignty in an attempt to free up land and water coveted by corporations, four native women founded Idle No More, an Occupy-like movement that has sparked road and rail blockades, flash mobs, hunger strikes and a nearly 1,000-mile trek undertaken by a group of Cree youth from Quebec to the seat of government in Ottawa. Last month, an alliance of 10 tribes whose lands are slated to be veined by pipelines – including Keystone and the Northern Gateway – declared they would put their bodies on the line. "We have a responsibility to protect the land at all costs," says Shannon Houle of Idle No More.

In Alaska, a coalition known as Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL) is mobilizing opposition to drilling in the treacherous Arctic waters that support their way of life. REDOIL brought concerns directly to Shell's shareholders at an annual meeting last year, and the group has participated in lawsuits challenging offshore leasing. "Is it worth it to lose 1,000 years of culture, clean air and clean water?" asks Faith Gemmill, REDOIL's executive director. "We don't want to make that trade-off. Shell's promises are empty."

Chloe Maxmin: The Divestment Nerd

Raised on a farm in rural Maine, Chloe Maxmin, a 20-year-old "social-theory nerd," has been active in environmental campaigns since she was 12. In high school, she founded a nationally lauded climate-action club and an online network of young environmentalists. Now, she's taking on two of the world's most powerful forces: Big Oil and Harvard.

"There is an increasingly shrill refrain of 'Don't just sit there – do something!' " says Dr. Kevin Caffrey, Maxmin's Harvard adviser. "Chloe's one of the voices that says, 'Don't just do something – sit there and think about it first.' "

As one of the coordinators of Harvard's student-led divestment campaign, Maxmin, a sophomore, has become a national key player in the rapidly growing movement. "The fossil-fuel industry has a stranglehold on the system, so we're going to bypass it," she says. Last fall, Harvard students passed a referendum demanding the university untangle its $31 billion endowment from the fossil-fuel industry. Maxmin refuses to be daunted by the administration's chilly response. "My life has been taken over by divestment," she says, "and I can see it succeeding."

Cherri Foytlin: The Angry Mom

Not long after the BP oil spill, Cherri Foytlin, a part-time journalist in a small Louisiana town, hitched a ride with a fisherman into the Gulf of Mexico to see for herself the damage caused by one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S. history. As they pushed farther out from shore, Foytlin started to notice gooey brown sludge bubbling up along the surface of the ocean, and then she saw something that changed the course of her life: a pelican, covered in oil, gasping for its life. Foytlin yanked the bird from the water, and it died in her arms.

"When I pulled that pelican from the water, I realized I couldn't stand on the sidelines any longer," Foytlin says. As the wife of an oil worker who has spent most of the last decade on the Gulf Coast, Foytlin speaks from a position of authority, noting that for all the money Big Oil sops up every year, precious little ends up in the communities that are the backbone of the industry. "We're a battered woman that keeps going back to the aggressor," Foytlin says. "We still have oil in our marshes, fishermen are out of work and it seems like everyone knows someone with cancer. It's time to take the blinders off and see what this industry is doing to us."

Fed up with Washington's feeble attempts at clean-up, Foytlin walked from New Orleans to D.C. to raise awareness about the ongoing environmental problems related to the spill. Since then she's expanded her activism, chaining herself to the gate of a Keystone XL pipeyard to delay the project and organizing protests and rallies from Texas to Florida. She's been arrested four times, had a brick thrown through the window of her car and listened to death threats against her and her husband. She blogs about her experiences on a website called Bridge the Gulf Project. "When I introduce myself to people, I say, 'I'm a mom with six kids,' because the message I want to put out there is that normal, everyday people have to take up this fight," Foytlin says. "It's too easy to think someone else will do it for you."

Danny Kennedy and Andrew Birch: The Solar Mavericks

Longtime activist Danny Kennedy nearly died from malaria while documenting the abuses of oil companies in Papua New Guinea and has gotten himself arrested on three continents. Now, he's teamed up with former investment banker and BP Solar executive Andrew Birch to reinvent the home solar-energy business. Their company, Sungevity, harnesses high-tech tools like satellite imagery to shepherd homeowners through a full conversion remotely, and allows them to lease, rather than buy, their photovoltaic setup,  eliminating the upfront investment. "We're trying to make it as easy as possible – think Netflix," says Kennedy. So far, they've converted more than 5,000 homes. "I'm overly trained as professional opposition," says Kennedy. "As climate activists, we have to start telling the world what we're for and fight for that."

Billy Parish and Wahleah Johns: The Crowd-Funders

Can we crowd-fund our way to a solar revolution? That's the vision of Billy Parish, the co-founder of Mosaic, an Oakland start-up that enables individuals to invest collectively in solar projects. So far, the company has channeled more than $1 million into solar panels atop housing complexes and community centers. The idea that crowd-funding could catalyze the shift to green energy was inspired by Parish's wife, Wahleah Johns, a founder of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, which advocates for a transition to renewables on the impoverished Navajo Nation in the Southwest. Decades of dirty-energy production on Navajo lands have left a legacy of pollution, even while thousands continue to live without electricity. "Solar can generate revenues for communities," Johns says. "But we have to find ways of financing these projects. Tribes don't have the capital." At current rates of traditional, top-down investment, a worldwide change to renewables will take about 400 years. Parish, who dropped out of Yale in 2002 to become a full-time activist, thinks his financing model could supercharge that process. "We're trying to find new capital but also get people invested in clean energy, literally."

Jeremy Grantham: The Financial Crusader

74-year-old investor Jeremy Grantham's firm manages more than $100 billion in assets thanks in part to his legendary knack for identifying and profiting from market bubbles. Over the last 15 years, Grantham has been ringing the alarm about the carbon bubble in the atmosphere, whose bursting threatens more than a temporary economic downturn. The former oil analyst entered the energy debate fray in 1997 when he co-founded the Grantham Foundation For the Protection of the Environment, which is to climate change what the Gates Foundation is to malaria. The foundation supports major environmental advocacy organizations from the World Wildlife Fund to the Nature Conservancy, as well as two London climate-research institutes bearing his name. Grantham also uses his widely read newsletter as a platform for warning the investment community about the limits of growth and the looming dead-end of profit-driven, short-term planning. Sometimes he speaks in the language of investment advice, explaining profits will be hard to turn in a future of soaring commodities prices, food scarcity and wild social, climatological and geopolitical instability. Other times, he'll make direct appeals to investors to free their minds, hoping their portfolios will follow. "We humans have the brains and the means to reach real planetary sustainability," wrote Grantham in a 2011 newsletter. "The problem is with us and our focus on short-term growth and profits, which is likely to cause suffering on a vast scale. With foresight and thoughtful planning, this suffering is completely avoidable."

Last year, Grantham took to the pages of the scientific journal Nature to call for bolder public involvement by the scientific community – including acts of civil disobedience resulting in arrest – to counter the climate-denialism machine lavishly funded by his fellow billionaires in the fossil fuel industry. "Scientists are understandably protective of the dignity of science and are horrified by publicity and overstatement," wrote Grantham. "These fears, unfortunately, are not shared by their opponents, which makes for a rather painful one-sided battle. This is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species' existence."

Sandra Steingraber: The Toxic Avenger

Sandra Steingraber had plans to attend medical school when she received a diagnosis of bladder cancer at age 20. Her suspicion that the illness was linked to contaminated water in Tazewell County, Illinois, where she grew up, set her on a path to understand the public health impact of common carcinogens released into the environment – first as a biologist, now as one of the most celebrated writer-activists-ecologists of her generation. Her trilogy of books about environmental health – Having Faith, Living Downstream, and Raising Elijah – wraps complex science lessons in finely drawn memoir and has earned her comparisons to her hero, Silent Spring author Rachel Carson.

In 2011, she received a Heinz Award worth $100,000 and used the money to seed New Yorkers Against Fracking, a coalition of anti-fracking groups in her current home state. By then Steingraber had made opposing fracking her life's work. "My anti-fracking work has absorbed my toxic chemical work," she says, "because the road to chemical reform runs straight through energy policy – green energy solves both toxic chemicals and climate change."

In March, Steingraber was arrested during a road blockade to stop the construction of a gas compressor near her home close to Seneca Lake. "New York has a temporary fracking moratorium, but the infrastructure is getting fast tracked," she says. "To see this happening so close to my home, I needed to let my body speak."

Rev. Sally Bingham: The Church Lady

Since launching the Interfaith Power and Light Campaign in 2000, Rev. Sally Bingham has organized 15,000 churches, synagogues and mosques into a formidable national network of faith communities who see climate change not as a policy or technical challenge, but as an issue of spiritual dimension. "In this country, we've never had the kind of cultural and social change climate change requires without religious involvement," says Bingham. "Anti-slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights – all of these movements succeeded because of their moral foundation." IPL started like most environmental networks and institutions: small and local. Bingham began with 60 California episcopal churches that agreed to purchase a portion of their energy from the renewable energy provider Green Mountain. The group's ranks multiplied fast. But in 2001, rising wholesale costs sabotaged California's fledging renewable market. "That's when I realized we had to get involved at the policy level," she says. IPL joined the fight for a California energy standard requiring utilities to derive a fifth of their energy from renewables by 2017. The bill passed in 2002 and has since been expanded twice, now mandating a third of the state's energy to come from renewables by 2020. Bingham, meanwhile, has taken her policy work to Washington. Each spring, she leads a delegation of 80 IPL state leaders to Capitol Hill for meetings with Congressional delegations. "We're trying to maintain a unique voice based in theology so we can have more Republicans within our community," she says. The strategy appears to be working. "We're starting to get some traction in red states like Oklahoma, Minnesota, Arkansas, Kansas," she says. "Eyes are opening in faith communities across the political spectrum that climate change is about values and a duty to protecting God's creation."

Kevin Grandia: The Muckraker

When "climategate" first surfaced, blogger Kevin Grandia knew journalists were missing the real story. The trumped-up controversy was based on over 1,000 stolen emails between the world's leading climate scientists that seemed to suggest global warming was a hoax, or lacked evidence. But Grandia had spent three days reading all of the emails, which totaled 20,000 pages, and he knew that the supposed scandal was nothing more than a few quotes taken out of context. Eventually the story would be debunked by six separate investigations, but its immediate results were disastrous: The release of the emails came weeks before the 2009 global climate summit at Copenhagen, where world leaders were poised to agree to binding emissions reductions. "Unfortunately, most journalists didn't have time to read the emails, and they just ran with the story," Grandia says. "To this day, climate-gate lingers in people's minds, and continues to sow doubt that global warming is real."

Grandia hopes something like that never happens again – which is why he now helps run DeSmogBlog, a Canadian website that does daily battle with climate change skeptics, aggregating the best research on global warming and dissecting misinformation campaigns backed by right-wing think tanks. He's traced much of the money that funds anti-global-warming research back to the fossil fuel industry and found that some of the most outspoken skeptics once worked for Big Tobacco. "They're using the exact same tactics they used to convince people smoking doesn't cause cancer," Grandia says. "It's a tactic that's been around forever. You can muddle up a debate for a long time just by creating doubt."

When DeSmogBlog started seven years ago, Grandia says he had to call reporters to get them to pay attention to his research, and many hung up. "Now we've got staffers in D.C. calling us, politicians in Canada, the UK, looking for information. We have producers at ABC News and the BBC asking for help on research," he says. "There's still a lot of work to do, but we think the tide is turning."

Tar Sands Blockade: The Monkey-Wrenchers

Last year, when president Obama approved the southern leg of Keystone XL – which will run 435 miles from Cushing, Oklahoma to refineries near Houston – he unwittingly unleashed the Tar Sands Blockade, a loose but relentless coalition of environmental activists and landowners angered by TransCanada's seizure of their property. "We see ourselves as people who are acting in an emergency capacity," says Ramsey, a 29-year-old Texan and former Green Party organizer with indigenous roots who interrupted a pipeline conference in January by locking himself to the stage. "This fight will be very intense, and it will be very polarizing."

Dedicated to disrupting 'business as usual,' the Tar Sands group does not shy away from putting their bodies on the line – members have locked their necks to excavators in Oklahoma, sealed themselves inside pipe segments in Winona, Texas, and stormed TransCanada's Houston offices. In one of the group's most dramatic operations, activists staged a tree-sit in a forested piece of private property in east Texas that had been claimed for the pipeline route over the objections of the landowner. After a three-month standoff, TransCanada re-routed the pipeline around the blockade.

The group has raised enough of a ruckus to draw a legal attack from TransCanada, and the activists are now barred from company property in Texas and Oklahoma. So they've shifted their attention to training other groups and to action against partners like TD Bank, one of TransCanada's top shareholders, and Valero, a petrochemical giant that plans to refine bitumen transported in the pipeline.

Beyond, blockaders are drawing attention to the environmental racism they say is endemic along the pipeline route. "The communities that bear the brunt of pollution caused by oil sands development are poor people of color," says a blockader called Rue, who organizes in Manchester, a predominantly Latino Houston neighborhood ringed by refineries. "We need people power, and that's why we're using direct action," Rue explains. "I'm sick of people trying to appeal to the President's moral compass on Keystone – it's not going to happen."