Reflecting on the past year of work has given us a moment to celebrate our collective community, learn from the work of the many activists and organizers we are connected to, and ground ourselves with intentionality for the hard work ahead.

Collective Updates

First, some updates about our collective! This year, fellow Nastasia Lawton-Sticklor officially joined the CDC core team! Nastasia has been an incredible addition to our crew, and has brought her expertise on community building, collective support systems, and restorative justice to everything we do. This year, we also began formally collaborating with Professors Siobhan Senier and Nathan Phillips as CDC praxis fellows. Siobhan and Nathan are both brilliant scholars, teachers, and organizers, and we are so excited to be working with them on joint projects that bridge the gap between theoretical education and real-life resistance. More about our work with Nathan and Siobhan will be coming soon!

CDC core team (left to right) Marla, Nastasia, and Leif

This year, we also made some much-needed updates to our website with the help of our friend and technology expert Gregg Housh. Much of this update involved curating the resources we offer to make them easier to find. You can see our new website here! Over the past months, we’ve also been grateful to work with our new data architect Sophie Dantzic, who has helped us create a streamlined system for tracking and supporting defendants through the court system. Thank you so much to Gregg and Sophie, and we are looking forward to continuing our work with you! 

Trainings and Workshops

This year, training and workshops have taken an even larger part of our focus than usual. Between the proliferation of Palestine solidarity campaigns, increased interest in climate direct action, and a rising need to defend queer events, we’ve been receiving training requests every week! We’ve been so honored to work with many incredible groups doing amazing frontline work, and have loved offering trainings on how folks can best support! Our workshops have ranged from multi-day formal NVDA trainings for established orgs to spontaneous midnight de-escalation briefings for scrappy affinity groups. No matter the audience or topic, we are so happy to be in this work with you! 

Here is a breakdown of some highlights from our training work this year: 

• Marla spent —– facilitating zoom NVDA workshops for activists with Third Act, culminating in two multi-day, in person trainings in Washington DC and New York City. Leif assisted with the in-person roleplays. 
• Marla and Leif traveled to West Virginia for a community defender summit organized by West Virginia Can’t Wait, where they gave workshops on de-escalation, NVDA, and fierce vulnerability.
• Leif gave dozens of workshops for Vermont-based queer groups, focusing on event safety planning, traffic coordination, and abolitionist de-escalation. These trainings ranged from pre-event briefings for new safety team members, discussions with community leaders on threat modeling, and bystander intervention practice for queer youth. 
• Marla, Leif, and Nastasia all offered workshops to student activists and community groups involved in Palestine solidarity encampments. These trainings included information on legal observation, police liaisoning, jail support, encampment safety, and direct action, as well as discussions of campaign strategy and community care. 
• Through No Coal No Gas, we also hosted trainings on several direct action “hard skills,” including scouting and climbing. 
• Leif estimates that they spent over 85 hours in active facilitation mode (not including prep), and trained about 575 participants over the course of the year. 
• Marla and Nathan gave an NVDA training for the American Geophysical Union

Marla at a training for Third Act

Action and Defendant Support 

In addition to training, we’ve also spent much of our year doing support work for communities engaged in direct action against systems of extraction and violence. This past spring and summer, we supported teams from New England traveling to Appalachia and New York to participate in resistance to the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Summer of Heat. In Massachusetts, Nastasia, Marla, and Nathan were all deeply involved in the campaign to defend the Lincoln forest from Enbridge’s Project Maple pipeline, while Leif supported Vermont-based actions against weapons manufacturers and biomass plants. As a collective, we’ve been especially involved in providing training, know-your-rights info, strategy consultation, and legal support to Palestine Solidarity campaigns in Tennessee, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. Solidarity work makes up a lot of what we do, in recognition that collective liberation is necessary for a healthy climate. 

Nastasia has been working alongside our friend Kira from the Climate Defense Project to bottomline legal support for defendants who were arrested at Dartmouth’s student encampment Over 70 student, faculty, and community activists joined a joint defense after their peaceful encampment on campus was dismantled by police. Defendant support team members helped activists navigate their cases while staying grounded in their values of solidarity with the people of Gaza. As of this writing, almost everyone has resolved their case and a few are headed to trial. Siobhan has also been supporting defendants in the Portsmouth area. 

Nathan and Lizzie after a court hearing for their work protecting the Lincoln forest. All charges were dismissed without arraignment.

No Coal No Gas 

More detailed recap here: Ncng end of year recap

Much of our action support this year has been through our work with the No Coal No Gas Campaign. Together with 350NH, we started the campaign in 2019 with the goal of building community, showing what’s possible, and shutting down the last coal plant in New England. This spring, we accomplished our third goal when the owners of coal-fired Merrimack Generating Station in Bow announced a shutdown date for the plant. No Coal No Gas is determined to build off of this victory. In —, we announced a new goal #3 for the campaign- to shut down all fossil-fuel fired peaker plants in the region. Peaker plants in New England are plants that only run when there’s extra demand on the grid, for example during hot and cold weather when folks need more air conditioning or heat. These plants get paid just to sit at the ready, and most of them only run about 3% of their capacity. Over the past months, we’ve been organizing actions and community building events to build the collective power needed to shut them down! 

No Coal No Gas started off the year with a cohort program designed to train new leaders and welcome new activists to the campaign. Cohort participants met to practice skills together- working on projects from soil remediation to scouting to art projects. At the same time, we were working to research all of the fossil fuel peaker plants in the region and develop strategy for this new phase of our regional organizing. Over the summer, we built teams across the region ready to take direct action at their local peaker plants, and supported protests and art installations by local allies in Vermont and Maine. In August, we formally launched the new phase of our campaign with distributed actions at all of the fossil fuel peakers in NH (all of which are owned by Granite Shore Power and its hedge fund parent company Atlas Holdings). On August 11, activists infiltrated every remaining fossil fuel peaker in the state, installing art installations at Schiller Station and White Lake Station, planting a guerilla garden at Lost Nation Station, and dropping a 270 foot banner off the smokestack of Newington Station, before reuniting across the river from Merrimack Station for a community celebration of its shutdown. Five people were arrested and are currently navigating the court system. 

A 170-foot banner hangs off of the smokestack at Newington Station reading “No Coal (check), No Gas”.

Banner hanging in front of a pile of coal at Schiller Station reading: “Congrats on the battery park. What’s all this then?” 

Our August launch was just the beginning! In recent months, No Coal No Gas has worked with local activists to host actions at the Berlin Peaker in VT, the Montville Peaker in CT, the Tanner Street Generator in MA, and the Cape Gas Turbine in ME. We are also currently challenging the permits for White Lake station and the ratepayer-funded subsidies given to these and other fossil fuel peakers by regional grid operator ISO New England. We are determined to continue building the power needed to do what must be done and shut these and other fossil fuel peakers down! 

ISO-NE Work

Much of our, and No Coal Gas’s organizing over the past year has focused on New England regional grid operator ISO-NE, which is responsible for the continued funding of peaker plants through ratepayer-funded “forward capacity payments.” We began the year by challenging the auction that awards these payments, and filed comments with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission opposing the continued subsidization of fossil fuel plants. After a lengthy back-and-forth in the docket between us, FERC, and ISO-NE, FERC ruled that our arguments about ISO’s violation of its own mission were “outside the scope” of the proceedings. FERC recommended that we take our concerns to the “stakeholder advisory process,” otherwise known as NEPOOL. NEPOOL is a clandestine industry council of transmission companies, power plants, and corporate businesses that is responsible for approving ISO policies, budget, and mission changes. It is also subject to strict secrecy guidelines and high membership fees, making it extremely inaccessible to everyday ratepayers. So, we decided to make it more accessible, by showing up to NEPOOL’s yearly retreat at the Bretton Woods resort near Mount Washington, NH. For three days, our presence at the hotel wreaked havoc amongst the NEPOOL participants, eventually resulting in a meeting with NEPOOL leadership and permanent observer status for our elected CLG CC members. 

The CLG CC is the only ratepayer-elected body within the ISO-NE power structure. As the coordinating committee of the Consumer Liaison Group, it is responsible for planning quarterly meetings between ISO board members, staff, and the general public. In Dec 2022, we took over the CLG CC in the election that has since become known as the “ballroom coup,” and since then our CLG CC reps have been using their new platform to change the narrative surrounding grid transition. This years’ meetings focused in particular on the need for “conservation demand response”- the practice of reducing electricity usage during times of peak energy demand instead of simply turning on more fossil fuel peakers. In this years’ CLG meetings, we advocated for collective conservation over the continued funding of fossil fuels, and announced our own grassroots effort to organize ordinary residents as a demand response entity. We’ve been building pods of neighbors committed to doing demand response together, building curriculum for rate[payers to understand and disrupt the ISO market system, and challenging ISO’s narrative that a call for conservation is the worst possible scenario. At the same time, our CLG CC members have been challenging NEPOOL as a structure and forcing ratepayer influence in proceedings that were designed to ignore us. All of these efforts culminated in the Dec 4 CLG meeting, where we once again elected a slate of candidates- thirteen this time!- to serve on next year’s CLG CC. 

Marla leads a teach-in at Montville Station in Uncasville, CT. after the September CLG meeting.

Movement Theory

This year, we’ve also been working to contribute to social movement theory how and when we can! Nastasia has been continuing her studies on restorative justice at Vermont Law School, and traveled to Cuba to learn about community-led work in energy and agriculture.! Climate pedagogy in particular has been a major focus of our work over the past months. Nastasia is teaching a course at Clark University this spring called Local Action Global Change. The course gives space for students to build on their identities as changemakers in their community and will connect them to our work. Marla, Nathan, and Siobhan are also working to connect students to real-life organizing work. Recently, Marla spoke at Yale about —–, while Nathan and Siobhan are currently supporting student research into activism, with Nathan’s course focusing on community-led demand response. This fall, Nastasia and her co-editor submitted a final manuscript for a volume called Uncovering Possible: Pedagogies for Apocalyptic Times, which includes chapters by Marla, Siobhan, and Leif. Leif presented for the Boston Anarchist Bookfair and had a chapter published in The Existential Toolkit this past spring. 

Leif inspiring enthusiasm and resolve at a training

At the moment, much of our focus is on the role of noncompliance in resisting totalitarian governments. We began discussing this topic in particular in the lead up to the November election, and have since hosted calls on the subject for the No Coal No Gas community. We plan to publicize trainings on this topic soon! In general, please keep an eye on our blog in the coming months as we hope to share more of our movement theory thinking there.