Rutland, membership in action.

Another week another successful round of Global Warming meetings… It’s great to be an activist in a state where action is the name of the game!

Hey it’s Sean the Field Guy again and for those you just tuning in VPIRG and its allies are out around the state this month growing support for H. 127 the Clean Safe and Affordable Power Act which will require the state to get 25% of all its energy from renewable power by 2012.

This time I took the long lonely ride through the mountains to Rutland to host a meeting with CAN (That’s Citizens Awareness Network for those of you that don’t know). I was a little worried because VPIRG has never been huge in Rutland. But to my great surprise turnout was amazing: more than 25 people showed up!

I want to thank everyone who came for making the event most excellent. The night started off with a talk by yours truly on why global warming is bad for Vermont and what we can do about it. This ended up as an amazingly productive dialogue on how to get action going in the region. We then went to a Q&A session and finally to the phone calls.

At every VPIRG Global Warming event we say that coming together and talking about the problem is only the first step: We must take action. And that’s exactly what we did in Rutland. The lovely Wendy at Unicel donated some cell phones and we got to work calling our legislators. I had two wonderful assistants help me with the training and then we broke out into two groups and got our grassroots on. We ended up making more than twenty phone calls to local legislators in support of the Clean Safe and Affordable Power Act, the best we’ve done so far at any of our meetings. Kudos again to the Rutlandians….Rutlanders…. Rutlandites… ehem… for coming up big!

Well, that’s it from Rutland. I’d like to again thank everyone for coming and making it our most successful Global Warming meeting yet (despite the technical foibles). And don’t forget to come to Citizen Action Day at the State House on February 15^th at 9am in Room 11. We’re going to be teaching everyone how to effectively lobby their legislators and then go talk to those legislators about the issues we care about! So join us Thursday February 15^th for democracy in action! And go to www.vtactionday.org to sign up!