BRATTLEBORO — Post Oil Solutions announces it has received an $8,000 Community Petroleum Resistance and Habitat Protection grant from clothing company Patagonia.
Post Oil said in a press release that the funds will support its continuing efforts to build a regional grassroots “resistance movement” of a piece with efforts taking shape nationwide and globally to “stop the extreme extraction and burning of fossil fuels.”
“We will engage in community organizing,” Post Oil's grant proposal reads in part, “coordinating with regional and national groups to promote non-violent resistance to petroleum … specifically, the extreme extraction of fossil fuels such coal, tar sands, hydrofracked gas and oil, and deep-ocean drilling.”
Post Oil said the funds would be used to organize and engage citizens on a range of outreach, education, and nonviolent civil disobedience efforts.
On Post Oil's radar: encouraging Vermont lawmakers to divest state retirement funds from fossil fuel companies; supporting efforts at local colleges, private secondary schools, and the area faith community to divest from fossil fuels; and protesting the proposed tar sands and fracked gas pipelines, “particularly in the Northeast Kingdom and Addison County, where such projects are either threatened or already underway.”
According to Post Oil's founding director, Tim Stevenson, “Time is running out on us as a species.”
“As the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned upon the release of the IPCC's latest findings this past September, we have five minutes before midnight,” Stevenson said in the press release.
Post Oil Solutions hosts a fourth-Tuesday-of-the-month Climate Change Café at 6 p.m. at the Brooks Memorial Library community room in Brattleboro.
At its next gathering, on Tuesday, Jan. 28, the Café will screen bestselling author and environmental activist Bill McKibben's “Do the Math” (2013), which launched his www.350.org divestment campaign.
Patagonia, of Ventura, Calif., says on its website that it gives at the grassroots level to innovative groups mobilizing their communities to take action: “We fund activists who take radical and strategic steps to protect habitat, oceans and waterways, wilderness and biodiversity. This is our niche: supporting people working on the front-lines of the environmental crisis.”
Since the grant program began, the company said, it has given more than $55 million in grants and in-kind donations to more than 1,000 organizations.