by Mike Coday

Currently, there are two wood waste incinerator power generation projects being planned for Shelton. These projects are generating a lot of heat and discussion in the local environmental community. Works in Progress' Mike Coday reached out to speak with Pat Rasmussen, a local environmental activist with the World Temperate Rainforest Network and Duff Badgley of No Biomass Burn of Seattle about the Shelton biomass incinerators.

from WIP News Service

Scores of Olympia activists headed east over the past few weeks to attend and take part in the US Social Forum in Detroit and maybe to look in on the G20 Summit in Toronto. Olympia can expect to be hearing about the US Social Forum in the near future as Olympians return to the South Sound, but at deadline for Works in Progress we have no first person coverage from Detroit or Toronto.

by Mike Coday

The Evergreen State College is exploring the possibility of switching from natural gas to a biomass gasification power source as part of TESC's plan to be carbon neutral by 2020. This project is generating a lot of heat and discussion in the local environmental community. Works in Progress reached out to speak with local environmental activists and representatives from TESC to learn more about the TESC biomass gasification proposal.

When TESC agreed to take part in this discussion, they requested that they be able to issue the following statement.

by Duff Badgley

"Is this the Apocalyptic Moment we have been dreading--when our Seas Run Black and our Air Turns Poison? No one can say it is. No one can say it isn't. But, no one can argue this isn't a lurid, impossibly lethal chapter in the Corporate Reign of Ruin. Who runs the planet? Not elected leaders like Obama, head of the most ferocious military in history. He has been rendered pathetically ineffective, reduced to making hollow threats against British Petroleum--the transnational oil company that Rules the Oily Seas.

from SchNEWS

SchNEWS.org -- In response to America's largest ever environmental disaster, Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, said, "I'd like my life back." We're sure he does, as would the eleven workers who died on BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig when it exploded 40 miles off the Louisiana coast, in the Gulf of Mexico, on April 20.

by Women's Coordinating Committee Chile-Canada

Toronto Media Co-op -- More than 600 people were detained throughout the city of Toronto during the G8/20 summits this past weekend. The harassment and persecution of the repressive apparatus was made apparent after Saturday's protest on June 26, where "Black Bloc" protesters left at least three police cars in flames, broke through chain stores, destroying two TV channel vehicles, banks and other things throughout the centre of the financial district - in this way taunting and discarding $1.3 billion dollars required for the "security" of the summit.

by Paul Rogat Loeb

When we try to engage people politically we never know who will respond, or when someone will shift from reveling in their apathy to taking powerful public stands. Here's a striking example of one such transformation. Virginia Tech freshman Angie De Soto didn't vote in the 2004 election. The president, she thought, had nothing to do with her life. She didn't care who won. Instead, she and friends played a drinking game in one of their dorm rooms. Nobody cared who won the election, so they divided into random "red" and "blue" teams, and chugged a beer each time new results on TV favored their team. Angie woke up the next morning hung over and with no idea of the election outcome, but it hardly seemed to matter.

by Works In Progress

States are suffering from the greatest decline "in state tax receipts on record." 48 states' 2010 budgets have collectively dealt with revenue shortfalls totalling $200 billion or 30 percent of state budgets - the largest gaps on record. Only about $40 billion remains for 2011 in federal aid to states provided in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

by Craig Hymson
Originally printed in the December 1996 Works In Progress

"If you love the Arabs so much, why don't you go and live with them?", she yelled into the face of the 16 year old Jewish boy as he repeated for the fourth time, "We have to share." "Give up the land?", she continued, "Who raised you to have such crazy ideas? How could a Jew believe such things? Are you really Jewish?" He glanced down at the anti-Palestinian flyers on her information table and was silent as she continued, "You probably want to give Jerusalem to them, too."

by Travis Giobbi

The Freedom Socialist Party is happy to invite Pacific Northwesterners to three days of freewheeling discussion of ideas and action, from Friday, July 9 through Sunday, July 11, at its convention at Evergreen State College in Olympia. This is a gathering for people who are not only convinced that another world is possible but are eager to explore what that different world would be - and how working women and men, together with students, the poor, and the unemployed, can bring it about.

from WIP News Service

The day Works In Progress went to press last month, we learned a dear friend of ours, social justice activist and longtime local mainstay Mark Wedeven, was declared lost in an avalanche on Mt. Rainier. His body has not been found.