The Green Room: MTR Senate Hearing

An Introduction

Hello and welcome to The Green Room, a show which is broadcast biweekly from WESU Middletown 88.1 FM, Wesleyan University's community radio project. The show is written and produced by me, Sam Bernhardt, a student at Wesleyan. The show's first season was based around a collaborative project between WESU and Professor Suzanne O'Connell, of the Wesleyan Earth and Environmental Science department, in which students of Professor O'Connell's Environmental Justice class created their own radio segments, which were aired as part of the show and which you can find on the show's iTune's U page.

However, this is only the start. For our next season, starting in September, I hope to expand this collaboration between WESU and Wesleyan's classes even further, giving the microphone to a whole range of classes in Wesleyan's newly created Environmental Studies department.

This blog is partly to provide another venue for listening to the show (in addition to itunes U and live streaming from WESUFM.org and, of course, traditional listening on 88.1 FM if you are in the middle-northern connecticut area). More generally, it acts as another medium for communicating information, especially as a way to keep up with the environmental newsing while I am away from WESU for the summer.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

MTR Senate Hearing

I always get these emails from various environmental organizations advertising an action or legal event, but they're always too far away. Last week, I got an email from ilovemountains.org discussing a senate hearing on mountain top removal. As I am currently working only about an hour away from DC, I decided to take the opportunity to head over and check out what this hearing was about. Sadly, it turns out the commute takes one hour when there are no other cars on the road, which was not the case at 3 PM on Thursday.

However, from what I gathered after the fact, the hearing went very well for those who are trying to stop mountain top removal. Those testifying provided moving accounts of why these horrible practices should be ended. Most pro-coal activists showed up too late to even get into the room.

My camera was recently stolen (probably by evil pro-coal activists). However, my newly purchased camera arrived Thursday morning, so I got to take some pictures of the hearing room after all was said and done.

Here's Senator Benjamin Cardin, chairman of the subcommittee on Water and Wildlife, where this hearing took place.