“What happened here is worth sharing because it shows all of the gains happened in incremental baby step ways. They weren’t magnificent, you didn’t all of a sudden say, here’s a hundred thousand acre park. It wasn’t like that. It was all incremental.”
Gary Giacomini, Marin County Supervisor 1972-1996
In Rebels with a Cause

A few weeks ago we went to see a movie called “Rebels with a Cause.” It is a documentary about the people behind the open space and National and State parks in Marin County, CA. Hundreds of thousands of acres were kept out of the hands of developers by a small group of people who had a goal in mind and stayed focused on achieving it. It was a very uplifting story.

Fast forward to this evening. MoveOn was sponsoring viewings of the new documentary “Gasland 2“. It is the sequel to the Academy Award nominated documentary Gasland, which sheds light on the danger of hydraulic refracturing (fracking) as a way of getting natural gas out of the ground.

Unfortunately, this was not an uplifting movie. As Josh Fox says at the beginning of the movie – “In sequels, the empire always strikes back” – this was that story. The “empire” was in the form of corporations, the media and local, state and federal governments. Read more ›