Why the Smartphone Became the Lightsaber of the Environmental Justice Movement

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:


Why the Smartphone Became the Lightsaber of the Environmental Justice Movement
From West Virginia to the Gulf Coast, residents of communities facing environmental problems are discovering that visual storytelling brings results. Their number-one tool is the humble smartphone.

by Kristin Moe
posted Jan 24, 2014


[font size="1"]Attendees at 350.org's Global Power Shift summit use their phones to record part of the event. Photo by Shadia Fayne Wood / Project Survival Media.[/font]


A week after the chemical spill that poisoned the drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians on January 9, Governor Earl Ray Tomblin announced that water was again safe for consumption. The emergency crews packed up, taking their supplies with them. Now, new tests confirm what West Virginians knew all along: their water is far from clean, and the crisis is far from over.

In the absence of government aid, a citizen network has sprung into action, collecting donations, recruiting volunteers, delivering water, and getting the human story of the crisis to an international audience. From the beginning, their smartphones were an essential tool—to coordinate water deliveries, post emergency updates, and also to share photos of neighbors helping one another.

Now, the "WV Clean Water Hub" Facebook page is the best place to go for aid information, more comprehensive even than the website set up by state government to provide information about the emergency. And it was those smartphone snapshots that made the difference, says Joe Solomon, a volunteer in West Virginia who has been working on the digital front of the crisis from the beginning.

"You can't change the world with a statistic," he says, but "photos…may be the secret to just how big the climate movement has grown in the last couple years." ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/why-the-smartphone-became-the-lightsaber-of-the-environmental-justice-movement

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Excellent headline

and story.

Once again, Facebook comes thru, shining above the many faults it has.

Insta real time mass telephone tree, with pics.....fantastic.