{"id":11027,"date":"2021-11-09T16:10:05","date_gmt":"2021-11-09T16:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uaaglobal.com\/building-power-for-a-just-transition-the-art-of-environmental-justice-in-puerto-rico\/"},"modified":"2021-11-09T16:10:05","modified_gmt":"2021-11-09T16:10:05","slug":"building-power-for-a-just-transition-the-art-of-environmental-justice-in-puerto-rico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uaaglobal.com\/building-power-for-a-just-transition-the-art-of-environmental-justice-in-puerto-rico\/","title":{"rendered":"Building Power for a Just Transition: The Art of Environmental Justice in Puerto Rico"},"content":{"rendered":"
What does it look like to build another possible world, in the midst of resisting and surviving the assault on your present one?<\/p>\n
Perhaps it looks like installing solar panels in homes, groceries, the fire station, and the cinema of your town; and during Hurricane Maria when much of Puerto Rico lost power for extended periods of time, becoming an \u201cenergy oasis\u201d for the community. Perhaps it looks like owning your own radio station and newspaper, selling coffee to support community programs, and setting up a Bosque Escuela, a school in the forest to teach conservation and sustainable development.<\/p>\n
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And, perhaps most importantly, it means persevering for the long haul, learning and adapting through setbacks. These are some of the lessons from Casa Pueblo<\/a>, a \u201ccommunity self-management project committed to appreciating and protecting natural resources, cultures and humans.\u201d As Arturo Massol Deya described, the project began 40 years ago in Adjuntas, a municipality in central Puerto Rico, in response to the government\u2019s proposal to conduct open pit mining, which would have caused an ecological and social catastrophe in the area. At their first protest in 1980, one person came.<\/p>\n \u201cWe realized science itself is not enough,\u201d Arturo said. The group kept iterating, and came up with a practice formulated as Science + Culture + Community toward social transformation<\/em>. Fifteen years later, the mining proposal was defeated.<\/p>\n