save the date!

Now all of the issues of environmental racism and environmental justice don’t just deal with people of color. We are just as much concerned with inequities in Appalachia, for example, where the whites are basically dumped on because of lack of economic and political clout and lack of having a voice to say “no” and that’s environmental injustice.

— Dr. Robert Bullard


SAVE THE DATE
for

The Appalachian Public Interest Environmental Law (APIEL) conference.
November 19-21 at the University of Tennessee College of Law in Knoxville Tennessee.


APIEL is a conference designed to bring lawyers and activists together from the Appalachian bioregion and the surrounding states.

APIEL is a series of workshops and dialogues led by lawyers and activists who gather to exchange information, share skills, and foster collaboration between the grassroots and the bar in addressing our most pressing ecological problems.

APIEL is a chance for lawyers who are sympathetic to environmental issues to get together socially to chat and drink beer.

APIEL is modeled on the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC) established in Eugene, Oregon, where once a year lawyers, law students, activists, funders, and media come from around the planet to be a part of the nation's leading annual environmental law convergence.

There are many lawyers who assist environmental work in Appalachia and the surrounding states, but you wouldn't know it by working in the field. Often we work in pockets of isolation while dealing with huge corporations. APIEL is meant to be a chance to reach across state and regional lines to meet other lawyers and grassroots organizers who share our interests and goals.

APIEL is a chance for activists to learn from lawyers and for lawyers to learn from activists.

The workshop schedule will be:

--meet Friday night
--workshops on Saturday; social event Saturday evening
--workshops on Sunday morning.

Workshops include the Endangered Species Act (ESA), National Pollution Discharge and Elimination System permits (NPDES), Administrative law and procedures, Legal observing, How to work with your lawyer--and vice versa, Mountain Top Removal mining (MTR), Water testing on strip mine sites, etc.

Come to APIEL and eat, drink beer and gather ammo for your various struggles.

Here is the blog for updates.

http://apielknoxville.blogspot.com/

For information email:

apielconference@yahoo.com

Or Call (865) 257-4029

Write: APIEL CONFERENCE
POB 20363
Knoxville, Tennessee
37920

Work in progress

This week the organizers of the conference confirmed the date for the conference--November 19/20/21.

We began this blog--started the Facebook invitation page. Artwork is being drawn for the logo and we are making a "don't forget this date" email to send out.

We have also compiled the lawyers to be contacted--the application to attend is being written as I type. We are looking for help to get the website linked to this blog.

apielconference@yahoo.com

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=101827116534567

(865) 257-4029

Strip-Mining and Grassroots Resistance in Appalachia: Community Lawyering for Environmental Justice

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1478549

Abstract:
Environmental justice campaigns have been a dynamic feature of public interest lawyering for over four decades. These community lawyers, sensitive to the democratic imperatives of their grassroots clients, employ a viscous blend of legal and nonlegal strategies to achieve their clients’ aims. This article is the story of an environmental justice campaign, still being waged, in the Appalachian mountains of east Tennessee. The campaign seeks to halt the destructive practice of mountaintop removal strip-mining for coal through the deployment of traditional litigation and more unconventional extrajudicial strategies, both of which are designed to build the voices and power of the groups and communities opposed to mountaintop removal. This case study places this 'local' struggle in the context of emerging new public interest lawyering.