One thing I love about the Friends movement is its ability to live within the tensions of a being both a deeply spiritual ascetic practice and a strategically focused world-changing social action toolkit. Sometimes the two come together in wonderful ways. QuakerSpeak has a mini-documentary about the Earth Quaker Action Team’s campaign to stop PNC Bank from financing mountaintop removal mining:
George Lakey: So any way you look at it, this is an offense against the planet. It’s an offense against people. It’s where economic justice and climate justice coincide. Let’s tackle it.
Ingrid Lakey: This bank that had Quaker roots, this bank that called itself the greenest bank in the business was in fact blowing up mountains to get coal which is a major contributor to climate change. So we thought, “that’s not cool! We can’t let that slide.” Calling on our own belief in our integrity, we decided to call them out on it.
I myself could watch a whole video of George Lakey just laughing. I’ve attended a few EQAT actions over the years and wrote a personal story about my participation in a public fast in 2013.
http://quakerspeak.com/how-a-small-group-of-quaker-activists-took-on-pnc-bank-and-won/
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