CoalSwarm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoalSwarm
CoalSwarm is an American environmentalist online project which focuses on sharing information about the coal industry. It is structured as a set of pages on the SourceWatch wiki. According to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009, it has been an important player in the anti-coal movement.[2] Its purpose is to "build a shared information resource on coal is an effort to create an informational tool on coal for students, journalists, activists, public officials, and the general public", according to a statement on its website.[3] It was founded in 2008 by environmental activist Ted Nace.[2] Nace claimed in Dissent Magazine in 2009 that CoalSwarm had helped anti-coal activists and other environmentalists to derail 109 proposed coal plants.[4] In March 2009, there were 1500 articles,[5] and there were 2500 articles later that year,[6] and over 4000 in December 2010.
Origins
Nace noticed that hundreds of grassroots groups were opposing coal, and they were working together "kind of as a swarm", and he figured a way to help was to create an "information clearinghouse".[7] CoalSwarm includes articles on specific coal plants as well as on a variety of subjects pertaining to the anti-coal movement.
CoalSwarm has received attention in leftleaning publications such as Socialist Worker[8][9] as well as the online environmental journal Grist[10] the journal Atlantic Free Press,[11][12] and in the online blog by Joseph J. Romm entitled Climate Progress.[13] Poet and activist Beth Wellington was affiliated with CoalSwarm, according to the British newspaper The Guardian.[14] When CoalSwarm released a list of 126 coal-fired power plants which had 10,000 or more people living within a three-mile radius of each plant, and that a medical group cautioned about possible health effects, this finding was reported in Online Journal in 2009.[15] CoalSwarm, as an organization, is a project of the Earth Island Institute. The CoalSwarm wiki is a joint project between CoalSwarm and the Center for Media and Democracy.
Director Ted Nace writes regularly about anti-coal issues in publications such as the bimonthly Orion Magazine.[16] CoalSwarm received a grant of $34,500 from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation in 2010.[17]