Coal Free Mizzou rallies at Speakers Circle

Students want to speed up support for a coal-free campus.

By Megan Donohue

Published Nov. 13, 2009

A crowd of Coal Free Mizzou members and supporters in bright yellow shirts carrying signs and props gathered Wednesday in Speakers Circle for a rally and a march.

The rally was held not only to iterate the group's goal of transitioning the university from coal, but also to tell people the campaign has the full support of Chancellor Brady Deaton, as the group found out at a meeting with him Tuesday, Sustain Mizzou Campaign Co-chairwoman Melissa Vatterott said.

"We discussed with the chancellor the importance we felt for Mizzou to transition off of coal because of the many harmful effects to the environment and our health," Vatterott said. "He was in complete agreement and encouraged us to pursue working with the Sustainability office as well as people with the environmental affairs."

With Deaton's full support, the group will try to gather the sustainability organizations on campus together to form a plan for the university to transition to a sustainable energy source, Coal Free Mizzou Faculty Coordinator Paul Rolfe said.

"They actually agreed to send a letter to the leaders of those groups saying 'we would be involved' and we would be pushing with them to get a plan to move beyond coal," Rolfe said.

The petitions and personal letters the group gathered were a great help in gaining Deaton's support, he said.

"I think those actually showed a lot of student support," Rolfe said. "Right now we have over 1,300 petitions and over 100 letters from students."

Vatterott said she is still not quite satisfied with how things are going.

"We still feel that we should move at a faster pace than the university already is because we feel that it is a very urgent issue for us to address in order for us to be sustainable, as it is one of the goals at the university," Vatterott said.

All this was discussed at the rally, where Vatterott, Sustain Mizzou Campaign Co-chairwoman Mallory Schillinger and finally Larry Brown, a faculty member from the geography department and the group's new faculty adviser, spoke before leading the group in a march to the power plant.

"I think it went really well," Vatterott said. "The energy was great, everyone was happy to be there. I feel that a lot of people saw what we were doing and it was just another way for us to get the word out there to the students of Mizzou that coal is not sustainable and Mizzou can be a leader in transitioning to alternative energy."

Although Vatterott and Schillinger focused on the group's goal and the newly gained support of the chancellor, Brown discussed coal's history at MU, its overall harmfulness and MU's ability to move beyond it.

"The problem with coal is we don't think about it," Brown said in his speech. "We are not carrying around a lump of coal. We are not sticking a lump of coal in our pocket. We are not necessarily holding a lump of coal up to our face to breath. But in all those ways that's how coal works in our society. "

Brown also highlighted on moving the mining of coal from near campus to Wyoming, West Virginia and Kentucky.

"We stopped harvesting coal here and moved it far away," Brown said. "We're not seeing the dust clouds, we're not necessarily breathing it, but it is here, and as much as we use coal on this university campus, we perpetuate that same dirty history that went on before."

Brown ended by summing up the group's hope MU will act more quickly to transition off of coal.

"We need to continually let the university know that they can move faster and more completely," Brown said. "We can get beyond it, we can go through the withdrawal processes, go into the social therapy that we need to get off our coal addiction and find something else that in the long run is far more helpful to our life, to the ecology of the planet and also in terms of our economy."