Craig Williams on Weapon Disposal in KY (Nov 9) and Erik Reece on Radical Strip Mining/Mountaintop Removal in KY (Nov 15)

November 9, 5-6:15 p.m., Auditorium, 230 Oswald Building, Craig Williams, 2006 winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize and CWWG Director. One The Pentagon Lost: A Twenty Year Battle for Safe WMD Disposal In Kentucky. Two decades of activism, research and political efforts have resulted in turning around the Pentagon's decision to burn chemical weapons in Central Kentucky. Instead, the materials will be safely neutralized, eliminating a host of public health and environmental impacts associated with incineration. What were the ingredients and strategies used by the Chemical Weapons Working Group to achieve this? About Craig Williams: He successfully convinced the Pentagon to stop plans to incinerate stockpiles of chemical weapons stored in multiple locations around the United States, including at the Bluegrass Army Depot in Richmond. Williams started his campaign in 1985 after learning that one of nine weapons stockpiles to be burned was at an Army depot in his community. Worried that incineration would put local citizens and their environment at risk, he built a nationwide grassroots coalition — the Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG) — to demand safe disposal solutions and openness within the Pentagon’s program. For this work, he recently received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2006. Mr. Williams is also a Vietnam veteran, having served as a translator. He was one of the original group of veterans who formed the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation in 1980. The Foundation, in turn, was one of six organizations that co-founded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which was awarded the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. He is quoted as saying: “We must not leave the health of our families and protection of the world ecology to corporations, governments and military organizations preoccupied with profit, power and armed conquest. Rather, we must take that responsibility into our own hands. It’s up to us to come together across cultural and political divides to prevent these military-industrial polluters from degrading the earth and threatening the well-being of our communities for their own selfish interests.”

· November 15, 2-3:15, Auditorium, 230 Oswald Building, Erik Reece, UK professor and author of Lost Mountain, will speak on the issue of mountaintop removal. About Erik Reece: Since 1999, he has been a lecturer at UK, and has earned recognition as Outstanding Writing Program Instructor. He coordinates UK’s Summer Environmental Writing Program. Last year, one of his essays, “Death of a Mountain,” was published in Harper’s Magazine. This was followed in February with his book Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness (Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia). He says that “A strip job is more than a moral failure; it is a failure of the imagination. It is time we stopped thinking like those who conquer a mountain and started thinking like the mountain itself.”