EDITING

Helping other people communicate their ideas clearly has been at the heart of my work life. Editing and compiling big reports is not easy — but can result in critical information seeing the light. Below are documents I wrote and edited for the nonprofits Witness for Peace (the Guatemala investigation); Living Cities (the climate change report); HEAL Utah (the critique of Rocky Mountain Power.)

A PEOPLE DAMMED

“In total, the patrollers and soldiers killed 178 people in Río Negro on March 13, 1982: 70 women, 107 children and an old man who was forced into a canvas sack and thrown off a cliff. In a series of massacres later that year, they killed hundreds more in Río Negro and neighboring villages.

"What happened to Río Negro in 1982 was so unjust," Luís says, "but we were not innocent. We had committed many crimes: the crime of being indigenous, the crime of being Catholic, and most importantly the crime of being united, of working together to fight that cursed dam."

The "cursed dam" was part of the Chixoy Hydroelectric Project, a massive dam, reservoir and power station built by the Guatemala state electricity company (INDE) with funding and technical support from the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank. The village of Río Negro stood in the path of the project.”

The full document “A People Dammed” is not available online, but you can read a summary of its findings in an article I wrote for the Multinational Monitor.

GREEN CITIES

“In an effort to inform and shape the coming wave of investment in sustainability, Living Cities conducted a thorough survey of programs and policies in 40 of the nation’s largest cities, spoke to dozens of experts in the field and studied a series of initiatives at the local level. It’s one of the first-ever assessments of exactly how cities are addressing climate change — and what they need in order to take these efforts to the next level. (See the Survey Results at the end of the report, for complete findings.)

What we found is that cities did not wait for action from the federal government or even their state governments to begin to turn themselves into green “laboratories,” testing ways to lower greenhouse gas emissions, and to build healthier, cleaner, more sustainable environments. “

BROWN SKY

“Rocky Mountain Power has fought to make it more expensive for corporations like eBay and Wal-Mart to directly buy renewable energy. The utility has tried to lower the price it pays renewable energy entrepreneurs – and its lobbyists work diligently in Washington to weaken the one federal law that opens up electricity in markets to competition.

The full story of what Rocky Mountain Power really thinks about renewables hasn’t seen the light of day … Until now. In this paper, we will start by illustrating how little clean energy Rocky Mountain Power sells. We will then describe the limitations of the popular Blue Sky program and finally outline how the utility actively works to keep renewable energy from its customers.”