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The Guide is titled “Protecting Your Community Against Mining Companies and Other Extractive Industries: A Guide for Community Organizers.” The authors are Carlos Zorrilla, Arden Buck, Paula Palmer, and David Pellow.

This guide was produced by this team of activists and scholars who have worked for many years as advocates of sustainability and environmental justice in communities around the world. We created the guide because no other resource like it exists and because many communities have repeatedly asked us and our partners to share this kind of information with them. The audiences include community organizers and concerned residents of villages, towns, and regions where large mining companies seek to extract wealth without taking precautions to protect public health and ecosystems. The Guide offers clear and accessible information about the harm that mining causes, how companies impose their will on communities, and how ordinary people can fight back. We also offer examples of how communities like Intag (Ecuador) have produced sustainable alternatives like producing shade-grown coffee, sustainable hand-made soap and shampoo, fish farming, egg production, and ecological tourism.

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The Guide is now in the hands of international, national, regional, and local NGOs and community organizers in Africa, Canada, the United States, Central America, South America, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific Islands.

The impact of the guide was immediate. Since it was released in 2009, activists around the globe have used it in their campaigns and in their broader efforts to educate and enlist support from residents in affected areas. An activist from Sierra Leone told me “my community is fighting a mine right now and this guide is a great help to us.” When I was at the annual Earth First! Round River Rendezvous in June of 2009, one of the event organizers told me “a friend of mine who is an anti-mining activist said this was the single best resource on the subject he has ever seen.” Briana, an activist in a mountainous area of Mexico, provided a testimonial about the guide’s impacts in her community. She described how activists are challenging the local power structure, which tends to be anti-democratic:

“But this is fast changing, especially since one mine has already been operating with increasingly strong objections by the local people. The guide… proved to be very important for this effort. We distributed over 100 copies. Copies of copies are being made by those who received our copies. The guide provides a cool-headed orientation on how to proceed with resistance via national and international legal systems. This is important so that people can proceed…The movement… is quickly gaining strength under the leadership of the Church. The priests are using the approach of empowering people so that they will lead their own response to threats to public health and common environs. We were glad to be able to feed information to the key people who are the appropriate ones to organize further. Now it is up to the people to stand firm for the better world we all work for.”

Martin, an activist who works with an organization to confront extractive companies exploiting native communities in Southeast Asia also was pleased to use the guide. He went a step further and offered to translate it into a local language, thus making it more accessible to residents.

The Guide has had a series of positive impacts in numerous communities around the globe, and we expect that to continue. The next step is to assist activists in moving beyond opposition to mining toward development sustainable alternatives.

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We need more resources for the following:

Detailed guidance for communities seeking to embrace sustainable alternatives to mining that make sense in their local or regional economic, cultural, and ecological contexts.

Assistance with producing a similar guide for communities facing predatory practices from oil/petroleum extraction industries.