It was the uniform versus the unicorn this past Saturday when Dominion Power complete with police protection standing by, and Blue Ridge Earth First! displaying a particular wit and whimsy, held a stand-off at tables directly across from one another at RVA Earth Day.

So a couple weeks ago some Richmond residents upset with the city’s Earth Day organizers for accepting a majority of funding from Dominion and then giving them a table at the festival called on Blue Ridge Earth First! to make an appearance at the event as well.

We were granted space for our own table and when a car-load of us got there Saturday morning and met with our hosts, we set up our table right across from Dominion.Dominion’s table focused on personal steps towards conservation that individual consumers can take and of course made no mention of the utility’s plans to construct a new coal-fired power plant in Wise County and to expand it’s nuclear power plant in Louisa County. We figured since Dominion makes claims that coal and nuclear energy are clean, safe and damn-near-godliness, that we’d join in on the fantasy theme with our own mythical representative - a large pegasus-unicorn (that’s a horse with both a horn and wings) in Dominion’s blue and white color scheme no less. Several of us took shifts in the unicorn-suite throughout the day, dancing, tumbling, charming children and adults alike and lampooning Dominion’s facade of environmentalism with hand-outs about Dominion’s Toxic Fantasy-land.

This was fun for us and very well received by the majority of fest-goers who we spoke with but after a while we thought, “you know here Dominion is trying so hard to look green which is hard enough for them what with all the coal and nukes and so on, and all we’re doing is antagonizing them and making the whole thing worse!” so then we decided we’d shift gears and help them green their image. We unveiled a large Dominion logo at our

table and offered passersby the opportunity to “greenwash” the logo with paint we had on hand. Lots of folks having come straight from the Dominion table and seen firsthand the pitiful portrayal of environmental ethics offered by the fortune 500 company were more than happy to do their part and splatter some green across that big “D”. After an hour or so RVA Earth Day participants had managed to completely cover the logo with a vast verdant spread - so green and meaningless, so much like a “reclaimed” strip-mine.

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 2:11 pm.
Filed under Dominion, Action.
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