The North Carolina Conservation Network - Essay Example

The goals of this network include the provision of timely communication regarding the environment to the stakeholders, enhancing healthy communication and partnership lines, drilling activists into better advocates, and bringing together and enabling coalitions with a focus on tackling outstanding environmental concerns. The NC Conservation Network is hugely in advocacy work where members engage in vigorous activism concerning bills that mostly threaten the environment. This is done through sensitization campaigns where members of the public are asked to contribute their signatures either in support or disapproval of a recently introduced bill and the political personality behind such a bill. The staff of the NC Conservation Network has been working overtime to stop many anti-environmental bills according to A Big Stink at the Coast.

One of the most recent actions has been the drive to protect the North Carolina coast by urging members and the NC to support the veto of the Senate Bill which exposes the North Carolina coastline and shores to the more damaging risk of crude oil spills as a result of offshore drilling activities. The Network further insists that bill S709 would cause even more harm as it permits the use of hydrofracking (James, 18). This is an onshore drilling routine that has in the past raised contentious issues as it has been established that it causes water poisoning and destroys wells.

Another bill that has caught the Network’s attention for all the wrong reasons is Bill 183 of the Senate that facilitates the expansion of infrastructure and the NC Conservation Network believes this is at the expense of the environment. According to the Network, the ground space along motorways would be increased and this involves cutting down any trees that are along the way. This is an affront to the NC’s natural and scenic beauty (James, 22). In retaliation, the Network asks Governor Perdue to veto this bill.

Still in environmental activism, the NC Conservation Network is asking the public to sign a petition opposing hikes in energy rates for NC homes and businesses. There is also a campaign to express the people’s will for congress and the president to protect the Act on Clean Air which contains a stern forewarning that any efforts seen as undermining the above-mentioned act would be met with unrelenting opposition. It seems the Network lived up to its promise or rather threat when shortly afterward a campaign was rolled into motion whereby petitions were collected from the public in disapproval of Senator Burr who had just introduced a bill that is considered a threat to the Clean Air Act or the EPA. His decision is strongly termed as irresponsible in the petition.

The Network has also joined forces with other advocacy groups to put up a fight for the environment at a more elevated stage. In collaboration with Defenders of Wildlife, they have set up an initiative for protecting fish through environmentally conscious fishing practices (James, 3). The groups are raising complaints to the state fisheries authorities to curb commercial trawling of striped bass until a time when a management plan controlling wasteful practices is implemented. There is a campaign by the NC Conservation Network condemning KFC for what is KFC’s action of destroying forests while its fast-food competitors are being environmentally conscious in their operations.