For Earth Day, Backbone Campaign partnered with Pace e Bene for a Solutionary Circle. We hosted a panel of environmental justice and labor organizers to discuss how we can shift US rail from being a source of harm to an infrastructure that benefits us all. 

Guests included Andrea Vidaurre (People's Collective for Environmental Justice), mark! Lopez (East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice), Tabitha Tripp (Public Rail Now), Ryan Calbreath (UE Green Locomotive program), and Jess Conard (Rail Watch), interviewed by Solutionary Rail Director/Backbone Campaign Executive Director Bill Moyer.

Over the last few years, EJ and labor organizers have been deepening their bonds of solidarity and finding common cause in the fight to electrify our rail system. But electrification is not the only interest or benefit that a more accountable rail system would provide.

Another goal is shifting our rail system toward delivering greater community safety and broader societal benefit by getting more trucks off the road, reconnecting service to rural communities, and hosting new transmission on rail corridors.

Working at the state and federal level, these allies and organizers are shaping policies and shifting the political calculus to overcome the profound power of the biggest (“Class 1”) railroads (BNSF, UP, CSX, NS, CN, and CPKC) whose management has been captured by extractive Wall Street forces. 

Backbone Campaign's Solutionary Rail project is part of the Moving Forward Network, a national network that centers grassroots, frontline-community knowledge, expertise and engagement from communities across the US that bear the negative impacts of the global freight transportation system.