At a dairy and beef farm in Hadley, Massachusetts, 123 acres of farmland has been permanently protected from development. Hadley borders Amherst. A photo of the farm is below. The farm is at 172 Hockanum Road and has a store that is open to the public. This environmental victory was made possible by www.KestrelTrust.org.

Most people who live in the Valley need a car to get to work or school, and to go shopping or visit friends.

In Chicopee, Massachusetts, more than 375 people showed up at a rally to protest Walmart's firing of a woman for her union activism. Aubretia Edick had worked at Walmart for 14 years. She worked as a cashier at the Chicopee store. “I was fired for speaking out,” she told the Valley Post on December 5.

A worker who answered the phone at the Chicopee Walmart declined a request to interview the store's manager about why he fired Edick. Chicopee borders Springfield.

Telephone and internet workers are on strike. They are asking the public to join their picket lines in Brattleboro and Keene. More than 1,700 workers at Fairpoint Corporation are on strike in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. The company is the monopoly provider of landline telephone and DSL internet in those states.

Fairpoint is based in North Carolina. It wants to cut wages for workers it hires in the future by 40 percent.

In Brattleboro, a 110-year-old school for deaf people closed this year. Deaf activists and their supporters are organizing to get the school, which had been funded by the state, re-opened. They recently held a rally at the state capitol in Montpelier. More than 300 people were at the rally.

Recent rallies in Holyoke and Boston for better education were attended by Valley residents. On September 8 in Holyoke, activists held a rally in support of a public school teacher who the teachers' union says was fired for his union activism. Until he was fired, Gus Morales was a full-time English teacher in Holyoke, and part-time president of the Holyoke teachers' union, which is part of www.MassTeacher.org.

In a grassroots victory, a coal fired electricity generating facility in Holyoke will close permanently in October. The Mount Tom Power Plant currently burns about 1,200 tons of coal every day. “Now we will have less air pollution,” said Vilma Vazquez, a Holyoke resident who attended rallies to close the facility.

The movement to close the coal facility was organized by www.n2nma.org and www.ToxicsAction.org.

Police arrested 12 women for non-violent civil disobedience at the gates of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, which is three miles from Massachusetts and a stone's throw from New Hampshire.

One of the women who was arrested is Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of www.CodePink.org, a direct action for peace group with offices in California and Washington, DC.

Last year, Benjamin interrupted a nationally televised speech by President Obama and asked him to close the Guantánamo Bay prison. The United States government has been torturing people at Guantánamo, according to:

On May 15, there was a rally on the Greenfield town common to protest plans for a fracked gas pipeline that would cross the valley. Massachusetts state Representative Denise Andrews of Orange, near Greenfield, told the Greenfield Recorder newspaper she is ready to risk arrest for civil disobedience to stop the pipeline. “The priority ought to be conservation, reduction, efficiency, renewables, and then the more challenging energy resources,” she said.

The Pioneer Valley, and the area around Brattleboro and Keene, are at the highest risk nationally of having privately owned forests turned into parking lots, roads, strip malls, vacation houses, and other kinds of so-called "development." That's according to the U.S. Forest Service's map, below. Susan Stein wrote the 2009 report that the map appeared in. She works for the Forest Service. “Based on today's data, the map would probably be similar,” Stein told the Valley Post earlier this month.

On April 1 at 5:30 p.m., there will be a protest at the gates of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The public is invited. Vermont Yankee is three miles from Massachusetts and a stone's throw from New Hampshire. The protest organizers' main goal is to close the reactor immediately and permanently. Other goals relate to how and when the site will be cleaned up after the reactor is closed. Vermont Yankee is currently scheduled to close permanently late this year or early next year.