Twelve Hour Blockade Against Rare Earth Metal Exploration, Canada

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The 23rd July we stopped the Cana­di­an cor­po­ra­tion Tas­man Met­als’ test drillings for rare earth ele­ments (REE) in Nor­ra Kärr, Swe­den. We heard they prob­a­bly had been secur­ing the place with CCTV-cam­eras so we decid­ed to dri­ve as fast as pos­si­ble right into the ene­my claimed for­est, straight through any alarm sys­tem. Then we ran a few kilo­me­ters until we found the drilling rig. Using bike-locks we chained our bod­ies to the nasty machine. We alert­ed some media with a press release. Then some cops came with peo­ple from the cor­po­ra­tion in a few hours. They gath­ered 20 some­thing cops but Tas­man decid­ed not to inter­vene even though we were break­ing the law. They didn’t want the extra fuzz from bru­tal cop-vio­lence. So we could stay at the beau­ti­ful site with the ugly machine the whole day talk­ing to jour­nal­ists and drink­ing cof­fee with excit­ed sup­port­ers.

We know rare earth min­ing has been apoc­a­lyp­tic in desert bio­mes due to all the tox­ic waste. This mine would be right next to Swe­dens biggest drink­ing water reserve, the beau­ti­ful lake Vät­tern. It’s got bright clear water and sup­ports 260 000 peo­ple with clean water at the moment, more cities want to plug in! Tas­man Met­als is hid­ing its ugly plans to make investors gam­ble with human and non-human health and we will not allow that!

In sol­i­dar­i­ty with all peo­ple fight­ing patri­archy and the white mans colo­nial world­view!

More pic­tures on the cam­paign web­site.