Global – Page 30 – Earth First!

Indigenous Peoples Stop Dam Construction With New Occupation at Belo Monte Site 2nd May

Altamira, Brazil – Some 200 indigenous people affected by the construction of large hydroelectric dams in the Amazon launched an occupation today on one of the main construction sites of the Belo Monte dam complex on the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon. The group demands that the Brazilian government adopt effective legislation on prior consultations with indigenous peoples regarding projects that affect their lands and livelihoods. As this has not happened, they are demanding the immediate suspension of construction, technical studies and police operations related to dams along the Xingu, Tapajos and Teles Pires rivers. Shock troops of the military police were awaiting indigenous protestors when they arrived at the Belo Monte dam site, but they were unable to impede the occupation.

The indigenous protestors include members of the Juruna, Kayapó, Xipaya, Kuruaya, Asurini, Parakanã, Arara tribes from the Xingu River, as well as warriors of the Munduruku, a large tribe from the neighboring Tapajós river basin. The indigenous peoples are joined by fishermen and local riverine communities from the Xingu region. Initial reports indicate that approximately 6,000 workers at one of the main Belo Monte construction sites, Pimental, have ceased operations as a result of the protest. The occupation, according to the indigenous communities, will continue indefinitely or until the federal government meets their demands.

Indigenous peoples of the Xingu and Tapajós released this statement [English translation]:

We are the people who live in the rivers where you want to build dams. We
are the Munduruku, Juruna, Kayapo, Xipaya, Kuruaya, Asurini, Parakanã, Arara,
fishermen and peoples who live in riverine communities. We are Amazonian
peoples and we want the forest to stand. We are Brazilians. The river and the
forest are our supermarket. Our ancestors are older than Jesus Christ.

You are pointing guns at our heads. You raid our territories with war trucks
and soldiers. You have made the fish disappear and you are robbing the
bones of our ancestors who are buried on our lands.

You do this because you are afraid to listen to us. You are afraid to hear that
we don’t want dams on our rivers, and afraid to understand why we don’t
want them.

You invent stories that we are violent and that we want war. Who are the
ones killing our relatives? How many white people have died in comparison to
how many Indigenous people have died? You are the ones killing us, quickly
or slowly. We’re dying and with each dam that is built, more of us will die.
When we try to talk with you, you bring tanks, helicopters, soldiers,
machineguns and stun weapons.

What we want is simple: You need to uphold the law and promote enacting
legislation on free, prior and informed consent for indigenous peoples. Until
that happens you need to stop all construction, studies, and police operations
in the Xingu, Tapajos and Teles Pires rivers. And then you need to consult us.

We want dialogue, but you are not letting us speak. This is why we are
occupying your dam-building site. You need to stop everything and simply
listen to us.

Occupations against the Belo Monte dam complex and mobilizations against other Amazonian dams have become increasingly commonplace. Construction on Belo Monte has been halted on at least seven occasions over the last year due to the efforts of affected indigenous communities and fishermen to call attention to the failures of the Norte Energia dam building consortium and government agencies to comply with the project’s mandated environmental and social conditions. On March 21st, approximately 100 indigenous peoples, riverbank dwellers (ribeirinhos) and small farmers expelled dam workers and occupied the Pimental site, maintained by the Belo Monte Construction Consortium (CCBM). Additionally, recent strikes and protests by dam workers have created additional unrest at CCBM construction sites.

The Munduruku indigenous people and other local communities have mobilized against a cascade of over a dozen large dams slated for construction on the neighboring Tapajós river and its major tributaries, the Teles Pires, Juruena and Jamanxim. One of the first major dams under construction, UHE Teles Pires, has been the subject of lawsuits by Federal Public Prosecutors for lack of prior consultations with the Kayabi, Apiaká and Munduruku indigenous peoples. In recent weeks, the removal of funeral urns of the Munduruku people by dam contractors at the Sete Quedas rapids, considered a sacred site for indigenous tribes, provoked outrage.

Last March President Dilma Rousseff signed Decree no. 7957/2013 allowing the use of the National Guard and other armed forces to ensure that dam construction at places like Belo Monte and technical studies for planned Amazonian dams are not interrupted by indigenous protestors. In April, upon a request of the Ministry of Mines and Energy, approximately 250 federal and military police troops were dispatched to the Tapajós region to ensure continuation of technical studies for the first two large dams scheduled for construction, São Luiz do Tapajós and Jatobá. The military operation came in response to protests from the Munduruku people, whose traditional lands would be directly affected by the two large dams and who have suffered from a history of military operations on their lands.

“Today’s protest demonstrates the relentless resistance of a growing group of united peoples against Belo Monte, Tapajós and other destructive dams throughout the Amazon,” said Leila Salazar-Lopez, Amazon Watch Program Director. “These are the final moments to change course as construction closes in on the Xingu and other lifeline rivers of the Amazon.”

Fearing Protestors, Tree Biotech Conference Cancels Visit to GE Tree Test Plot 2nd May

EF! confronts GE tree scientists on the high seas in Charleston, SC in 2007

EF! confronts GE tree scientists on the high seas in Charleston, SC in 2007

There is still a month to go before activists hit the streets of Asheville, NC to protest the 2013 Tree Biotechnology Conference, but the industry is already showing signs of retreat. Apparently fearing that protestors will follow them wherever they go, the conference organizers recently cancelled a group trip to a test plot of genetically engineered eucalyptus trees. While the counties in which these test plots are planted are publicly known, the exact location of these mutant trees is a closely guarded secret. It seems they don’t want a mob of Earth First!ers to find out where they are!

The 2013 Tree Biotechnology Conference is an international gathering of scientists, forestry corporations and university researchers with a major focus on genetically engineered tree production. GE trees pose an unprecedented threat to native forests. Timber and utility corporations want to plant millions of acres genetically engineered trees throughout the South to burn for electricity, as well as to continue supplying the unsustainable lumber and paper industries. These trees would be engineered to produce their own pesticides, grow straighter and faster, tolerate manufactured pesticides, produce sterile seeds, and reduce lignin content (this is what makes the wood in a tree strong enough to stand up). If these traits escaped into native tree populations, the effects would be devastating and irreversible.

In another setback for the GE tree industry, the USDA just announced the results of their public comment period on the proposed approval of commercial plantings of genetically engineered eucalyptus trees. While over 30,000 people spoke out against the commercial planting of these Frankentrees, an underwhelming, four, yeah that’s right four, people spoke out in favor of planting GE trees. Though this public comment period shows that there is next to no support for GE trees, it is no time to let our guard down considering that government agencies regularly ignore the public opinion.

Help us keep the up the pressure on the USDA and the tree biotech industry. Join activists from around the country as we stand up for native forests and send a loud NO to GE trees with a week of protests and educational events in Asheville, NC May 26-June 1^st.

Goldcorp Security Shoots Peaceful Protesters in Guatemala 1st May

Police, military and private security attack peaceful anti-mining protesters at the San Rafael mine in Guatemala, Sep.

Police, military and private security attack peaceful anti-mining protesters at the San Rafael mine in Guatemala, Sep. 2008

From Rights Action:

Six civilians were shot and wounded (2 seriously) on April 27, 2013 by Tahoe / Goldcorp security forces at Tahoe’s “San Rafael” mine site (municipality of San Rafael Las Flores, department of Santa Rosa, Guatemala). The wounded are: Adolfo García, 57; his son Luis García, 18; Wilmer Pérez, 17; Antonio Humberto Castillo, 48; Noé Aguilar Castillo, 27; Érick Fernando Castillo, 27. Local residents, who are maintaining a permanent peaceful occupation by the mine entrance in protest against it, saw company armed guards open fire on the group of men who were walking by. (Prensa Libre, April 29, 2013, http://www.prensalibre.com/santa_rosa/personas-resultan-incidente-San-Rafael_0_909509181.html)

Read more here about Goldcorp’s (and subsidiary Tahoe Resources’) recent history of violence and repression against indigenous and campesino communities in Guatemala.

The Fuel Nightmare Continues

It’s as if the universe is trying to tell us something, isn’t it?

It’s as if the universe is trying to tell us something, isn’t it?

First, a disastrous month that saw at least 15 separate oil spills worldwide, nearly all of them in North America. That month also saw an oil barge catch fire after a collision, and the publication of a study implicating fracking as a cause of earthquakes.

Now at least 600 gallons have spilled from an Enbridge oil pumping station near Viking, Minnesota.Two fuel barges carrying a natural gas derivative have exploded and are still burning on the Alabama River. And new reports strongly suggest that tar sands from Exxon’s Pegasus Pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas have seeped into Lake Conway and are heading toward the Arkansas River.

Disasters like these bring the real costs of fossil fuels into sharp focus, because we can imagine ourselves affected by them. But the truth is, disasters like these are part of everyday life for the people and other beings living in areas where fossil fuels are extracted—or any other industrial materials, from copper for solar panels to coltan for cell phones.

If you wouldn’t want oil spilling into your back yard, if you wouldn’t want a strip mine ripping open a hole behind your house and poisoning your water, then it’s time to admit that the economic system founded on consuming these materials has got to go. We’ll never have justice or sustainability if we base one group’s “high standard of living” on the dislocation and destruction of others.

The Efficiency of Green Energy

We ought not at least to delay dispersing a set of plausible fallacies about the economy of fuel, and the discovery of substitutes [for coal], which at present obscure the cri

We ought not at least to delay dispersing a set of plausible fallacies about the economy of fuel, and the discovery of substitutes [for coal], which at present obscure the critical nature of the question, and are eagerly passed about among those who like to believe that we have an indefinite period of prosperity before us. –William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question (1865)

There are, at present, many myths about green energy and its efficiency to address the demands and needs of our burgeoning industrial society, the least of which is that a switch to “renewable” energy will significantly reduce our dependency on, and consumption of, fossil fuels.

The opposite is true. If we study the actual productive processes required for current “renewable” energies (solar, wind, biofuel, etc.) we see that fossil fuels and their infrastructure are not only crucial but are also wholly fundamental to their development. To continue to use the words “renewable” and “clean” to describe such energy processes does a great disservice for generating the type of informed and rational decision-making required at our current junction.

To take one example – the production of turbines and the allocation of land necessary for the development, processing, distribution and storage of “renewable” wind energy. From the mining of rare metals, to the production of the turbines, to the transportation of various parts (weighing thousands of tons) to a central location, all the way up to the continued maintenance of the structure after its completion – wind energy requires industrial infrastructure (i.e. fossil fuels) in every step of the process.

If the conception of wind energy only involves the pristine image of wind turbines spinning, ever so wonderfully, along a beautiful coast or grassland, it’s not too hard to understand why so many of us hold green energy so highly as an alternative to fossil fuels. Noticeably absent in this conception, though, are the images of everything it took to get to that endpoint (which aren’t beautiful images to see at all and is largely the reason why wind energy isn’t marketed that way).

Because of the rapid growth and expansion of industrialiation in the last two centuries, we are long past the days of easy accessible resources. If you take a look at the type of mining operations and drilling operations currently sustaining our way of life you will readily see degradation and devastation on unconscionable scales. This is our reality and these processes will not change no matter what our ends are – these processes are the degree with which “basic” extraction of all of the fundamental metals, minerals, and resources we are familiar with currently take place.

In much the same way that the absurdities of tar sands extraction, mountaintop removal, and hydraulic fracturing are plainly obvious, so too are the continued mining operations and refining processes of copper, silver, aluminum, zinc, etc. (all essential to the development of solar panels and wind turbines).

It is not enough – given our current situation and its dire implications – to just look at the pretty pictures and ignore everything else. All this does, as wonderfully reaffirming and uplifting as it may be, is keep us bound in delusions and false hopes. As Jevons affirms, the questions we have before us are of such overwhelming importance that it does no good to continue to delay dispersing plausible fallacies. If we wish to go anywhere from here, we absolutely need uncompromising (and often brutal) truth.

A common argument among proponents of supposed “green” energy – often prevalent among those who do understand the inherent destructive processes of fuels, mining and industry – is that by simply putting an end to capitalism and its profit motive, we will have the capacity to plan for the efficient and proper management of remaining fossil fuels.

However, the efficient use of a resource does not actually result in its decreased consumption, and we owe evidence of that to William Stanley Jevons’ work The Coal Question. Written in 1865 (during a time of such great progress that criticisms were unfathomable to most), Jevons devoted his study to questioning Britain’s heavy reliance on coal and how the implication of reaching its limits could threaten the empire. Many covered topics in this text have influenced the way in which many of us today discuss the issues of peak oil and sustainability – he wrote on the limits to growth, overshoot, energy return on energy input, taxation of resources and resource alternatives.

In the chapter, “Of the economy of fuel,” Jevons addresses the idea of efficiency directly. Prevalent at the time was the thought that the failing supply of coal would be met with new modes of using it, therefore leading to a stationary or diminished consumption. Making sure to distinguish between private consumption of coal (which accounted for less than one-third of total coal consumption) and the economy of coal in manufactures (the remaining two-thirds), he explained that we can see how new modes of economy lead to an increase of consumption according to parallel instances. He writes:

The economy of labor effected by the introduction of new machinery throws laborers out of employment for the moment. But such is the increased demand for the cheapened products, that eventually the sphere of employment is greatly widened. Often the very laborers whose labor is saved find their more efficient labor more demanded than before.

The same principle applies to the use of coal (and in our case, the use of fossil fuels more generally) – it is the very economy of their use that leads to their extensive consumption. This is known as the Jevons Paradox, and as it can be applied to coal and fossil fuels, it so rightfully can be (and should be) applied in our discussions of “green” and “renewable” energies – noting again that fossil fuels are never completely absent in the productive processes of these energy sources.

We can try to assert, given the general care we all wish to take in moving forward to avert catastrophic climate change, that much diligence will be taken for the efficient use of remaining resources but without the direct questioning of consumption our attempts are meaningless. Historically, in many varying industries and circumstances, efficiency does not solve the problem of consumption – it exasperates it. There is no guarantee that “green” energies will keep consumption levels stationary let alone result in a reduction of consumption (an obvious necessity if we are planning for a sustainable future).

Jevons continues, “Suppose our progress to be checked within half a century, yet by that time our consumption will probably be three or four times what it now is; there is nothing impossible or improbable in this; it is a moderate supposition, considering that our consumption has increased eight-fold in the last sixty years. But how shortened and darkened will the prospects of the country appear, with mines already deep, fuel dear, and yet a high rate of consumption to keep up if we are not to retrograde.”

Writing in 1865, Jevons could not have fathomed the level of growth that we have attained today but that doesn’t mean his early warnings of Britain’s use of coal should be wholly discarded. If anything, the continued rise and dominance of industrialisation over nearly all of the earth’s land and people makes his arguments ever more pertinent to our present situation.

Based on current emissions of carbon alone (not factoring in the reaching of tipping points and various feedback loops) and the best science readily available, our time frame for action to avert catastrophic climate change is anywhere between 15-28 years. However, as has been true with every scientific estimate up to this point, it is impossible to predict that rate at which these various processes will occur and largely our estimates fall extremely short. It is quite probable that we are likely to reach the point of irreversible runaway warming sooner rather than later.

Suppose our progress and industrial capitalism could be checked within the next ten years, yet by that time our consumption could double and the state of the climate could be exponentially more unfavorable than it is now – what would be the capacity for which we could meaningfully engage in any amount of industrial production? Would it even be in the realm of possibility to implement large-scale overhauls towards “green” energy? Without a meaningful and drastic decrease in consumption habits (remembering most of this occurs in industry and not personal lifestyles) and a subsequent decrease in dependency on industrial infrastructure, the prospects of our future are severely shortened and darkened.

35 Arrested in Winona Frac Sand Protests 29th April

Thirty-five people were arrested for trespassing during a large protest against frac sand Monday morning staged at two separate locations in Winona.

The Winona Police Department arrested 19 people at the city’s commercial dock, after they were asked multiple times to leave the private property. Officers than responded to a frac sand processing plant on Winona’s west end, where they arrested another 16 people for trespassing there.

Protesters said their goal was to halt business operations at each site.

“I think people see that the issue of silica sand is something affecting the entire region,” said protester Molly Greening. “They’ve come to stand in solidarity with this issue.”

Dan Nisbit, the owner of CD Corp., which leases the commercial dock, said the protest created a distraction for workers and temporarily slowed operations at the facility.

“Obstructing business isn’t the right way to go about things,” Nisbit said.

Winona Catholic Workers organized the protest, reaching out to area residents who oppose the frac sand industry, as well as others in the region’s Catholic Worker community.

The protest was part of an annual celebration of the regional Catholic Worker community, and volunteers from Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan and other states in the Midwest traveled to Winona to participate.

Catholic Workers and others in the Winona area have protested the industry for more than a year. They have blocked a rail loading terminal, demonstrated at the steps of the Winona City Hall prior to a city council meeting on frac sand regulations, and held other rallies.

“As Catholic Workers living with the poor and marginalize, we come to this land to prevent the desecration of this land and the health of this community,” they wrote in a statement sent Sunday evening to area media outlets.

“We declare Monday to be a moratorium of business as usual at the sites of production of silica sand to eliminate a necessary component of fracking.”

There hasn’t been a history of citations or arrests at any of the demonstrations, though during one rally at city hall in May 2012 a protester was cited for littering after he threw a handful of frac sand on the front steps.

Lockdown Halts Keystone XL Work in Oklahoma 29th April

Spaulding, OK- Monday, April 29th, 6:15 AM– Earlier this morning two Texas residents locked themselves to machinery being used to construct TransCanada’s dangerous and controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in Spaulding, OK through Muscogee Creek Nation land by treaty. Benjamin Butler and Eamon Treadaway Danzig took action today to prevent the Cross Timbers bioregion from being poisoned by this inherently dangerous tar sands pipeline, just as the surrounding wetlands and residential areas have been poisoned as a result of Exxon’s Pegasus pipeline rupture near Mayflower, Arkansas. Recent Tar Sands spills in Minnesota and Arkansas, as well as an explosion at a Tar Sands refinery in Detroit have highlighted the urgency in stopping Tar Sands extraction and transportation.

Butler and Danzig are acting as a part of Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance, a growing coalition of groups and individuals dedicated to stopping the expansion of Tar Sands infrastructure throughout the Great Plains. Their actions follow the escalating number of work-stopping actions that have occurred in Oklahoma this past month. Both anti-extraction activists cite concern of the effect a spill will have in the Cross Timbers bio-region that they call home. Their action comes in the wake of the rupture of Exxon-Mobile’s Pegasus pipeline which spilled Tar Sands bitumen in neighboring Mayflower, Arkansas. In addition to the high rates of sickness that the surrounding community displayed, the spill in Arkansas has polluted Lake Conway and has had devastating effects on local wildlife. The permanent effect on people’s livelihoods and the health of affected ecosystems remains to be seen.

“This pipeline is essential for continued tar sands exploitation which poses an imminent threat to the health of indigenous communities near the point of extraction, fence-line communities around the toxic refineries, and ultimately the health of every living being along the route,” said Benjamin Butler, who was born at Tinker Air force Base in Oklahoma. “I believe in a more beautiful world, one where the profits of a corporation don’t outweigh the health of the people and the planet.”

“These companies come through with false promises and leave sickness and devastation in their wake,” said Eamon Danzig of Denton, TX. “People in Mayflower experienced fainting, nausea, and nosebleeds from the benzene gas which separates from the diluted bitumen in a spill and hovers above the ground. Leaks, ruptures, and other accidents on tar sands pipelines are so commonplace and inevitable that I can’t let this pipeline be built through the Cross Timbers.”

The Tar Sands megaproject is the largest industrial project in the history of humankind, destroying an area of pristine boreal forest which, if fully realized, will leave behind a toxic wasteland the size of Florida. The Tar Sands megaproject continues to endanger the health and way of life of the First Nations communities that live nearby by poisoning the waterways which life in the area depends on. This pipeline promises to deliver toxic diluted bitumen to the noxious Valero Refinery at the front door of the fence-line community of Manchester in Houston.

Currently, there is staunch resistance to the expansion of Tar Sands infrastructure—Lakota and Dakota peoples in “South Dakota” have sworn to protect their land and people from the Keystone XL, lifelong Oklahomans and Texans are consistently halting construction of the inherently dangerous Keystone XL, and the Unis’tot’en Camp has entered the third year of their blockade of the Pacific Trails Pipeline.

UPDATE: 11:27AM : Eamon and Ben are both being charged with trespassing. We need $500 to get them out of jail.

UPDATE: Eamon has been charged with trespassing and is being held on a $250 bail in the Hughes County Jail. We are still waiting to find out Ben’s charges.

UPDATE: 9:18 AM: Lock box has been cut in half with jaws of life. Ben and Eamon have been taken into custody by the police.

UPDATE: 9:12 AM: Using jaws of life on the lock box

UPDATE: 9:08 AM: More police and firetruck has arrived

UPDATE: 8:12AM: Another sheriff has arrived. Failed at sawing

UPDATE: 8:05AM: Private security has given the sheriff a hacksaw. The sheriff is sawing at the lock box

UPDATE: 8:02: Sheriff talking to Ben and Eamon. The sheriff is inspecting the lock box

UPDATE 7:51AM: Hughes County Sheriff has arrived

UPDATE: 7:43 AM: Private security trying to convince Ben and Eamon to unlock

UPDATE: 7:36 AM: More workers arriving on site

UPDATE: 7:30 AM: Private security has arrived on site. Head of security has informed us that he is a retired sheriff of Hughes County.

UPDATE: 6:20 AM: Workers on site

Climate Activist on Day 29 of Hunger Strike

Earlier this month, 350.org founder Bill McKibben, wrote about the new movement of fossil fuel resistance that was spreading around the world.

This resistance is needed now more than ever, as global temperatures edge towards the 400 parts per million (ppm) mark for the first time in millions of years, something that is seriously worrying scientists. “It looks like the world is going to blow through the 400 ppm level without losing a beat,” argues Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist, Ralph Keeling.

One person who is part of this resistance is a young American activist Brian Eister, who has worked with John Kerry’s presidential campaign, League of Conservation Voters, Green Party, Public Citizen and was involved in the Occupy Movement.

But now he has put his body on the line for climate change. He is on day 29 of a planned 30 day hunger strike. For nearly the last month, all he has consumed is water, salt and potassium.

Eister is currently camped outside the American Petroleum Institute (API) in Washington, DC, the oil industry’s most powerful lobby group.

He is trying to raise awareness about climate change. “I am on hunger strike,” Eister writes, “because I can think of no action which could adequately express the urgency of humanity’s present situation. There are more than a few trends which, left unchecked, are likely to make life impossibly difficult for future generations.”

He argues that, “Given the urgency of what is coming, every one of our lives should, first and foremost, be dedicated to preventing this coming catastrophe.”

Over the weekend, Eister gave an interview as to why he is taking what many would argue is radical action. His anger is channeled towards those in power: politicians, the press and of course the oil industry itself.

“There are the policymakers, who treat this issue as though we had all the time in the world to fix it. They already know better,” he argues. “There are members of the press, who bury stories about the impending ruination of the world’s economy by global warming on page 13 of the newspaper, while consistently placing stories about members of congress wrangling over budgets on front page. They already know better.”

Perhaps saddest of all, he says: “there are educated, intelligent people who surely love their children working for groups like the American Petroleum Institute and Americans for Clean Coal Electricity. They already know better.”

The lobbyists at the API do know better, but like the tobacco barons before them, they are trying to still spin a web of denial and deception over the science and urgency of climate change.

As the world hurtles towards 400 ppm, the window for meaningful action on climate is rapidly closing. But, as Eister says, politicians, the press and the oil industry, all know better but carry on as if nothing is the problem.

If President Obama is to start listening to people like Eister, one first small step would be to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline. But that would only be the first small step of true meaningful action.

Eister argues, “In our minds, we imagine that somehow, someway, this problem will be solved: how, after all, could a world full of responsible adults allow all of our children’s lives, and their children’s lives, to be ruined?”

Lockdown Continues in the “Red River Showdown” 25th April

A protester with the group Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance has stopped construction of the Keystone XL pipeline by locking his arm into a concrete capsule buried directly in the pipeline’s proposed path. Fitzgerald Scott, 42, is the first African American to risk arrest while physically blockading TransCanada’s dangerous tar sands pipeline, and the second person to take action this week. On Monday a 61 year old man locked himself to a piece of construction equipment effectively shutting down another Oklahoma pipeline construction site. This week of action, called the “Red River Showdown,” is intended to protect the Red River, which marks the border between Oklahoma and Texas and is a major tributary of the Mississippi.

The site Scott has blockaded is a wetland area where crews are attempting to lay sections of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline directly into the marshy waters. An undetected pinhole leak at this location would cause cancer causing chemicals to mix directly into the local community water table.

Scott, who has a master’s degree in urban planning from the University of Illinois, Chicago, is a longtime activist for social and environmental justice. While organizing against Keystone over the past five months, Scott has met many people struggling to protect their homes from TransCanada’s abuse of eminent domain.

“I am doing this for the people who don’t have the financial resources to protect themselves from a bully like TransCanada,” explained Scott. “Imagine how much worse it is for them – like the mostly African American neighborhood in Winona, TX, where protesters with the Tar Sands Blockade found holes in welds of the pipeline section that runs right behind a children’s playground, and neither TransCanada nor the government will do anything about it!”

As construction on the southern portion of Keystone XL nears two thirds completion, no regulators or politicians show any willingness to halt the project or even inspect those faulty welds. According to George Daniel, spokesperson for Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance, “Scott’s action sends a clear message: because every other avenue has failed to stop this deadly project, we will blockade – all summer and on into the fall, if that’s what it takes.”

Today’s action comes just a few weeks after the devastating tar sands spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, which has left communities across Oklahoma and Texas terrified that they may be the next victims of reckless industry practices. Survivors of the spill in Mayflower have reported nausea, blurred vision, vomiting, and black outs caused by the same blend of raw tar and poisonous chemical solvents that will be transported through Keystone XL.

UPDATE 9:30 AM Work is still stopped on the easement due to the large amount of police and emergency equipment needed for extraction! Show your support for Fitzgerald here!

UPDATE 9:10 AM: Firefighters have extracted Fitzgerald and he’s now in police custody. Please show your support with a generous donation to his legal fund.

UPDATE 8:49 AM: Another fire rescue vehicle on scene, officer just commanded “everyone not involved in emergency services, back off now!” and workers retreated slightly.

UPDATE 8:30 AM: Half a dozen work trucks, four police cars (3 sheriffs and 1 state trooper), four cops, four firefighters, 2 EMTs, one fire truck and a fire rescue truck on scene. Special fire department equipment truck just arrived; large group of officials crowded around Fitzgerald.

UPDATE 7:42 AM: Sheriff on scene.

Harvard Announces Closure of Primate Research Center April 24th

Harvard Medical School has issued a statement announcing that the New England Primate Research Center will be closing within 24 months. Harvard’s New England Primate Research Center has been embroiled in an ongoing controversy following the negligent deaths of at least 4 primates. The facility is currently under investigation by the USDA and faces a potentially major federal fine for multiple violations of the Animal Welfare Act. “Harvard wants the public to believe that this closure is due to economics,” said Michael A. Budkie, A.H.T., Executive Director, SAEN (Stop Animal Exploitation NOW!). “That is simply not true. The only way Harvard could quash this scandal is to close the primate center, because even last year’s resignation of the Center’s Director could not end their ineptitude. This closure is the direct result of pressure from activists led by SAEN.” “The closure of Harvard’s Primate Research Center is the best news I have ever heard,” added Budkie. “The potential exists to bring freedom to many monkeys and to redirect millions of dollars into clinical and epidemiological research which will more directly benefit humans.” SAEN has announced plans to contact the Harvard Medical School’s administration to explore the possibility of placing at least some of the primates in sanctuaries. “These primates have suffered enough,” added Budkie. “They deserve a chance to have a new life in another environment where their needs will be put first.”