Check out these lengthy news pieces on Grassy Narrows’ victory in kicking the clear-cut logging corporations off their territory - an area three times the size of Yosemite National Park.
CBC National primetime interview with Roberta Keesick
JB Fobister is a Grassy Narrows member who has been a key part of the community’s work towards self-determination. He sends this message:
Six years ago when we blocked the main logging road near our small community people told us we were crazy to take on two of the largest logging companies in the world. We weren’t crazy, we were just fed up with watching our livelihood, our culture, our medicine, our children’s future – our forests - being carried off our land right before our eyes. We were tired after decades of letter writing, petitions, meetings, protests, speaking tours, legal challenges and rallies, but we refused to give up.
Last night, as I was standing in front of my house looking out at Grassy Lake, it occurred to me that the news I had received a day earlier was something huge. Only at that point did it finally sink in that we had forced AbitibiBowater – the world’s largest paper company – to withdraw from our lands.
I’m really thankful for everybody that made this happen. We couldn’t have done it without everybody’s help over all these years.
I met yesterday with Ministry of Natural Resources regional manager Al Wilcox. His tone was entirely different from past meetings. He said “things will be different from now on.” They sure will be. Grassy will not stop until we are in control of our lands and until our territories have been withdrawn from all clear-cut logging. Our moratorium on industry without our consent still stands, and we will enforce it.
I’m very happy today. People need to hear about what we have done. Then people need to stand up and do something for themselves and for the land too. If Grassy can do it, so can you .
JB Fobister
I’m in Montana at the bottom of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. People are pouring into the “Climate Change Ground Zero Action Camp.” For the next week, we’ll be talking about how to answer the $200 Billion dollar question of how to beat the climate challenge. The coal and oil industry and most of our country’s elected officials want to invest in oil pipelines, oil refineries and coal fired power plants. We think that looks a lot like what got us into this mess in the first place so we’re honing strategies to take back our future.
Why Montana? Two reasons. First, Montana is at the center of the oil and coal bonanza lurking just on the horizon of North America. We’re camped just outside of Helena, where the Governor is pushing plans to expand four oil refineries in the state mostly in order process cheap, dirty crude oil from the Canadian Tar Sands–part of a massive nationwide push to tap into one of the biggest and most destructive industrial projects on the planet. Montana also sits on top of more coal than just about anywhere on the planet. If the Governor and his industry backers get their way, most of that coal will pulverized, burned and pumped into the atmosphere–pollution and global warming be damned.
The second reason we’re in Montana is JR Roof. JR’s spent most of his life training activists in creative campaign strategies and non-violent direct action tactics with Greenpeace. Most of the people you’ve seen hanging banners from bridges and buildings over the last 20 years probably learned some of what they know from him (or someone he that trained with him). For the last two years, he’s been based in Montana and Alberta, organizing ranchers and farmers to oppose punching a power transmisison line through some of the continent’s most pristine wilderness just North of here. He’s pulled together some of the most experienced rabble-rousers on the continent pass on non-violent direct action skills to the climate movement and “make sure that this new generation of activists has an opportunity to learn from our mistakes.”
So here we are, from Montana, Alberta, Ontario, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, California, New York and Washington, DC, passing on skills getting ready to take action for the climate. We’ll be blogging, posting interviews and photos all week.
So this morning at the Carbon Capture and Sequestration conference I had the opportunity to hear the infamous Fred Palmer, Sr. Vice President of Peabody coal do his ‘I love coal’ rap. And jeez louise does that old boy know how to lay it on thick. I had been promised that he was likely to actually rub his hands together with glee when talking about his favorite black rock, but today he opted for the more measured ‘all the other fuels are going to run out except coal and that’s good because coal doesn’t just keep the lights on it also grows trees, teaches our children, gives us healthcare, makes the sky blue and the grass green’ approach. Not terribly convincing, but certainly amusing so long as you don’t think too hard about Peabody’s severe climate impacts and human rights violations.
Oh yes and Fred thinks we need to burn more coal, not less. He’s very excited about new coal-fired power plants, as you can probably imagine. I think his exact words were: “We’ve got 250 billion tonnes of coal that we’re gonna gasify, liquify and burn. When I get an anxiety attack about our growing energy needs I wrap myself in the security blanket of our coal reserves”.
At question-time I challenged Fred on Peabody’s treatment of coal-field communities and asked him how in the world he thought that any new coal-fired power plants were going to be built when coal and construction costs are rising exponentially (even without CCS), 60 plants have been canceled in the last year alone and 75% of the American public supports a moratorium on new coal development.
Fred almost sputtered with indignation at my assertion that Peabody doesn’t have a squeaky clean human rights record - but then he started rambling on about public coal-fired power plants and completely lost me in what seemed to be an effort to argue that the fact that he’d worked in civil service for a couple of years nullified the devastating impacts of Peabody’s mining operations.
But what really amazed me was this choice line:
“We’re going to put SNG in the pipelines, send it to California and they won’t even know they’re USING coal”.
I kid you not, he actually said that. He then followed up with another doozy: “If you go to the Powder River Basin you don’t see any scars - the land is better than it was before”.
Apparently so is Appalachia.
My sense listening to Fred’s reply to my question was that here is a man who is fighting for his industry’s life. Just like Ken Lewis at Bank of America when I questioned him about his coal investments - Fred Palmer knows that the writing is on the wall, that coal is over. That’s why he and the entire coal industry is clinging so desperately to the CCS life-raft. Trouble is, the thing doesn’t float.
Update: better quality video of the event is here.
Update: pictures from the event are here.
This morning, RAN activists gave Weyerhaeuser shareholders an idea of what the company is really about (not the greenwashing lies it posts on its website). About 20 of us descended on the company’s annual shareholder meeting with a 20-foot banner equating the “American Dream” (of big, new homes) with a “Native Nightmare” of flattened forests and eviscerated ecosystems. Three activists locked themselves to the HQ’s front entrance and declared that they wouldn’t leave until Weyerhaeuser got out of Grassy Narrows. Weyerhaeuser had a regular SWAT team of police officers at the ready, and the activists were removed…but not before they ruffled some shareholder feathers by letting them know where–and how–the company gets their quarterly dividends.
(Quick review for those of you not familiar with our battle with Weyerhaeuser: The Grassy Narrows community has been demanding that clear-cut logging stop on their land since 2000, and the Canadian constitution protects their right to preserve their territory for traditional activities such as hunting, which is hard to do when the ecosystem is dead.)
Grassy Narrows also had allies inside the meeting. A handful of RAN sympathizers used the normally polite Q&A period to make Weyerhaeuser execs explain their actions in Grassy Narrows to investors. One woman announced that she had bought Weyerhaeuser stock to support sustainable forestry, but learning about devastation and human rights abuses across the border made her furious. OK, alright: the woman was a plant, but she did call us last night fuming about the blatant lies on Weyerhaeuser’s website.
It was a powerful experience for the activists, and one I’m pretty sure the execs (and security team) won’t forget. One activists is telling me now that I should say a lot of love was felt in the action–and it’s true, it’s love for the planet and for our friends in Grassy Narrows that makes us keep going head to head with a company that is unabashed about its abusive, smarmy business practices.