Local Climate Change Activists Draw a Line in the (Tar) Sand

This season’s JP Forum was kicked off at the on Friday evening with a program called A mixture of both the political and the personal, speakers at the event showed slides, discussed the controversial energy project, and described their participation at the recent protests in Washington, D.C., where they all were arrested.

Ellen Cantarow, a Boston journalist who has written on Israel, Palestine, and women’s issues, was the first member of the four-person panel to speak.  She explained that the tar sands deposits are located in a forested and environmentally sensitive area of Alberta, Canada, near the Athabasca and Peace Rivers.  A proposed 1,600 mile-long pipeline called the Keystone XL would carry the sticky substance called diluted bitumen through the Midwest, linking the deposits with refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The tar sands deposits are, she said, “the second largest pool of carbon in the world” and have made Canada the “U.S.’s number one exporter of oil.  The oil,” she stated, “can be wrenched from the earth with an expensive and wasteful process.”

Cantarow showed a slide of a devastated, lunar landscape and explained that “this industrial process removes the boreal forest.”   An existing pipeline that carries the so-called "dilbit" to the Midwest she stated, “has sprung twelve leaks,” including one that spilled into the Kalamazoo River.  If fully exploited, she claimed, the additional carbon would raise current levels in the earth’s atmosphere from 390 ppm to nearly 600 ppm.

It’s “game over” for the environment, she stated, quoting NASA chief climate scientist Dr. James Hansen.

“Cool JP” Green Block leader Carolyn Nikkal addressed the crowded church next.  Nikkal, who said she had her cane taken from her by police at the protest, expressed her concerns about the toxic substances that extraction of the sands produces, and the catastrophic consequences of the pipeline on water resources as well as wildlife such as fish, moose, caribou and water fowl, that lie in its path. 

"Native Americans are not dying of old age,"  stated Nikkal, who reported a rise in rare cancers in the area, as she showed a photo of a fish with two mouths.

“It straddles two major aquifers,” she said.  “This is the breadbasket of the world. We’re told that we need this for economic reasons.  What about clean energy?” she asked.

Loie Hayes, coordinator of the Boston Climate Action Network, described her participation in the “two week long campaign of civil disobedience” that took place at the White House.”  The protestors, she explained, “underwent training” and were told to “dress in business attire.”

“We were given three warnings,” she stated.  Hayes spoke positively of her imprisonment. “It gives you concentrated time with others who care deeply about the same issue.”  Subsequently, after “posting and forfeiting $100,” the group, she said, was “processed and released.”

“I don’t get arrested every day,” stated final speaker Unitarian Universalist Pastor Rev. Terry Burke, who compared the pipeline project to “burying an axe in the head of the earth.”

“It was a wonderful experience,” he said of his arrest, and “it had a spiritual quality.”  Deprived of his wallet, cell phone, and keys, Burke stated, he “felt like a body at the morgue representing millions who will die due to climate change.”

During the subsequent panel discussion, and question and answer session with the audience, much of the conversation focused on future strategies that climate change activists can undertake to stop the pipeline and force the Obama administration, which holds presidential approval in the matter, to keep the campaign commitments to clean energy that it made during the election in 2008.

Although attendees appeared unanimous in their objection to the pipeline, the American Petroleum Institute (API) on its website Energy Tomorrow denies that its construction will add to greenhouse emissions or have other detrimental effects on the environment.   API contends that the project will provide a safe and secure source of oil, reducing imports from the Middle East, as well as boosting GDP and create jobs in the sagging economy.

"Step one," of the group's action plan, explained Hayes, was to “report back to the community.” 

Strategies to follow could include organizing delegations to go en masse to campaign headquarters, making phone calls, knocking on doors, withholding campaign contributions, and otherwise spurring a wider grassroots movement.  Organizers appeared hopeful about the outcome, citing a letter signed by nine Nobel Prize winners urging the President not to approve the pipeline, and a recent New York Times editorial that also denounced its construction.  

Clean energy advocates were urged to participate in the upcoming Moving Planet event, which will begin here in JP with

“If I have to go to Nebraska for months to block bulldozers, that’s what I’ll have to do,” Hayes said.