by Benjamin Storrow / Scientific American
When the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona shuts down later this year, it will be one of the largest carbon emitters to ever close in American history.
The giant coal plant on Arizona’s high desert emitted almost 135 million metric tons of carbon dioxide between 2010 and 2017, according to an E&E News review of federal figures.
Its average annual emissions over that period are roughly equivalent to what 3.3 million passenger cars would pump into the atmosphere in a single year. Of all the coal plants to be retired in the United States in recent years, none has emitted more.
(more…)by Megan Devlin / The Globe and Mail
Enbridge Inc.’s Line 5 pipeline tunnel agreement with the previous state government is unconstitutional, Michigan maintained in its latest response in the continuing court battle over the Calgary-based company’s crude oil pipeline through the Straits of Mackinac.
Michigan argued the agreement didn’t have a title that adequately reflected its contents, which isn’t allowed.
“First, the title did not provide fair notice to legislators and the public of substance of the bill. Second, it improperly combined two unrelated purposes: the Mackinac Bridge and a proposed ‘utility tunnel’ meant to house a new Enbridge oil pipeline,” Attorney-General Dana Nessel’s office said in a statement Thursday.
(more…)From Intercontinental Cry
Nikki Sanchez, @nikkilaes August 12, 2019
At the base of Mauna Kea, the world’s tallest mountain and the first point on earth where raindrops touch the earth, the largest land defense action in modern Hawaiian history is currently in taking place and the entire movement is being guided by love.
(more…)[Franklin County, VA] — At 6 A.M. this morning, two pipeline fighters locked themselves to separate pieces of construction equipment at a Mountain Valley Pipeline site in Franklin County, VA. Banners on site read “EARTH IS ON FIRE, TURN OFF THE GAS” and “¡SOLIDARIDAD CON PUERTO RICO!”. Work at the site was prevented for 6.5 hours before the protesters were extracted from their blockade by law enforcement around 12:30 P.M. As of 5 P.M. the protesters had not been arraigned, no charges had been released, no bail had been set.
(more…)by Marissa Papanek / KRCR News
KLAMATH, Calif. — Green Diamond and Western Rivers Conservancy have agreed to return tens of thousands of acres of ancestral lands to the Yurok Tribe.
On Monday, Aug. 19, the Yurok Tribe, Green Diamond Resource Company and Western Rivers Conservancy will celebrate a decade-long, hard-won effort to preserve and place into tribal ownership approximately 50,000 acres of forest surrounding four salmon sustaining streams, including Blue Creek, according to tribal leaders.
“It is a good day for the Yurok people,” Joseph L. James, the Chairman of the Yurok Tribe said. “On behalf of the Yurok Tribe, I would like thank Green Diamond and Western Rivers for assisting us in the reacquisition of a significant part of our ancestral territory and putting us in a position to permanently protect the Blue Creek watershed, which is the crown jewel of the Klamath River. These organizations have stood by us every step of the way during this 10-year project.”
by Talli Nauman / Intercontinental Cry
RAPID CITY – Advocates for the U.N. declaration of a World Indigenous Peoples Decade of Water have partnered with local organizations to drum up grassroots support at the Mni Ki Wakan (Water is Sacred) Summit here Aug. 13-15.
The international public event is taking place on the heels of conveners’ presentation in Geneva to the 12th Session of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, EMRIP.
(more…)by Likhts’amisyu Solidarity / It’s Going Down
Many of us in the environmental movement share a dream of a free society, in which people live together, caring for the land they inhabit. We imagine such a community as an autonomous zone, existing independently of the colonial, capitalist system we oppose.
I am pleased to report that I now write these words from exactly such a place. I now find myself by the shore of Parrott Lake, on a territory belonging to the Sun House of the Likhts’amisyu Clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation. The exact place where we now camp was a Wet’suwet’en village site for many generations. In subsequent waves of colonial violence, the Wet’suwet’en were driven from this ancestral home. Now they have reclaimed it and are building a new village, which is be a place of cultural revitalization, of learning, of healing, and of stewardship of the land.
(more…)by Paul Gregoire / Sydney Criminal Lawyers
Victoria police turned up at the Djab Wurrung Heritage Protection Embassy on 8 August and issued the traditional owners camped there with a notice to vacate the sacred landscape in southwestern Victoria within 14 days.
Major Road Projects Victoria and VicRoads have plans to run a 12.5 kilometre stretch of the Western Highway duplication project between the towns of Ararat and Buangor straight through the lands of the Djab Wurrung people.
(more…)by Unoffensive Animal / Animal Liberation Press Office
The night of the 6th of August we headed to Brightling Park and paid a visit to Jon Gaunt’s game farm. Mr Gaunt rears both pheasant and partridge as the gamekeeper of the park.
The pheasants were already in the release pens, but two rows of rearing pens full of partridge remained. We cut the ties that held the panel frames together and pulled the end off. Because the partridge was ready to fly, we decided to roll up all the netting, making sure that birds wouldn’t get caught and we made the birds fly away.
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This article and others are featured in our upcoming Summer issue of the Earth First! Journal. There’s still time to subscribe now!
Intro by Panagioti Tsolkas, interview conducted with Lill, an anarchist organizer born and raised in southeast Kentucky
When I heard news of the coal miners’ railroad blockade in Harlan County, I knew it presented a real chance for growth, especially for movements like Earth First! who are at the intersection of various struggles, including eco-defense, anti-capitalism, climate justice, and prison abolition.
Though I spent most of my life in flat swampy Florida, stories of Harlan County, Kentucky, were burned into my head as a teenage anarchist in circles of Earth First!ers and IWW-types singing labor songs by fireside.
One of the most famous of union ballads, “Which Side Are You On?,” about miners’ resistance in the Kentucky coalfields, includes the line, “They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there…” Even before the development of climate-focused mass movement, it has always been Big Coal vs. the rest of us.
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