Climate Activists Are The Real Super-Heroes

wired imageLast week, our world took a turn towards the surreal.

On Monday, Disney’s TV network, ABC, aired a spin-off of the popular Avengers movies called “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”  The show’s main antagonist is a shadowy hacktivist group called “The Rising Tide” with a logo that looks a lot like ours. The highly-rated first episode frames the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., protecting the government’s secrets and lies, as the heroes, while “The Rising Tide” are “a looming threat” for exposing the truth

Sign this petition demanding that Disney stop co-opting Rising Tide’s name and logo.

In reality, Rising Tide is not an underground group that undermines humanity, but a network of climate activists challenging the root causes of climate change. Rising Tide North America works in solidarity with communities that live on the frontline of fossil fuel extraction and climate change.

WIRTOur chapters and allies have stood with communities living next to coal mining sites and who have had their property seized for pipeline construction. Rising Tiders have been faced criminal and civil prosecution, been physically attacked for taking non-violent action and mocked by industry in the media.

Groups fighting for truth, justice and ecological sanity should not be portrayed as the bad guys on major network television shows.

Will you stand with us in demanding that Disney stop co-opting our name and logo on “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.?

Sign the petition now.

No, Actually, We Are The Rising Tide

cant stopSometimes our idols die hard.

This long time Marvel Comics true believer is finding Joss Whedon’s new TV show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., a deal breaker after decades of love and devotion to Marvel Comics and Whedon’s fantasy world that’s given us Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But now, the other true love of my life, Rising Tide North America, is under attack by the real corporate super villains, Disney and ABC Studios, seeking to co-opt our name and brand for some ratings and commercial air time with Whedon’s new show.

Rising Tide vs. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Whedon’s new television series, premiering tonight on ABC, depicts a secret NSA/Dept. of Homeland Security style agency confronting a “looming new threat” called “The Rising Tide.” In this spinoff of the popular Avengers movie series, Rising Tide is a shadowy cyber-terror group similar to Anonymous. Their role in the show is to expose super humans, like the Hulk and Thor, and secret government agencies like S.H.I.E.L.D.

In our estimation, exposing governmental secrets and lies is a most worthy pastime and similar to what groups like WikiLeaks and Anonymous have done in real world. Unfortunately, the series plays to our mainstream culture’s fears around anarchists and radicals, and portrays the group as a threat to national security. Some reviews call the group “cyber-terrorists.” This is par for the course in a Hollywood that uses pop culture to turn government agents into heroes and seekers of truth, justice and ecological sanity into evildoers.

Some may say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but the big problem for Rising Tide North America is that Whedon’s show uses our name and a very similar logo to ours for his villains. In a most humiliating blow, at the end of the first episode, the lead Rising Tider, Skye, actually joins S.H.I.E.L.D. as an asset. So not only are we depicted as terrorists, but one of our own actually switches sides and joins the police state.

pdxWe are the REAL Rising Tide

Rising Tide is an all-volunteer international climate justice network challenging the root causes climate change.

Rising Tide originated in 2000 at the sixth United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) meeting at the Hague. It formed as direct action network forming an opposition to the talks were deeply influenced by corporate lobbyists, marginalizing representatives in the Global South and pushing carbon markets as a (false) solution to the climate crisis. Over 300 groups from both the Global South and Global North signed the Rising Tide statement in 2000. Since then Rising Tide network have grown and spread throughout the United Kingdom, Australia and North America.

In North America, we have over 50 active chapters, local contacts and allies in our network. Rising Tide North America formed in 2006 in the heart of Appalachia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, when climate and anti-extraction fighters with Mountain Justice and Earth First! decided it was time to make climate change an issue relevant to more than the D.C. Green non-profit industrial complex.

Our goals remain:

  • Bringing non-violent direct action into North American climate movements (something we think we’ve been successful at lately)
  • Work in solidarity with frontline communities directly impacted by fossil fuel extraction and climate change.
  • Challenge the false solutions to climate change. This includes “clean coal,” nuclear power, natural gas, overly-compromised non-profits based in Washington D.C. as well as market based mechanisms like carbon trading.

Currently, our network is waging campaigns from the coalfields of Alaska to Ed Abbey’s redrock wilderness in southern Utah to up and down the Keystone XL Pipeline route to Appalachia’s devastated mountains.

In effect, we are everywhere. And we are the real Rising Tide.

Join us in demanding that Disney stop co-opting our name and logo in their depiction of a shadowy cyber-terror group.

BREAKING: Mobile Residents March to Draw the Line on Tar Sands on Mobile Bay

PRESS RELEASE * For Immediate Release

Press Contacts: Joe Womack, Kim McCuiston, 251-298-7952, mejacoalition@gmail.com

Mobile Residents Draw the Line on Tar Sands on Mobile Bay
New Coalition Marches on GM&O Rail Terminal Protesting Tar Sands Tanker Shipments

MOBILE, ALABAMA, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2013, 10AM – As multiple new tar sands infrastructure proposals on Mobile’s waterfront reveal themselves, the anti-tar sands movement of greater Mobile has set its sights on the question of how tar sands is entering the community to begin with. Plans for an expanded tar sands unloading depot by the Canadian National Railway (CN) in partnership with Houston-based corporations Plains South Cap, American Tank & Vessel (AT&V) and ARC Terminal have outraged Mobile residents. Fed up with the lack of consultation and led by the newly-formed Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition (MEJACoalition), affected residents and supporters marched to GM&O Terminal to “Draw the Line” on tar sands in Mobile.

“I may be a resident of Africatown, but today I’m marching for all residents of Mobile and our efforts to stop Plains South Cap, CN and the rest from bringing tar sands into or around Mobile County. We really don’t appreciate the way that they’ve done their business,” explained Joe Womack, resident of the Africatown Historic District, the sight of intense opposition to the proposed tar sands projects. “It should’ve been above board and the community should’ve been brought in from the beginning.”

The tar sands train depot, as described in City of Mobile planning documents dating from October 4, 2012, will expand the existing CN railyard adjacent to GM&O Terminal and pipe tar sands under the Mobile River to ARC Terminal tar sands storage tanks on Blakeley Island, formerly operated by Gulf Coast Asphalt Company but acquired earlier this year by ARC in February.

Currently, tar sands are brought in via rail through rural southwestern Alabama communities over the Escatawpa River where trains have derailed twice in the last decade. The CN tar sands tanker cars then wind their way through the hearts of Saraland, Chickasaw, Prichard, and Africatown to the existing CN railyard near GM&O Terminal. To unloaded the cars into tanker trucks the tar sands slurry is taken to ARC Terminal’s Chickasaw depot, formerly Mobile Asphalt. From there, they travel yet again through the heart of Africatown across the Cochrane Africatown USA Bridge to ARC Terminal’s Blakeley Island tar sands storage facilities. The new tar sands depot near GM&O Terminal and the Plains South Cap pipeline under the Mobile River would shorten the circuit and allow for a dramatic increase in the volume of tar sands coming through Mobile for export.

Carrying colorful signs and banners reading “Environmental Justice For All,” “No Tar Sands In Mobile,” and “Africatown Not Tank Farm Town” while symbolically wearing blue and black, the marchers gathered in Cathedral Square before shoving off to the GM&O Terminal where tar sands tankers remain nearby until their unloading at ARC’s Saraland depot.

Foley, Alabama resident Kimberly McCuiston described the symbology of the black and blue color coordination, “We’ve already been deeply bruised by the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. The illnesses, the damage to our waterfront, those things still haven’t been addressed appropriately, and I’m sick of living in a dirty energy sacrifice zone. At this point, certain underrepresented communities like our neighbors in Africatown, Prichard, and Chickasaw are necessarily organizing like Selma in ’63 and I’m here to help. I’m not gonna sit idly by while environmental injustices and human rights abuses on the part of these tar sands corporations are perpetrated on my neighbors.”

Joe Womack agreed, “These projects are hazardous to the entire Gulf Coast, especially Africatown which has been repeatedly dumped on already. It’s time to clean Africatown up and stop making it a dumping ground for hazardous waste and materials in this section of the world.”

Just weeks ago, AT&V unexpectedly pulled their proposal for a massive 32-tank tar sands tank farm to be sighted in historic Africatown across the street from the Mobile County Training School, Alabama’s oldest primarily African-American Middle School. And last week saw a lower Alabama court rule against Plains South Cap corporation’s bid to illegally expropriate private property through eminent domain. That decision affirmed the right of Mobile Area Water & Sewage System to turn down the pipeline corporation’s plans to install a tar sands pipeline through greater Mobile’s primary source of fresh water, the Big Creek Lake watershed.

MEJACoalition’s march coincides with a National Call to Action called “Draw the Line” by the climate justice organization 350.org. The day of action features scores of creative events across the country and the Gulf South, with large rallies planned in areas already affected by climate change and places at increased risk from climate chaos if strong action, such as limiting tar sands exploitation, is not taken. Other events focus primarily on the Presidential Permit required for the northern segment of TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, which has faced unprecedented pressures from adversely affected nearby residents, tar sands refinery communities, landowners, and climate justice organizers alike.

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MEJACoalition is the greater Mobile area’s first environmental justice organization.

Rising Tide Philly Targets TD Bank’s Cherry Hill Headquarters Over Investments in Tar Sands and the Keystone XL Pipeline

RT PhillyRising Tide Philly Targets TD Bank’s Cherry Hill Headquarters Over Investments in Tar Sands and the Keystone XL Pipeline

Local grassroots climate change group takes action against the largest funder of the Keystone XL pipeline and presses for a clean energy future.

Contact: Elias Schewel, Rising Tide Philly

Contact: mr.schewel@gmail.com / 267 918 9739

Cherry Hill, NJ – On August 20 at 9:00 AM, a group of citizens concerned about climate change’s effects on the Philadelphia region and on southern New Jersey will gather to peacefully protest in front of the TD Bank headquarters located at 1701 Route 70 East, Cherry Hill, New Jersey.  The protesters are pushing for TD Bank to stop its funding of tar sands petroleum extraction in Alberta, Canada, because of the threat this practice presents to the global climate and to First Nation peoples in Alberta.

TD Bank is also a major funder of the Keystone XL pipeline which would bring tar sands petroleum from Alberta to Texas to be refined and exported. “We want TD Bank to withdraw its funding from both the KXL pipeline and from tar sands extraction, now,” Rising Tide Philly organizer Kevin Starbard summed up the demands.

The Friday protest is organized in coordination with a simultaneous action of hundreds of activists mobilized by 350.org as part of the national Draw the Line weekend of action to hold President Obama accountable for his campaign promises on renewable energy.

The Rising Tide Philly protest in Cherry Hill was planned with help from citizens in Texas and Oklahoma who are fighting the pipeline as part of the Tar Sands Blockade.

Philadelphia resident Rachel Leone explained the importance of connecting TD Bank and Tar Sands extraction in the environmental movement: “Tar sands extraction is already poisoning the water supply of thousands of indigenous people in central Canada, in violation of multiple treaties, and we here in Philadelphia will continue to suffer the worsening effects of climate change, things like Superstorm Sandy, if dirty energy projects like tar sands extraction don’t stop.”

Over 69,000 people across the nation have signed CREDO’s Pledge of Resistance against the Keystone XL Pipeline. Tens of thousands more will attend nationwide Draw the Line protests meant to get the message to Obama that climate change is a major concern, and we will hold him to his campaign promises.  Until Obama’s State Department blocks the KXL Pipeline and until TD Bank divests from tar sands, Rising Tide Philly will continue to target TD Bank for their profiteering from climate disaster and genocide of indigenous people in Alberta.

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