Kitchen Crews Fueling the Movement

Cross-posted from Medium

by Patrick Young

— Part II of the Lawyers, Lockboxes and Money series

Every mobilization, every blockade, every march depends on a complex network of movement infrastructure that will likely never make it to the front page of the papers. To make all of these things possible, hundreds of people prepared and served food, organized legal support, set up medical clinics, designed websites, facilitated trainings, organized transportation, secured meeting spaces, maintained databases, and took on dozens of logistical tasks that allowed movements to operate.

The Lawyers, Lockboxes and Money series is a project that explores the role shared social movement infrastructure has played in social movement uprisings and how this infrastructure has evolved over time, moving across issue areas and geographies to knit together a shared fabric of progressive social movements. In this segment we look at the networks and organizations that provide one of the most basic infrastructural tasks movements need to take on?—?feeding people.

Fueling the Movement

Feeding people during mobilizations, particularly for activities lasting more than a few hours, is one of the most basic infrastructural needs to be encountered by social movements. All over the world, the practice of preparing and sharing food plays an important role in displaying hospitality, sharing culture and cultivating relationships. It is not surprising, then, that the organizations and networks that provide food for social movements share a rich legacy and history.

Many of the kitchen collectives currently organizing providing food for social movement mobilizations can trace their histories to two long-standing (and often intertwined) institutions?—?Food Not Bombs (FNB) and Seeds of Peace?—?both of which emerged from the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s.

Photo Credit: Occupy Eugene

Food Not Bombs is a network of all-volunteer collectives that serve vegetarian and vegan meals for free in public squares and parks in cities around the world. It was started by Keith McHenry and C. T. Butler, two activists who had been deeply involved in the movement against the construction of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in New Hampshire. In 1981 the two helped to organize a protest at the annual shareholder meeting of First National Bank, one of the major financial backers of the Seabrook Power Station. In their history of the Food Not Bombs movement, McHenry and Butler laid out their plan for the action. “As nuclear-power protesters, we wanted to do street theater that would remind people of a 1930s-style soup kitchen, to highlight the waste of valuable resources on capital-intensive projects such as nuclear power while many people in this country went hungry and homeless.”[1]

The two initially planned to recruit actors to fill out the soup line but then they realized they could recruit people who were actually hungry and homeless to participate. McHenry and Butler collected day-old bread and salvaged produce from the local food coop and cooked a large bowl of soup. During the shareholder meeting over 100 people turned out for the meal. The event was an incredible success. The Food Not Bombs frame proved to be so salient that serving free salvaged food in public places as a protest of the massive spending on nuclear infrastructure became a staple in the anti-nuclear movement’s repertoire of contention.[2]

Michael Maher Photography

By 1988, Food Not Bombs groups had spread to Boston, San Francisco and Washington, DC. In May of that year, the San Francisco chapter decoupled their food servings from other actions and started holding weekly servings in Golden Gate Park, offering free healthy food for poor and hungry people. While this fulfilled the charitable function of feeding hungry people, Heynen observed that these food servings also acted “to expose poverty to the glare of those who do not want it to exist.”[3]

The next summer solidified a major shift in the political nature of Food Not Bombs. In 1989, after a decade of austerity and at the peak of urban disinvestment, people experiencing homelessness organized major tent cities in urban centers around the country to protest the crisis of homelessness. Food Not Bombs chapters in New York and San Francisco offered mass food servings at these camps and became deeply involved in organizing in support of them. By this time, Food Not Bombs had developed a robust political analysis around poverty, hunger, food security, and public space.[4]

FoodNotBombs.net

In less than a decade a group of anti-nuclear activists that had initially planned to recruit actors to participate in a soup line as a street theater action developed into an organization that was organizing around homelessness and regularly risking arrest while serving food in public parks. In 1992 Food Not Bombs held its first international gathering with representatives from 30 active groups in the US and Canada.[5] At the meeting, Food Not Bombs established its three foundational principles: “1. Always vegan or vegetarian and free to everyone. 2. Each chapter is independent and autonomous and makes decisions using the consensus process. 3. Food Not Bombs is not a charity and is dedicated to non-violent social change.”[6]

Throughout the 1990s, Food Not Bombs chapters continued to form around the US and worldwide. In addition to serving free food in public parks, Food Not Bombs chapters often contribute to social movement infrastructure by providing food during actions and movement events. In 1999 when the global justice movement burst onto the scene during the protests of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, Washington, members of different Food Not Bombs chapters, primarily from the US and Canada traveled to Seattle to gather, cook and serve food to the thousands of people who took to the streets during the multi-day mobilization.

The other principal nucleus of social movement institutions providing food at mobilizations is Seeds of Peace. Seeds also traces its history to the anti-nuclear movement, emerging out of the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament in 1986?—?a nine-month, 3,700-mile march from Los Angeles to Washington, DC to raise awareness about the growing dangers of nuclear proliferation. The group of activists that came together to provided food, water, medical support and other logistics for the march recognized the important role that this type of logistical infrastructure could play in social movements and decided to form a permanent collective.[7]

Continuing its anti-nuclear work, Seeds developed a relationship with the Newe (Western Shoshone) who were demanding an end to nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site and the return of their historic homelands. Later, Seeds organized food and other support for the Dineh (Navajo) elders in their fight against forced relocation and became deeply involved in Earth First! forest defense campaigns.

While Food Not Bombs established a network of chapters organized regular food servings in their communities and could be mobilized in support of actions, from the start, Seeds was much more focused on building infrastructure to support mobilizations. In addition to food, Seeds of Peace organized to provide medical and logistical support and direct action trainings in support of mobilizations, campaigns, and action camps, often building out the logistical core of movements and mobilizations. During Redwood Summer in 1990, a three-month mobilization in northern California to protect old-growth redwood trees from logging, Seeds of Peace organized nearly all of the core infrastructure for the campaign. That summer, when labor and environmental organizer Judi Bari’s car was bombed, she was on her way to the Seeds of Peace house in Oakland.[8]

When Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast in 2005, scott crow, a co-founder of the Common Ground Collective published a national call to action inviting volunteers to come to New Orleans to provide relief where the government would not. Food Not Bombs organizers were among the first to answer that call. crow writes, “a Food Not Bombs chapter from Hartford took the initial risk to get hot food into people still stranded in the waters across the river in the Seventh and Ninth Wards. The Red Cross would not go there. We knew people on the other side needed water, food, and medical attention immediately.”[9] Over the next several months, dozens of Food Not Bombs and Seeds of Peace activists traveled to Common Ground to participate in the relief efforts.

Common Ground Collective

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Seeds of Peace, Food Not Bombs and a wide range of similarly structured kitchen collectives would provide food support for mobilizations and other movement events around the country in a wide range of different organizational formations. While these organized collectives could deploy mobile kitchen equipment and experience in feeding thousands of people thousands of people in mass mobilizations settings, they would generally integrate large numbers of local activists to provide the labor to actually prepare meals.

Seeds of Peace identifies their role as something of a facilitator. “It is our intention to use our skills and equipment, not merely to provide a ‘service,’ but to promote individual empowerment and community solidarity by providing an effective and adaptable framework. As a small collective, we cannot, by ourselves, cook for 5,000 people. But by providing kitchen equipment and a certain level of experience, we can work with and facilitate a group of people to cook, deliver and serve a meal on such a scale.”[10]

Kitchen Crews Emerging Organically

While Seeds of Peace and Food Not Bombs have played an incredibly valuable role in supporting movements and uprisings, movements and communities often organically develop the capacity to provide food as movements emerge. In Ferguson, Missouri, in the aftermath of the murder of Mike Brown, Cathy “Mama Cat” Daniels, a retired grandmother went looking to find a way to help out. “I asked, ‘what can I do?’” she told the Huffington Post. “They said a little home-cooked meal wouldn’t hurt nothing, so I went home, and the next day I came back with spaghetti and salad and garlic bread. After that, every day I fed them. Every day.”[11] Daniels would continue serving food through the weeks of protests and the non-indictment. Later on, volunteers from Seeds of Peace would travel into Ferguson to support Daniels, particularly during the Ferguson October mobilization and the resurgence of activity following the announcement of the non-incitement.

During the mobilization to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock the task of feeding the thousands of water protectors who had converged in North Dakota brought together a wide arrangement of kitchen collectives. There, water protectors organized at least 13 different kitchens across the three main camps to feed the thousands of people who were living at Standing Rock. The main kitchen was coordinated by a vegan chef named from the Netherlands who had worked with a collective of vegan chefs in Greece that cooked meals at refugee camps for 8,000 people a day. Another kitchen was staffed by Seeds of Peace volunteers, yet another was led by Brian Yazzie, a Navajo chef and chef de cuisine at the Sioux Chef, a Minneapolis-based catering company that works to revitalize Native American food culture.

Photo Credit: Brian Yazzie

Elizabeth Hoover from the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance (NAFSA) observed that preparing traditional indigenous foods became culturally and politically important to the movement. “Traditional foods are considered an important tool in, and motivation for, winning this fight against polluting fossil fuels. Getting traditional foods into camp to keep morale up?—?whether that was enough buffalo meat in the stews across camp, or more tribally specific delicacies… was an important focus.”[12]

Stepping Up Stepping In

The participatory aspect of preparing and serving food at mobilizations has acted as a useful tool for absorbing new activists and providing opportunities for people to meaningfully participate in creating the mobilizations they are participating in. Kim Ellis, an organizer with the RAMPS Campaign said, “it’s just easy to plug into this work. It’s a way for people without a lot of experience to get involved… When you are doing something concrete you know you can be useful.”[13]

While some roles in an uprising require complex skill sets and long-term commitments, nearly anyone can help out in a kitchen, washing dishes or chopping vegetables. Involving volunteers in cooking food and washing dishes helps to bridge the gap between the people attending or participating in mobilizations and the people who are organizing them and making them happen. Ellis also observed that the landscape of organizations and collectives organizing to provide food for social movements has expanded. “It’s not just Seeds anymore. There are lots of kitchens being formed. Lots of people are doing this work all over the place.”

[1] C. T. Butler and Keith McHenry, Food Not Bombs, Revised edition (Tucson, Ariz.: See Sharp Press, 2000).

[2] Nik Heynen, “Cooking up Non-Violent Civil-Disobedient Direct Action for the Hungry: ‘Food Not Bombs’ and the Resurgence of Radical Democracy in the US,” ed. Paul Routledge, Urban Studies 47, no. 6 (May 2010): 1225–40, https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098009360223.

[3] Heynen.

[4] Butler and McHenry, Food Not Bombs.

[5] McHenry, Keith, “Documenting 30 Years of Food Not Bombs,” accessed May 1, 2019, http://foodnotbombs.net/z_30th_anniversary_2.html.

[6] “Three Principles of Food Not Bombs,” Food Not Bombs, accessed May 1, 2019, http://foodnotbombs.net/principles.html.

[7] Seeds of Peace, “About Us.”

[8] Nick Stocks, Interview with author, March 16, 2019.

[9] scott crow and Kathleen Cleaver, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective, 2nd ed. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014), 120.

[10] Seeds of Peace, “About Us.”

[11] Zeba Blay, “In St. Louis, This Woman Is Making A Change One Meal at A Time,” HuffPost, 54:24 400AD, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/in-st-louis-this-woman-is-making-a-change-one-meal-at-a-time_n_59ef7ebde4b0bf1f88364889.

[12] Elizabeth Hoover, “Feeding a Movement: The Kitchens of the Standing Rock Camps,” From Garden Warriors to Good Seeds: Indigenizing the Local Food Movement (blog), December 7, 2016, https://gardenwarriorsgoodseeds.com/2016/12/06/feeding-a-movement-the-kitchens-of-the-standing-rock-camps/.

[13] Ellis, Interview with author.

Send Lawyers, Lockboxes, and Money

Wikimedia Commons

cross-posted from Meduim

By Patrick Young

Shared social movement infrastructure in popular uprisings

Across the United States and around the world, the past decade has been marked by a series of dramatic episodes of social movement uprisings. Thousands of people have taken to the streets facing down chemical weapons and police violence, camped out for months at a time blocking the expansion fossil fuel infrastructure, and faced felony charges and decades of jail time for their alleged participation in militant direct action.

Images of protestors facing down tear gas, people locked to construction equipment, and burning limousines have appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the country and been plastered across social media. But every mobilization, every blockade, every march has depended on a complex network of movement infrastructure that will likely never make it to the front page of the papers. To make all of these things possible, hundreds of people prepared and served food, organized legal support, set up medical clinics, designed websites, facilitated trainings, organized transportation, secured meeting spaces, maintained databases, and took on dozens of logistical tasks that allowed movements to operate.

Many of the social movements that have emerged in recent years have moved beyond simply critiquing the systems they were struggling against, they also offered new models of how society could be organizing. Throughout these long and challenging mobilizations, thousands of people experimented with modeling and developing the practices of direct democracy, autonomy, and mutual aid that their movements aspired to create.

Much has been written on the manifestations of direct democracy in the political sphere that were on display at the mass assemblies of the Occupy Movement and other plaza mobilizations around the world.[1] Something less explored and certainly less celebrated are the practices of mutual aid and solidarity that have been baked into the economic and social, as well as the political spheres of these new social movements. In the plaza movements and the more recent episodes of contention in Ferguson, Standing Rock and J20 social movement infrastructures emerged to provide the food, medical care, legal support, internal communication, transportation and myriad other logistical needs of the movements. Developing all of these aspects of social movement infrastructure offered participants opportunities to create and practice models of direct democracy and mutual aid in allocating scarce resources, navigating social relationships, and providing the basic human necessities that participants needed to continue to engage in the movements.

While much of this social movement infrastructure emerges organically within distinct social movements or mobilizations, many of the networks, organizations, and institutions with the skills, resources, and experience in providing social movement infrastructure frequently mobilize across seemingly disparate social movements spaces at different times and in different places. From the outside, the episodes of contentious politics that played out in Ferguson, Standing Rock and J20 appear as distinct social movements with little overlap. But interestingly, many of the same organizations and networks providing food, legal support, and medical care participated in each of these uprisings. The people doing this important work each had unique backgrounds and movement histories but over a lifetimes of activism, their paths have continually crossed in the streets.

Shared Social Movement Infrastructure

Traditional theories on how social movements emerge focused mainly on the individual grievances that catalyzed movements, the relationships between participants in these movements, and the ways that new threats and grievances emerged.[2] By the 1970s, scholars reflecting on the social movements of the 1960s began to recognize that the role that the availability of resources and a number of structural factors can play a more important role in the emergence of social movements. McCarthy and Zald describe this new body of analysis which has become known as resource mobilization theory as an approach that “examines the variety of resources that must be mobilized, the linkages of social movements to other groups, the dependence of movements upon external support for success and the tactics used by authorities to control or incorporate movements.”[3]

Researchers have argued about which types of resources contribute to the success of movements and how those resources impact various movement outcomes, but the idea that movements need money, facilities, legal skills, and other resources to operate is relatively non-controversial. Movements have built out infrastructure to develop and organize these resources in distinct ways: vertically (internal to movement organizations) and horizontally (shared movement infrastructure).

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

 

Most commonly, social movement organizations have sought to build infrastructure vertically within their organizations and issue areas, amassing trained volunteers, skilled staff, and large treasuries. This infrastructure gives social movement organizations the ability to make strategic decisions about how to allocate their resources as they plan campaigns and mobilizations. It also, however, also forces social movement organizations to compete for scarce resources, respond to the whims of funders and donors, and jockey to ensure that their particular movement or issue receives the most attention.[4]

Alternatively, organizers who recognize the intersections between different movements and issue areas have worked to build out infrastructure horizontally, developing an infrastructure of material and technical support that can be deployed in different times and spaces among various seemingly-disparate social movements. The networks and organizations that provide these resources across different social movements make up a shared social movement infrastructure.

When social movement organizations, labor unions, and NGOs build infrastructure internally, that infrastructure is constrained by the same limitations of the organizations that they are controlled by. Historically, social movement organizations and labor unions have not created movements and have often acted to constrain movement. Piven and Cloward observe this playing out in Poor Peoples Movements, their important analysis of four major social movements in the 20th century. “Because [mass membership organizations] were acutely vulnerable to internal oligarchy and stasis and to external integration with elites, the bureaucratic organizations that were developed within these movements tended to blunt the militancy that was the fundamental source of such influence as the movements exerted.”[5]

Recognizing Piven and Cloward’s critique of the limits of social movement organizations, Engler and Engler suggested a “momentum-driven” theory of organizing to “build decentralized networks to sustain protest mobilizations through multiple waves of activity.” This model suggests that social movement organizations can develop infrastructure to absorb and energy as moments surge and retain capacity to be mobilized in future waves after the “moments of the whirlwind” recede.[6]

The momentum-driven organizing approach is useful because it acknowledges the natural ebbs and flows of social movement activity and suggests strategies for sustaining movements through multiple waves of activity, in large part, by developing social movement infrastructure. The Momentum Community has emerged as a “training institute and movement incubator,” teaching and promoting this momentum-driven organizing approach. Momentum has incubated the launch of some important movement organizations including Movimiento Cosecha, IfNotNow, and the Sunrise Movement.[7]

But the momentum model still implicitly assumes that infrastructure must be developed vertically within a particular social movement or social movement organization. Many of the organizations and networks that provide key infrastructure for social movements are mobilized across movement spaces, however. This shared social movement infrastructure, then, does not necessarily need to ebb and flow the way that individual movements do. Instead, movement infrastructure organizations can move laterally from movement to movement in response to trigger moments and in support of uprisings happing across a wide range of social movements. Infrastructure organizations doing this work have created the shared social movement infrastructure that has emerged in uprising after uprising in recent years.

Bringing More to the Table Than Breakfast

When the people, organizations and networks that build and share the infrastructure that social movements rely on move across different movement traditions, issue areas, and geographies, the impact that they have can extend well beyond the specific resources that they are bringing to those spaces. As infrastructural organizers enter new and emerging movement spaces, they also often bring with them a set of organizational practices, politics, movement histories, and relationships. Nick Stocks, a longtime organizer who has worked with the Seeds of Peace Collective and Rising Tide North America observed, “the organizations that provide infrastructure for movements, like Seeds [of Peace] have been some of the standard bearers for some of the practices our movements have been using for decades.”[8]

Kim Ellis from RAMPS expanded on this point. “Most folks who get involved in infrastructure come to it out of a particular political theory around horizontalism. That brings prefigurative politics into lots of movements.”[9]

When a kitchen collective with three decades of experience providing food at protests shows up to provide food for a nascent movement, they don’t just bring breakfast, they bring decades of movement history, shared norms about how to cooperatively operate a campaign kitchen, the explicit or implicit political analysis that has guided their work over time, and relationships with organizers in other movements and other types of infrastructural roles. These shared practices can have a profound impact on emerging social movements.

Often these practices are transferred organically. When activists participating in movement infrastructure use horizontal organizing structures, local activists often take notice and adopt those tools and practices. When activist legal collectives work with groups of defendants who have little experience with the criminal justice system and share stories of activists successfully engaging in collective defenses and strategies of non-cooperation the defendants can become more likely to adopt those approaches.

In many cases, however, this dissemination of common social movement practices can be more deliberate. Most notably, infrastructure organizers have historically played an important role in promoting principles of horizontal organizing and consensus-based decision making. C.T. Butler, one of the founders of Food Not Bombs co-wrote and published a manual on the formal consensus process, On Conflict and Consensus.[10] That manual has been circulated widely within a broad range of social movements and has introduced thousands of organizers to the formal consensus process. The Seeds of Peace Collective has also offered consensus trainings. Medical teams conduct ‘bridge trainings’ to teach medical professionals about principles for consent-based care and horizontal organizing. The Tilted Scales Collective’s Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant presents an explicitly political context for legal defense work. [11]

Because infrastructure organizations are generally not tied to one specific movement and instead move across movement spaces, they often create important bridges between different social movements. Kim Ellis observed “any issue or movements need infrastructure. That’s a way to bring movements together, and it’s an incredible coming together point.”[12]

Movement Infrastructure: Scarce Resources, Huge Potential

In social movements and uprisings all over the country, movement infrastructure organizations and networks have mobilized an astonishing level of support activity. In Ferguson, legal workers built a legal support structure from scratch in less than a week that was able to track down people who were arrested and, in most cases, bail them out and get them back on the streets the very next night. At Standing Rock kitchen crews and medics kept thousands of people who were camping outside in North Dakota in the winter healthy and well fed for months. At J20 the creation of shared infrastructure created space for dozens of different movements?—?many of whom had no experience working together?—?to take bold direct action on the same day in the same city.

What is more astonishing than the sheer scale of activity generated by these infrastructure projects is how relatively few resources have been dedicated to them. While the value of sustainable infrastructure projects is widely acknowledged, there are only a handful of well-established organizations that work to create movement infrastructure that operates across social movement spaces. Few of these organizations have paid staff, and nearly all depend almost entirely on volunteer labor.

Fundraising can be difficult for movement infrastructure projects. Many donors will be happy to give money to bail an activist out of jail, but be less likely to donate to make sure that there is a well-trained, experienced and sustainable legal collective available to set up the fundraising link, track the activist through the legal system, and show up at the jail with the cash to bail them out. Many foundations and other traditional funding sources for social movements consider infrastructure ‘overhead’ and will not fund it, opting instead to support programmatic work.

Activists who organize movement infrastructure projects report that this work is also often undervalued or ignored within movements. One long-time organizer lamented, “within our movements, there is a tendency to celebrate the people who take really big risks…the people who are doing the labor (to create infrastructure) are often undervalued.” The limited support for movement infrastructure takes a toll on the people who are doing this work. The organizer continued, “A lot of people who fill support roles over the longer term are people who have dedicated a substantial portion of their lives to movement work. They’re showing up at the cost of having stable jobs, healthcare, and financial security.” This can lead to burnout and high turnover. Nick Stocks said, “the people who do any type of grassroots organizing work often do it for two or three years and then burn out. Very few people are able to do it for the long haul.”[13]

Behind every protest, blockade, encampment, or occupation there is a complex set of organizational structures that handle the logistical, administrative and other support functions that keep the action going. Sometimes, the infrastructure to provide this support emerges independently within specific social movements, but in important ways, the individuals, networks, and organizations that offer infrastructural and logistical support are often mobilized across dramatically different movement spaces through informal and semi-formal networks, personal relationships, and formal organizational structures.

It is reasonable to argue that the availability of this social movement infrastructure can hasten the emergence and increase the resilience of social movement uprisings. Relying on existing movement infrastructure to provide or, at least coordinate, key logistical needs of the movement can free up movement organizers to focus on the political and strategic work of their movements. Organizations providing infrastructural support to social movement bring with them important resources including technical skills, political relationships and often physical equipment.

The legal support collectives, campaign kitchens, and medic teams that work tirelessly to support a wide range of social movements will, unfortunately, probably not be featured in the history of our movements. But looking closely at social movement moments throughout recent history it’s clear that the people who staffed the clinics, organized the kitchens, and coordinated legal support played an important role supporting the action on the front lines and in weaving the fabric of our shared social movements.

Notes

[1] Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini, They Can’t Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy From Greece To Occupy, 1 edition (London ; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2014); Jerome E. Roos and Leonidas Oikonomakis, “They Don’t Represent Us! The Global Resonance of the Real Democracy Movement from the Indignados to Occupy,” in Spreading Protest: Social Movements in Times of Crisis (ECPR Press, n.d.), 117–36.

[2] J. Craig Jenkins, “Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 9, no. 1 (August 1983): 527–53, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.09.080183.002523.

[3] John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6 (May 1977): 31.

[4] INCITE! The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, Reprint edition (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2017).

[5] Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, unknown edition (New York: Vintage, 1978).

[6] Mark Engler and Paul Engler, This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century (New York: Bold Type Books, 2016).

[7] “Movements,” Momentum, accessed May 13, 2019, https://www.momentumcommunity.org/movements.

[8] Stocks, Interview with author.

[9] Ellis, Interview with author.

[10] C. T. Lawrence Butler and Amy Rothstein, On Conflict & Consensus: A Handbook on Formal Consensus Decision Making, Second Edition (Food Not Bombs, 1991).

[11] The Tilted Scales Collective, A Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant.

[12] Ellis, Interview with author.

[13] Stocks, Interview with author.

Water Protectors Lock Down to Stop Line 3 Construction

via Ginew Collective 

Water Protectors Lock Down to Stop Line 3 Construction, Powerlines Built for Tar Sands Pipeline Through Army Corps Land as Enbridge Seeks Water Crossing Permits

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 3, 2019
Contact: ginew@protonmail.com

(Park Rapids, MN) This morning, water protectors supported by Ginew Collective, Northfield Against Line 3 and others halted work at an active construction site on the proposed Line 3 route. Three water protectors locked themselves to logging equipment while over a dozen concerned citizens rallied in support.

Great River Energy, Enbridge’s named utility provider for numerous pump stations it needs to power its tar sands pipeline, is logging through water crossings and wetlands next to the Line 3 route.

Enbridge has significant unmet energy needs to power the Line 3 route, and notes its partnership with Great River Energy in its application to the Army Corps of Engineers to bulldoze through wetlands and water crossings. Great River Energy specifies in its Army Corps application that it is building the electric transmission line to power Enbridge’s pipeline unbuilt pump station.

Minnesota has not issued the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) or DNR permits required for Line 3 construction across wetlands or water crossings. Minnesota announced the 401 water quality certification process will not be complete until fall 2019.

“Enbridge pretends to follow the process while it is busy bulldozing through our forests and wetlands,” said Frances Weatherall while locked to logging equipment.

“This is a years-long plan to send more dirty tar sands through Minnesota, don’t be fooled into thinking they won’t destroy as much as they can while they wait for their final state permits,” said Mollie Weatherall, locked with her sister on the same machine.

Jonas, who was also locked to a machine said, “This is a step towards decolonization, Enbridge is carving up the planet and our government doesn’t care. Today it’s my turn to put my body between the planet I want to protect and the attacks against our water, our climate, and Native sovereignty.”

###

PLEASE SHARE:

Link to fundraise for bail: PayPal.me/nfldal3

Link to Facebook post with press release & pictures: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2254586604870599&id=2061510617511533

San Francisco: Climate Shenanigans Target California Democratic Convention

photo courtesy of Diablo Rising Tide.

via Diablo Rising Tide

This weekend, as California’s Democrats, the next generation’s “real climate leader” Gov. Gavin Newsom and a dozen or so presidential candidates gathered in San Francisco, guerrilla climate advertisers with Diablo Rising Tide pasted, projected and otherwise displayed messages to the liberal masses about fossil fuels and climate change.

One of California’s biggest secrets is that the oil lobby has captured the  state government and dominates the public and political discourse around fossil fuels and climate change.

California writer Dan Bacher recently outlined a must-read of the power, influence and methods that the oil lobby uses around the state:

photo courtesy of Diablo Rising Tide.

“The Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) is not a household name in California, but it should be. It’s the trade association for the oil industry and the largest and most powerful corporate lobbying organization in the state. If  you want to know the industries, organizations and people that control California, WSPA and Big Oil are right at the top of the list.

WSPA represents a who’s who of oil and pipeline companies, including AERA, BP, California Resources Corporation, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon, Plains All American Pipeline Company, Valero and many others. The companies that WSPA represents account for the bulk of petroleum exploration, production, refining, transportation and marketing in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, according to the WSPA website, www.wspa.org.

WSPA and Big Oil wield their power and influence over public discourse in 6 major ways: through (1) lobbying; (2) campaign spending; (3) serving on and putting shills on regulatory panels; (4) creating Astroturf groups: (5) working in collaboration with media; and (6) contributing to non profit organizations.”

photo courtesy of Diablo Rising Tide.

In San Francisco this weekend, WSPA remained behind the scenes, but disruptions, bird-dogs and protest were peppered through the weekend targeting Newsom and presidential candidates.

  • At one point 11 year Charlie asked Newsom why California wasn’t adopting a Green New Deal. Newsom, doing his best impression of Dianne Feinstein, told Charlie that “California is doing enough on climate.” Clearly, in a state where hundreds of oil drilling permits were issued in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, a million acres of federal land are being opened to fracking and an entire city burned to the ground during wildfires, the state of California and its governor is not doing enough.
  • A group of Porter Ranch residents found Governor Newsom to ask him when the infamous Aliso Canyon methane storage facility was going to be closed. He re-committed to closing the facility, but forgot to include what his timeline. Maybe he should have just done it the first time and he’d not have to re-commit.
  • Climate youth also converged outside and inside the convention calling for stronger climate action.
  • And then the “conservative voice” of the Democratic presidential candidates, former Colorado Gov. John “Frackenlooper” Hickenlooper was booed during most of his speech after attacking climate action, healthcare for all and socialism. We should have disrupted that shithead.

More shenanigans await as we aim to continue fucking with Big Oil and its lacky politicians.