Hundreds march, tell Rich Fitzgerald “No fracking in Allegheny county parks FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 19, 2013 Contact: Ashley Bittner 412-370-2310 Saturday October 19 – Pittsburgh – At 2pm this afternoon Protect Our Parks will lead a march from the David Lawrence Convention Center to the Allegheny County Courthouse demanding that Rich Fitzgerald revoke the Request for Proposals for fracking in Deer Lakes Park and stop all efforts to open county parks up for fossil fuel extraction. The march is intended as a celebration of the parks which make one of the nations largest county parks systems with over 12,000 acres of protected area. Participants will bring beach balls, fishing poles and other equipment they use to enjoy the parks. “We're here to show Fitzgerald who the parks belong to and what they are really for,” said Ashley Bittner, Protect Our Parks member and life-long Allegheny County resident. “These are public lands for residents and visitors of Allegheny county, and we will not allow them to be exploited for private profit.” Polls from the Post-Gazette and Tribune review show that a majority of county residents oppose fracking in the parks. “The County Council has an opportunity to show that they actually have the interest of the public at heart and distinguish themselves Mr. Fitzgerald who has so blatantly sold out to the gas industry,” continued Bittner. The March coincides with Power Shift 2013 a youth climate conference happening at the David Lawrence Convention Center throughout the weekend. Over 5,000 young people will come to Pittsburgh for a weekend of workshops, trainings, and actions to build the movement to stop climate change. Conference organizers are working to help highlight the work being done locally against fossil fuel extraction and many conference attendees will be joining the march. Keith Brunner of Rising Tide Vermont came to Pittsburgh for the conference, “We stand in solidarity with the Protect Our Parks campaign, knowing that this fight is part of a much larger movement against all forms of fossil fuel extraction which are devastating local communities and the climate.” Power Shift will culminate with a day of action on Monday, October 21 with several actions planned across the city targeting key institutions which are standing in the way of a clean energy future. Today's march will feature a giant puppet show starring a marionette of Rich Fitzgerald controlled by his gas industry manipulators. It will conclude with a rally at the County Courthouse. Speakers will include Protect Our Parks organizers, community members living near county parks, and residents who have been impacted by fracking in other parts of the region. The march is also part of the Global Frackdown, an international day of action against fracking organized by Food and Water Watch. ###
Category: Announcements
Announcements from Rising Tide and Rising Tide affiliates and close allies. An announcement is pretty much never also a reportback!
RTNA Analysis: The Climate Movement’s Pipeline Preoccupation
Originally posted in Earth Island Journal
The Climate Movement’s Pipeline Preoccupation
Yes, Keystone XL is horrible – but so are plenty of other fossil fuel infrastructure plans
By Arielle Klagsbrun, David Osborn, Kirby Spangler and Maryam Adrangi
Architecturally, a keystone is the wedge-shaped piece at the crown of an arch that locks the other pieces in place. Without the keystone, the building blocks of an archway will tumble and fall, with no support system for the weight of the arch. Much of the United States climate movement right now is structured like an archway, with all of its blocks resting on a keystone – President Obama’s decision on the Keystone XL pipeline.
This is a dangerous place to be. Once Barack Obama makes his decision on the pipeline, be it approval or rejection, the keystone will disappear. Without this piece, we could see the weight of the arch tumble down, potentially losing throngs of newly inspired climate activists. As members of Rising Tide North America, a continental network of grassroots groups taking direct action and finding community-based solutions to the root causes of the climate crisis, we believe that to build the climate justice movement we need, we can have no keystone – no singular solution, campaign, project, or decision maker.
The Keystone XL fight was constructed around picking one proposed project to focus on with a clear elected decider, who had campaigned on addressing climate change. The strategy of DC-focused green groups has been to pressure President Obama to say “no” to Keystone by raising as many controversies as possible about the pipeline and by bringing increased scrutiny to Keystone XL through arrestable demonstrations. Similarly, in Canada, the fight over Enbridge’s Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline has unfolded in much the same way, with green groups appealing to politicians to reject Northern Gateway.
However, the mainstream Keystone XL and Northern Gateway campaigns operate on a flawed assumption that the climate movement can compel our elected leaders to respond to the climate crisis with nothing more than an effective communications strategy. Mainstream political parties in both the US and Canada are tied to and dependent on the fossil fuel industry and corporate capitalism. As seen in similar campaigns in 2009 to pass a climate bill in the United States and to ratify an international climate treaty in Copenhagen, the system is rigged against us. Putting Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the keystone of the archway creates a flawed narrative that if we, as grassroots groups, work hard enough to stack the building blocks correctly to support them, then elected officials will do what we want. Social change happens when local communities lead, and only then will politicians follow. While we must name and acknowledge power holders like Obama, our movement must empower local communities to make decisions and take action on the causes of the climate crisis in their backyards.
Because of the assumption that the climate movement can trust even “sympathetic” politicians like Obama, these campaigns rely on lifting up one project above all else. Certain language used has made it seem like Keystone XL is an extreme project, with unusual fraud and other injustices associated with it. Indeed the Keystone XL project is extreme and unjust, as is every fossil fuel project and every piece of the extraction economy. While, for example, the conflict of interests between the State Department, TransCanada and Environmental Resources Management in the United States, and Enbridge and federal politicians in Canada, must be publicized, it should be clear that this government/industry relationship is the norm, not the exception.
The “game over for climate” narrative is also problematic. With both the Keystone and Northern Gateway campaigns, it automatically sets up a hierarchy of projects and extractive types that will inevitably pit communities against each other. Our movement can never question if Keystone XL is worse than Flanagan South (an Enbridge pipeline running from Illinois to Oklahoma), or whether tar sands, fracking or mountaintop removal coal mining is worse. We must reject all these forms of extreme energy for their effects on the climate and the injustices they bring to the people at every stage of the extraction process. Our work must be broad so as to connect fights across the continent into a movement that truly addresses the root causes of social, economic, and climate injustice. We must call for what we really need – the end to all new fossil fuel infrastructure and extraction. The pipeline placed yesterday in British Columbia, the most recent drag lines added in Wyoming, and the fracking wells built in Pennsylvania need to be the last ones ever built. And we should say that.
This narrative has additionally set up a make-or-break attitude about these pipeline fights that risks that the movement will contract and lose people regardless of the decision on them. The Keystone XL and Northern Gateway fights have engaged hundreds of thousands of people, with many embracing direct action and civil disobedience tactics for the first time. This escalation and level of engagement is inspiring. But the absolutist “game over” language chances to lose many of them. If Obama approves the Keystone XL pipeline, what’s to stop many from thinking that this is in fact “game over” for the climate? And if Obama rejects Keystone XL, what’s to stop many from thinking that the climate crisis is therefore solved? We need those using the “game over” rhetoric to lay out the climate crisis’ root causes – because just as one project is not the end of humanity, stopping one project will not stop runaway climate change.
The fights over Keystone XL and Northern Gateway have been undoubtedly inspiring. We are seeing the beginnings of the escalation necessary to end extreme energy extraction, stave off the worst effects of the climate crisis, and make a just transition to equitable societies. Grassroots groups engaging in and training for direct action such as the Tar Sands Blockade, Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance, the Unist’ot’en Camp, and Moccasins on the Ground have shown us how direct action can empower local communities and push establishment green groups to embrace bolder tactics. Our movement is indeed growing, and people are willing to put their bodies on the line; an April poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication found one in eight Americans would engage in civil disobedience around global warming.
However, before the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway mainstream campaigns come to an end, we all must recognize the dangers of having an archway approach to movement building. It is the danger of relying on political power-holders, cutting too narrow campaigns, excluding a systemic analysis of root causes, and, ultimately, failing to create a broad-based movement. We must begin to discuss and develop our steps on how we should shift our strategy, realign priorities, escalate direct action, support local groups and campaigns, and keep as many new activists involved as possible.
We are up against the world’s largest corporations, who are attempting to extract, transport and burn fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate, all as the climate crisis spins out of control. The climate justice movement should have no keystone because we must match them everywhere they are – and they are everywhere. To match them, we need a movement of communities all across the continent and the world taking direct action to stop the extraction industry, finding community-based solutions, and addressing the root causes of the climate crisis.
Arielle Klagsbrun is an organizer with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment and Rising Tide North America, and is a 2013 Brower Youth Award winner. David Osborn is climate organizer with Portland Rising Tide and Rising Tide North America. He is also a faculty member at Portland State University. Maryam Adrangi is a campaigner with the Council of Canadians and an organizer with Rising Tide Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories. Kirby Spangler works with the Castle Mountain Coalition and Alaska Rising Ride.
Climate Activists Are The Real Super-Heroes
Last 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.
Our 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
Sometimes 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.
We 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.