[Climate Reality Check] National Call: Escalating Action in Solidarity with Standing Rock
Climate Reality Check has just announced:
Dear Friends,
On Thursday, November 17, at 3 pm Eastern / 2 pm Central / 1 pm Mountain / 12 noon Pacific time, the Climate Reality Check team will hold the latest in our series of national conference calls to help strengthen community organizing on climate, entitled:
Stopping the Flow: Direct Action to Shut Down Pipelines
RSVP for the call: https://goo.gl/forms/rhOoL59J3QMhhG7C2
Ten climate activists were arrested on October 11th for attempting to shut down all tar sands oil coming into the United States from Canada by manually turning off pipelines in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and Washington State. They cut chains and turned manual safety valves to stop the flow through the pipelines.
The activists issued a statement saying the action was in support of the call for International Days of Prayer and Action for Standing Rock.
Join a Standing Rock solidarity event near you on November 15.
Action in D.C. on November 14.
They also called on President Obama to use his emergency powers to keep the pipelines closed and mobilize for the extraordinary shift away from fossil fuels now required to avert catastrophe.
Those charged for the action were: Emily Johnston, Annette Klapstein, Ken Ward, Michael Foster, Sam Jessup, Reed Ingalls, and Leonard Higgins. Two video documentarians, Deia Schlosberg and Steve Liptay, were also charged. Charges brought included trespass, burglary, sabotage and assemblage of saboteurs, theft of property, and conspiracy to tamper with or damage a public service. Some are facing 45 years in prison.
On our November 17 call two of the arrestees, Ken Ward and video documentarian Deia Schlosberg, will explain:
why they decided to do this action
- what their plans are as they face trial
- what has been the response from others in the climate movement
- what is the significance of the arrest and charging of videographers
- what they hope will be the impact of this action
Even if you can’t make it on the 17th, register to receive a recording of the call.
Bios of our presenters:
Deia Schlosberg is a video documentary maker. Schlosberg directed Backyard, a documentary film about hydraulic fracturing. She produced the Oscar Award nominated 2016 documentary by Josh Fox, How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change. Shlosberg won the National Geographic Adventurer of the Year award in 2009, after spending two years trekking 7,800 miles along the spine of the Andes Mountains, together with Gregg Treinish. Five years later, in 2014, she won the Best Documentary Award and the Bricker Humanitarian Award from the Student Emmy Awards in 2014.
Ken Ward is a co-founder of the Climate Disobedience Center, with Tim DeChristopher, Marla Marcum and Jay O'Hara. In 2013, Ken and Jay O'Hara anchored their lobster boat in the path of a coal ship off the Brayton Point coal plant, in Somerset, Massachusetts. A year later, Bristol County District Attorney made headline news by dropping criminal charges, saying he agreed with Ken and Jay and marched with them in the September, 2014 NYC Climate March. Ken served in leadership positions and co-founded a number of public interest and environmental organization, including New Jersey PIRG, Greenpeace USA, National Environmental Law Center, Fund for Public Interest Research, U.S. PIRG and Environment America.
Talk to you soon!
The CRC team* – Allison, Nancy, Jean and Ted
*The CRC team is Allison Fisher, Public Citizen, Nancy LaPlaca, NC WARN, Jean Su, the Center for Biological Diversity and Ted Glick, Beyond Extreme Energy and movement builder.
Have an idea or speaker for a call? Email Allison at afisher@citizen.org
admin
Climate Reality Check's Allison Fisher has shared the following after report from the call, including additional resources, a link to the audio recording, and an article by Ellen Barfield:
Thank you for your interest in the Climate Reality Check Coalition's call:
- Earthworks, FracTracker, & CATF 'Oil & Gas Threat Map': http://oilandgasthreatmap.com/
- FracTracker Alliance (great maps and other resources at state, regional and national levels): https://www.fractracker.org/
- Earthjustice Oil Refinery Map: https://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v4/earthjustice.k117n6hi.html?access_token=pk.eyJ1IjoiZWFydGhqdXN0aWNlIiwiYSI6IlU0cEpmQkUifQ.ZwPIj7SlWKasFQMrG6sxGQ#3/46.26/-120.85
- National Pipeline Mapping System (not perfect but it does help!): https://www.npms.phmsa.dot.gov/
- Article on Necessity Defense (below)
DISOBEDIENCE OR RESISTANCE
Ellen Barfield
The theory and practice of nonviolent direct action, disrupting the system enough to risk arrest, to challenge war and warmaking, are a living, evolving issue. Some frequent arrest-riskers have experienced a growing frustration with the inaccuracy of the still widely used wording "civil disobedience".
"Disobedience" means breaking a specific law which is or embodies the problem, such as African Americans breaking racist Jim Crow municipal ordinances by sitting in at lunch counters legally prohibited from serving them, or Indians processing their own salt from sea water or spinning thread and weaving khadi cloth instead of buying them as legally required from the occupying British. While challenging oppressive laws when possible is perfectly valid, the complex web of laws and policies governments use to prepare and perpetrate war do not lend themselves to direct breaking.
Peace and anti-war activists contend that what governments and corporations do to prepare and perpetrate war is illegal, and they consider their own actions of civil resistance to the governments or corporations as obeying higher laws, be they international treaties and human rights agreements, or national constitutions, or religious tenets, or all of those. Civil resistance actionists uphold the Nuremberg principals that citizens have responsibilities to resist illegal government crimes of aggression, act out of the necessity to technically break a minor trespass or municipal order rule to prevent a much more serious tragedy or crime, or obey such religious admonitions as "Love one another" and "Thou shalt not kill."
The issue is more important than just a semantic quibble for several reasons. Prosecutors have argued in court that, if the protesters were doing civil disobedience, then they already admitted they broke the law, when civil resisters contend they are responsibly pointing out and objecting to law-breaking by their government. Classic civil disobedience includes accepting draconian jail sentences and filling the jails.
Resistance includes legally challenging the government's behavior, and urging juries and judges to uphold the citizen right and responsibility to protest government wrongdoing by acquitting accused resisters. Juries are much more likely to be convinced by these arguments, since judges are usually beholden to the government officials who appointed them, so actions serious enough to get jury trials are necessary for activists working to establish legal precedent that resistance actions are legal.
Law professor John Alan Cohan, in his unfortunately-named but still useful 2007 law review article "Civil Disobedience and the Necessity Defense", details a series of legal cases, many of which resulted in acquittal for the activists who argued necessity or Nuremberg defenses. During the 1980's, Latin America, South Africa and Central Intelligence Agency wrongdoing generated cases of blockading weapons plants and military bases and Congressional office sit-ins, many of which saw juries acquit the activists based on their necessity and Nuremberg arguments.
A more recent 2008 Maine case involving the occupation of Senator Susan Collins's local office to protest the Iraq and Afghanistan wars saw 6 of the 13 protesters go to trial and discuss their "state of mind" opposing war and trying to save lives when they acted, as their attorneys argued they had the right to do. The jury acquitted all of them, and noted in discussion afterward they had learned a lot about the wars and appreciated the activists challenging the state.
Even when acquittal does not happen, sentencing can show sympathy, as in a 2007 case where activists protesting the Iraq war occupied Colorado Representative Salazar's office after long trying to get a meeting with him. After the activists readily admitted on the witness stand they stayed past the closing time of the office, but argued they were trying to save lives, the jury convicted the protesters of trespass, but the judge suspended $50 fines and court costs.
More serious actions involving destruction of weapons, called Plowshares (or Ploughshares in Europe) from the Biblical injunction to beat swords into plowshares, seldom see acquittal and can result in years of jail time and thousands of dollars of restitution. But even Plowshares actions have recently resulted in activists victories, at least outside the U.S.
After doing 2 million pounds damage to a US warplane refueling at Shannon, Ireland, Airport in 2003, 5 activists were acquitted by the jury at trial in 2006 after arguing that Ireland is a neutral country and U.S. troops and military cargo bound for Iraq should not be hosted there and paid for with Irish funds.
Three New Zealand (Aoteoroa) activists were acquitted in March, 2010, after an April, 2008, action destroying the vinyl dome cover of a radio transmitter dish at the Waihopai Echelon spy base where messages are intercepted and transmitted to the U.S. National Security Agency to facilitate U.S. military activity in Iraq. The activists argued they had a "claim of right", like the U.S. necessity, to expose the spying and challenge Aoteoroa's connection to the Iraq war.
In June 2010 five British activists were acquitted of doing 180,000 pounds of damage in January, 2009, during the Operation Cast Lead Israeli attack on Gaza, to a EDO MBM weapons factory in Brighton, England, manufacturing items to be sold to the Israeli military and used in the Palestinian occupied territories. The activists argued that the corporation was misusing export licenses to ship arms illegally, and they used a "lawful excuse" defense of their actions, comparable to the U.S. necessity defense.
While occasional courtroom exoneration for activists the government wants to punish is satisfying, and "getting off" can encourage others to also act, the war machine mostly rolls on, perhaps slowed slightly by the activist grit in the cogs, but not much. An exciting recent development though, shows exactly what activists are working for. The actions damaging US warplanes at Shannon Airport to dramatize that neutral Ireland should not be hosting soldiers and facilitating transport of war materiel, and acquittal of the activists, seem to have helped the brand-new Irish government decide to uphold the 1907 Hague Convention which allows neutral countries to prevent the use of their territory for warmaking, as Switzerland has for years.