The Keystone XL pipeline: Youth protests

Four days after I moved to Washington, DC, on 28 August, 2014,I was fortunate enough to find my way into the 50th anniversary celebrations of the March on Washington.  While the event was no protest, the goal was clear--direct political messaging, in this case about the confluences of racial and economic injustice.  That day provided my first taste of attending more politically charged events in this city.  Fast forward through a heated anti-drone summit by CODEPINK and a peace vigil in solidarity against the Keystone XL pipeline to today, when several hundred youth activists marched from the Red Square at Georgetown University to The White House to engage in civil disobedience dissent action to send a simple, concise, and extremely political message to President Barack Obama--say no to the construction of the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Saying no to the pipeline sets the stage for a course correction on President Obama's "all of the above" energy policy, which is basically this: we can combat the social and ecological dimensions of climate change while still expanding offshore oil drilling, promoting fracking, continuing mountaintop removal, and becoming even bigger trade partners with Canada by importing their ecologically devastating oil.  How such an energy policy can reduce America's dependence on fossil fuels and lighten this culture's burden on the world I do not know, but at the very least saying no to the pipeline is a serious symbolic commitment that activists can gather around to wean this country and the world of toxic and climate change-inducing fossil fuel energy.

Today, I am energized by the spirit of young climate change activists who came in buses and cars from all across the country and who zip-tied themselves to The White House fence and got arrested, with the intention of showing President Obama that the youth cares deeply about the causes and effects of climate change--physical, economic, social, political, ecological.  I thus revive this blog from its hibernation by focusing my next several posts on the Keystone XL pipeline, both to educate myself and to provide you with information about the spectrum of issues that tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline affects.

My next posts will focus on:

• the science and engineering behind tar sands extraction, processing, and transport
• a brief foray into the social implications of tar sands
• the ecological impacts of tar sands, now and possible
• arrest, direct action, and the legal issues surrounding arrest for civil disobedience and dissent
• the climate change movement's relation to other social movements
• the State Department's environmental impact statement 

Responses to this culture's addiction to oil cannot look at alternatives that continue to bolster the political, economic, and technological paradigm that has us locked in to degrading our Earth to the benefit of a few.  Tar sands represent the very worst things about the risks our government and corporations are willing to take to keep themselves in power.  Just take a look at a very real and ongoing tar sands disaster on the Kalamazoo River--here, here, here and here--in my state of Michigan.  More than three years and close to a billion dollars in clean-up efforts later, who knows when the nightmare will end. 

For now, I leave you with photos I took today during the dissent.

Little girls? No. Strong women

I entered a session titled Change starts with a passion at the Ann Arbor Reskilling Festival yesterday and had no idea who I was about to meet.

As we have seen with the Civil Rights Movement, the protests against the Vietnam War, as well as with the Occupy movement, it is through youth that leadership is exemplified. This is because it is the youth that are most imaginative, the most free in spirit, and most inquisitive and questioning about norms. They are, therefore, the most discerning about the realities of our actions. (More about this soon.) But many times, when we think of "the youth", we think of college students and the recently employed. We tend not to think of middle schoolers and high schoolers. But we ought to...

What started off as an effort to understand why orangutans are endangered has turned into a massive campaign to rid our food of palm oil, the plantations of which are also destroying biologically diverse habitats and releasing massive amounts of greenhouse gases through deforestation and peat demolition. This effort started off five years ago, when two Ann Arbor seventh graders, Madison Vorva (on right in picture below) and Rhiannon Tomtishen (on left), took on an advocacy project as girl scouts. They realised that Girl Scouts cookies contain palm oil, and have since been on a mission to rid our foods of palm oil.

Rhiannon and Madison (from a2reskilling.org)

I met Madison, now a junior in high school, yesterday, and was awestruck and inspired by her maturity, her confidence, her passion. It takes a whole lot of all of those things to create a movement and endure the subsequent downs and challenges. Five years in, their movement is really gaining traction.

I am hoping to bring them to speak to students here at the university. There's so much to learn from these strong women. More thoughts soon. For now, check out their TEDxRedmond talk.

Words of wisdom from Grace Lee Boggs

It is just a couple of days ago that I wrote about how special interest and vested interest blurs the wisdom of old age. One thing I hope for all of us is the courage to recognise, accept, understand, be introspective, and consequently outwardly changed when we are at fault. I know of several elders, professors included, who were more radical in their youth than in their old days, and one man who has receded so much in his idealism that the status quo seems more reasonable. I hope that we can continue to be as enthusiastic about our visions for a changed world as we grow in age, and not throw up our hands and say of the problems we've created, "Well, it is just human nature...things will never change." I hope we can all strive to be like Grace Lee Boggs, a ninety-six year-old activist and philosopher from the most fascinating of places, Detroit. Take five minutes and listen to her words of wisdom, and although they were directed towards the Occupy movement, they transcend the movement.

Grace Lee Boggs' message to Occupy Wall Street - 10/9/11 from American Revolutionary on Vimeo.

Grace Lee Boggs' Message to Occupy Wall Street Part 2 from American Revolutionary on Vimeo.

When special interest supersedes wisdom

I grew up in a culture that respects elders--their wisdom, their advice, their experience. I believe that certain ways of thinking and discerning only emerge with age, whether it is being able to see through people's arguments, being able to read between the lines of what people say and do. I realise more and more each day that much of the advice that my parents gave me when I was young was spot on. I just wasn't mature enough to understand what they were saying.

On the other hand, we have a world run by elder people that are stuck in their ways, whether it is neoliberal economics, cost-benefit analysis, American domination, and global competitiveness. We are also bound to national and international institutions and regimes that were founded in times when people had drastically different mentalities, institutions such as the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and even the United Nations. Even in most all journalism that I read, in such media outlets like the BBC and the New York Times, the way in which situations here and abroad are analysed is one that treats the world as some sort of infinite reserve of material, a world in which a material and industrial economy can supposedly grow forever.

What has brought us to this point, ecologically, and consequently socially, and consequently economically, is a truly old way of thinking, further influenced by special interests. There seems to be a contradiction then between the wisdom that comes with old age, and the way in which special interests seem to supersede that wisdom. No old person in his or her right mind would say that the way we are treating the environment and ourselves is in the best interest of longevity of the ecosystems that comprise the biophysical world. But this seems to keep happening. We are constantly protesting decisions to go to war, decisions to let financial institutions off the hook, decisions to build a pipeline carrying tar sands across a continent. And that is probably why Abigail Borah, a student from Middlebury College, felt it necessary to take a stand in Durban a couple of weeks ago.



We can see clearly a generational gap, possibly one that existed in times of great change, like, for example, during the Civil Rights movement. This isn't to say that there aren't any elders who are thinking radically differently. But it seems that the world's environment and climate are changing faster than ever before, and that we cannot wait until 2020 for some "meaningful" climate commitment from nations. While the elders won't be alive in twenty or thirty or forty years, the youth will be, and they are the ones that will be faced with the difficult tasks of changing infrastructure, of adapting to a changing climate, of likely dealing with mass migration.

It is very difficult to sit back and hope that the elders running this country will change the way they think and behave. While working in the lab a couple of weeks ago, Scott said to me that it will truly take another twenty or thirty years for a generation of thinkers and actors to get into positions of influence to make meaningful changes in policy and culture. How do the youth navigate this? What might the youth be able to do to counter special interests? And how might the youth remain "youthful" in the future, open to changing ourselves in response to a changing world?