This Changes Everything (52 page)

In October 2010, a small crew of local activists took me on a drive along the part of Highway 12 that the so-called big rigs would have to travel. We went past groves of cedar and Douglas fir and glowing, golden-tipped larch, past signs for moose crossings and under towering rock
outcroppings. As we drove, with fall leaves rushing downstream in Lolo Creek next to the road, my guides scouted locations for an “action camp” they were planning. It would bring together anti–tar sands activists from Alberta, ranchers, and Indigenous tribes all along the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline, and locals interested in stopping the big rigs on Highway 12. They discussed a friend
who had offered to set up a mobile kitchen and the logistics of camping in early winter. Marty Cobenais, then the pipeline campaigner for the Indigenous Environmental Network, explained how all
the campaigns are connected. “If they can stop the rigs here then it affects the [production] capacity in the tar sands to get the oil to put in the pipelines.” Then he smiles. “That’s why we are building
a Cowboys and Indians alliance.”
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Following a long fight, the rigs were ultimately barred from this section of Highway 12 after the Nez Perce tribe and the conservation group Idaho Rivers United filed a joint lawsuit. “They made a huge mistake trying to go through western Montana and Idaho,” Alexis Bonogofsky, a Billings, Montana, based goat rancher and activist, told me. “It’s been fun to watch.”
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An alternate route for the huge trucks was eventually found, this one taking them through eastern Oregon. Another bad move. When the first load made its way through the state in December 2013, it was stopped several times by activist lockdowns and blockades. Members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, objecting to the loads crossing their ancestral lands, led a prayer
ceremony near the second shipment in Pendleton, Oregon. And though local concerns about the safety of the big rigs were real, many participants were clear that they were primarily motivated by fears over what these machines were helping to do to our climate once they arrived at their destination. “This has gone too far,” said one Umatilla blockader before she was arrested. “Our children are going
to die from this.”
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Indeed, the oil and coal industries are no doubt cursing the day that they ever encountered the Pacific Northwest—Oregon, Washington State, and British Columbia. There the sector has had to confront a powerful combination of resurgent Indigenous Nations, farmers, and fishers whose livelihoods depend on clean water and soil, and a great many relative newcomers who have chosen
to live in that part of the world because of its natural beauty. It is also, significantly, a region where the local environmental movement never fully succumbed to the temptations of the corporate partnership model, and where there is a long and radical history of land-based direct action to stop clear-cut logging and dirty mining.

This has meant fierce opposition to tar sands pipelines, as
we have seen. And the deep-seated ecological values of the Pacific Northwest have also become the bane of the U.S. coal industry in recent years. Between grass
roots resistance to building new coal-fired plants, and pressure to shut down old ones, as well as the rapid rise of natural gas, the market for coal in the United States has collapsed. In a span of just four years, between 2008 and 2012,
coal’s share of U.S. electricity generation plummeted from about 50 percent to 37 percent. That means that if the industry is to have a future, it needs to ship U.S. coal to parts of the world that still want it in large quantities. That means Asia. (It’s a strategy that global energy expert and author Michael T. Klare has compared to the one tobacco companies began to employ a few decades ago:
“Just as health officials now condemn Big Tobacco’s emphasis on cigarette sales to poor people in countries with inadequate health systems,” he writes, “so someday Big Energy’s new ‘smoking’ habit will be deemed a massive threat to human survival.”) The problem for the coal companies is that U.S. ports along the Pacific Coast are not equipped for such large coal shipments, which means that the industry
needs to build new terminals. It also needs to dramatically increase the number of trains carrying coal from the massive mines of the Powder River Basin, in Wyoming and Montana, to the Northwest.
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As with the tar sands pipelines and the heavy hauls, the greatest obstacle to the coal industry’s plans to reach the sea has been the defiant refusal of residents of the Pacific Northwest to play along.
Every community in Washington State and Oregon that was slated to become the new home of a coal export terminal rose up in protest, fueled by health concerns about coal dust, but also, once again, by larger concerns about the global impact of burning all that coal.

This was expressed forcefully by KC Golden, who has helped to usher in many of the most visionary climate policies in Washington
State, when he wrote: “The great Pacific Northwest is not a global coal depot, a pusher for fossil fuel addiction, a logistics hub for climate devastation. We’re the last place on Earth that should settle for a tired old retread of the false choice between jobs and the environment. Coal export is fundamentally inconsistent with our vision and values. It’s not just a slap in the face to ‘green’ groups.
It’s a moral disaster and an affront to our identity as a community.”
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After all, what is the point of installing solar panels and rainwater barrels if they are going to be coated in coal dust?

What these campaigns are discovering is that while it’s next to impos
sible to win a direct fight against the fossil fuel companies on their home turf, the chances of victory greatly increase when the
battleground extends into a territory where the industry is significantly weaker—places where nonextractive ways of life still flourish and where residents (and politicians) are less addicted to petro and coal dollars. And as the corroded tentacles of extreme energy reach out in all directions like a giant metal spider, the industry is pushing into a whole lot of those kinds of places.

Something
else is going on too. As resistance to the extractive industries gains ground along these far-flung limbs, it is starting to spread back to the body of carbon country—lending new courage to resist even in those places that the fossil fuel industry thought it had already conquered.

The city of Richmond, California, across the bay from San Francisco, provides a glimpse of how quickly the political
landscape can change. Predominantly African American and Latino, the city is a rough-edged, working-class pocket amidst the relentless tech-fuelled gentrification of the Bay Area. In Richmond, the big employer isn’t Google, it’s Chevron, whose huge refinery local residents blame for myriad health and safety problems, from elevated asthma rates to frequent accidents at the hulking facility (including
a massive fire in 1999 that sent hundreds to hospital). And yet as the city’s largest business and employer Chevron still had the power to call the shots.
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No more. In 2009 community members successfully blocked a plan by Chevron to significantly expand its oil refinery, which could have allowed the plant to process heavier, dirtier crudes such as bitumen from the tar sands. A coalition of environmental
justice groups challenged the expansion in the streets and in the courts, arguing that it would further pollute Richmond’s air. In the end, a superior court ruled against Chevron, citing a wholly inadequate environmental impact report (which “fails as an informational document,” the judge tartly remarked). Chevron appealed, but in 2010 it lost again. “This is a victory for the grassroots,
and the people who have been suffering the health impacts of the refinery for the past 100 years,” said Asian Pacific Environmental Network senior organizer Torm Nompraseurt.
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Richmond is not the only place dominated by Big Oil finding new reserves of courage to fight back. As the anti–tar sands movement spreads
through North America and Europe, Indigenous communities in the belly of the beast—the
ones who were raising the alarm about the dangers of the tar sands long before large environmental groups showed any interest in the issue—have also been emboldened to go further than ever. They’ve launched new lawsuits for violations of their land rights, with potentially grave ramifications for industry’s access to carbon reserves, and delegations from deeply impacted First Nations communities
are now constantly traveling the globe to alert more people to the devastation of their territories in the hopes that more arteries will be severed. One of these activists is Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a mesmerizing speaker with an understated courage who has spent much of her early thirties on the road, showing ugly slides of oil spills and ravaged landscapes and describing the silent war the
oil and gas industry is waging on her people, the Lubicon Lake First Nation. “People are listening now,” she told me, with tears in her eyes in the summer of 2013. “But it took a long time for people to get to that place.” And this, she said, means that “there is hope. But it can be pretty dire sometimes in Alberta.”
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What is clear is that fighting a giant extractive industry on your own can
seem impossible, especially in a remote, sparsely populated location. But being part of a continent-wide, even global, movement that has the industry surrounded is a very different story.

This networking and cross-pollinating is usually invisible—it’s a mood, an energy that spreads from place to place. But for a brief time in September 2013, Blockadia’s web of inspiration was made visible. Five
carvers from the Lummi Nation in Washington State—the coastal tribe that is leading the fight against the largest proposed coal export terminal on a contested piece of the West Coast—showed up in Otter Creek, Montana. They had traveled roughly 1,300 kilometers from their home territory of mountainous temperate rainforest and craggy Pacific beaches to southeastern Montana’s parched grasses and gentle
hills, carrying with them a twenty-two-foot cedar totem pole, strapped to a flatbed truck. Otter Creek is the site of a planned massive coal mine and the Lummi visitors stood on that spot, which until recently had been written off as doomed, with more than a hundred people from the nearby Northern Cheyenne Reservation, as well as a group of local cattle ranchers. Together, they explored
the ways
in which they had been brought together by the ambitions of the carbon frenzy.

If the Otter Creek mine were built in the Powder River Basin, it would compromise the water and air for the ranchers and the Northern Cheyenne, and the railway transporting the coal to the west coast could disturb the Cheyenne’s ancient burial grounds. The export port, meanwhile, was set to be built on one of the Lummi’s
ancient burial grounds, and the coal would then be carried on barges that would disrupt their fishing areas and potentially threaten many livelihoods.

The group stood in the valley by the banks of Otter Creek, under a sunny sky with hawks flying overhead, and blessed the totem pole with pipe smoke, vowing to fight together to keep the coal under their feet in the ground, and to keep both the
railway and port from being built. The Lummi carvers then strapped the totem pole—which they had named Kwel hoy’ or “We Draw the Line”—back onto the truck and took it on a sixteen-day journey to eight other communities, all of whom found themselves in the path of coal trains, big rigs, or tar sands pipelines and oil tankers. There were ceremonies at every stop, as the visitors and their hosts—both
Native and non-Native—together drew connections among their various local battles against the extractive industries. The journey ended on Tsleil-Waututh land in North Vancouver, a pivotal community in the fight against increased oil tanker traffic. There the totem pole was permanently planted, looking out at the Pacific.

While in Montana, Lummi master carver Jewell Praying Wolf James explained
the purpose of the long journey: “We’re concerned about protecting the environment as well as people’s health all the way from the Powder River to the West Coast. . . . We’re traveling across the country to help unify people’s voices. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you are at or what race you are—red, black, white or yellow—we’re all in this together.”
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This kind of alliance building
among the various outposts of Blockadia has proven the movement’s critics wrong time and time again. When the cam
paign against the Keystone XL pipeline began to gather momentum, several high-profile pundits insisted that it was all a waste of valuable time and energy. The oil would get out through another route regardless, and in the grand scheme of things the carbon it would carry represented
little more than “a rounding error,” as Jonathan Chait wrote in
New York
magazine. Better, they argued, to fight for a carbon tax, or for stronger EPA regulations, or for a reincarnation of cap-and-trade.
New York Times
columnist Joe Nocera went so far as to call the strategy “utterly boneheaded,” and accused James Hansen, whose congressional testimony launched the modern climate movement, of
“hurting the very cause he claims to care so much about.”
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What we now know is that Keystone was always about much more than a pipeline. It was a new fighting spirit, and one that is contagious. One battle doesn’t rob from another but rather causes battles to multiply, with each act of courage, and each victory, inspiring others to strengthen their resolve.

Beyond the
fossil fuel industry’s pace of expansion, and its forays into hostile territory, something else has propelled this movement forward in recent years. That is the widespread conviction that today’s extractive activities are significantly higher risk than their predecessors: tar sands oil is unquestionably more disruptive and damaging to local ecosystems than conventional crude. Many believe it to
be more dangerous to transport, and once spilled harder to clean up. A similar risk escalation is present in the shift to fracked oil and gas; in the shift from shallow to deepwater drilling (as the BP disaster showed); and most dramatically, in the move from warm water to Arctic drilling. Communities in the path of unconventional energy projects are convinced they are being asked to risk a hell of
a lot, and much of the time they are being offered very little in return for their sacrifice, whether lasting jobs or significant royalties.