Wild Idaho Rising Tide advances climate justice by challenging dirty energy corporations in the streets and the courts. We need you by our sides, both physically and fiscally, to confront accelerating invasions of wild and rural lands by tar sands, natural gas, oil, and coal exploiters and other drilling and mining ventures. Your donation goes a long way to help our grassroots collective of activists cover legal fees, materials costs, and outreach expenses. Give today and tell your friends about the crucial work you support. Thanks for the changes we make together!

Support Grassroots Resistance to Dirty Corporate Energy!

Wild Idaho Rising Tide confronts the root causes

of climate change with and for you!

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Wild Idaho Rising Tide

301 N. First Avenue 209B, Sandpoint, Idaho 83864

2011 Donation Appeal:

Support WIRT, One of ‘Ten Small Green Groups That Make a Big Difference’!

Congratulations and happy new year, dear friends and supporters!

2011 has been a truly remarkable year for activism, embodying one of the most outstanding expressions of our collective commitment to environmental and social justice ever displayed in American and Idaho history.  And all of our protesting, speaking, letter writing, political maneuvering, and relentless agitation have not gone unnoticed.  On the eve of Christmas weekend 2011, our group of dirty energy dissenters was recognized as one of the Ten Small Green Groups That Make a Big Difference by the widely-read, progressive, online newsletter Counterpunch!  Imagine that only 19 months ago, many of us had never heard of a “megaload” and that only last January 17, we held our first direct action training and did not co-found our collective until March 31 (when we plan to host a one-year anniversary celebration in 2012)!

In conferring his esteem for grassroots assertiveness, Counterpunch writer and political analyst Jeffrey St. Clair acknowledged the earnest efforts of Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) and our appreciated peers with a nationwide fundraising pitch for year-end contributions.  He proclaimed that we are among

…Ten groups who stand up for what they stand on, who put protection of the environment before politics.  They all operate close to the bone; their meager budgets are spent on activism and litigation, not on self-promoting direct mail operations, glitzy offices, or bloated administrative expenses.  These groups will put your money to work defending the planet.  Now pony up!

In his description of our initiatives, partially quoted from our web pages, Mr. St. Clair alludes to our position as “the second front in the fight against the tar sands oil frenzy in Canada,” although we all know well where the front line runs down Washington Street in Moscow.

Activated by his October 2010 visit to Idaho and his December 6, 2011, nationally broadcast conversations with Lin Laughy and Helen Yost on KPFA, only four hours before the worst megaload collision yet, Flashpoints radio show host Dennis Bernstein passionately asked his December 28 guest, radical philosopher and writer Derrick Jensen, how Moscow activists can take practical actions to halt megaloads without risking our lives, bodies, and freedom (between 39:46 and 46:00 and beyond at KPFA).  Empathetic of the urgency, danger, injustices, and despair we have endured from the lopsided power differential between dismissed rural Idahoans and the combination of brute ExxonMobil corporate force and American denial and despondency, Dennis paraphrased “Truth has few friends, and those few are suicides,” as he mentioned Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Judi Bari, and Moscow protesters in one breath.  Reluctant to offer us direct advice in response, Derrick maintained that we ALL need to start thinking like warriors and building broadly supportive resistance that understands and implements asymmetric warfare tactics within the ongoing, pervasive, industrial siege of the Earth’s places and people.

Even before Counterpunch and Flashpoints applauded our worthily persistent blood, sweat, and tears, our seemingly desperate, obscure rampages against Big Oil were steadily gathering broader attention, thanks to the encouraging and enlightening support of our amazing network of fellow regional activists and distant facebook friends.  On December 19, a former editor of the Earth First! Journal invited us to submit an extensive article about our work and allies for an anthology about land-based struggles, Grabbing Back.  He noted that he has been “particularly amazed by your awesome actions against the tar sands highway expansion project” and sent a list of the authors who have also committed to contributing to this book.  Our essay Resistance to Alberta Tar Sands Transports in Idaho and Beyond will share some written space in sections addressing the land ethics, displacement, organization, and autonomy of indigenous and resistance cultures confronting industry, agriculture, and colonization with writers ranging from Ward Churchill, Stephanie Mills, and Vandana Shiva to on-the-ground organizers in Appalachia, East Harlem, and the Gulf Coast (author list available upon request).  While we are not the first or only vanguard against the onslaught of the millennia-old oppression of peoples and places, the question of how we will work to slow and stop Alberta tar sands transportation projects through not just our cherished scenic rivers and wildlands and hometown streets but through all of the Northwest is obviously significant to concerned citizens beyond our heroic efforts to impede the biggest mine on Earth.

How will we resolve during 2012 our quandaries that ponder and refute dirty energy’s ubiquitous impacts on the viability of current civilization and the fate of future life?  Like any honorable human endeavor, our work will require the rigorous sacrifice and perseverance of not just a few people, as we are so inclined to assume of conservation professionals, but of all of us standing up and speaking out in the streets and in the courts.  Although we often forget this strategic fact hidden from our too comfortable American lives, morally defensible change only arises from among those members of society who physically understand the wrongs perpetuated by its majority, from those who suffer its greatest detriments.  We are fortunate that our good consciences call us to halt the world’s largest industrial project, an opportunity that has literally landed on our doorsteps.  How we react to this challenge reflects not only our community character but the compassion of our entire culture.  If we are to succeed in checking climate change, we must redouble our outreach across the Northwest and the country, as we seek support for our legal and direct actions against tar sands megaloads and pipelines, natural gas fracking, and Asian coal exports.

For now: congratulations!  You and all of us activists should be proud and elated to receive national recognition and exposure as we celebrate our 2011 successes and reinvigorate our battles against megaloads, fracking, and coal trains in Idaho.  Wild Idaho Rising Tide is infinitely grateful to work with our colleagues throughout the region and within the international Rising Tide network.  Over the last year, our three dozen demonstrations have postponed tar sands shipments and resulting facilities development by redirecting megaload traffic to Highway 395 in Washington, by influencing Imperial Oil to request a modified injunction in Montana to send their reduced height modules up Highway 12, and by delaying transports numerous undisclosed times when Mammoet-sponsored city and state police have been unavailable to protect their payloads.  Not including additional reimbursements to Idaho state troopers and megaload layover guards, WIRT brought over $450,000 into the regional economy during 2011, from Imperial Oil/Mammoet funding for public/private security against our staged and potential actions at the Port of Lewiston and Moscow.  But most significantly, together we expanded awareness, interest, and participation in restricting and abandoning tar sands operations and in activating our American liberties long before Keystone XL and Occupy demonstrations were even conceived.

But active WIRT members have also borne the disproportionately arduous and onerous burden of defending our globe from the ravages of industrial giants.  All of the ten local arrestees except the two megaload monitors, whose cases await February hearings, have accepted reduced charges and sentences and have collectively spent about $5000 on bonding fees, court costs, citation fines, property restitution, and attorney expenses, all donated to our cause.  The conflicts, challenges, and distractions of coordinating our group endeavors have also compromised the employment and education of several WIRT organizers.  Jeffrey St. Clair was correct in his assessment of our organizational resources: we have sparse income, cannot replicate the arrogant excesses of larger non-profits, and only want to literally “save the planet” while we can, despite personal hardships.

Obviously, your generosity could evoke the karmic miracle of WIRT rewards that would offset corporate money’s stranglehold on our shared vision of a sustainable future.  We need the active involvement of all of our friends (including you!), both physically and fiscally, as we directly confront the invasions of oil companies on Alberta tar sands supply corridors, of natural gas fracking enterprises in Idaho aquifers, and of coal export ventures along rail and port routes.  Please join us in protests in Moscow and throughout the Northwest and Northern Rockies and share your $upport of Wild Idaho Rising Tide by mail or online at our website.  Your donations to WIRT strengthen our community outreach and direct actions that additionally benefit our economy.  We greatly appreciate your many contributions to our ongoing, principled opposition to corporate business-as-usual, and we enthusiastically anticipate accomplishing and enjoying together even more effective and meaningful victories in 2012.

In sincere solidarity,

Helen Yost

Wild Idaho Rising Tide