As North America turns back toward the sun with the Winter Solstice at 9:30 pm on Wednesday, December 21, concerned citizens and Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) activists turn our sights away from the dirty oil, coal, and gas we collectively dig from the ground toward the abundant energy that fills our skies with light, wind, and residual carbon.  Please join us for a mass exercise of our First Amendment rights to re-envision and re-empower our material and political lives as we confront the corporate power, government complicity, and industrial forces that threaten life on our home planet.

The tar sands are America’s dirty secret and the reason that Canada has abandoned the Kyoto Protocol.  We consume 97 percent of the “oil” produced by assembled megaloads and accompanying energy- and water-intensive processes amidst 250 square miles of a denuded First Nations boreal forest wetland.  Idaho may be the first sacrifice zone of Big Oil expanding transportation to and from the tar sands to world energy markets.  Its wildness should make it the weakest link: Rise up, tough Idahoans, or watch your forests burn!

In the aftermath of two life-threatening megaload-related collisions resulting in three injuries, a delivered pay-off by the hauler Mammoet of our Moscow police officers to guard its payloads from our protests, and our police chief’s mis-proclamation of suspended tar sands module traffic on Highway 95 until mid-January, we have plenty of machines and mechanisms to rage against.  Megaload monitors are meeting outside Moscow City Hall at the corner of Second and Washington streets at 7:30 pm, to observe transport passage between Lewiston and Moscow, and after the Moscow protest at 10:30 pm, to scrutinize movement on Highway 95 between Moscow and Coeur d’Alene.  If demonstrators do not arrive promptly by 9:30 pm, they may miss our group decisions and direct actions.

Although megaload convoys confuse even their drivers, and Idaho State Police escorts have proven incapable of protecting travelers’ safety, access, and rights to our tax-supported infrastructure, two ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil tar sands shipments will depart the Port of Lewiston after 8 pm and separately grind north on Highway 95 until they converge south of Moscow for another trip through the anti-megaload Moscow gauntlet lined with impassioned protesters, excessive city police, and disorganized flaggers.  Carried on conventional truck trailers, the loads weigh 80,000 and 130,000 pounds and measure 24 feet (two lanes) wide, 15 feet high, and 80 and 110 feet long.  Like the other two transports, the module that caused the December 6 wreck and parked five miles north of Moscow over the past two weeks will also rumble toward a staging area east of Coeur d’Alene on Wednesday night.

Please contact WIRT at 208-301-8039, on facebook, or at wild.idaho.rising.tide@gmail.com, and visit the web pages at WildIdahoRisingTide.org, for more information about joining monitoring and protesting efforts as we face off again with Big Oil (http://www.kearltransport.com/2011/12/highway-95-shipment-update-34/).