Moscow, Sandpoint, and Spokane activists of Spokane Rising Tide and Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) enthusiastically invite regional community members eager to design and stage public education events and protests to the third annual Stand Up! Fight Back! Against Fossil Fuels in the Northwest! information sharing, brainstorming, and strategizing sessions [1, 2].  Opponents of coal, fracked natural gas and oil, and tar sands extraction and transportation projects are converging from northern Idaho and eastern Washington for these urgent planning gatherings.  Like Missoula comrades of Indian Peoples Action, Blues Skies Campaign, and several other groups, who have been meeting since November 19, participants could talk about campaign strategies, creative tactics, and practical arrangements for upcoming training workshops, panel discussions, and direct actions [3].  The Missoula potluck convergence shared “thoughtful dialogue about stopping TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline and all other forms of extraction,…forming an allegiance among local eco-warriors.”

As we continue to formulate similar ideas, we would appreciate your input at these early December discussions in Sandpoint, Spokane, and Moscow.  Besides together thinking and talking about oil and coal train resistance methods and overdue protests, suggestions for two other possible events have arisen among associates and allies.  Communications have begun about one-day Keystone XL Pledge of Resistance non-violent, direct action trainings in Boise, Spokane, and Missoula, likely on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, January 17 to 19.  Area climate activists would like to contact, invite, and prepare the hundreds of regional folks who signed this pledge, and an indigenous anti-Keystone XL activist and an attorney well-versed in “know your rights” training may share their relevant knowledge at these workshops.  Teaching the first steps of the safe, staged kinds of demonstrations that an otherwise reticent public idolizes could lead to later, greater leaps of faith on tracks, roads, and pipelines and ultimately to stronger, regional, anti-fossil fuels activism.  We also anticipate engaging in frontline, on-the-ground resistance along the Montana path of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, if (when!) the U.S. Congress escalates this onslaught in January 2015.

Another possibility entails a public education event like a panel discussion in the Sandpoint/Spokane area, to inform, recruit, and activate local rail line residents for further issue and action involvement.  Because Rising Tide and allied direct action groups practice methods that make the mainstream organizations and topic experts of a potential panel squirm just contemplating and typically, endlessly rejecting them, hosting such a proposed event could prove logistically complex and difficult [4].  For instance, government officials may decline to participate, averting public perceptions of association with radicals, and we will never invite industry to such conversations.  But our regional groups must expand the interest, imagination, and passion of the fossil fuels opposition, with hopes that  bringing more people together to consider train accidents and responses will eventually lead to more numerous and widespread actions spurred by a greater sense of personal knowledge, responsibility, and empowerment.

Gathering Dates & Locations

* Monday, December 8, 7 to 9:15 pm at Second Avenue Pizza, 215 South Second Avenue in Sandpoint, Idaho

* Tuesday, December 9, 6 to 7:45 pm at the Downtown Spokane Public Library, 906 West Main Avenue (corner of Lincoln Street and Main Avenue) in Spokane, Washington

* Wednesday, December 10, 7 to 9 pm at The Attic, up the back stairs of 314 East Second Street in Moscow, Idaho

Extraction, production, and transportation of carbon-dense, dirty energy fuels across the Northwest increasingly threaten the wellbeing of people, places, and the planet with their risky and toxic byproducts of polluted air, water, land, policies, and perspectives.  Inbound Alberta tar sands megaloads and pipelines, expanding drilling and processing of oil and gas, and outbound coal, oil, and tar sands trains bound for West Coast export terminals crisscross the region, as they transform the continent into a resource colony serving Asia and the world.  Governments consistently fail to defend their citizens from the ravages of some of the largest multinational corporations on Earth, as they together plunder public resources, taxpayer coffers, and civil liberties in pursuit of billions in profits.  Fracking Idaho farmlands for gas and North Dakota and Alberta grasslands for shale oil, strip-mining Montana and Wyoming prairies for coal, and steam blasting Alberta boreal forests and bogs for tar sands challenge the conscious and quality of life of Pacific and Inland Northwest residents and businesses.  The railroad industry increasingly hauls countless gallons of explosive oil and tons of dusty coal every day around remote lakes, within river valleys, and through ranches, farms, and cities to terminals and refineries on Oregon, Washington, and California coasts and rivers and ultimately to Asia, hastening climate chaos.

Because conventional avenues for citizen recourse to corporate crooks and colluded public officials predictably succumb to industry influenced rules, laws, elections, and bribes, Northwesterners must challenge this corruption and confront the root causes of ecological and economic oppression and devastation in more creative and assertive ways.  On Monday through Wednesday, December 8 to 10, Spokane and Wild Idaho Rising Tides encourage concerned people throughout the region to push back the boundaries of their resistance to industrial invasions, with new allies, tactics, and strategies.  Event organizers and facilitators expect participants to graciously contribute their insights throughout the gatherings, to provide potluck food and beverages, and to share their understandings of ways to stall and stop the forces that are destabilizing our climate and destroying our democracy.  Please print and post the color, letter-sized Stand Up Fight Back 2014 Flyer and urge family, friends, and co-workers to attend these catalyzing discussions and networking opportunities.

[1] Stand Up! Fight Back! Against Big Coal in the Northwest 11-3-12 (November 9, 2012 Wild Idaho Rising Tide)

[2] Stand Up! Fight Back! Against Fossil Fuels in the Northwest! (November 5, 2013 Wild Idaho Rising Tide)

[3] Missoula Eco-Warriors Unite (Elrae Mazakahomni facebook event)

[4] Everett Coal and Oil Trains Panel Discussion (Sightline Daily)