Invite your friends and families, and join Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT), the #No2ndBridge group, and the regional, climate activist community at 7 pm on Wednesday, March 21, at the Gardenia Center, 400 Church Street in Sandpoint, Idaho, for conversations about strategies and tactics opposing Northwest, fossil fuel extraction and transportation.  Among potluck food, beverages, and ideas, we will share current, issue updates and background on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway proposal to expand rail bridges and tracks across Lake Pend Oreille and downtown Sandpoint, and associated, state and federal, public comment periods, hearings, and other participation processes [1, 2].  Besides the March 30 and 31, Seventh Annual Celebration of WIRT benefit concerts in Moscow and Sandpoint, we are planning #No2ndBridge, public information sessions, targeted protests, and a summer, direct action camp, to further catalyze resistance to ongoing train derailments and fossil fuel pollution of essential watersheds and the shared, global climate.  See the January through March, Moscow and Sandpoint, meeting alerts on the WIRT website, for other, possible topics of discussion, and contact WIRT via email or phone, with your questions and suggestions.

For this third-Wednesday monthly, March 2018 gathering, we will screen Momenta, a 42-minute documentary released in Bellingham in June 2014, which describes the first years of the Northwest movement dedicated to “educating, raising awareness, and activating communities to stop all proposed coal exports,…rethink fossil fuels [and] their impacts on climate and environment, and accelerate the clean energy revolution” [3].  We will also present the trailer for the upcoming documentary Choke Point, the story of the “Inland Northwest’s fight against exploding oil trains and fossil fuels,” produced by grassroots, Spokane videographers Rosie Ennis and Joe Comine of Dancing Crow Media, who need your donations for their ongoing work [4].  Choke Point “is about trains transporting coal and highly combustible crude from the Bakken oil fields, through the area between Sandpoint, Idaho, and Cheney, Washington, known as the ‘choke point.’  These trains travel over our aquifer and water resources, across unstable infrastructure, and through the heart of our home,…[and] tend to blow up when there’s a derailment or due to equipment failure.”  The completed film could include excerpts, which we will show, of talks by Spokane City Council president Ben Stuckart, Sightline Institute policy director Eric de Place, Spokane tribal activist Twa-le Abrahamson, and Railroad Workers United organizer Jen Wallis, recorded at the June 2015 Coal Exports, Oil Transport, and Solutions Forum, held at Gonzaga University in Spokane.

[1] Public Notices NWW-2007-01303, February 26, 2018 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

[2] BNSF Railway Company Application, February 26, 2018 Idaho Department of Lands

[3] Momenta – Full Film, Plus M Productions and Protect Our Winters

[4] Choke Point (in Production for 2018) & COIL Forum, June 23 at Gonzaga University, Dancing Crow Media