Since spring 2010, frontline Northwest activists have been resisting tar sands transportation projects and associated police states in our communities and on our roads, through six court cases, a dozen arrests, and over 50 direct actions.  Residents of Moscow and Lewiston, Idaho, Spokane, Washington, Missoula, Montana, and regional rural enclaves have defended our wild places, home towns, and public roadways from the climate-wrecking, industrial ravages of “megaload” equipment transported for ExxonMobil, Weyerhaeuser, and other undisclosed corporations to Alberta destinations and tar sands operations.  Our monitoring, protesting, and litigating activities have challenged, stalled, diverted, blockaded, frustrated, cost millions, and forced some of the biggest, wealthiest, most powerful dirty energy purveyors on Earth to boost their security, pay our state, county, and city police officers as escorts, guard their unoccupied stopover and port spaces, dismantle their supposedly irreducible loads, and sneak around us on alternative routes.  Strategically considering and creatively implementing group trainings, rallies, testimonies, demonstrations, concerts, presentations, sit-ins, videos, photos, critical mass walks and bike rides, marches, street theater, fundraisers, and banner drops, we will not stop resisting until corporate interlopers stop rampaging our planet.

Tar sands module convoys encountered monitors and protests with every passage up Highway 95 through Moscow, Idaho, between July 2011 and March 2012, and similar pushback in Spokane, Washington, in May and June 2012.  During the last week of October 2012, a 236-foot-long, 520,000-pound wastewater evaporator accomplished the first successful transit to the Alberta tar sands, through our narrow, sinuous, and steep Highway 12 wild and scenic river corridor across the largest wildlands complex in the lower 48 states.  As first fracking in Idaho looms to the south and coal export trains impend in the north, two smaller tar sands transports – with potentially thousands on the outsourced Asian production horizon – will attempt the same rugged route in early December, but not without our vigilant confrontations and their predictable accidents, injuries, and anguish imposed on people and property, collisions with vehicles, power lines, cliffs, and trees, delays of heart attack victims, emergency services, and holiday traffic, and degradation of our shared infrastructure and civil liberties, indigenous rights and northern boreal ecosystems, and atmospheric integrity. Continue reading →

Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) will walk among friends, co-workers, colleagues, and neighbors and may be accompanied by local musical performers in the 2012 University of Idaho Homecoming Parade, aptly named The Brave and Bold.  On Saturday, October 6, our grassroots collective of activists, who directly confront the root causes of the climate crisis and promote community solutions to it, will carry our five-by-fifteen-foot group banner and dozens of tar sands, coal, and fracking protest signs along Main Street to Seventh Street.  The homecoming parade presents one of our best opportunities to reach our fellow city residents, as we once again take to the streets, chant brief slogans, and hand out educational and Dana Lyons concert flyers along the way.  The entry announcer will describe our mission and introduce us as “Hundreds of these regional citizens are protesting hydraulic fracturing (or ‘fracking’) for natural gas in Idaho, export of Montana and Wyoming coal to Asia on 50 daily trains to ports across the Northwest, and Alberta tar sands development and transportation via megaload equipment transports and pipeline construction.”

Meet us under our unfurled banner beneath the Rosauers sign in the east parking lot (411 North Main Street in Moscow) at 9 am on Saturday morning.  We have requested a spot toward the back of the parade that starts at 10 am, so some of our more melodious co-activists in the front can potentially double back and bolster our entourage.  Although we share plenty of tar sands, megaload, and fracking protest signs, we plan to craft our first anti-coal export signs for parade display at the WIRT Activist House on Thursday evening, October 4, at 5 pm.  Spark some crucial, election month resistance to the tyranny of fossil fuel corporations and stir up some action in Moscow this weekend with us!  If we have not been The Brave and Bold in this town over the last year, then who has?  Let’s shine together again!

During the 2012 Idaho legislative session, a majority of our state senators and representatives succumbed to the mercenary ambitions of the oil and natural gas industry and passed state laws and regulations allowing hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and subsequent waste injection wells accommodating oil and gas exploration, production, and transportation in the state.  Despite sustained outcry from thousands of citizens and diligent input from scientists, elected officials, and conservation organizations, our delegates have effectively compromised our drinking water, jeopardized our health, undermined local protective ordinances, threatened agricultural communities, endangered tourism revenue, and risked the state’s lands and economy.

In response to our policy makers and in conjunction with the Global Frackdown! on Saturday, September 22, concerned citizens and climate justice activists from across Idaho are converging to stage the first public demonstration against looming initial fracking in Idaho.  As we craft a ballot measure to ban all toxic oil and gas practices statewide, Wild Idaho Rising Tide, Idaho Residents against Gas Extraction (IRAGE), and other groups and individuals are launching a petition and rally on the Jefferson Street steps of the Idaho Capitol in Boise (700 West Jefferson Street).  Join us between 11 am and 12:30 pm with your family and friends and protest signs, banners, and chants.  Contact Wild Idaho Rising Tide at 208-301-8039 or Idaho Residents against Gas Extraction at 208-695-1556 for information about carpools embarking from northern and southern Idaho respectively.  (We are departing the south lot of Eastside Marketplace in Moscow at 5 pm on Friday, September 21, and returning on Saturday evening.)

Idahoans and neighbors, please profusely print and post this letter-sized, color Global Frackdown in Boise Flyer, hand distribute this Global Frackdown in Boise Quarter Flyer, and do not miss this historic event!  Thanks!

Cross-posted in the Earth First! Newswire: Global Frackdown! in Boise, Idaho

On Wednesday, August 22, at 2:15 pm, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, along with Idaho Governor Butch Otter, U.S. Senator Mike Crapo, and U.S. Senator Jim Risch, will tour the Port of Lewiston dock for about 45 minutes.  Event organizers have invited a group of 50 port customers, entrepreneurs, local elected officials, and reporters.  This rare Idaho visit of a White House Cabinet official, the first since June 2005 in Boise, emphasizes a June $1.3 million federal grant, only one of seven given to ports, and a $600,000 Idaho loan for the $2.9 million expansion next summer of the 125-foot container dock to 275 feet.  But port use for Pacific Coast and overseas shipping of agricultural and wood products through the fish-blocking gauntlet of Snake and Columbia river dams has declined significantly over the last decade, due to evolving market demands and alternative transportation opportunities.  Our purported governmental representatives have believed the port’s grant application misinformation and likely hold at least one overriding pork-barrel objective for the financially failing Port of Lewiston: Alberta tar sands equipment transport through north central Idaho. Continue reading →

A carload or caravan of climate justice activists from northern Idaho and eastern Washington will participate in the culminating protests of the Coal Export Action at the Montana Capitol in Helena on Saturday and Sunday, August 18 and 19.  Our allies of the Blue Skies Campaign in Missoula are hosting Montanans and concerned citizens from across the country, staging sustained, peaceful demonstrations beginning on August 12 and continuing through August 20, when the State Land Board will decide whether to approve a permit for Arch Coal to mine Otter Creek.  Please visit the Coal Export Action website for more information and registration, and then join in displaying strong opposition to coal exports across our region.  Unlike the Tar Sands Healing Walk in Fort McMurray, Alberta, this week of actions is your closest opportunity to contribute toward the nationwide Summer of Solidarity against the fossil fuel industry and for a livable planet.  Similar to the August/September 2011 Washington DC protests of the Keystone XL pipeline, Helena demonstrators will both support and risk arrest to send a unified message to the Land Board and Big Coal: save Otter Creek – no coal exports!  To partake in the Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) carpool, contact us at 208-301-8039 or wild.idaho.rising.tide@gmail.com or drop by the WIRT House in Moscow between noon and 8 pm PDT daily, invite your friends through the facebook event post Coal Export Action: Rally and Sit-In!, and post our Coal Export Action Flyer (WIRT).  Also listen to WIRT’s Monday, August 13, Climate Justice Forum radio program between 7:30 and 9:30 pm PDT live at 92.5 FM or online at KRFP Radio Free Moscow, when a core Coal Export Action organizer will describe the first day of sit-in demonstrations and recent issue developments.

[UPDATE: Please RSVP by Sunday, July 29, as prospective passengers are quickly filling the Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) vehicle to the healing walk.  Contact us soon to reserve an inexpensive ride through the Canadian Rockies, bitumen ground zero, and Northwest megaload routes (wild.idaho.rising.tide@gmail.​com or 208-301-8039).  Fort McMurray or bust!

We are also considering organizing a concurrent action in Moscow, such as a Native drum circle or some other demonstration of solidarity, and welcome your ideas and participation in this event as well.  Please offer your suggestions and co-leadership!] Continue reading →

On Wednesday, May 23, and Wednesday, May 30, another five megaloads of Earth-ravaging, energy-sucking, water-poisoning, climate-wrecking, life-killing Alberta tar sands processing parts will probably rumble through Spokane and Spokane Valley streets on their way to the largest industrial carbon extraction project in the world.  While most of America sleeps, satiated on its oil-derived opulence, obesity, and overpopulation, interior Northwest activists will take to the streets to express our outrage that our city, state, and federal governments facilitate First Nations genocide, boreal forest and wetland destruction, and global climate chaos through Big Oil’s abuse of our subsequently deteriorating roads and bridges.

Occupy Spokane and Wild Idaho Rising Tide invite you to your likely last opportunity (for now) to stand up to ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil, the Washington State Department of Transportation, the hauler Mammoet, and their contracted megaload convoys of industry-colluded state troopers, pilot truck drivers, and flaggers.  Whose streets and rights?  You know the 99 percent’s answer and what you must do to regain our democracy, public infrastructure, and civil liberties from corporations who value profits over people and the planet.

Meet fellow protesters to strategize and mobilize our resistance by 11:30 pm at the Occupy Spokane Clubhouse, 1808 East Sprague Avenue in Spokane, or for the demonstration at 11:30 pm at East Third Avenue and South Regal Street.  Moscow activists are carpooling from the corner of Second and Washington streets, near Moscow City Hall, at 9:30 pm.  Bring some or all of your friends, protest signs, strong voices, mic check chants, musical instruments, and ideas for actions.  The next seven generations of humans and Earth co-habitants are depending on you to stop the reckless expansion of Alberta tar sands operations.  The world is waiting and watching, Spokane!