On Friday evening, October 19, performer and environmental educator Dana Lyons of Bellingham, Washington, brought his Great Coal Train Tour to Moscow. Best known for his comedy hit song Cows with Guns, Dana has recorded eight albums during his lifetime artistic career, working around the world to raise awareness, activism, and funds for environmental and social justice causes. Visiting communities from Billings to Bellingham and from Portland to Coos Bay along the route of proposed coal export trains through four Northwestern states, Dana’s fun and inspiring concert intermingled stories of resistance to associated mines, trains, and ports, gathered from potentially impacted groups like eastern Montana ranchers, Lummi Indians, and Puget Sound residents. While federal, state, and county agencies accept public scoping comments on the largest prospective coal export facility in North America, five local conservation organizations hosted this benefit event to bolster knowledge and participation in this significant regional and global issue. Wild Idaho Rising Tide, the Palouse Group of the Sierra Club, Friends of the Clearwater, Palouse Environmental Sustainability Coalition, and the Palouse Broadband of Great Old Broads for Wilderness offered appetizers and no-host beer and wine for almost 100 attendees at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Palouse. After the show, visiting Occupy Spokane activists and Wild Idaho Rising Tide members staged a light projection action near the Sixth and Jackson street intersection in Moscow. Illuminating some recently repainted crop silos with messages denouncing Northwest coal exports and proclaiming various group affiliations, Ziggy and his comrades huddled under an awning in the rain, as passing motorists and pedestrians marveled at huge spotlighted campaign slogans and logos.

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On Saturday morning, October 6, Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) celebrated our ongoing community solidarity and shared successes, as we reveled in the sunny, supportive, citizen-packed streets of Moscow, so close but so far away from the same cold, dark, and lonely streets that we together defended from the regional and global ravages of ExxonMobil tar sands megaloads.  Participating in the 2012 University of Idaho Homecoming Parade, aptly named The Brave and Bold, our grassroots collective of activists carried our five-by-fifteen-foot group banner and tar sands and fracking protest signs from Rosauers to Seventh Street, through a cheering crowd lining Main Street in downtown Moscow.  Along the way, we handed out organic candy, our new issue-oriented WIRT brochure, and Dana Lyons concert flyers to our fellow city residents.  At Friendship Square, the entry announcer introduced us by proclaiming half of our mission statement (perhaps by reading our banner): “Wild Idaho Rising Tide confronts the root causes of climate change.”

After walking earlier in the parade with the Latah County Democrats, several melodious members of the Moscow Volunteer Peace Band doubled back and joined us for the last few blocks and bolstered our entourage to over a dozen walkers with rambunctious tunes.  Congratulations and hearty thanks to everyone in our community who contributed to our effective demonstration, especially Meghan, who printed our 100 handouts and supplied our candy for the parade-side kids, Ellen, Jo, and Meghan, who valiantly wielded our heavy sail of a WIRT banner for a mile through the winds of change, Lynn, who displayed our campaign messages on protest signs, Helen and Pat, who created and distributed educational material, and Fritz, Jeanne, and the Peace Band, who gracefully emboldened our fossil fuel resisters with their music.

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As the culminating action of the weekend direct action training sessions at the Northwest Extraction Resistance Workshop, activists held up a giant, plastic mesh banner and projected anti-coal export and -fracking “bat signals” on the wall across the street from local LGBTQ hangout, Irv’s Bar, in downtown Spokane, Washington, on the Saturday celebratory evening of the Pride event on June 9.  Photos by Joan Medina and Helen Yost feature workshop trainers Kim Marks and Jasmine Zimmer-Stucky of Portland Rising Tide, Bill Moyer of Backbone Campaign, and participants Dave Bilsland, Terry Hill, Joan Medina, and Richard Schmidt of Occupy Spokane and Helen Yost of Wild Idaho Rising Tide.

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While returning from Wild Idaho Rising Tide’s (WIRT) Tar Sands Megaloads Road Show of Tipping Point: The Age of the Oil Sands screening in Kennewick, Washington, on June 2, a lone WIRT activist saw rainbows, but heavy rain compromised dawn explorations of Lower Monumental Dam. If ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil or other companies barge more Alberta tar sands equipment to the Port of Lewiston, Idaho, the modules would move through the tallest structure on the downriver (right) side of the dam and out along the levee jutting upriver (left).

While traveling from Wild Idaho Rising Tide’s Tar Sands Megaloads Road Show of Tipping Point: The Age of the Oil Sands screening in Kennewick, Washington, on June 1, a solitary WIRT activist saw rainbows and thoroughly scouted the Port of Pasco for the final ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil modules. She spotted a huge “blue box” hooked to a truck, facing the dock yard gate, and guarded by a security car and two frame-type megaloads near the port cranes or on a trailer. These transports rumbled through Spokane streets and protests just a few nights later on June 3, the last of ExxonMobil’s first phase of tar sands development rampaging our region.