Through the ongoing participation of Northwest fossil fuels resisters in public events, hearings, marches, and media stories, we have clearly registered our opposition to the expansion of coal, oil, and gas infrastructure projects across the region. Accelerating impacts of climate change call for ever stronger messages and unified, non-violent, civilly disobedient, direct actions.  For months, Pacific Northwest organizers have been planning a Break Free from Fossil Fuels action, a mass 350.org and allied protest of two crude oil refineries at March Point near Anacortes, Washington, on May 13 to 15, 2016 (http://breakfreepnw.org/).  Please join us in risking arrest or supporting others as part of ongoing Northwest resistance to fossil fuels.

In late March 2016, Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) and allies promised hundreds of participants in well-attended screenings and panel discussions of the global climate activism documentary This Changes Everything in Moscow and Sandpoint, Idaho, and at WIRT’s Fifth Annual Celebration in Moscow, that we intend to stage regional direct action and kayaktivist trainings before the Anacortes uprising.  Over the last month, we have incessantly requested that our western Oregon and Washington colleagues send trainers to the inland Northwest, to further recruit, mobilize, and prepare activists for the mid-May Break Free Pacific Northwest action.  After pouring years of energy into supporting opposition to Washington state fossil fuel infrastructure projects, we are understandably eager for some West Coast input toward receptive inland Northwest frontlines.

A small team of Oregon comrades generously proposed to travel to northern Idaho and eastern Washington and present several trainings on consecutive days, among a dozen similar workshops scheduled across the region. But considering the time and expense involved in providing guidance to predictably low Idaho turnouts, they decided to cancel their plans.

Unwilling to sacrifice our networks to the strong tendency to discount interior Northwest activism, due to low participation numbers, unnecessary competition and targeted suppression from larger groups, and the limited capacity of a few climate activism organizers dismissed by their communities as too radical or criminal, WIRT is now hosting three Break Free logistics planning and direct action training convergences. Although we would prefer to concentrate our efforts on local empowerment and resulting strong, relatively urgent actions like those against tar sands megaloads and Shell Arctic drilling armadas, not to mention volatile bomb trains and explosive gas facilities, please expand our work supporting this historic protest by attending these workshops:

* Tuesday, May 3, 7 pm at The Attic, up the back stairs of 314 East Second Street in Moscow, Idaho

* Wednesday, May 4, 7 pm at the WIRT office, 301 North First Avenue in Sandpoint, Idaho

* Saturday, May 7, 4 pm at the Liberty Park United Methodist Church, 1526 East Eleventh Avenue in Spokane, Washington Continue reading →

April 13-14: Bill McKibben at WSU

Climate movement leader, educator, and author Bill McKibben is speaking twice for Humanities Week at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman [1]. In the wake of well-attended screenings and panel discussions of the global climate activism documentary This Changes Everything in Moscow and Sandpoint in late March, Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) and regional allies anticipate that McKibben can further mobilize inland Northwest residents to participate in the 350.org-initiated Break Free from Fossil Fuels mass action in Anacortes, Washington, in mid-May [2]. WIRT is calling on you and all volunteers to assist with distributing the attached quarter-sheet flyers outside both WSU events, to recruit more involvement in the already hundreds-strong Break Free Pacific Northwest demonstration of fossil fuel resistance: Please contact WIRT if you can help.

April 13: Humanities Week keynote address: ‘The Human Element in Nature: From Harm to Hope’ at 5:30 pm on Wednesday in the CUB senior ballroom

April 14: Foley Institute Coffee and Politics talk: ‘Report from the Front Lines of Climate Change’ at noon on Thursday in Bryan Hall 308

May 13-15: Anacortes Break Free Action

“We are in a kind of climate emergency now,” struggling to stay below 1.5°C of warming, to avoid radical climate destabilization [3]. No current policies keep us anywhere near this goal: We are barreling towards double that temperature, leaving us with a broken world. This has to change, and we have to lead: We have to Break Free from Fossil Fuels! [4] This global climate movement initiative aims to shut down the world’s most dangerous fossil fuel projects and support the most ambitious climate solutions.

In the Northwest, we are breaking free by taking on the region’s biggest carbon bomb: the Shell and Tesoro refineries at March Point in northern Washington. Combined, these facilities refine 47 percent of all the gasoline and diesel consumed in the region, and produce the largest, unaddressed point source of carbon pollution in the Northwest. They are an integral part of the system that we must change – within years, not decades.

Join us for regional mobilization and a mass action outside these refineries on May 13, 14, and 15, to demand that we Break Free from Big Oil and speed up a just transition to 100 percent renewable energy. By land and by sea, we will stage creative and inspirational sit-ins, blockades, and kayaktivism. For people who prefer to not engage in civil disobedience, support roles and general opportunities for participation are essential to this action. WIRT and allied carpoolers, caravaners, and protesters risking arrest or not are traveling from Missoula, Moscow/Pullman, Sandpoint, and Spokane to Anacortes for this Break Free Pacific Northwest mass action. Continue reading →