Sandra Buffington has spent her life working to carve a home and ranching business out of the sparse grasslands around the South Unit of Badlands National Park.
But she and other Lakota ranchers face the possibility of losing their grazing rights to make way for a huge bison reserve planned by the Oglala Sioux Tribe.
Buffington, who is in her late 60s, runs her cattle year-round on 11,000 acres of leased land. It’s land that her father once leased. She also owns 80 acres where her home sits.
Many of the ranchers in the path of the planned reserve for a herd of 1,000 bison own small sections of land close to or adjacent to the land they lease.
The letter revoking Buffington’s permission to continue grazing also reminded her that the tribe also has the power to condemn her own land, land that has been in her family for many years.
“The land I’m leasing is what my father leased,” Buffington said.
Without the leased land, she would have to sell her cattle. A grandson’s dream of some day operating the ranch would be lost, she said.
Native American author, educator, activist, mother and grandmother Winona LaDuke, Anishinaabekwe, is calling on tribes to relocalize food and energy production as a means of both reducing CO2 emissions and of asserting tribes’ inherent right to live in accordance with their own precepts of the sacredness of Mother Earth and responsibility to future generations.
She said during a recent presentation on climate change at Harvard University, “We essentially need tribal food and energy policies that reflect sustainability. Tribes [as sovereign nations] have jurisdiction over food from seed to table and we need to take it or else USDA will take it…. The last thing you want is USDA telling you how to cook your hominy, that you can’t use ashes in it …. I am the world-renowned, or reservation-wide renowned, beaver tamale queen. So who’s going to come to my house and [inspect the beaver]? I don’t want USDA in my food. I want us to exercise control over our food and not have them saying we can’t eat what we traditionally eat.”
LaDuke was talking about tribal food sovereignty.
Winona LaDuke of White Earth, Jackie Francke of First Nations Development Institute and Julie Garreau, executive director of the Cheyenne River Youth Project, at the first meeting of the NAFSA founding council. (Courtesy First Nations Development Institute)
Neither the United States Department of Agriculture nor the Food and Drug Administration is likely to turn up in your family’s kitchen, but federal policies have a lot to say about what food products are allowed to get into that kitchen in the first place. Antibiotics and growth hormones in the meat supply, vast harvests of corn, rice or wheat cultivated from the same genetic stock, genetically modified organisms—be they corn or soy or fish–and preservatives added to food during processing are primarily under the control of the USDA and FDA. As are the regulations about what foods can be served by tribes at day care centers, schools and senior centers, not to mention those on how food intended for commercial markets must be grown and processed.
Of particular concern right now is the 2011 federal Food Safety Modernization Act, which increases regulation and oversight of food production in an effort to prevent contamination. If the rules pertaining to the law are not changed in response to public comments, some of the federal government’s regulatory and inspection responsibilities will devolve to state governments, a direct threat to tribal sovereignty, according to First Nations Community Development Institute Senior Program Officer Raymond Foxworth, Navajo. “The [historic] loss of food system control in Indian Country is highly correlated with things like the loss of land, the loss of some aspects of culture related to agricultural processes, and … some pretty negative health statistics [including obesity, diabetes and lifespan]. It’s our belief that food sovereignty is one solution to combat some of these negative effects, be it the negative health statistics, the loss of culture or the loss of land.”
Harley Coriz, director of the Santo Domingo Senior Center, inside of the center’s new greenhouse. (Courtesy First Nations Development Institute)
The institute has been instrumental in establishing the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance under its Native American Food System Initiative. The alliance will be a national organization focused on networking, best practices and policy issues. The founding members of NAFSA “have been working on trying to pressure the FDA into initiating tribal consultations related to FSMA.”
The alliance, in the works for more than a decade, recently got start-up funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. FNCDI contracted with the Taos County Economic Development Corp. to coordinate its establishment. Directors Pati Martinson and Terrie Bad Hand convened a group of 16 people who have been working on food systems at the grassroots level to form a founding council. That group had its first face-to-face meeting in October.
Among the founding council members is Dana Eldridge, Navajo, formerly on the staff at Diné College and now an independent consultant and would-be farmer, who has done extensive work in analyzing food systems for the Navajo Nation. One of her main concerns is genetically modified organisms. GMOs, she says, threaten both the ownership of Native seeds and the spiritual aspects of food. “Corn is very sacred to us—it’s our most sacred plant. We pray with corn pollen–in our Creation story we’re made of corn—so what does it mean that this plant has been turned into something that actively harms people?”
Children at the Akwesasne Freedom School in New York near the Canadian border work in the their gardens in a farm-to-school project led by Kanenhi:io Ionkwaiontonhake. Much of the food grown in the gardens goes directly to the school for meals. Two teachers even instruct the older kids in the pre-K through grade 8 school in how to can and store their food, according to Elvera Sargent, Mohawk, who has been at the school since 1995 and who is a member of the NAFSA founding council. (Courtesy Akwesasne Freedom School)
Eldridge says food sovereignty is also important because it is a way to begin to address the trauma colonization has inflicted on Native people. “What I’ve learned during this food research is you can’t produce food by yourself. You need people, you need family, you need community and relationships, so a lot of it is about rebuilding community and reconnecting with the land and I think that’s a very important healing process for our people.”
The Taos County Economic Development Corp. has found that one way to keep USDA and FDA out of your kitchen is to invite them in. When regulators amped up their enforcement of regulations in relation to Native commercial food enterprises in northern New Mexico, TCEDC built a 5,000-square-food commercial kitchen where people could process their crops and learn directly from USDA inspectors what the regulations were. Says Martinson, “The food center was our way of modeling and bringing forward local healthy food through helping those people become actual businesses and entrepreneurs.” In 2006, TCEDC added a mobile slaughtering unit. Housed in a tractor trailer truck, the MSU travels out to small ranches where USDA inspectors oversee the slaughter of livestock—”bison, beef, sheep, goats and the occasional yak,” says Bad Hand–intended for commercial sale. The meat is then brought back to the center for cutting and packaging, again under federal oversight.
There is an irony to all this federal oversight of food production in sovereign Native nations, says Martinson. Traditional Native food growing, harvesting and processing principles kept people healthy for millennia before USDA even existed. The food contamination that FSMA is intended to prevent is a consequence of the industrialization of food production. “All these scares that you hear about, e. coli or salmonella making people really sick, if you trace those back, they come from huge packing plants, from industry.
A young girl at Cochiti Youth Experience (at Cochiti Pueblo) working in the garden. (Courtesy First Nations Development Institute)
“One of the things that I think Native people recognize and have passed down culturally is that you need to have human beings within food production ecosystems for all of those reasons—safety, quality, a relationship with your food. The principles of safe food are indigenous and inherent in Native communities,” Martinson says.
The answer to “What’s for dinner?” has profound implications for the well-being of Native American tribes. Tribal food sovereignty could mean the difference between continuing to retain (or regain) language, land, religious precepts, traditional lifeways and physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health or losing them.
There’s a beauty in the breath of horses, fall mornings’ breath seen in the air, and the smell and sound of horses. We rode horses from the Headwaters of the Mississippi along the proposed route of a new oil pipeline that would cross the reservation. It was the third of a series of rides on oil pipeline routes.
The rides were sponsored by Honor the Earth, along with the Horse Spirit Society, Owe Aku and the White Earth Land Recovery Project. Those rides took us on the Alberta Clipper proposed expansion route (from Superior, Wisconsin, to the Red Lake Reservation), and to the proposed Keystone XL route in the Dakotas, where riders from White Earth Reservation joined with the Lakota to ride between Wanbli and Takini or Bridger on the Cheyenne River Reservation. Then we came home, to our own reservation, where a new pipeline is proposed to cut near our largest wild rice lake.
“We are not protesters, we’re protectors,” said Michael Dahl, leader of the third ride. That is true.
Michael Dahl, leader of the third ride. (Photo: Suze Leon)
We called this the triple crown of pipeline rides. What’s at stake is a lot of water and a lot of risk. In the Dakotas it is a land without a single pipeline across it and one large aquifer, the Oglala.
“We can buy bottled water, and drink it, “ Percy White Plume pointed out. “The buffalo and horses cannot.”
This is a good point. So it was that 15 riders braved some harrowing terrain, a land littered with 100,000 dead cattle from a freak September blizzard, (frozen dead on the sides of roads, gullies and the like) and rode the proposed Keystone XL route.
In Minnesota it is wild rice, water and oil. The Enbridge pipeline corporation is proposing to both expand a present oil sands pipeline, the Alberta Clipper, doubling its capacity and making it the largest tar sands pipeline in the U.S. That has its own risks—such as those of carrying dilbit, a highly corrosive substance, in a pipeline that is monitored remotely from Edmonton, Alberta. Enbridge also wants to construct a 610-mile pipeline from near Tioga , North Dakota, to Superior, Wisconsin. This is the same oil as the 800,000 gallons that devastated a Tioga farm field in North Dakota in early October. That pipeline was six inches in diameter; the proposed pipeline is 30. The proposed Sandpiper pipeline would carry 375,000 barrels of oil and cross through the White Earth reservation and the 1855 treaty area.
Enbridge is facing some obstacles.
“This is land that has been in my family for decades. It is prime Red River valley agriculture land. It was handed down to me by my mother and father when they passed away, and I’m intending to hand it down to my children when I pass away…. My wife and I have … told our children that we will pass this on. Of course, if 225,000 barrels of oil bursts through this thing, that certainly is the end of this family legacy. —James Botsford, North Dakota landowner and Winnebago Supreme Court Judge in Enbridge Sandpiper right of way
The Enbridge North Dakota company asked Botsford if they could survey his land.
“I told Enbridge … I am not going to give you permission,” Botsford said. “You are going to have to take it.”
So Enbridge filed a restraining order against Botsford, “denying me the private use of my own land,” he said. In fact, Enbridge told the court, “Unless defendant is restrained and enjoined from preventing or interfering with access to the property … Enbridge will be irreparably harmed.”
Enbridge told Botsford that the company’s rights trumped his rights. Enbridge seems pretty comfortable with that position, particularly ever since the Canadian corporation magically became a North Dakota utility. This metamorphosis allows the corporation to have eminent domain rights within the state. That occurred a decade ago and has served Enbridge well.
The company, however, has not been so lucky everywhere. In June 2013 the British Columbia government denied Enbridge permits for the Northern Gateway pipeline, citing environmental, safety and economic concerns about the corporation. That was in addition to massive opposition by First Nations. In Minnesota, Enbridge needs to get 2,000 rights of way for its pipeline proposal, and a certificate of need approved at the Public Utilities Commission. Those are all being challenged.
“Farmer Steven Jensen said the smell of sweet light crude oil wafted on his (rural Tioga) farm for four days before he discovered the leak, leading to questions about why the spill wasn’t detected sooner.” —Reuters on the 865,000-gallon spill in North Dakota in October 2013
Right now most of the oil moving in this country, from the Bakken fields, basically the Ft. Berthold reservation, goes by rail. That’s up to 380,000 rail cars projected to move this year. That is perhaps why Warren Buffett purchased the Burlington Northern Railroad; because he saw that the money was in the landlocked oil. The problem is that the oil is moving faster than regulation, with safety especially lagging as companies seek to extract as quickly as possible, before rules are imposed.
This past summer, four square blocks of the town of Lac Megantic, Quebec, blew up as a train’s braking systems failed. The train was carrying Bakken oil. Forty-three people were virtually vaporized in an explosion that baffled Canadian authorities. They had never seen anything like it.
Bakken oil, the stuff they want to put in the Sandpiper line, seems to be very volatile, sort of like a bomb in a pipeline. Which seems a bit worrisome. It’s even more worrisome given that the North Dakota accident (the 835,000-gallon spill) was attributed to lightning. Now, I’m not sure, but I think that lightning and an extremely volatile substance may be a very bad idea in a pipeline. That is the Sandpiper line.
The Sandpiper pipeline proposal.
The other Minnesota line—the Alberta Clipper—holds 440,000 barrels per day of tar sands oil. The Enbridge proposed expansion to 880,000 barrels per day would make that the largest tar sands pipeline.
Tar sands oil is both controversial for its origin and controversial for its transport and increased risk. Meanwhile the Keystone XL pipeline is facing huge opposition from farmers, ranchers, environmentalists and the Lakota Nation. In mid-November, Cheyenne River reservation leaders sent TransCanada’s representatives off the reservation, in an abrupt meeting.
Enter the Pig
Enbridge’s pipelines are largely monitored by the company. That is, if you don’t count the 135 federal inspectors who are responsible for 2.5 million miles of pipeline. Those inspectors, working for the U.S. Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHSMA), were on furlough when the 835,000-gallon Tioga spill happened, but it didn’t matter because remediation was in company hands.
It turns out there’s a piece of equipment called a “pig” (a pipeline inspection gauge actually), which goes through the lines to check them for structural problems. Sort of like a pipeline colonoscopy. This pig hasn’t worked out too well, it seems.
According to Enbridge’s company data, between 1999 and 2010, across all of the company’s operations, there were 804 oil spills that released 161,475 barrels (approximately 6.8 million gallons) of hydrocarbons into the environment. This amounts to approximately half of the oil that spilled from the oil tanker Exxon Valdez after it struck a rock in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1988. The single largest pipeline oil spill in U.S. history was the Kalamazoo spill, which was an Enbridge line.
“Federal regulators are investigating the 2010 rupture of Line 6B, part of the Enbridge-operated Lakehead pipeline system,” Michigan lawmakers testified. “The National Transportation Safety Board found Enbridge knew of a defect on the pipeline five years before it burst open and spilled around 20,000 barrels of oil into southern Michigan waters.”
So maybe the pig was mute. I don’t know. What I do know is that there are a lot of pipelines, and no one seems to be monitoring them.
In 2012 the PHSMA ordered Enbridge to submit plans to improve the safety of the entire Lakeland System. Meanwhile, Canada’s National Energy Board has stated that Enbridge is not complying with safety standards at 117 of its pumping stations. The board is analyzing concerns and solutions.
New Project/New Plan
Enbridge’s pipeline wish list, some of it granted.
Pipeline safety is increasingly under scrutiny, even as it becomes more mechanized. The pipeline safety system itself, however, is not local.
“This line—the Sandpiper line—the plan is that it will be operated from the control center in Estevan, Saskatchewan, … northwest of Minot, across the Canadian border,” Greg Sheline of Enbridge explained. From there, “that information gets reported back to the control center, so that the operators can monitor the operation.”
This of course does not sit well with those whose lives depend on the vigilance of this remote, robotic system.
“We don’t know if any of those lines will hold, and Enbridge has not proven itself to be a safe part of our environment,” said Dahl. “Our lakes and wild rice beds will be here forever, but if there’s an oil spill they will be destroyed, and Enbridge will not be here. They are a 50-year-old Canadian corporation, and we are a people who have lived here for ten thousand years.”
Enbridge’s expansions are intended to feed into a set of pipelines in the Great Lakes region. The Minnesota lines are intended to snake through and around tribal reservations and wild rice beds to a refinery in Superior, Wisconsin. From there Enbridge hopes to ship forth that oil, through pipelines, to a proposed 17 refinery expansions.
Many of these pipelines are more than 50 years old, including a precarious link in the straights of Mackinac. That link in particular is making a lot of people nervous. An underwater spill in the straights would, according to scientists, spill a million gallons before it could be stopped.
The Certificate of Need, or Was It Greed?
The expansion is predicated on “need,” or a certificate of need. In Enbridge’s application before the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, access to a stable supply of oil is the primary measure of need.
Need is subjective. It turns out that the world’s largest oil reserves are in the western hemisphere, in Venezuela—followed by Saudi Arabia—and then the Alberta tar sands. Venezuela is a country that has demanded a fair price for oil and has used that oil to develop its infrastructure. If there were such thing as an example of “fair trade” oil, this would be it.
In fact, a good chunk of Venezuelan crude has historically come back to tribal reservations. More than 223 of them have benefited from Venezuelan petroleum company Citgo’s largesse in communities that suffer from fuel poverty. As that country’s exports to the U.S. decline, this will likely be affected. In turn American corporations, driven by some hostile historic foreign policy, do not, it seems, want to pay a fair price for oil from that country. Hugo Chavez should rest in peace.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, in February 2013 Venezuelan crude oil and byproduct shipments to the U.S. dropped by 33 percent from 2012 levels. These sales had been paid in cash, so the loss deprives Venezuela of cash flow.
The interests of greed are large. The Koch brothers (two of the wealthiest Americans, worth $36 billion apiece) make much of their money on the oil market (a.k.a. derivatives) and have some very large interests in the Keystone XL pipeline. The brothers also own Minnesota’s Flint Hills refinery, which processes 25 percent of Canada’s tar sands oil in the U.S. They may profit considerably if a certificate of need is awarded for all these pipelines. Or as investigative reporter Greg Palast explains, “Koch brothers could save two billion dollars a year if they can replace Venezuelan heavy crude with Canadian tar sands—one of the dirtiest sources of carbon emissions on the planet.”
This past fall Venezuela faced serious economic woes from a loss of oil exports. Instead of developing a country, it seems that Suncor, Exxon, Mobil, Tesoro and Enbridge are facilitating the long-term destruction of Native territories from the Upper Missouri to the Athabasca River. There is, in short, no shortage of western hemispheric oil. There is only the greed-driven destruction of territories and communities whose people will neither benefit, nor control the process.
I’m done riding pipelines for the winter, I think. And I, like my fellow Mississippi Band of Anishinaabe members, intend to stay here, in our homeland at the headwaters. I am pretty sure we aren’t interested in sharing that with an oil company.
I’m off the horse, but I’m not done talking about pipelines. In the meantime, our horses are going to hope there’s water to drink and that their hooves will touch land not tainted with oil.
Twobills in the Senate would require the country to get at least 25 percent renewable electricity by 2025, but neither has a chance in hell of making it to Obama’s desk. Thanks, Republicans! So the president is doing what he can without approval from Congress: requiring the federal government to get more of its power from renewable sources.
President Obama says the U.S. government “must lead by example” when it comes to safeguarding the environment, so he’s ordering federal agencies to use more clean energy.
Under a presidential memorandum out Thursday, each agency would have until 2020 to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable supplies. …
Agencies are supposed to build their own facilities when they can, or buy clean energy from wind farms and solar facilities. …
The memo also directs federal agencies to increase energy efficiency in its buildings and its power management systems.
The U.S. government currently gets about 7.5 percent of its electricity from renewables, so the new goal would almost triple that percentage.
With today’s memorandum, Obama follows through on a promise he made in his big climate speech in June. We’re looking forward to him keeping the rest of the promises from that speech.
Credit KUOW Photo/Ashley Ahearn Tribal treaty fishing rights give Washington tribes the opportunity to weigh in on, and even block, projects that could impact their fishing grounds.
Dozens of crab pot buoys dot the waters around Lummi tribal member Jay Julius’ fishing boat as he points the bow towards Cherry Point – a spit of land that juts into northern Puget Sound near Bellingham, Wash.
It’s a spot that would be an ideal location to build a coal terminal, according to SSA Marine, one of two companies that hopes to build a terminal here. If the company has its way, up to 48 million tons of coal could move through these waters each year aboard more than 450 large ships bound for the Asian market.
SSA Marine has its eye on Cherry Point because it’s surrounded by deep water with quick access to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Pacific Ocean.
But if the Lummi and other tribes exercise their fishing rights, there may not be any coal ships servicing American terminals in these frigid Northwest waters.
“I think they’re quite disgusting,” Julius said when asked how he feels about the terminal backers’ efforts to make inroads with the Lummi. “It’s nothing new, the way they’re trying to infiltrate our nation, contaminate it, use people.”
Credit KUOW Photo/Ashley Ahearn
Aboard a Lummi fishing boat just south of the Canadian border near Cherry Point.
‘People Of The Sea’
One out of every ten members of the Lummi Nation has a fishing license. Ancestors of the Lummi, or “People of the Sea” as they are known, and other Salish Sea peoples have fished the waters surrounding Cherry Point for more than 3,000 years. Today Lummi tribal officials are sounding the alarm about the impacts the Gateway Pacific Terminal could have on the tribe’s halibut, shrimp, shellfish and salmon fishery, which is worth a combined $15 million annually.
Tribal treaty fishing rights could play a major role in the review process for the Gateway Pacific Terminal. According to the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, nine tribes’ treaty fishing grounds would be impacted by the Gateway Pacific Terminal and the vessel traffic it would draw.
In the mid-1800s, tribes in this region signed treaties with the federal government, ceding millions of acres of their land. Native American populations plummeted and the survivors were relegated to reservations.
They insisted on reserving the right to continue to fish in their usual and accustomed fishing areas. It is an extremely important part of the treaty.
The tribal leaders of the time did a smart thing, said Tim Brewer, a lawyer with the Tulalip tribe in northwestern Washington: “They insisted on reserving the right to continue to fish in their usual and accustomed fishing areas. It is an extremely important part of the treaty.”
But those fishing rights weren’t enforced in Washington until the Boldt Decision, a landmark court decision in 1974 that reaffirmed tribal fishing rights established more than a century before.
“If a project is going to impair access to a fishing ground and that impairment is significant that project cannot move forward without violating the treaty right,” Brewer said.
Since the Boldt Decision, tribes have been fighting for their treaty rights.
In 1992, the Lummi stopped a net pen fish farm that was proposed for the waters off of Lummi Island by a company called Northwest Sea Farms.
But agreements have been made in other situations. The Elliott Bay Marina, the largest, privately-owned marina on the West Coast, was built in 1991 within the fishing area of the Muckleshoot tribe. It took 10 years of environmental review. The Muckleshoot fought the project but ultimately came to an agreement with marina supporters.
When Dwight Jones, general manager of the Elliott Bay Marina, was asked if he had any advice for companies that want to build coal terminals in the Northwest, he laughed.
“I’d say good luck,” Jones said. “There will be a lot of costs and chances are the tribes will probably negotiate a settlement that works well for them and it will not be cheap.”
Jones said the owners of Elliott Bay Marina paid the Muckleshoot more than $1 million up front and for the next 100 years will give the tribe 8 percent of their gross annual revenue.
“Anyone who’s in business can tell you that 8 percent of your gross revenues is a huge number,” he said. “It really affects your viability as a business.”
Credit KUOW Photo/Ashley Ahearn
A gathering of coal export opponents last summer at Cherry Point. The event was part of an anti-coal totem pole journey led by the Lummi Nation. Its tribal members fish at Cherry Point.
Starting Negotiations
SSA Marine and Pacific International Terminals – the companies that want to build the terminal at Cherry Point – have lawyers and staff members working to negotiate with the Lummi to build the terminal. The companies declined repeated requests for interviews.
Last summer, Julius and the rest of the Lummi tribal council sent a letter opposing the coal terminal to the US Army Corps of Engineers. The federal agency will have final say over the key permits for the coal terminal.
In the letter the Lummi lay out their argument, which centers around threats to treaty fishing rights and the tribe’s cultural and spiritual heritage at Cherry Point.
But there’s a line at the end of the letter, which legal experts and the Army Corps of Engineers say leaves the door open for continuing negotiation on the Gateway Pacific Terminal: “These comments in no way waive any future opportunity to participate in government-to-government consultation regarding the proposed projects.”
Tribes and ranchers say they have reached a major breakthrough in negotiations over sharing water in Oregon’s arid Klamath Basin.
They have the outline of a deal that could end 38 years of lawsuits and pave the way for removing four dams.
The conflict came to a head this summer when the Klamath Tribes used their senior rights to protect fish by shutting off the water to nearby ranches.
Those shutoffs sparked new negotiations. Don Gentry, Chairman of the Klamath Tribes, says the two sides have reached an agreement in principle.
“This is really definitely a landmark step,”Gentry said. “This is really positive but we have a lot of work to do as we move forward to negotiating a final agreement.”
Under the draft agreement, ranchers would cut their water use by 30,000 acre feet. And help restore streambanks to reduce nutrient pollution.
In exchange the tribes would limit their power to call on junior water users to turn off their irrigation. And all sides agree they won’t oppose a plan to remove four dams on the Klamath River. They hope to finalize the deal by January.
Late Monday evening, after the tires were set on fire, a group of anti-fracking demonstrators round danced against a backdrop of flames in the middle of a New Brunswick highway while they waited for the RCMP to respond.
The tires were set alight in the late afternoon around the same time a New Brunswick court judge in the provincial capital of Fredericton granted an extension to an injunction against the demonstrators for 14 more days.
(A round dance by flaming tires on Hwy 11. Photo courtesy of Candi Simon)
An increasing drumbeat of eye-witness reports from the area late Monday evening indicated that the RCMP was ramping up its numbers in preparations to move on the blockade.
There was also a report from an eye-witness that a total of three fires had been lit on Hwy 11 in the same vicinity.
SWN Resources Canada, a Houston-based energy firm, asked for the injunction arguing weather and protests had slowed down the last phase of its shale gas exploration work. Its previous injunction was set to expire at midnight.
The flaming tires on Hwy 11 followed a day of heated confrontation near Richibucto, NB, where SWN Resources Canada had been trying to continue its exploration work for shale gas deposits.
Richibucto is about 83 kilometres north of Moncton and sits at the place where the Richibucto River flows into Richibucto Harbour which links to Northumberland Strait.
Videos from the scene showed lines of RCMP officers pushing groups of demonstrators off the highway. The RCMP officers would shout “move” as they tried to force the demonstrators into the ditches.
It’s unclear how many people were arrested during the day. APTN National News has been able to confirm at least five arrests from eye-witness accounts.
(RCMP arrest a man on Hwy 11 earlier in the day Monday. Photo courtesy of David Goodswimmer)
Two young Mi’kmaq men were arrested during the afternoon.
Judd Poulette and his friend, who goes by the aka “Soda Pop,” said they were taken to the Shediac RCMP detachment.
Poulette said RCMP officers stomped on his knuckles and they swelled to the point paramedics had to visit the holding cell to drain them.
“They were stomping me while I got arrested for walking an elder on the side of the road,” said Poulette, after his release.
The J-Division RCMP media relations officer did not return repeated phone calls and emails seeking comment and confirmation of the day’s events.
While RCMP units from other provinces, including Saskatchewan and Quebec, are in New Brunswick to bolster the police presence there, J-Division continues to command the ongoing operation.
APTN National News has relied on videos, photographs and eye-witness testimony to piece together the day’s events.
As of this article’s posting, the anti-fracking demonstrators were attempting to maintain a permanent blockade of Hwy 11.
“This is a permanent blockade, everybody is sick and tired of this,” said one Elsipogtog First Nation resident from the scene.
The Mi’kmaq from Elsipogtog have been leading the fight against SWN for months and their strength has been bolstered by supporters from the Acadian and Anglophone communities in the region.
The current blockade is about 18 km northeast of Elsipogtog.
Several Acadians have been arrested over the past few days in relation to the ongoing demonstrations.
APTN National News contacted one of the demonstrators involved in the blockade who said the tires where set on fire in response to RCMP tactics and the incident involving the truck and three women demonstrators.
The RCMP had managed to surround the demonstrators on the highway several times.
“They got some of our people blocked in a little ways so we’re gonna block them,” said one of the demonstrators, an Elsipogtog community member.
One of the trucks involved with SWN’s exploration work bumped into three women on the highway, according to two eye-witnesses.
SWN has also been using contractors during its exploration work.
The witnesses said the demonstrators tried to stop a white truck which was driving at a low speed on the highway. The witnesses said the truck sped up and hit one woman. A second woman ran over to the truck and was also bumped. While a man began yelling at the driver, the truck bumped into a third woman.
The witnesses said two of the women were taken to hospital with bruises. The incident did not cause any life-threatening injuries.
“And all through this the (driver) was smiling away,” said one witness. “The cops were right there and they said they didn’t see anything.”
The day also saw several banner drops in Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton in support of Elsipogtog, along with an hour-long blockade at the federal Vancouver port terminal and protests in Halifax and Ottawa.
SWN has faced ferocious opposition to its exploration for months.
Elsipogtog residents fear the discovery of shale gas will lead to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and pose a threat to the area’s water.
Their concerns are also shared by non-First Nation people from the surrounding communities who have been supporting their demonstrations and the various camps set up to counter SWN’s exploration work.
Heavily-armed RCMP tactical units raided an anti-fracking camp on Oct. 17 that was blocking SWN’s exploration vehicles in a compound in Rexton, NB. About 40 people were arrested after a day of violent confrontation between Elsipogtog residents and the RCMP.
The RCMP said officers seized three rifles, ammunition and crude explosives from the campsite. The police also freed SWN’s vehicles.
Premier David Alward has signaled he wants to see the protests broken, calling the current conflict on Hwy 11 a “beachhead” that could determine the fate of other energy projects slated to hit the province.
TransCanada is planning to build a pipeline to Saint John, NB, that would carry Alberta mined bitumen to an expanded terminal owned by Irving Oil. Irving Oil executives have been quoted in news reporters saying shale gas would provide a cheap source of energy for the firm to process the additional bitumen coming from Alberta.
Irving Oil is owned by the Irving family which also owns JD Irving Ltd. JD Irving owns Industrial Security Ltd. which provides security for SWN.
Irving Oil and JD Irving are independent companies, run separately.
By Tahir Hasnain, December 4, 2013. Source:EnviroCivil
Women experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime and they suffer severe physical and emotional pain due to the violence and abuse. Unfortunately, climate change is making it worse and supplements violence against women. The society must do more to empower women and ensure their safety.
The world is celebrating these days the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence and calling for greater gender equality. The 16 Days of Activism is an international campaign that starts on 25 November, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and ends on 10 December, Human Rights Day. Actions are taken by the civil society across the world to raise awareness about gender-based violence as a human rights issue at the local, national, regional and international level.
Violence against women is a common phenomenon in Pakistan which affects women from all kinds of backgrounds every day. According to the 2012 report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Pakistan is the world’s third-most dangerous country for women as 90pc women face domestic violence. Many women face violence on a daily basis and this reflects the miserable condition.
Climate change (changing weather patterns) is also intensifying violence against women. The climate change has in fact exposed communities to extreme weathers i.e. rise in temperature in summer, unpredictable and unprecedented rain fall, high wind speed, etc. The community in rural areas has revealed that the climate change is putting more pressure on women as compared to men. Hence, in our efforts to end violence against women, climate change has to be addressed properly to achieve this critical goal.
Women are the front line victim of the climate crisis. Women in rural Pakistan spend most of their time in doing agricultural activities and collecting water and fuel for their families. Changing weather patterns are constantly affecting agriculture and the natural resources including forests and water. As a consequence of these changes, workload and hardships of women has increased manifold. Women now travel farther and face more risk of attack.
Women currently have less socialization due to increased work hours and economic pressures. Emotional wellbeing of women has also reduced with increased level of stress, anxiety and frustration. As a result, family disputes and domestic violence have also increased and women always argue financial problems with men and in return, the frustrated men tend to show anger and use violence against women. These disputes have also given rise to escalating divorces and court cases.
Higher temperatures are linked to increased tensions. Escalating temperatures and economic pressures have encouraged domination of men over women besides frequent incidents of violence against women (physical assault) and undue social restrictions. The climate change impact on women is well demonstrated in below mentioned figure.
Source: Shirkat Gah Study on Gender Dimensions of Climate Change: A Case Study of Coastal Community in Sindh
Climate change is impacting negatively on agriculture and fishing activity and is intensifying poverty. In the backdrop of mounting economic pressures and growing poverty, women currently face marriage problems as well. Most of the marriages in poor rural communities now happened to be forced marriages. Families and the bride herself cannot choose and they have no other option but to accept and compromise completely. Escalating cases of early age marriages have also profound link with poverty.
Pakistan is confronting with climate induced natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, windstorms, droughts and cyclones since last many years. Recently, the incidents of flood disaster have increased and flood-prone communities have suffered mass internal displacement. In this regards, women suffer more problems due to their isolation from other family members. These disasters make women vulnerable to violence. A number of cases of sexual violence and abduction were reported during earthquake in 2005 and flood disaster in 2010. According to a recent report from the UN Environment Programme, rape victims and human trafficking in women and children rise steeply during disasters like floods, storms and cyclones.
Climate change is thus a serious threat and women’s concerns have to be recognized and integrated in climate change and disaster risk management policies to make them comprehensive. It is now established that Climate challenge is huge and multidimensional that demands unity, collective actions and solidarity with each other to deal with this great challenge.
In view of the useful knowledge and experiences that women possess, they should be effectively used to mitigate climate change as well as developing strategies to cope and adapt. Capacity building and empowerment of women are thus key areas to address while addressing climate change and its impacts on women.
By Billy Frank Jr., Chairman, Northwest Indian Fisheries
OLYMPIA – As removal of two fish-blocking dams on the Elwha River dams nears its end, I’m scratching my head. Why is a proposal to build a brand new dam on the Chehalis River watershed in Lewis County receiving serious consideration? And why is the Quinault Indian Nation being left out of the discussion?
There is no question that terrible flooding has occurred on the Chehalis during recent decades. People’s lives and homes have been damaged and destroyed. I-5 has been closed for days. But much of that damage has been caused by encouraging development in flood prone areas and by the unwillingness of short-sighted politicians to enact proper flood plain management systems. While a few entities have taken steps to restrict development in harm’s way from flooding, others have not. Building more dams is not the answer. Condemning an entire ecosystem and subjecting everyone who lives in the basin to the long term effects of a dam is not the best or the only way to fix the problem.
I thought we had learned our lessons about dams by now. All over the country dams are being taken out to try to undo the damage they have done to critical natural processes. Time and again, dams have been proven to kill fish and destroy the natural functions of the watersheds after they’re built. We need to be looking forward when it comes to natural resources management. Building a flood control dam on the Chehalis is backwards thinking that doesn’t contribute to sustainability of our natural world. We need to do whatever we can to avoid damage before it is done. Flood control dams prevent the river’s natural floodplain from doing its job to help reduce the effects of flooding. While a dam may reduce how often floods occur, it can’t prevent the biggest, most damaging floods from happening.
The Chehalis River basin – the second largest in the state – already is heavily damaged. More than 1,000 failing and under-sized culverts block access to more than 1,500 miles of salmon spawning and rearing habitat. A huge network of poorly maintained logging roads is loading silt into the river and smothering salmon egg nests. At the same time, forest cover in the basin is quickly disappearing, reducing shade needed to keep stream temperatures low for salmon
A dam would only make things worse. The only thing it would be certain to do is harm salmon and steelhead at every stage of their life cycles and damage natural functions that are vital to every living thing in the Chehalis Basin.
Unfortunately, the State of Washington refuses to recognize that as a co-manager with treaty-reserved property rights to fish, hunt and gather in the Chehalis Basin, the Quinault Indian Nation must be directly engaged in government-to-government discussions about flood control and measures to protect the health of the Chehalis Basin. It is painfully clear that the Quinault’s treaty rights will suffer severely if a new dam is built. Yet the Chehalis Basin Flood Control Authority, which is due to make its recommendations on flood control measures this time next year, flatly refused to even allow the Quinault Nation to sit at the table.
Ongoing loss and damage of salmon habitat threatens tribal treaty rights. Through the tribal Treaty Rights at Risk initiative, we are asking the federal government to protect our rights and lead a more coordinated effort to recover and protect salmon in the region. One of our recommendations is a requirement that federal funding for state programs and projects be conditioned to ensure the efforts are consistent with state water quality standards and salmon recovery plan goals. That’s what should be done on the Chehalis. Preconditions should be established before allowing any federal funding to be spent to study or begin permit review processes. As a start, commitments must be made to fully protect the ability of the Quinault Nation to exercise its treaty protected rights by addressing harmful impacts on fish, wildlife, and ecological processes. All governments in the Chehalis Basin must be required to ensure that future development in flood prone areas is not allowed.
Federal agencies, the State of Washington, and the Chehalis Flood Control Authority need to sit down with the Quinault Nation. Together, they need to address flooding issues while also meeting the needs of the natural resources and everyone in the Chehalis basin whose culture, food and livelihoods depend on those resources.
In the late 1800s, when dams were first built around the Northwest, salmon and steelhead stocks began to decline. Fish hatcheries were put forth as a solution. Wild fish were taken from Northwest rivers and spawned in captivity, ensuring future generations of fish could be released back into the wild every season.
Jim Lichatowich is a biologist who’s worked on salmon issues as a researcher, manager and scientific advisor for more than 40 years. He sat down with EarthFix’s Ashley Ahearn to talk about his new book: “Salmon, People and Place: A Biologist’s Search For Salmon Recovery.”
Ashley Ahearn: For someone who doesn’t know what a hatchery is or doesn’t understand how it operates, what happens at a hatchery?
Jim Lichatowich: Fundamentally at a hatchery, salmon are taken out of the river, put into ponds until they’re ready to spawn and then the eggs are taken. They’re fertilized. Various different procedures are used at different hatcheries but that’s basically it. The eggs hatch, the juveniles are reared in the hatchery for varying levels of time and then they’re released back to the river and expected to migrate downstream fairly rapidly and go out to the ocean and from that point on pick up the normal life history of a regular wild salmon.
I guess the idea of how hatcheries started and [what] sustained them was, habitat was degrading and the fish weren’t doing as well in the degraded habitat. So the hatchery became a solution, a way of circumventing the problems we were creating ourselves by building dams, pumping out irrigation water, poor forestry practices that put silt and sawdust into the streams. The hatchery was supposed to take the salmon away from that problem, circumvent the problem.
Ashley Ahearn: Jim you talk about the ‘machine metaphor’ for nature. What is that? Can you read a section from your book here?
Jim Lichatowich: Sure I’ll read where I talk about the machine metaphor and the fish factory. And I might add here that I use ‘fish factory’ instead of hatchery through a large part of the book because that’s what hatcheries were originally called when they were first being used. They were called ‘pisce factories,’ or fish factories.
“The fish factory and the machine metaphor are a perfect match. The mechanistic worldview reduced salmon-sustaining ecosystems to an industrial process and rivers to simple conduits whose only function was to carry artificially-propagated salmon to the sea. The mechanistic worldview still has a powerful grip on salmon management and restoration programs in spite of a growing scientific understanding that the picture of ecosystems created by the machine metaphor was seriously flawed.”
And really, it’s been the factory metaphor that has guided a lot of the operation of hatcheries.
Ashley Ahearn: One of the things I really liked about your book is these side channel chapters that you sprinkle in between some pretty heavy critique of the way we manage our fisheries in this region. One of your side channels that I particularly liked was when you write about a trip to Indiana to the St. Joe River. Tell me about that side channel.
Jim Lichatowich: Well I grew up outside of South Bend, Indiana and the St. Joe River flows through South Bend. When I grew up there the St. Joe was pretty much a sewer that didn’t have much in the way of fish life. And over the years, particularly since I left — I left there in the 60s — there’d been a lot of clean up. And with the introduction of salmon into Lake Michigan — the St. Joe flows into Lake Michigan — they built a salmon hatchery and had a Chinook salmon run up the St. Joe River. They had to build a hatchery and clean the river up, too.
I was there and I was walking along the river and I came to where a tributary came into the St. Joe, and there was a salmon carcass — a Chinook salmon carcass laying up on the bank of the stream — and it just struck me how out of place it was. Seeing carcasses along rivers is pretty common here, but in Indiana that was a sight. And later on in watching the river, I saw salmon trying to spawn and I knew that their spawning was not going to be successful because the gravel was so silted in that the eggs weren’t going to get oxygen. I talked to a biologist a couple of days later and they confirmed that there’s very little or no actual reproduction, even though there are fish out there spawning.
I thought, you know, this really robs the salmon of their whole heroic story of battling up stream to get to the place where they spawned and where they could complete the cycle of parent to offspring. Even though it’s looked on by sportsmen in Northern Indiana as a positive thing, and there were a lot of people fishing for these fish that were in the river, I somehow had this nagging feeling that ‘should we be doing this to other species? Should we take them from where they belong and put them in a place where they have no chance of surviving without our intervention in a hatchery and call it salmon management?’
Ashley Ahearn: Is that what is happening here in the Northwest? I mean, we have salmon. The salmon have lived here for thousands of years — it’s not like Indiana, but arguably it’s a similar closed … are we robbing the salmon of their story here in the Northwest?
Jim Lichatowich: Well when we rely on hatcheries instead of healthy rivers, then we are robbing them of part of their story. Fortunately most of the rivers in the Northwest can support some wild production, some more than others.
But by relying more and more on hatcheries we’re creating a charade of sorts where the river that can’t support a salmon becomes a stage prop where fishermen and fish play out their respective roles, reenacting something, an important part of our past, that now is sort of a hollow empty memory of it.
Ashley Ahearn: Jim from your perspective are all hatcheries bad? Is there a good hatchery?
Jim Lichatowich: I think there might be, but the answer to that question hasn’t been answered. There has been attempts to reform hatcheries in the past and they haven’t been successfully implemented. There is a lot of good science now that should help managers change the way hatcheries are being operated to begin to see if they can begin to be integrated into a natural production system in a watershed. But it remains to be seen whether that will actually happen.
Ashley Ahearn: So if you were in charge, what needs to happen? What would be your order of operations to get salmon recovery back on track in this region?
Jim Lichatowich: Well I have two kind of strong ideas and those strong ideas were what I followed in writing this book. One was from John Livingston who said that all environmental problems, and I take that to mean salmon problems, are like icebergs, because, like an iceberg, environmental problems have a visible tip and for the salmon that tip is dams, over harvest, poor hatchery practice, poor logging practice –- the litany of things that we’re all aware of. But he says in addition there’s this huge hidden mass that an iceberg has. In that mass he calls it, he says in that mass there are the myths, beliefs and assumptions about how nature works that drive the decisions that either create the issues or prevent them from being corrected. And I think that’s a pretty powerful idea. We need to examine that body of myths, assumptions and beliefs. What I call in my book, our salmon story, and improve upon it. Make sure it reflects the latest science and not some really outdated myths or beliefs.
Ashley Ahearn: Or machine metaphors.
Jim Lichatowich: Or machine metaphors, right. And the other is Gary Nabhan’s idea. In one of his books he says that animals don’t go extinct because someone shoots the last one, or a bulldozer scrapes the last habitat. They go extinct because the web of relationships that sustain them unravels. He then put it in anthropomorphic terms and said, they go extinct because of a lack of ecological companionship. I think that idea is intuitive but at the same time very powerful. It should lead us to instead of defining the salmon’s problem in terms of numbers, which is really limiting your definition to the symptoms, it would be defined in terms of the unraveling of those relationships. And recovery, instead of boosting numbers by releasing more hatchery fish, would be a mending of those relationships. Trying to re-institute those relationships, and that’s a different approach than what we’ve been doing.
Ashley Ahearn: It seems your solutions center around a fundamental philosophical shift that needs to happen in the way we view management.
Jim Lichatowich: That’s right, and that is a good summary of my purpose in this book, is to make an argument for that shift.
Jim Lichatowich is the author of “Salmon, People and Place: A Biologist’s Search For Salmon Recovery.”
