Stop The Pipeline

By Debra Sweet, Director of World Can't Wait                                                                                                                                                                                          August 20 - through September 3.  More than 2,000 people are signed up for civil disobedience to stop federal approval of the Keystone Pipeline from Canada's tar sands to Texas refineries.  The invitation to participate says, "To call this project a horror is serious understatement... the Keystone Pipeline would also be a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous."

It is good and righteous that people like Wendell Berry, Danny Glover and Bill McKibben are calling on people who care about the planet to act in a way that is commensurate with the emergency facing humanity.  Today, I met up with the actress Margot Kidder who is one of 4 Montana women joining the protest next week.  From their story ontarsandsaction.org:

We live in Montana, the first place the Keystone XL Pipeline will cross into the United States. We live on the beautiful Yellowstone River. During the spring floods this June, 42,000 gallons of conventional crude oil was dumped into the Yellowstone from a much smaller pipeline than the proposed Keystone. The river and the farmlands and wilderness areas that border the river will not recover for many, many years, probably not in our lifetimes.