Stop Enbridge's Line 9 in the Beverly Swamp / Flamborough (!)

SWAMP LINE NINE ! DRAW THE LINE !                                      Up, Down. 

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As of 9 AM today (Wednesday 26th) the Hamilton Police (bought and paid for by Enbridge) arrested the occupiers - details on the occupiers' Tumblr blog (which is the best place for news of these events).

This fat old fart is proud of the group that occupied the pumping station and salutes them and applauds them - unfortunately that's about all he can do, for today anyways ...

This statement by David Prychitka in the Hamilton Spectator sums it up nicely: "We must act on Enbridge. ... The decision to act should be obvious."

 

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(Quoted from the participant's website):
USING DIRECT ACTION TO STOP ENBRIDGE'S LINE 9 PIPELINE(AKA DEFENDING ONTARIO'S WATERSHED FROM GREEDY SOCIOPATHIC MONSTERS)

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The Location: Westover Road & Concession Road 6 West near Hamilton - map. Enbridge calls it the 'North Westover pumping station'; in the former town of Flamborough aka Flamboro; near Hamilton, Ontario.

Google Maps are easy to mistake: The map above looked to me to show Highway 5 coming off 403, but the next magnification makes it clear that it is Highway 6. And you can get to the corner of Westover Road & Concession Road 6 West (which is where the arrow points) and still not know where the pumping station is. (It is just a tch west from the intersection on the north side of the road.)

 

The Participants: They keep a website and a news site. A loose coalition by the looks of it - possibly taking to heart the recent Brazilian chant: 'O povo, unido, não precisa de partido!' / The people, united, do not need a party!

 

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Videos: Overview & background from Rachel Deutsch; June 6 - 1 (police protest); June 20 - 1 (locking it up), 2 (with Elysia Petrone), 3 (the site), 4 (with Danielle Boissoneau), 5 (overview); June 22 - 1 (with David Prychitka).

 

News Reports:
 May 06: Enbridge pipeline protesters close Ontario highway,
       : Blockade of Ontario Highway in Protest of Line 9 Tar Sands;
June 05: Group protests Enbridge donations to Hamilton police;
June 20: I got the news of the Westover occupation from Rising Tide,
       : Protesters halt Enbridge project in Flamborough,
       : Protesters lock gates at Enbridge pumping station,
       : Anti-Enbridge occupation just the start says Tuscarora woman,
       : Enbridge protesters in 'for the long haul' at Hamilton site;
June 21: Enbridge pumping station remains locked down,
       : Protesters still holding Hamilton Enbridge pumping station,
       : Flamborough Enbridge pumping station remains locked down,
       : Enbridge protest continues,
       : Enbridge officials dispute environmentalists’ charges,
       : Natural Resources Minister watching Enbridge protest,
       : Enbridge Line 9 station near Hamilton shutdown by protesters;
June 22: Protesters must still respect the rule of law;
June 23: Quiet occupation of Enbridge site carries on;
June 24: ... still there :-)

         ... to be continued ...

Google News Search for 'Flamborough Enbridge' by date and by relevance (why should these give different results?).

 

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Enbridge ran this pipeline east-to-west as part of the fuck-over of Aamjiwnaang; now they want to reverse it and participate for profit in the fuck-over of the climate and ecology of the whole country, continent ... planet. 'Sociopathic' doesn't even begin to cover it.

Galleries:

May 6 - blockade of Highway 6:

June 5 - protest Enbridge police buyoff:

June 20 Flamborough occupation:

Articulate, imaginative, courageous, committed, and RIGHT ON!    Good on you!

Be well. 

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Noon on Tuesday June 25 in Toronto

 

Swamp the Courthouse!

 

In solidarity with Swamp Line 9!

 

Where: Ontario Courts, 361 University Ave, Toronto (map).Other solidarity events are being organized in other cities.

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I will tidy this up later sometime and add some photos of the Toronto Solidarity demonstration ... for now I have just about enough jam left to show that we made it down there.

I meant to give the Tim DeChristopher salute for that picture and then forgot, oh well. I think we helped them along a bit, hope so, they certainly deserve it. Heroes!

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Down.

Birds of a feather continued ...

                                                        NASTY monkey!                                                               Up, Down.                 Longest Day 

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English Grade 12 in Quebec in the early 6o's is some kind of middle ground (in many dimensions - it's Montréal's West Island). University-style lectures for English Literature in a large steeply-sloped room and the Norton Anthology, a huge book to carry around. Our teacher is a white-haired lady who knows how to speak Middle English - one of the first actually 'educated' people I (ever) meet. She reads aloud to us some of the prologue to The Canterbury Tales and I will never forget the sound of her voice. She also knows how to properly perform public speaking with no microphone required. Another one I remember is:
        Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll!
        Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.
                    (From Childe Harold's Pilgrimage fourth canto verse CLXXIX (179) 1812-1818, Lord Byron.)

She rocks the place ... but that's another story ... 

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Chaucer doesn't write about the Great Rising which must be going on at about the time The Canterbury Tales are being written & performed in whatever way they're disseminated. He is the king's bureaucrat and a 'moneyer', and it just wouldn't do. And the likes of Wat Tyler & John Ball don't ride to Canterbury with good pilgrim burghers either I guess.

Readers of this blog will know that I have been looking at the holocaust a bit over the last few years - there are tags: Holocaust, Rwanda ... There is a section on my bookshelf with Primo Levi, Henry Kreisel, Hannah Arendt, Georgio Agamben, Zygmunt Bauman ...

But by a coincidence I don't read Jared Diamond's take on it. Last week, after his notions on agriculture shake me violently up and down, the very next (or so) chapter in The Third Chimpanzee is 16: In Black and White ... on genocide. 

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I plod along, slowly coming to realize that genocide perpetrators are ordinary folks; wondering how that could be? And then BOOM!   It is frequent if not continuous if not structurally necessary to human development and history; the 1994 Rwanda genocide has antecedents, an extended context, background; species kill their own kind as their capabilities permit.

The Third Chimpanzee is published in 1992 and mentions Hutus & Tutsis but not the 1994 case. Diamond subsequently brings his thinking up-to-date in Chapter 10 of Collapse - Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide.

I won't belabour it - like I said before he is not trustworthy. Read these things and digest and absorb them if and as you will.

... consider that torture is a high art, refined, subtle, technologically advanced - and has been ... forever; or Chinese lotus feet and infibulation (both male and female); or that 90% of Nazi death camp commandants were nominally Catholics. 

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The idea that human nature has fundamentally (as it were) changed very much since Chaucer's time is simple nonsense. The bourgeois bromide 'Life is Sacred'   ditto. How did I get this old and have no clue?

My son asks several times in the last few years why I bother trying to raise consciousness of the environmental debacle which is coming down - and my reasons really come (again beginning in that Øth chakra, the kundalini fundament) through some women I meet in Brazil, and Oxum and Iansã and Iemanjá, and a reaction I have to knowing that the first hard rain will fall upon them and people much like them and their kids.

(Anyone who don't know that men relate to the world through their pricks don't know much. Not the one-and-only, neither the be-all nor the end-all; but certainly right up there among the very first of objective correlatives. With respect to my mother for her part in teaching me this.)

I am surprised at the quickness of these jagged pieces falling so certainly into place in the jigsaw ... click.

Bottom line gentle reader is that looking at the humanity I see these days doesn't show much reason to be striving for climate- or eco- or any other kind of justice. Is this the cockeroach in the ointment? Is this why the 'movement' is not... moving?

( Just askin' y'unnerstan' ... )                     Be well.

 

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Later on sometime:    ... Sure it's personal.

How not to wonder and ask the obvious questions: What is my share in deserving oblivion? How much of this is mine? Who needs this species and what is it good for beyond some sentimental attachments to the music of Bach & Handel?

Homo erectus, Homo sapiens ... Homo grǽdum? Homo agapiens? Which will it be and, who can say?

It becomes less difficult to understand transcendental end-runs: inventing gods and devils; putting it all more-or-less comfortably 'out there' to be dealt with 'objectively' (or trying to). And too, understanding that (vain? futile?) temptation compassionately (or trying to).

It is never pleasant to be faced with another's pain & suffering; less to have to cut into your own existence for any reason.

Anyway, it's not 2015 yet. There's still time to turn it around. And we're not quitters are we? That's what I say to my son as we sit looking out into an urban land- socio- spirit-scape which we agree there is no good reason to preserve.

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[Lamer than usual gentle reader; oh well ... "How're ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?"] 

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Down.

Birds of a feather flock together.

                                                                                                                                                                   Up, Down.        Great Rising 1381 

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[Unrelated, but I strongly recommend a close look at the latest issue of 'Policy' (freely-downloadable pdf here) 'The Great Canadian Energy Puzzle' including articles by Elizabeth May, Jim Prentice, and Joe Oliver (our very own Alfred E. Newman, direct from Mad) among others.]

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In 2011, somewhere in the vicinity of Rancho Mirage ... the Koch brothers hold a summit:

Coke, Koch, Koch, Koch, Pet, Petcoke, Koch:

Bankety bankety bank ... with help from Ogden Nash (1902–1971):

... they deserve our appreciation and thanks, the jackasses who go around saying that health and happiness are everything and money isn't essential, because as soon as they have to borrow some unimportant money to maintain their health and happiness they starve to death so they can't go around any more sneering at good old money, which is nothing short of providential.

 

With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row:

In 2013 at the Annenberg Retreat, Sunnylands (also somewhere in the vicinity of Rancho Mirage):

 

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中国梦   'Chinese Dream'. The translation coming via Google Translate (and keep in mind that someone like me who does not even know if Chinese is read right to left or up and down is not to be trusted).

Jared Diamond is not to be trusted either. A strange looking fellow - no harm in that. I was with him until Chapter 15 of his book 'Collapse' - Big Businesses and the Environment: Different Conditions, Different Outcomes - at which point the whitewash/greenwash of Chevron in Papua New Guinea left me ... gobsmacked!

But times are tough - I am running out of books to read and can't afford to buy more - so 'The Third Chimpanzee' finds its way to my bedside table and in a few days I get to Chapter 10 - Agriculture's Mixed Blessings. IT SHAKES MY CONSTELLATION! I sleep and have nightmares. 

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Next morning I am still breathless. Not because of the scholarship - which I am unsure of (anyway, how would I know?); and not the cogency of the arguments which are not particularly ... more like the day when some little girl finally lifts her dress and you catch your first glimpse of coochie.

Ah, a bona fide translation: 和悦梦想   'Harmonious Happy Dream' (with at least one ideogram in common) at Peggy Liu's JUCCCE (Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy).

My own (simpleminded and sentimental) harmonious dream runs to a meadow, a cabin, a brook, a garden in which to dig & delve, very Thoreau, and as anima an Abishag who at least occasionally smiles. Never to be gentle reader ... once upon a time I offer an onion farm in São José do Norte to a beloved friend and she says "Sou preta mas não escrava / I am black but not a slave." Oh well ...

This notion of Diamond's strikes directly at that garden eh?

There is a copy posted on-line to read and think about maybe. That's it.

Be well. 

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Even Paul Krugman almost gets it - but not quite. A 'strong social safety net' he says. Yes, he's got that right; but he is addicted to corporate ideology (has to be because for him it is an existential condition); and he still thinks some policy committee or other armed with tax money can accomplish good - which is nonsense.

There are important clues (as to what a real safety net might look like) in the behaviour of Valdenir Munduruku and his friends and colleagues over the past several months as they confront the infernal machine that builds the likes of Belo Monte.

They are getting safely home again after a struggle in which they risked all - in this I heartily rejoice. Sadder but wiser - and it isn't over yet. 

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Down.