Monthly Archives: August 2015

Video of Monday’s Tripod Blockade Shut-Down of Children’s Legacy Camp Clearcutting

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Last week, we watched US Oil Sands clearcutting the Children’s Legacy Camp, completely devastating the area in just four short days.

Then on Monday, two tripods went up on the newly-bulldozed haul road that leads into the destruction zone, set up by stealthy and quick-moving allies. No sooner had they thrown up the tripods than two agile climbers had pulled themselves up into their apexes, all before the cops posted at the processing site down the road must have had any idea what was happening.

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Watch this awesome video of the action from Direct Autonomous Media!

As the day wore on, spirits stayed high, with folks singing, chanting, and calling moral support to the tripod sitters. By late morning, a cherry picker had finally arrived to extract the folks perched on the tripods. But after the cops arrested the  first tripod sitter, and the cherry picker was moving toward the second, another quick-thinking comrade locked to the cherry picker itself, causing a serious delay to the extractions!

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For more coverage of the action, visit PeacefulUprising.org/aca2015

We’re so very grateful for the brave folks who took action to defend Children’s Legacy Camp and the legacy we are leaving for the children of our world. The images of the bulldozed site speak for themselves: The only legacy USOS would leave our children is one of toxic destruction. We think they deserve something better. Join us at the vigil to see for yourself what is happening and get involved!

http://www.tarsandsresist.org/camp/

Vigil Location Update

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Friends, if you decide to visit the vigil, we are at a site set just slightly back from Seep Ridge Road across from US Oil Sands’ worksite. It’s right by the big gravel pile that’s on your left as you head down Seep Ridge Road from the Vernal/Roosevelt area. You turn onto a small road on your left, which is just before the gravel pile. You’ll see the vigil site as you pull onto that road. Come visit and get involved!

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BREAKING: USOS Is Bulldozing Children’s Legacy Camp NOW

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BREAKING: US Oil Sands is at this moment bulldozing the beloved Children’s Legacy Camp–a site where we’ve held multiple Intergenerational Campouts and other events over the past three years!

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Over the past day, they have been stripping trees and soil from the land, dumping soil into the lush canyon below their processing site.

The Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining recently issued them a permit to expand into this area, but USOS has not yet secured its permits from the EPA to allow it to move forward with work. The EPA sent the company a letter in June 2014–over a year ago–telling it to get these permits.

We are outraged at how the state of Utah turns a blind eye to the harm USOS is causing to our watershed and airshed, and to the rampant habitat destruction they are right now causing to one of our region’s most diverse and wild places.

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The children who have spent time bonding with this land will be devastated to see these photos, but they need to know whose interests the state of Utah protects. It’s their future at stake, and we need to fight for it alongside them, and alongside all frontline resisters fighting the world’s most deadly projects.

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These photos say it all. There is no future in tar sands mining. It brings death, destruction, depletion of our most vital resources. JOIN US at the vigil, see for yourself what is at stake, and take action. Write letters to the editor, call the people who are allowing this to go forward without even the bare-minimum permitting, and JOIN THE FIGHT to stop it!

This is NOT any kind of future for our children and grandchildren! Call the Division of Oil, Gas and Mining at (801) 538-5329. Flood EPA Region 8’s lines! 303-312-6312 or in Region 8 states 800-227-8917.

Your voice, your presence, your energy are needed now more than ever to prevent this destruction from going any further!

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Even the Sky Is at Stake

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Image c/o ForestWanderer.com

Image c/o ForestWanderer.com

It’s not their sky simply because they’ve leased the land below it, stolen from indigenous peoples by an imperialist government. It’s not our sky. Possessives have no place when talking about something so vast and all-encompassing. Yet US Oil Sands’ lights have gone up—streetlights, on the ridgeline of the Book Cliffs wilderness. Streetlights lying dormant, threatening every night to awaken and consume that which should never be claimed.

In the Book Cliffs—the land the state of Utah has leased as a tar sands sacrifice zone—you’ll find a place with skies darker, stars brighter, than almost anywhere else you may ever go. There is nothing, for many miles, to impede that view at all. The constellation pop out of this expanse as you search for the ones you know and muse upon what other societies, like the Uintah Utes, see when they look up at night.

On the full moon, you can hike across the ridgelines where sagebrush glow silver and ghosts roam the edges of imagination. You start to see bears everywhere—in the rocky canyonside, in the shining aspen groves in the shadowy ravines below. With the return of the new moon, you stay close to the campfire, the world shrouded in a dark cloak of possibilities—cougar or coyote slinking along forest’s edge, swarms of bats sweeping out of their caves, hiding in the thick stands of trees.

Now they want to take away even that.

US Oil Sands has installed lightposts around their 23-acre ridgeline worksite where they are setting up tar sands processing equipment. Every day, we wonder: Will tonight be the night they take the sky away?

Fish and Tadpoles Seen at the Abandoned Mine!

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Life is not going to return on the abandoned tar sands mine over the hill from US Oil Sands’ site in the Book Cliffs any time soon. Called the “Bryson 4,” it has lain barren for over three decades, the hilltop scraped away to reveal a flat expanse of tar sand rock, like an uneven asphalt parking lot. Mounds of crumbled rock sit as if waiting to be processed in the rusted contraption that sits below the pulverized hill, rubble frozen onto its output chute as if time has stopped.

But nature still tries to return. Last week, a flock of ravens sat atop one of the rock piles, and it became apparent that they had been snacking on small fish and tadpoles that had somehow emerged in the unlikeliest of places–a green cesspool of a puddle that had collected on the exposed tar sands.

It was mere inches deep–probably not large enough to call a pond–yet the fish, frogs, and insects had taken advantage of this tiny haven on the wounded hilltop. It would certainly dry up eventually; it surely wasn’t an earmark of progress for the failed reclamation of the site. And it suggests that when the land returns, it may look radically different than it did before. The beings inhabiting it could have illnesses or mutations from lifelong exposure–or total submersion–in toxic waste. No, this is not a resurgence–it’s a call to trust nature, in her infinite ingenuity; to celebrate the miracles that abound all around us, rather than fracturing and pulverizing all the beauty that is here, all the beauty that is home to so many.

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