BREAKING: USOS Is Bulldozing Children’s Legacy Camp NOW

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

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?