From the woods:
I’m currently part of a team of awesome friends roving through the woods of east Texas as part of the Tar Sands Blockade (TSB). This is an epic fight to defend Texans’ homes and land against the clearcutting and pollution caused by the building of the massive Keystone XL pipeline.
The media team for TSB are doing an awesome job of updating our website as TransCanada (TC) and their hired goons advance toward our blockade with heavy equipment and repeatedly endanger our people in some scary ways. A friend and I thought that friends and allies of the TSB might appreciate an on-the-ground perspective, and so before I go back to defending our blockade I thought I’d update y’all.The forest of east Texas is totally beautiful. Water oak, sweet gum and slash pine trees define the canopy, and green briar, muscadine grapes and beautyberry bushes cover the ground. This forest is home to great blue herons, turkey vultures, whippoorwills, lots of deer, rattlers and other snakes, armadillos, and even occasional black bears. All of these are our natural allies and have been incredibly disturbed by the clear cutting of their home.At the beginning of this week the bad guys were operating a feller buncher and clear cutting a vast swath of forest aimed directly at our blockade. On Tuesday morning we temporarily stopped them by placing ourselves directly in the path of their machines. As a backhoe was placing timbers over a gully so that other more destructive stuff like feller bunchers could advance toward our blockade, two of our team locked down to the backhoe and stopped it in its tracks while the rest of us provided cover. The lockdowners were then tortured by local police with TC supervisors watching and laughing. After they were extracted from the backhoe, the timber bridge got built and the feller buncher started rapidly destroying trees advancing toward our blockade. Then we ran out in front of it and one of my friends sat down directly in its path. All of us were way too close to the backhoe for it to operate safely. Instead of backing away slowly to a safe distance per OSHA regulations, the operator of the machine (which might’ve been the same guy operating the backhoe) decided to fell another tree and drop it right on my friend’s head. This demonstrates antisocial and potentially murderous behavior and this guy clearly should be getting mental help, not operating heavy machinery. TC supervisors were watching this happen the whole time, and nodding with approval. This is criminal and they should be prosecuted for reckless endangerment and attempted manslaughter, both of which are illegal in the state of Texas. It’s lucky that I caught the whole thing on film and even luckier that my friend jumped out of the way in time and is now relatively safe.