BREAKING NEWS: Trump seeks to revive Dakota Access vs. Water is Life #NoDakotaAccessPipeline

BREAKING

Tuesday 24th of January

Trump seeks to revive Dakota Access, Keystone XL oil pipelines

“President Trump signed executive orders Tuesday to revive the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines, another step in his effort to dismantle former president Barack Obama’s environmental legacy.

He also signed an executive order to expedite environmental reviews of other infrastructure projects, lamenting the existing “incredibly cumbersome, long, horrible permitting process.”

“The regulatory process in this country has become a tangled-up mess,” he said.

It remained unclear how Trump’s order would expedite those environmental reviews. Many are statutory and the legislation that created them cannot be swept aside by an executive order. Indeed, Trump’s order on the Dakota Access pipeline left some ambiguity. The executive order directs the Army Corps of Engineers to “review and approve in an expedited manner, to the extent permitted by law.”

Trump said that both pipeline projects would be subject to renegotiation. His order for the Keystone XL project “invites” the company to “re-submit its application.”

… vs…

“Greenpeace Executive Director Annie Leonard noted in a statement that a broad coalition of opponents — “indigenous communities, ranchers, farmers, and climate activists” — managed to block the projects in the past and would not give up now.

“We all saw the incredible strength and courage of the water protectors at Standing Rock, and the people around the world who stood with them in solidarity,” she said. “We’ll stand with them again if Trump tries to bring the Dakota Access Pipeline, or any other fossil fuel infrastructure project, back to life.”

“We will resist this with all of our power, and we will continue to build the future the world wants to see,” she added.”

Read Full article at The Washington Post

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Virunga Stands with Standing Rock: Water is Life #NoDakotaAccessPipeline

On the 9^th of September 2016, 1,300 government and civil society members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) passed Motion 26. This motion declares the six IUCN Protected Area Management Categories and four Governance Types as well as Sacred Natural Sites to be “no go zones” for extractive industries and developers. Unfortunately as a resolution, it is non-binding on governments and companies, however as experts rightly state it “becomes one more tool for groups to use in pushing for policy changes at a local, national and international level”.

ECOWATCH reports that this resolution responds to the “direct and urgent needs of people too, including indigenous people whose sacred sites and lands face destructive forces. One need only to look at the Dakota Access Pipeline battle here in the U.S., which would disturb sacred sites as well as water sources of the Standing Rock Sioux, to imagine that this sort of injustice happens to indigenous groups everywhere”. Think what could happen to the water sources of Lake Edward in Virunga National Park, how an oil spill could affect the lives of millions of peoples, destroy their livelihoods and only source of life as well as ignite conflicts in a region that have been plagued by warlords and people profiting of the illegal extraction of its resources.

Motion 26 is no silver bullet, but it helps people unite and mobilize against the destructive path of extractive industries and infrastructure development in the world. Colombia, DRC, US no matter where these developments will appear next, they will encounter the same resistance: we are all protectors.

Motion 26 reflects a call that indigenous peoples the world over have been making for decades. Colombia’s U’wa kicked Occidental Petroleum out in 2002. In the Ecuadorian Amazon, Sarayaku similarly fought and beat Argentinian oil company CGC in the mid 2000s. Look at the inspiring No Dakota Access Pipeline actions happening right now. Indigenous peoples are going to vigorously defend their sacred territories from extraction whether or not Motion 26 passes. But adoption of the measure would blow wind into the sails of indigenous campaigns for territorial defense and would offer a tool to help strengthen national level protected area norms to include sacred natural sites.

Andrew Miller in Ecowatch

Women are at the forefront of the #NoDAPL (No Dakota Access Pipeline) movement and they say it’s anything but a protest.

Women are the keepers of the water. Water is the first life, is our very essence, our very being.

It is so much bigger than just one pipeline, it is the fossil fuel Industry as a whole. It is ultimately going to be something that comes back on us as Humanity. It doesn’t matter the color of our skin, it doesn’t matter our religious background, it doesn’t matter our age. When we desecrate the water we desecrate ourselves. We are all as women going to keep-up holding the line, pushing forward to hold the line for water, and for life.

That label of protester…could never describe the protectors that are here.