At a rally last year in Southern California, high school students from Malibu make their commitment known with face paint.

This week, our staff worked up and down the West Coast of North America to wean the United States off of our addiction to fossil fuels.  In Oregon, Rory Cox and Sarah Kagan helped organize a rally in Salem protesting new proposed Liquefied Natural Gas terminals.  Proposals to build new terminals in Coos Bay and along the Columbia River would turn Oregon into an energy colony to feed gas to the California market. 

Remember the old slogan “Don’t Californicate Oregon”?  Well, these LNG terminals would do just that.  So Rory and Sarah worked with our partners in Oregon to rally on the capitol steps in Salem, bringing over 200 people together to voice their opposition to these polluting and unnecessary terminals.  Why would Oregon want to derail its renewable energy initiatives just to feed LNG, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, to California?  Click here to read more about the protest and see photos as well as a video clip! 

At the same time, up in Alaska, our nation’s Minerals Management Service was busy leasing off vast areas of the Chukchi Sea in the Arctic to oil and gas companies.  Shell was the high bidder, with ConocoPhillips and Statoil not far behind.  Last week, we filed a lawsuit challenging the sale.  At the lease sale itself, Alaska Program Associate Rachel James and Program Fellow Rebecca Noblin worked with Alaska Natives from the Arctic to make sure that their protests were heard by the media.  Rebecca even donned a polar bear suit to draw attention to the threats to the polar bears from drilling in the “Polar Bear Seas” and from increased greenhouse gas emissions that will result from the massive amount of proposed drilling.  Click here to read a live blog from the event hosted by our friends and colleagues at Alaska Wilderness League and see photos.  And click here to read a great opinion piece by our long-term partner Rick Steiner that describes the insanity of the Chukchi lease sale. 

Let’s hope we can take Rick’s words to heart and break our fossil fuel addiction in North America.  We need to do this – to protect our planet from global warming and oil spills as well as to build a new green economy.  That’s what our staff was doing all this week, up and down the West Coast!

Reindeer have been a way of life for centuries in the Russian Far East.

A number of our partners on Sakhalin have launched efforts to get Exxon to re-route a pipeline around Piltun Lagoon and away from reindeer breeding grounds.  Click here to read about our visit to the reindeer herders last fall. 

In December, the reindeer herders joined together with environmental and indigenous groups to send a letter to Exxon and to Russian state agencies to ask for the pipeline to be rerouted.  After all, there are strong biodiversity reasons for this:  Piltun Lagoon is the source of the rich benthos that feeds critically endangered Western Gray Whales off the coast of Sakhalin and is habitat for rich fisheries that feed native peoples.  Exxon’s on-shore construction has already impacted reindeer breeding grounds, and construction of a pipeline through the reindeer breeding grounds will likely doom this native tradition that is struggling to survive. 

Exxon, though, has other ideas.  Without informing leaders in the indigenous or environmental communities, Exxon secretly brought together many of the reindeer herders for a meeting.  The herders were confused and asked where were the leaders and why weren’t they at the meeting?  Exxon simply said the leaders couldn’t attend, even though these people had not been informed.   The reindeer herders, under the influence of alcohol, signed a statement allowing Exxon to build the pipeline. 

Exxon learned from the “divide and conquer” strategies used to subjugate indigenous cultures in the 19th century.  Too bad they’re still using these tactics. 

Thankfully, the herders themselves said that this meeting with Exxon was improper, and now even Exxon has agreed to a meeting that will bring all the stakeholders together.  After all, this decision is not that difficult.  All the reindeer herders want is a common-sense decision to re-route the pipeline so that it will avoid Piltun Lagoon and reindeer breeding grounds.  Certainly Exxon, with its record-breaking profits, can see the wisdom in this?