I haven’t lived anywhere I’m more conscious of “the fragility of each breath” than New York City. The density of traffic fumes and tobacco clouds, and occasionally the pungent odor of marijuana, too—all of these pollutants make it easy to notice my breath and the quality of air I’ve taken for granted until now. When […]
An update on #NoDAPL
“Elections have consequences.” That’s the Told Ya So of 2017: annoying and yet valid. Among the consequences: the AP reports that the acting US Army Corp chief has authorized resumption of the Dakota Access Pipeline project. Construction is moving forward yet again, over the objections of the Standing Rock Tribe and coalitions like the Indigenous […]
News from Michigan, Alabama, and Russia
A common thread of resistance and environmental racism links Flint, Michigan, Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota, and Waller County, Texas, where residents are fighting, respectively, state negligence, corporate encroachment, and an unwanted landfill. Phillip Luke Sintierre writes on the proposed landfill in Waller County for the African American Intellectual History Society: Opposition to Green Group’s […]
From encampment to divestment
As winter sets in the Dakotas and the government begins an environmental impact study of the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline, a coalition of Native people at and around Standing Rock is weighing its options. Should non-Natives leave the area or stay, ready to intervene? Should activists focus on Energy Transfer Partners and its ongoing construction […]
Water is life, we say.
There’s some good news from Standing Rock this week: good in the way that mere bureacracy always looks heroic when set beside rank cruelty and neglect. The US Army Corps has agreed to prepare an environmental impact statement on the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline otherwise known as DAPL. This impact statement, as Natives have said for […]
The latest from Standing Rock
The story of the Dakota Access Pipeline continues: The pipeline is planned from Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to Illinois, where it would tie in with an existing pipeline to refineries in the Midwest and on the Gulf coast. The project was never examined under an environmental impact review but instead was approved under […]