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365 Day Vow of Silence for animal rights activism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgR_zz8Kmbs

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https://amp.smh.com.au/national/everyday-heroes-compelled-to-break-the-law-when-government-fails-to-protect-us-20180325-p4z64n.html

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16 year old Ahed has been sentenced to an eight month sentence  for physically harassing an occupational guard on Palestinian territory.  She's causing quite the media stir. Can her civil disobedience be a catalyst for wider attention being given  to and consequences for the illigal Israeli occupation?

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Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are among the most watched people on the planet. They're under the constant gaze of Israeli soldiers.

But in the Israeli media, Palestinians aren't as visible as you might think. And when they do attract news coverage, there's a perception issue. Too often they're framed as problems - security problems for the most part.

The relative absence of Palestinians in the Israeli media has an effect on Israelis, to the extent that many Israelis refuse to believe that an occupation that has lasted more than half a century even exists.

The story of a young Palestinian girl - and her confrontation with an Israeli soldier two months ago - has got people talking. Ahed Tamimi was filmed slapping a soldier outside her home in Nabi Saleh, in the Occupied West Bank.

The video of that confrontation triggered a media frenzy in Israel.

"The first reaction of the Israeli public, they loved this clip, and everyone shared it, saying look, we are very proud of the Israeli soldier for constraining himself," says satirist and TV host Assaf Harel. "Then something interesting happened and people started to watch it from a different angle. How do we let a little girl talk like that, threatening and hitting a soldier and we do nothing?"

They [Israelis] imagine Palestinian women are all oppressed, passive, veiled...always in the background. Ahed is the extreme opposite of that. She is young, has supposedly 'European' features. She reflects the image Israelis have of themselves - suddenly a Palestinian sabotages that self-image.

Honaida Ghanim, director, The Palestinian Forum of Israeli Studies

In Israel, Tamimi's confrontation with the soldier is widely viewed as a provocation, a trap, designed to elicit a violent response that could be used to discredit Israel abroad. Which is why so much of the often hysterical media coverage of this case has focused on her appearance and how it plays to an international audience.

Tamimi doesn't fit the Israeli stereotype of what Palestinians look like and a number of prominent voices in the media argued she was being used in 'Pallywood' propaganda.

"They imagine Palestinian women are all oppressed, passive, veiled...always in the background. Ahed is the extreme opposite of that. She is young, has supposedly 'European' features. She reflects the image Israelis have of themselves - suddenly a Palestinian sabotages that self-image," says Honaida Ghanim, director of The Palestinian Forum of Israeli Studies. "So how do they deal with it? They say 'look at her hair, look at her eyes, she can't be Palestinian, she's just acting Palestinian and all of this is just theatre'."

The one-dimensional coverage of Palestinians in the Israeli media is a problem that extends beyond Ahed Tamimi. News outlets know that Israeli audiences aren't interested in nuanced representations of Palestinian life under occupation.

"On TV broadcasts, you can track ratings minute by minute. And when a feature about Arabs does not present them in an entirely negative way, and actually even if it does present them in an entirely negative way, the ratings go down" says Oren Persico, a writer with The Seventh Eye.

"Commercial media outlets know that not only will you lose audience interest, you'll later receive complaints asking 'why are you even dealing with them? They're our enemies'."

The Listening Post's Tariq Nafi explores the case, the coverage and the incarceration of Ahed Tamimi.

Contributors:
Honaida Ghanim, director, The Palestinian Forum of Israeli Studies
Abir Kopty, media expert
Oren Persico, staff writer, The Seventh Eye
Assaf Harel, satirist and TV personality as well as Contributor, Haaretz
Manal Tamimi, Nabi Saleh activist and Ahed Tamimi's aunt

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Ahed Tamimi: One story, multiple narratives

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Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are among the most watched people on the planet. They're under the constant gaze of Israeli soldiers. But in the Israeli media, Palestinians aren't as visible as you might think. And when they do attract news coverage, there's a perception issue.

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Articles on the teachers walkout in Oklahoma where they are demanding greater funding towards education. Tens of thousands of people gathered in the Capitol, and similar movements are taking place in other states as well. Maybe students can in some way be viewed as "voiceless" in this context as they are too young to vote but are yet highly impacted by the decision-makers.

http://kwsn.com/news/articles/2018/apr/03/oklahoma-teachers-vow-to-stage-second-day-of-walkouts/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/us/oklahoma-teachers-strike.html
http://time.com/5239548/oklahoma-teachers-walkout-ends/

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Civil disobedience agains reforms in Mexico

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Civil disobedience agains reforms in Mexico

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Mexican Education Secretary Aurelio Nuño at the presentation. Sáshenka Gutiérrez EFE

If deadlines are met, Mexican students will begin the 2017/2018 academic year with a new education plan that terminates a 70-year-old model and seeks to raise the country's historically low student achievement levels.

The reform was one of the star proposals of President Enrique Peña Nieto, and met with significant opposition from teacher unions before and after its parliamentary approval in 2013.

The new model includes greater school autonomy, periodic tests for teachers, and English classes for children from elementary through high school education.

Peña Nieto, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), has secured support for his reform from the main teacher union SNTE, which represents 1.5 million education workers. But it is still being rejected by a dissident faction of the CNTE, with around 120,000 members. These protesters have been clashing with government forces, organizing strikes and setting up road blocks to express their discontent at the sweeping changes.

Government officials presented the model on Wednesday at a public event that was not devoid of tension. The night before, government representatives and dissident teachers had met for six hours. The meeting ended with the teachers walking out and demanding that the presentation be cancelled.

Far from doing so, the government sent the secretary of education, a governor and the head of the majority teacher union to an event that was heavy with pomp and ceremony, as though to underscore the importance of this turning point for Mexico's education system.

"Our proposal is for Peña Nieto's six-year term to end with a radically different education system," said government sources.

The public event served as a governmental reaffirmation in the face of dissident teachers who have been routinely blocking access roads into cities. A day before the presentation, three buses were set on fire in Guerrero, and a police officer was forced to walk barefoot and shirtless with a CNTE flag in his hand.

Officials on Wednesday made it clear that the new plan will not eliminate the teacher evaluations that have been at the heart of protests in southern states. But Education Secretary Aurelio Nuño also made a point of insisting that the model is "unfinished" and that the government will revise "the controversial examination depending on the different regions of the country."

That is as many concessions as the protesting teachers have secured after weeks of frustrated negotiations. Protesters fear being expelled if they fail an evaluation that few of them are prepared for.

At the event, Juan Díaz, the head of the majority union SNTE, criticized his colleagues from the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca and Michoacán, saying that "nobody has the right to turn education into a political and ideological battleground."

But even he had words against the evaluation, which he described as being based on 1970s standardized models. "We will analyze its labor and professional impact, and if necessary demand respect for the rights of education workers," said Díaz.

The new education model will be assessed by schools, experts, parents, academics and chambers of commerce during the month of August. Their input will help develop a final model in December, which will then be implemented in the new schoolbooks for gradual introduction beginning in the fall of 2017, said Nuño.

Mexico is one of the OECD members that invests the most in education - nearly five percent of GDP - yet it consistently ranks at the bottom of international student achievement charts. Domestically, Oaxaca and Chiapas come in last.

English version by Susana Urra.

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Mexico presents education reform despite teacher opposition

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If deadlines are met, Mexican students will begin the 2017/2018 academic year with a new education plan that terminates a 70-year-old model and seeks to raise the country's historically low student achievement levels. The reform was one of the star proposals of President Enrique Peña Nieto, and met with significant opposition from teacher unions before and after its parliamentary approval in 2013.

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The Climate Disobedience Center exists to support a growing community of climate dissidents who take the risk of acting commensurate with the scale and urgency of the crisis.

The title of Gandhi's autobiography is "The Story of My Experiments with Truth." While the book is more focused on his own personal habits and spiritual disciplines rather than his political and strategic thoughts on satyagraha, the idea is one that motivated a group to gather in Virginia and North Carolina over the last three weeks.

Three of us from the Climate Disobedience Center joined around two dozen activists from across the US to see if we might experiment with a new expression of the truth in the climate fight. At the invitation of local activists, we visited with communities fighting the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and listened to those who were on the frontlines of this fight talk about this massive new project to export fracked gas from West Virginia. And at their invitation on Friday February 2nd, we occupied the North Carolina Governor's office.

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Our own Jay O'Hara is in Maine and supporting these clergy working to halt the immoral tax bill with training, coaching and social media.

Maine Clergy Risk Arrest in Civil Disobedience Action Against Immoral Tax Bill to Remind Senator Collins of Biblical Responsibility to Protect the Poor and Vulnerable

Portland, ME -- On Thursday, December 7th at 11 a.m., faith leaders will lead a nonviolent, faith-based civil disobedience action, calling on Senator Susan Collins to reject the tax bill that gives massive tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and powerful corporations, funded by raising taxes on middle class families and slashing funding for Medicare, Medicaid and education.

"Unitarian Universalism affirms the worth and dignity of each person, and our social and religious prophets spur us to work for justice, equality, and compassion so that we can live in community with others. My faith calls me to oppose this legislation because of the great harm it could cause in our communities. Cutting funding to those most vulnerable and using the gains as relief for those who need none flies in the face of our values, as people called to care for one another. In this moment, our faith calls us to speak out for those who will be most hurt by this bill, and we likewise call on Senator Collins to speak out for Maine's people by opposing this legislation." Molly Brewer, ministerial intern of the First Universalist Church of Auburn while working toward a Master of Divinity degree at Meadville Lombard Theological School.

"Our faith calls us to take care of our neighbors. Our faith calls us to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God. We call on Senator Collins to do the right thing for her constituents and to listen to God's call at this pivotal moment by opposing this unjust, immoral, and harmful piece of legislation. The fact is, this tax plan hurts low-income Mainers and seniors, and it gives massive tax cuts to the very wealthiest Americans and powerful corporations. This is an issue of fairness and misplaced priorities, especially because the tax breaks will be funded by raising taxes on middle class families and slashing funding for Medicare, Medicaid, and education." - Rev. Allen Ewing-Merrill pastor at Hope Gateway.

What: Multi-denominational faith leaders will participate in a civil disobedience action against the tax bill and call on Sen. Collins to remember the moral commitments of her faith traditions by publicly praying and reading Bible verses highlighting the commands to protect poor and vulnerable people.

When: Thursday, December 7th, 11 a.m.

Where: Sen. Susan Collins' Portland Office, Canal Plaza # 802, Portland, ME 04101

Who: Confirmed Faith leaders include:

Visuals: Faith leaders wearing clerical attire reading the Bible and praying publicly. Civil disobedience action planned with potential arrest of several faith leaders. Faith leaders will be accompanied by many supporters with signage.

For footage and photos please follow https://www.facebook.com/moralmaine
https://www.facebook.com/allen.ewingmerrill

https://twitter.com/AlleninMaine
https://twitter.com/oharjo

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Climate Disobedience Center Fellow, and Clergy Climate Action Founder, Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman shares her story of faithful action on the West Roxbury fracked gas pipeline.

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The Climate Disobedience Center truly NEEDS your support to sustain our unique and revolutionary work. From using civil disobedience trials as movement building opportunities to cultivating small groups that holistically fortify activists, the Climate Disobedience Center continues to strive for adaptable, effective and principled ways of defending a livable future.
Donate to keep our work going.
Let's be honest. The Climate Disobedience Center probably won't start getting big grants from major foundations and billionaires any time soon. The mainstream movement landscape is dependent on measurables, deliverables, and professing certainty about how approaches will play out in unprecedented crisis situations.

We don't pretend to have that certainty. But we strongly believe that the power of chosen vulnerability - a willingness to take disruptive action and to bear the consequences - has the potential to arouse the empathy of others in a way that expands what is possible. This is a culture-shifting strategy that aims to transform landscape of possibility within which politics and policy emerge. That's why the Climate Disobedience Center works to help people develop the courage and community of support to that make it possible to step into their power of vulnerability.

Our total annual budget is only about $150,000. Your gift to the Climate Disobedience Center supports trials and activists across the country and resources communities of resistance. We raise that money from people like you who value the critical grassroots work we do. Please donate today.
Can you give $50 to continue this critical work? Or give $250?
Thank you for your support, and for being a part of this movement.

Tim DeChristopher
for all of us at the Climate Disobedience Center

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On October 23rd, 2017, 84 members of congress submitted a letter to Attorney General Sessions regarding nonviolent direct action on crude oil pipelines. The letter, backed by American Petroleum Institute, Association of Oil Pipe Lines, and the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, is a dishonest effort to smear the climate movement, and fabricate a threat in order to legitimate further criminalization of dissent against one of Congress's largest clients: the fossil fuel industry. Rather than doing their job and protecting current and future generations from civilizational collapse caused by run-away climate change, members of Congress are working to protect their funders at the risk their constituents.

The letter begins the official process of expanding the Patriot Act and domestic terrorism laws to target those who resist fossil fuel infrastructure. The accusation of terrorism hinges on violence to human beings, which has never been even a fringe element of the climate movement. The only violent reference which this Congressional letter could find was Tucker Carlson's creative interpretation of a letter to the editor of a local newspaper in Boulder, Colorado. On that single thread hangs this attempt to defame a mass movement in order to repress dissent and free speech.

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The Climate Disobedience Center exists to support a growing community of climate dissidents who take the risk of acting commensurate with the scale and urgency of the crisis. The title of Gandhi's autobiography is "The Story of My Experiments with Truth."

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People protested against the criticism a pro-democratic scholar received when they spoke out as it is a "suppression of free speech"

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Hongkongers rally at legislature over 'attacks on free speech'

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Pro-democracy politicians voice alarm at government's rebuke to scholar, as their opponents step up calls for national security legislation

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Here is some news regarding the organisation Sea Shepard. Have fun reading it!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/29/sea-shepherd-says-it-will-abandon-pursuit-of-japanese-whalers

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"How a group of five activists called the Valve Turners decided to fight global warming by doing whatever it takes."

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Foster, who is 53, was charged with criminal trespass and criminal mischief, conspiracy to commit criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. At his bond hearing in Cavalier, N.D., he learned that he faced a maximum sentence of more than 26 years. When prosecutors requested that his bail be set at $100,000, Foster asked for a chance to speak. "Your Honor," he said, "one of the main reasons for this action is to appear here and see justice done for our children, and to protect the air and land and water that they will require to survive. So it's very important for me to be here in this courtroom, and I wouldn't miss it for the world. I'm - it's terrifying - but I am not going to miss it."

Judge Laurie Fontaine set his bail at $75,000.

I first met Foster on a pitch-black evening in November 2016, a week after the presidential election, in the community room of a progressive church in Hood River, Ore. Foster and the four others accused of pipeline sabotage, all of whom had been released on bail, had been dubbed the Valve Turners, and this was their first public appearance since their coordinated action. They stood in a self-conscious line before their audience, unsure how to begin.

One by one, they recounted their actions on the morning of Oct. 11. Ken Ward, 61, a longtime environmental activist from New England, closed a shut-off valve on Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline near Mount Vernon, Wash. Leonard Higgins, 66, a soft-spoken Unitarian and retired state-government employee from Corvallis, Ore., closed a shut-off valve on the Enbridge Express Pipeline near Coal Banks Landing, Mont. Emily Johnston, 51, an editor and a poet, and Annette Klapstein, 65, a retired attorney for the Puyallup tribe, traveled together from Seattle to Leonard, Minn., and turned the shut-off valves on a pair of pipelines owned by Enbridge. The five men and women said little about themselves, dwelling instead on what they saw as the existential threat of climate change and the inadequacy of available legal remedies. "I'm not courageous or brave," Johnston told the small crowd. "I'm just more afraid of climate change than I am of prison."

Foster, dressed in what I would learn was his standard outfit - Hawaiian shirt, jeans and running shoes - stood at one end of the row, bouncing on his toes. Slight and agile, he can seem much younger than his years, almost impish. "I'm not afraid," he said, grinning.

His companions laughed tolerantly; they had heard this before. "Well, that's good, because you've got the biggest charges," Johnston teased.

The Valve Turners are, for the most part, quiet people. They wear sensible shoes, and several attend church regularly. Most are parents, and one is a grandparent. All are white, all are college-educated and none are truly poor. While all are deeply concerned about climate change, none are immediately threatened by its worst effects: no one's home has flooded, and no one's health has been seriously damaged by heat waves or failed harvests or northward-creeping tropical diseases. All say that it is this relative safety - and the relative advantages of age, race, education and wealth - that makes them feel they have a particular responsibility, as climate activists, to push the boundaries of civil disobedience.

Most Americans treat climate change, as the saying goes, seriously but not literally. We accept the science, we worry about its forecasts. We tell ourselves that the effects won't be as bad as predicted, or that they will happen elsewhere, a long time from now. We tell ourselves that someone else will get serious about fixing the problem very soon. We find some way to blur the causal line between our individual actions and their cumulative effects. This is, in many ways, an eminently reasonable reaction, because it allows us to continue with our daily lives and to tend to the political emergencies of the moment - which are, after all, always numerous.

The Valve Turners take climate change both very seriously and very literally. They are among those whom Ward calls the "climate freakout people" - the scant 2 to 3 percent of Americans who, when asked by Gallup to name the most important problem facing the country today, mention pollution or the environment. They can quote from the work of scientists like James Hansen, the former director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, who was an author of a 2008 paper concluding that in order to preserve a planet "similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted," the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere needs to be reduced to 350 parts per million or less. (They can also tell you that the current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which was about 385 parts per million when Hansen and his team published their paper, is now above 407 - higher than it has been in at least 800,000 years.) For a variety of reasons, they have found themselves unable to look away from the scientific consensus that global business as usual is likely to cause, and may well already be causing, unspeakable suffering. With what their admirers call moral clarity and their detractors - including some of their loved ones - call tunnel vision, they've decided that their own business as usual must end.

Foster may have made up his mind as early as high school, when he starred in a production of "The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail," the 1970 play about Thoreau's refusal to pay a poll tax because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War. "It's very simple," the play's Thoreau tells the local constable. "What the government of this country is doing turns my stomach! And if I keep my mouth shut, I'm a criminal. To my Conscience. To my God. To Society. And to you, Sam Staples."

The modern environmental movement was born around the time Thoreau adjourned to his cabin on Walden Pond in 1845, but the climate movement - the part of the environmental movement concerned primarily with reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and easing the effects of climate change - is barely 10 years old.

For decades, the predictions of climate scientists inspired little citizen action: In North America, at least, the possible consequences of climate change were too abstract, too distant in time and space, to galvanize a popular movement. But as international negotiations kept stalling, proposed legislation repeatedly staggered toward failure and scientific forecasts worsened, frustration grew among grass-roots environmentalists. In 2008, seven Middlebury College graduates and a Middlebury scholar in residence, Bill McKibben - whose 1989 book, "The End of Nature," was among the first to take on climate change for a mass audience - founded the advocacy group 350.org, named after the study led by James Hansen. The work of McKibben and his students helped define the goal of the nascent climate movement: reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million or less. In the process, they also defined their opponents. Those who were adding the most carbon dioxide to the atmosphere were the movement's biggest enemies, and at the head of that list was the fossil-fuel industry.

Climate-movement leaders organized mass demonstrations - in front of the White House, at international climate conferences and elsewhere - but almost from the start, a handful of activists began executing smaller-scale, more confrontational actions, hoping to both rouse complacent sympathizers and shame major emitters. In Utah in 2008, an economics student named Tim DeChristopher, who had grown alarmed about the increasing likelihood of climate scientists' worst-case scenarios, posed as a bidder at an auction for public-lands drilling rights, placing fraudulent bids for leases on 22,500 acres of land. DeChristopher was convicted of two felonies, sentenced to two years in jail and fined $10,000.

Like DeChristopher, Ken Ward, a former deputy director and chief operating officer of Greenpeace U.S.A., had become convinced that such actions were essential provocations. "This is the kind of disruption that's necessary to change politics," he says.

Nearly six feet tall, Ward has craggy features, thick, dark eyebrows and a professorial air belied by his customary sturdy workwear. In the fall of 2012, he and other activists paid a series of surreptitious visits to Brayton Point, a port on the southeastern fringe of Massachusetts and the home of an aging coal-fired power plant that was, at the time, the state's largest carbon-dioxide emitter. Posing as bird-watchers, they surveyed the harbor with binoculars.

On May 15, 2013, Ward and a young Quaker sailmaker named Jay O'Hara piloted a 32-foot lobster boat into the Brayton Point ship channel, dropping anchor in the path of a freighter carrying a load of West Virginia coal to the power station. When the freighter neared, Ward and O'Hara alerted the police and the ship's crew that they were carrying out a peaceful protest. ("This coal is coming from the United States," a crew member responded. "What's the problem with that?") It took the rest of the day to move the boat, which Ward and O'Hara had named the Henry David T. The pair were charged with three misdemeanors and a felony.

But on the morning the trial was scheduled to begin, the district attorney, Sam Sutter, announced that he had decided not to pursue criminal charges. "Climate change is one of the gravest crises our planet has ever faced," he told reporters gathered in the courthouse plaza. Sutter added that he would join a climate march later that month. (That year, Sutter ran for mayor of the working-class city of Fall River, Mass., and won.) By then, the owners of the Brayton Point station had decided to close it, citing low energy prices and the costs of retrofitting the facility to meet current environmental standards.

Ward moved from Boston to a small town outside Portland, Ore., and began thinking about how he might continue what he and O'Hara started. Quietly, he began to discuss possibilities with core members of the climate movement in Seattle - conversations that would eventually include Michael Foster.

Foster, a family therapist, longtime environmentalist and father of two, had been living in Seattle for two decades, and he'd recently become active in raising awareness about climate change. But his road to the beet fields of North Dakota began years earlier near Houston, now the southernmost endpoint of the Keystone Pipeline.

When Foster was 3, his father was shot and killed on the street in Laredo, Tex. His mother, who left the family a few months earlier, lost custody of her three children to Foster's paternal grandparents. Foster and his siblings were raised in a Houston suburb, Deer Park; his mother remarried, moved to central Texas and maintained an affectionate but somewhat distant relationship with her children. (Not until Foster was in his 20s did she reveal her suspicion that his father, a junior-college professor, had been having an affair with a female student and was shot by a rival.)

Despite the upheaval of his early years, Foster remembers his childhood as a happy one. His paternal grandfather worked for the Shell oil refinery whose smokestacks still punctuate the Houston skyline, and his grandparents were able to raise Foster and his siblings in relative comfort.

Foster's grandmother died of cancer when he was in eighth grade, and he responded to the loss, in part, with a tent-revival religious conversion, becoming a Baptist. Foster believed that his future lay in the ministry, and he eagerly anticipated the return of the traveling preacher who had drawn him into the church. But as he sat with other believers in his high school auditorium, watching his mentor prowl the same stage where Foster had pretended to be Thoreau, he saw only artifice. "He was promoting his television show, he was asking for money," Foster says. "I'd learned something about performance, and I could see this was a performance." He walked out of the auditorium, and out of the church, with a lifelong horror of hypocrisy.

Foster first encountered the notion of climate change when his high school debate team was assigned to research energy independence. In Texas in the 1970s, support for increased domestic oil production was practically a requirement for residency, but the team had to argue both sides of the issue, so they studied the prospects for energy sources at home and abroad. One day, an upperclassman gave Foster an interesting tip: At Exxon, where some students' parents worked, company scientists had considered the effects of carbon-dioxide emissions on the climate and concluded that humanity would soon have to wean itself off fossil fuels.

"It was just this goofy, weird piece of information," Foster remembers. "We couldn't even figure out how to use it - was it an argument for energy independence, or against it?" In 2015, when news broke that Exxon scientists had indeed studied the causes and effects of climate change for decades, Foster would remember how he and his fellow debaters failed to understand that the industry on which their families depended might also be upending their world.

Foster studied theater at the University of Houston and found work performing Shakespeare in local schools. Theater led him to Louisville, Ky., where he returned to school for a degree in counseling, hoping to channel his love for children and the outdoors into a career as a wilderness therapist. After graduation he moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he worked for a succession of outdoor education programs. He also reconnected with his college girlfriend, who was working in Seattle, and in 1999, they married.

They soon had two children. Foster took enthusiastically to fatherhood; the violent death of his own father had given him an early lesson in the uncertainty of life, and he delighted in providing his family with the sense of security he had lost. "My friends started complaining that I wouldn't spend time with them because I insisted on being home for bedtime," he says. "I was just so happy - ridiculously happy."

But Foster was increasingly troubled by one particular threat to his family. In high school, he regarded the heating of the planet by humans as a goofy rumor, but he'd since come to see it as a credible, even pressing, concern. During the summer of 1988, when he was 23, he turned on the television just as Hansen was testifying before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on global warming. "It is already happening now," Hansen said at the hearing.

That's it, Foster remembers thinking. Now Congress knows. Now it's going to be fixed.

It wasn't fixed, of course. Through the 2000s, Foster worked as a therapist and an outdoor educator, finding solace in the connections he forged between kids and the rest of the living world. But he knew that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was increasing, and he knew that its heaviest consequences - more extreme droughts, floods, fires and storms - would be borne by his children's generation and those that came after it.

He felt compelled to do more, and in the summer of 2012, at the suggestion of a friend, he traveled to San Francisco for climate-change activism training run by Al Gore. When he returned home, he adapted Gore's famous PowerPoint presentation for younger audiences, adding stories about kids who planted trees, built their own wind turbines and sued the United States government over its inaction on climate change.

Soon Foster was talking about climate change to hundreds of students every month. He worked with a group of kids who were suing the state of Washington over its climate policy. In 2013, he and Emily Johnston helped found 350Seattle.org, which became part of an intensifying campaign against the expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest, successfully opposing the construction of several new coal and oil export terminals in Washington and Oregon. In May and June 2015 in Seattle, Foster, Johnston and hundreds of other activists tried to prevent the departure of Royal Dutch Shell's offshore oil rig, the Polar Pioneer, by forming chains of kayaks and canoes; the following month, Foster joined another boat blockade, in Portland, that tried to stop a Shell icebreaker from leaving for the Arctic. Though both vessels eventually proceeded north, Shell officials were reportedly surprised by the strength of the opposition and the coverage it garnered. In September, citing the disappointing results of its exploration, the company abandoned its Arctic drilling operations. For Foster, it was a revelation: He had put his body in the way of the polluters, and the polluters had turned back.

In the late summer of 2016, an acquaintance invited Foster to a meeting with Ward and a small group of other activists but warned Foster that his very attendance could make him an accessory to a felony. Foster didn't hesitate. "How lovely!" he remembers saying. "I've been waiting!"

On Oct. 9, 2016, Ward left for northwestern Washington, Higgins for Montana, Klapstein and Johnston for Minnesota and Foster for North Dakota. They agreed that their actions would be nonviolent and that they would willingly accept the consequences in court. All five have faced or are facing trials in the states where their actions took place, and in each, they have sought to use the "necessity defense" - to argue that they broke the law because they had exhausted all legal means to reduce or eliminate a clear and present danger, namely the threat of climate change. The necessity defense, traditionally applied to crimes committed to head off immediate physical threats, has been permitted only rarely in civil-disobedience cases, and it has almost never succeeded. But for the Valve Turners, its articulation is a deliberate extension of their campaign, a way to publicly express the urgency they feel. "It's both practical and political," says Lauren Regan, the executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Eugene, Ore., and the lead attorney in Ward's case. "Talking about this as a necessity - that really pushes the conversation in a direction the movement wants it to go."

The Valve Turners see their actions as complementary to the rest of the climate movement, as adding an offense to a movement that has so far played mostly defense - as it did during the mass protests against the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and early 2017, which were led by the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes. Foster says: "I'd participated in all these different protests, but how much of the poison had I actually stopped? That I had a chance to take a major action against the existing flow - God, finally."

But the Valve Turners' tactics are not popular within the environmental movement as a whole and remain controversial even within the climate movement. While the national leadership of 350.org offered its support to the Valve Turners after their arrests, the response from mainstream environmental groups was subdued; for some, the shut-offs were reminiscent of the anonymous vandalism carried out by groups like Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front beginning in the 1980s, which enabled opponents to demonize environmentalists as domestic terrorists.

DeChristopher, who went on to study divinity at Harvard, has worked with several of the Valve Turners through the New England-based Climate Disobedience Center, which provides strategic support to climate activists practicing civil disobedience. He says their willingness to assume responsibility, and to publicly explain their actions, distinguishes their strategy from that of anonymous saboteurs. "If you do something and then run away, that gives your opponents a huge opportunity to come in and say, 'Let me tell you who these people are and why we should go after them,' " he says. "If you stand your ground and tell your story, that puts a face on it, and it can have an entirely different effect."

This theory was tested when Ward, whose case was the first to go to trial, appeared in court in the small city of Mount Vernon, in far northwestern Washington State, on a cold, bright January morning last year. The judge, Michael Rickert, did not allow Ward to use a necessity defense, ruling that Ward had not exhausted his legal options. Ward was charged with both burglary and sabotage - which, in Washington, is defined in part as willful interference with a commercial enterprise - and as Rickert dryly pointed out, the case was "not exactly a whodunit." The jury even watched a video of Ward cutting the chain that secured the emergency valve of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline. But after nearly six hours of sometimes heated deliberation, the jurors announced that they could not come to a decision on either charge. They told me that all were in favor of conviction except for one, who maintained that Ward's primary intent was not to break the law but to make a point about climate change.

The judge declared a mistrial based on the hung jury, and Ward was tried again five months later, in June. This time, he was convicted of burglary, but once again the jurors could not reach a decision on the sabotage charge. The second jury was even more divided than the first: a retired nurse who voted against conviction on the sabotage charge described Ward as a "hero," while the presiding juror, Donald Munro, voted for conviction on both counts, calling Ward a "jerk" who "did it to get attention."

Another juror, Warren Wicke, a former corporate recruiter who retired to Mount Vernon, voted against a sabotage conviction, calling the charge "overkill," and described Ward as a "good man." But like many of the other jurors I interviewed, he has his reservations about Ward's strategy. "I'm worried about somebody trying to outdo him, somebody doing something more outrageous for the sake of publicity," he said.

The maximum penalty for second-degree burglary in Washington is 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. After the prosecution decided not to pursue a second retrial on the sabotage charge, Judge Rickert sentenced Ward to two days in prison and 30 days of community service, which Ward, an experienced carpenter, fulfilled this summer by working for the local Habitat for Humanity chapter. "Do I think that Mr. Ward's behavior's going to change if he spends 90 days in jail? No," Rickert said at the sentencing. "Would putting Mr. Ward in jail change the behavior of other people from throwing the tea off the boat or shutting off the oil pipeline? I don't think so."

Most of the Valve Turners say that their acute concern about climate change, and their decision to break the law because of it, have come with significant personal costs. Some have lost friends and partners, and all have found that "climate freakout people" are not popular at parties. Still, most have reached an accommodation with those who don't share their alarm.

Foster has found such accommodations - with himself, with others - nearly impossible. When Foster committed himself to the climate movement, he also recruited his children, then 8 and 10, to march and speak alongside him. His older child, now a cleareyed 16-year-old, says that both siblings were initially happy to participate - in part because it gave them a chance to spend time with their father, whom they saw less and less of as his activism increased. But before long, they felt pressured. "When we would try to refuse, when we would say, 'Hey, I'm tired,' or 'Hey, I have homework,' or 'Hey, I have school today,' it would be: 'Don't you care about the planet? Don't you care about the future?' " the older child explains. "That felt awful, because of course we cared, of course we wanted to do our part. But it felt like he was using our voices to spread his message."

Foster was also determined that his household reduce its own carbon footprint. He tried to talk his family out of a Hawaiian vacation and other travel. He tried to talk them out of buying a Christmas tree and getting a cat. "Everything I do and don't do today, to pollute or stop polluting, changes what lives and dies on the planet for the next 300 years - in a very specific, particular way," he told me. "I can't let myself off the hook."

He couldn't let his family off the hook either, and resentments deepened. "When people asked me how things were going, how I was doing, I'd say, 'He's doing important stuff, and it matters,' " says his ex-wife, Malinda, who asked that her last name and her children's names not be used to protect her family's privacy. "I'd also say, 'I really respect Gandhi, but I wouldn't want to be married to him.' " Both Malinda and her older child say they felt constantly judged, and frustrated, by Foster's inflexibility. In 2014, Malinda filed for divorce, and his children said they no longer wanted to be part of his activism - or part of his life.

Malinda says the emotional scars Foster left are profound. "I think he believes he is doing what's right, and he would be the first to say he's doing this to protect his kids," Malinda told me. "What's tragic is that he's traumatizing his kids' present, and what good is the kids' future without their present?" Things might have been different, Foster's older child added, if he had presented climate change to his kids as something to be aware of, not something to fear. If he had responded to their occasional reluctance with understanding instead of anger. If he had listened. "When I hear someone mention climate change now, I just feel this overwhelming guilt," Foster's older child said. "I think, 27 trees. I've only planted 27 trees. I haven't done enough. I have so much further to go."

After his divorce, Foster, who had already closed up his private therapy practice to focus on climate activism, moved into a room in a house owned by two fellow activists. He now lives on less than $500 a month, usually traveling by bus, train or bicycle. While low-carbon living affords him some peace of mind, he can't entirely eliminate his own impact on the climate, and he sometimes stands in the grocery store, wondering what he can possibly justify eating. He is not in regular contact with his family - a situation that clearly pains him deeply - and his voice still shakes when he talks about his children. "I am so sorry that I was not able to listen, or sit still enough, or be present with them enough so that they could share whatever they were feeling," he says now. "I failed to stay close and safe, and be somebody they could count on, and that will always be my single greatest shame."

Foster's trial began in Cavalier, a tiny town in North Dakota, on Oct. 2 of last year, and after two and a half days of testimony, the jury convicted him of felony criminal mischief, felony conspiracy to commit criminal mischief and criminal trespass, a misdemeanor. He was found innocent only of reckless endangerment. Foster's co-defendant, Sam Jessup, a 32-year-old carpenter who accompanied him to the valve and live-streamed its closing, was convicted of felony conspiracy to commit criminal mischief and misdemeanor criminal conspiracy. (The charges against Schlosberg were dropped.) In pretrial hearings, Judge Fontaine ruled that Foster and Jessup would not be allowed to mount a necessity defense, just as the judges had ruled in Ward's case in Washington and Leonard Higgins's in Montana. Lawyers for the two other Valve Turners, Emily Johnston and Annette Klapstein, were able to persuade the judge to allow that defense in their forthcoming trial, but the decision has been appealed by the prosecution. As a result, the climate scientist James Hansen, who attended Foster and Jessup's trial, was not allowed to testify, but it's very unlikely that more information about climate change would have altered the verdict.

Unlike the divided jurors in Ward's trial, all the jurors in Cavalier were persuaded that Foster and Jessup were guilty of something. "If you want to protest, you can protest," one juror told me, "but you can't go on to someone else's property and destroy things." Lonny Johnson, the TransCanada employee who visited the site after Foster turned the valve, testified that the valve wasn't designed to be closed against pressure as Foster had done, but that he'd found no cracks or leaks when he inspected it. The prosecutors, however, argued that a leak could have caused a fire or explosion or polluted the nearby Pembina River. During jury selection, several potential jurors said that they had heard about Foster's action while listening to police scanners and had been so frightened by the potential consequences that they did not feel they could serve on the jury.

After his conviction, Foster returned to Seattle to await sentencing. He continued to plant trees, give slide shows and talk publicly about his decision to turn off the Keystone Pipeline, and he gave several guest sermons at liberal churches, some inspired by Thoreau's essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience." "Hilarious to think my emotional experience is no different today," he told me in a text.

On Feb. 5, he and Jessup were back in Cavalier for their sentencing, accompanied by Klapstein, Higgins and family members. The temperature was well below freezing even at midday, and the frosted streets were quiet. That evening, in the bar of the town's only motel, the two prosecuting attorneys sat together, while Foster and his group ate dinner just a few feet away. Foster was in a reflective mood. "It's so strange to think that tomorrow I could get 21 years - or I could be free for lunch," he said.

The next morning, inside the century-old county courthouse, Judge Fontaine asked if Foster wanted to make a statement before his sentencing. "Yes, Your Honor," Foster said.

Apologizing pre-emptively for his tendency to "start preaching," Foster spoke for almost 20 minutes, invoking the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Thoreau. "I don't know if this action was effective," he said. "If somebody else, somewhere down the line, takes some meaning from what I did and they apply it in the way that they see fit, that's what my action was meant to do."

Jessup, weighing his words carefully, spoke next. "For my entire adult life, I've been concerned about this issue," he said. "I came to North Dakota because I had a hope that through the necessity defense, the people of North Dakota would be given the opportunity to consider the evidence and weigh in, participate in a public deliberation in a way that I haven't seen." He added, "I don't think that this was a perfect realization of that vision."

Judge Fontaine announced a short recess. "This is not a typical criminal case," she said when she returned. She had rejected the necessity defense because, in her view, there were still legal means to address climate change. "If you can't convince the government, then you convince the people," she said, "and it seems to me the way you convince the people in this world is by 60-second sound bites, by commercials."

She had, she said, received many letters on Foster's behalf, most describing him as generous to his community and as doing exemplary work with kids. A few, however, described him as narcissistic and attention-seeking. "You like being in front of the camera, you like all the attention," she said. "Everything about you, and everything you've said to me, is this was the right thing to do, this is what I'm called to do, this is what I have to do. So nothing about that tells me you wouldn't do the same thing next month, next year, next week."

Judge Fontaine sentenced Foster to three years in prison, with two of those years to be suspended and served on supervised probation. Jessup was given a suspended sentence of two years. When the hearing ended, two officers approached Foster. He stood, and as he silently mouthed, "I love you," to his supporters in the front row, he was escorted out of the courtroom. Jessup stayed behind the defense table, looking lost.

The next afternoon, Higgins and I visited the county jail, an 18-bed operation tucked behind the courthouse. We stood in the cramped cinder-block visiting booth, separated from Foster by a thick sheet of Plexiglas, and took turns speaking to him through a phone handset. Foster was dressed in bright orange prison scrubs topped with a matching sweatshirt, and he looked tired but happy. Higgins, whose own sentencing for felony criminal mischief and misdemeanor criminal trespass is scheduled for March 20, teased Foster about his new wardrobe, and Foster laughed. "I'm going to miss everyone," he said. "The isolation's going to be hard." He would miss fresh air too. Thoreau's cabin wasn't much bigger than a jail cell, but he got to go outside whenever he liked. Foster acknowledged, though, that he was there by choice, and said he had regrets about his statement to the judge. "I blew it. I really didn't speak to her concerns." But for the moment, at least, he felt as if he were in the right place. Then he paraphrased the man he portrayed onstage 30 years ago: "If society is unjust, the only just place for a person is in jail."

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'I'm Just More Afraid of Climate Change Than I Am of Prison'

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Foster, who is 53, was charged with criminal trespass and criminal mischief, conspiracy to commit criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. At his bond hearing in Cavalier, N.D., he learned that he faced a maximum sentence of more than 26 years. When prosecutors requested that his bail be set at $100,000, Foster asked for a chance to speak.

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Lawyer Siti Kasim has been striving to empower Malaysia's marginalized and oppressed communities to speak up for themselves.

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Lawyer Siti Kasim has been striving to empower Malaysia's marginalized and oppressed communities to speak up for themselves.

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There are Orang Asli people still living in bamboo houses, with no clean water or electricity.
Orang Asli have been facing difficulties trying to hold on to their way of life in the only home they've known, the forest, as the state government has increasingly been encroaching upon it for logging and mining activities.
Together with others, including Orang Asli activists, we go in and tell them that they have rights, they can speak up and not be afraid. No one can arrest them if they have done nothing wrong," explained Siti, adding that they are often threatened with arrests for challenging such encroachments.

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Embodying this year's International Women's Day theme of being bold for change, lawyer Siti Kasim has been striving to empower Malaysia's marginalized and oppressed communities to speak up for themselves.

Vociferous, unapologetic, doesn't suffer fools gladly: that about sums up Siti Zabedah Kasim.

The Malaysian lawyer and human rights activist has become synonymous with fighting for the customary land rights of peninsular Malaysia's "Orang Asli" (indigenous) communities and the oft-maligned and marginalized LGBT community.

Having often locked horns with politicians and conservative religious groups, she has earned a reputation for being a voice for the "voiceless."

"I could never see injustice or condescension of any sort since childhood. I cannot tolerate people who have no respect for others," she told DW.

After having lived in the UK for 17 years, the London-trained lawyer returned to Malaysia in 2004 and was quickly roped into the local Bar Council's human rights committee, eventually becoming co-deputy chair of the committee on Orang Asli rights.
The right to fight
With neither prior knowledge of nor contact with this community who live in the remote jungles of the northeastern state of Kelantan in peninsular Malaysia, her initial contact with them was an eye-opener. "I couldn't believe then there were people still living in bamboo houses, with no clean water or electricity."

Having often locked horns with politicians and conservative religious groups, Siti Kasim has earned a reputation for being a voice for the "voiceless"

Moreover, she discovered that the Orang Asli have been facing difficulties trying to hold on to their way of life in the only home they've known, the forest, as the state government has increasingly been encroaching upon it for logging and mining activities.

"They are very shy, humble and scared of authority and I realized that they really needed empowerment. So, together with others, including Orang Asli activists, we go in and tell them that they have rights, they can speak up and not be afraid. No one can arrest them if they have done nothing wrong," explained Siti, adding that they are often threatened with arrests for challenging such encroachments.

Siti has since been digging in her heels alongside Orang Asli activists, creating awareness and updating fellow Malaysians on the Orang Asli's causes through social media.

Similarly, she has defended the rights of the local LGBT community, even getting arrested for demanding a warrant when Islamic authorities raided a transgender event to which she was invited last year. Her suit against the authorities for that arrest is pending.
Challenging 'man-made' Islamic laws
Recently, she has become increasingly known for her outspokenness against creeping Islamization in multi-religious Malaysia.

She achieved near-cult status at a forum last year for flipping the bird at hecklers for drowning out her protest against a controversial private member's bill to amend a law that could empower Islamic courts to enforce punishment, except for the death penalty.

"They picked on the wrong person. I never realized that that finger incident, that one action, was actually something many people have wanted to do all this while. And they were just waiting for someone to tell these 'Islamofascists' to leave them alone and get the hell out of their lives," she exclaimed.

Despite earning the wrath of conservative religious groups, Siti remains undeterred.

"Only fascists force others to follow their way of life, to adhere to their concept of beliefs, their dogmas. This I will fight! Who are you to say that we should believe your version of Islam, which is so cruel and all about punishment? What about corruption? You never say a word about it! They are making Islam look so bad in the eyes of others," she said agitatedly.

Dismissive of court rulings or edicts by local religious authorities that have prohibited non-Muslim Malaysians from using the word "Allah" and insisted upon "halal" certifications even for household items that cannot be consumed, among others, Siti - who is a Muslim herself - began studying the Koran to challenge what she labels "man-made" laws.

It marked a turning point for her.

"I realized that it's so different from what was being taught at schools or in the mainstream teaching. That's when I discovered that what I'd thought about Islam all this while was wrong. And that's why I dare to challenge these 'Islamofascists' and to say that their version is not the true Islam."

Attempts by detractors to smear her by publishing "un-Islamic" photos of her do not faze her, she says. "I'm not a hypocrite. I smoke, I enjoy my life, I go to pubs, I publish it. So what? This is my life. They think, 'Oh, it's so easy to attack this woman.' What they don't realize is that if I didn't want people to see these photos online, I would never upload them on the internet in the first place," she explained.
Advocate but no politician
Despite unsavory names hurled her way - including "murtad" (apostate) for questioning Islamic authorities - the increasing number of Malaysians speaking up helps neutralize the sting.

"A couple of years back there weren't many Malay-Muslims who spoke up against Islamization for fear of being branded apostate but now more and more of them - especially young Malay-Muslims - are speaking up and I'm really happy."

Entering politics, however, is out of the question as she "could never toe any political line."

Her purpose comes from the grateful messages she receives from Malaysians she's helped embolden. "Every one message I receive, I feel really good about it. Even if one person can stand up for their rights, it's the greatest achievement for me."

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A woman's fight to embolden Malaysia's voiceless | DW | 08.03.2017

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Embodying this year's International Women's Day theme of being bold for change, lawyer Siti Kasim has been striving to empower Malaysia's marginalized and oppressed communities to speak up for themselves. Vociferous, unapologetic, doesn't suffer fools gladly: that about sums up Siti Zabedah Kasim.

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Civil disobedience is the only way left to fight climate change

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Civil disobedience is the only way left to fight climate change

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This article shows the important role of civil disobedience in coal industry in order to overcome political barriers which prevent sustainable development.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/13/civil-disobedience-climate-change-protesters

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Sometimes, being a "voice for the voiceless" is another excuse to place ourselves at the centre of the story.

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Sometimes, being a "voice for the voiceless" is another excuse to place ourselves at the centre of the story.

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http://www.craiggreenfield.com/blog/voiceforthevoiceless

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Obama foundation helps give a voice to the voiceless

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Obama foundation helps give a voice to the voiceless

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/16/obama-foundations-fellows-include-south-african-activist-and-afghan-refugee

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Criticism of the UN for their Climate Change youth video contest

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Criticism of the UN for their Climate Change youth video contest

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The UN has received criticism for creating a competition for youth between 18 - 30 year olds in Canada. Calling youth to create a 3 minute video, following specific and "questionable" criteria, of their civil disobedience for a cash prize.

Is this the role of the UN? Or is this an example of many peoples' resistance to the climate challenge?

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UN's 'climate change' youth video contest rewards civil disobedience

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Stand Up for Kids is a nonprofit in the United States that works with thousands of homeless youth across the country.  Their main goal is to to empower at-risk youth toward lifelong personal growth through counseling, mentoring, and life-skills training.
http://www.standupforkids.org/who-we-are

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Climate necessity - acquitting activists of criminal charges 

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Climate necessity - acquitting activists of criminal charges 

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For quite some time neoliberal market practices have justified ecological deterioration through financial returns.
Activists fight these immoral practices on behalf of the environment, but there is a price to be paid for this protection as these market practices are protected by the legal landscape in many ways.

This article talks about how an American judge refused to convict several people charged with acts of civil disobedience against a gas pipeline project. The judge deemed the accused to not be responsible by reason of climate necessity.

This represents the development in shifting judicial consciousness and legal landscape toward possible acquitting climate activists of criminal charges in the name of the environment.

http://vancouversun.com/opinion/op-ed/kegan-pepper-smith-climate-necessity-new-defence-in-civil-disobedience-cases

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This Atlas shows you the resistance movements against fossil fuel projects all around the world, referred to as Blockadia.

Super inspiring map, with an interactive legend and infos on all the resistance movements. Definitely check it out!

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Blockadia: Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground! | EJAtlas

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On every continent there is an increasing frequency and intensity of resistance movements against fossil fuel projects. These interwoven spaces of resistance are Blockadia, along the chain of extraction, transportation and combustion.

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The history of social reform in America is inextricably tied to civil disobedience. Women used it to advocate for their right to vote during the women's suffrage movement. Civil rights activists held sit-ins and marches to demand the end of discriminatory policies and racial segregation during the 1960s. Just in the last week, marchers shut down streets across the U.S. to protest the election of Donald Trump.

Painting a protest as a riot is a form of silencing.

In some cases, acts of civil disobedience-nonviolent violations of the law against a perceived injustice-are met with stern but level reproach from the state. Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail after refusing to pay six years of back taxes. The Delta 5, who blocked a BNSF railway in 2014 to protest the shipment of fossil fuels, were sentenced to two years probation and acquitted of more serious charges.

It was surprising to many, then, to watch a video of militarized police flanked by armored vehicles bear down on the protesters resisting the controversial $3.7 billion Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in October. Such an aggressive response to peaceful protest raises concerns and questions regarding the state's tolerance of civil disobedience as a classically American expression of dissent. And many worry those concerns will become all the more real under a Trump presidency and Republican-controlled Congress.

To quell the largely indigenous resistance and protect the pipeline's economic interests, North Dakota called upon the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, a 1996 program that enables interstate aid during crisis situations. Law enforcement agents from seven states used chemical spray, rubber bullets, and stun guns to forcibly remove protesters. More than 140 people were arrested and camps were destroyed in the sweep.

EMAC, called upon to assist with natural disasters, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and President Obama's 2009 inauguration, was also issued to mollify protesters during the Baltimore uprising following the death of Freddie Gray. The prolonged armed standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon did not receive this response.

"I think that's what makes the government and law enforcement's reaction to the protest really shocking," notes Candice Delmas, an assistant professor of philosophy and political science at Northeastern University who writes extensively on civil disobedience. "[The protesters] undertook the protest in a really acceptable, respectable way, and they're treated as just thugs and enemies."

"It's very hard to determine sometimes where First Amendment protections lie and where they have diminished."

A worthy consideration is whether the protectors, as the protesters refer to themselves, were engaging in acts of civil disobedience or rioting. According to Delmas, they followed all of the tenets traditionally associated with civil disobedience: a nonviolent and collective refusal of governmental demands in exchange for concessions. Riots, on the other hand, are outbursts of collective violence that are usually destructive. The mostly Native American activists had a clear, motivated aim of halting construction of the pipeline and were nonviolent in their approach.

But the distinction is one made in the moment. As was shown in the case of journalist Amy Goodman, who faced an arrest warrant and was subsequently absolved of criminal trespass and rioting charges for her coverage of the DAPL conflicts, the evidence doesn't always fit the state's narrative.

"Whenever you have laws [EMAC] that are intended for one purpose used for another-and especially to monitor what very well may be First Amendment-protected activities-that always should give the American public pause," said Jennifer Cook, policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Dakota. "Greater scrutiny should be used for how law enforcement is using this particular law and whether they should be using it at all for this purpose."

Painting a protest as a riot is a form of silencing, Delmas said, that shows the government's unwillingness to engage with activists or view them as political agents with legitimate concerns. "You're really putting it far on the opposite side of the spectrum from civil disobedience. I think it's a way of ending the conversation to label it riots," she said.

But the legal waters are murky at Standing Rock.

The First Amendment protects individual rights to freedom of religion, speech, press, petition, and assembly. But the legal waters are murky at Standing Rock, where protesters were pushed off private property that some argue belonged to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe under the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Individuals generally don't have First Amendment rights on others' private property, according to the First Amendment Center. The Bill of Rights provides individual liberty protection from actions by government officials, but private property, of course, is not government-owned.

"When you get a scenario where you have private land and public land all intermixed and you have such a heavily militarized police force, it's very hard to determine sometimes where First Amendment protections lie and where they have diminished," says Cook of the ACLU.

But what she finds most alarming is that EMAC was requested to deliver heavy-handed militarized crackdown against primarily people of color at Standing Rock and in Baltimore.

The militarized response to communities of color signals a possible double standard in law enforcement's acceptance of civil disobedience, said Judith LeBlanc, a member of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma and director of Native Organizers Alliance, an organization that provides training and support for Native activists.

"[Racism] is built into the system and it has specific, very specific impacts on communities of color in general and Indians in particular. We're actually being called trespassers on land that historically has been our land," she said in reference to the 1851 treaty.

Civil disobedience has also been integral to the fight for indigenous rights.

Civil disobedience has also been integral to the fight for indigenous rights. Native Americans used peaceful protest to defend themselves from European settlers. They hid their children from government officials who wished to assimilate them into White American culture through boarding schools. In 1969, a group calling themselves Indians of All Tribes began a 19-month-long occupation of Alcatraz Island to demand better treatment and bring public awareness to Indian termination, a 20-year national policy designed to acculturate Native Americans and end recognition of tribal sovereignty.

In August, the Native Organizers Alliance continued the tradition by holding a national training in Seattle. It explored how to build a grassroots base in Indian communities, and taught different forms of direct action as well as how to judge what would be most effective in the moment of struggle. For example, soft direct action involves dropping a banner, while hard action includes locking down construction equipment. A majority of the training's 25 participants went on to join the Standing Rock protest.

In blocking the DAPL, Native protesters are calling on the government to phase out rather than increase fossil fuel development and consult with tribes prior to launching infrastructure projects.

"We either save Mother Earth together or she will perish," LeBlanc said, adding that the protest at Standing Rock isn't only about fighting for Native American rights. "When we fight, it is not simply for our land, our air, and our water. It is for all of the people."
Editor's note: This article initially stated that the only other instance in which EMAC was used outside of a natural disaster was in response to the riots in Baltimore, Maryland following the death of Freddie Gray. The error has been corrected.
This article was funded in part by the Surdna Foundation.

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What Standing Rock Tells Us About Civil Disobedience

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The history of social reform in America is inextricably tied to civil disobedience. Women used it to advocate for their right to vote during the women's suffrage movement. Civil rights activists held sit-ins and marches to demand the end of discriminatory policies and racial segregation during the 1960s.

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Climate Disobedience in the Time of Trump

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Climate Disobedience in the Time of Trump

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https://www.thenation.com/article/climate-disobedience-in-the-time-of-trump/
An interview with a civil disobedience activist who avoided sentencing due to a sympathetic jury and who discusses the necessity and nature of civil disobedience regarding climate change in the modern day.

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When to protest and when to play along and attempt to control the damage

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When to protest and when to play along and attempt to control the damage

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This dilemma has stood at the heart of the civil disobedience debate throughout American history. Today, it is especially pervasive for members of the Trump White House who object to his divisive, intolerant stances.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a former president of the Boy Scouts, had to be talked out of resignation by Vice President Mike Pence following Trump's controversial speech at the annual Boy Scout Jamboree . Chief Economic Advisor Gary Cohn, who is Jewish, apparently a letter of resignation after Trump's response to the Charlottesville march. Both stayed on. Meanwhile, both former Attorney General Sally Yates and former FBI Director James Comey refused to give Trump their loyalty. Both were .

While administration officials often receive the most media attention, dissenting citizens also face the same dilemma: is it more impactful to protest within or beyond the boundaries of the law? Massive, peaceful protests outside the Capitol have received significant , but proven short-lived in their impact. Conversely, acts of civil disobedience proved effective in opposing Republicans' recent pushes to repeal Obamacare.

Despite the strong short-term impact of resignation, in order to make a sustained, positive impact on the Trump administration, officials must obey and work to influence Trump from within. But for dissenters outside of the administration, civil disobedience is the weapon of choice.
Disobedience From Within
When Yates openly to defend Trump's travel ban, she defended the Justice Department's "solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right." Before she was fired, not many knew her. But afterwards, she immediately became an idol to the Trump opposition. Hundreds of people letters thanking her. The Women's March , "We stand with Sally Yates, a true American hero. #ThankYouSally #RESIST." Soon, Twitter was with those hashtags.

On the flip side, b y standing with the administration, national security officials like Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis have helped tame the president while calming public fears about the administration's dangerously aggressive foreign policy. A Washington Post-ABC News conducted in September found that only 37 percent of Americans trust Trump to handle the strained situation with North Korea. Meanwhile, 72 percent trust U.S. military leaders, of which 43 percent said they trust them "a great deal." The presence of senior military advisors like Mattis and Kelly calms the public's worries over Trump's often unpredictable foreign policy.

The public's trust in these officials has a strong basis: Trump's national security team has been effective in countering Trump's dangerously aggressive foreign policy approach. Throughout Trump's jousting with Kim Jong Un, for example, Mattis and other national security officials have emphasized a diplomatic approach .

Mattis contradicted Trump's comments about abandoning diplomacy with North Korea, , "We're never out of diplomatic solutions. We're always looking for more." He even directly Trump's position on the Iran nuclear agreement, that remaining in the deal is in America's national interest. His willingness to contradict Trump brings hope to many. His visit in October to the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas and pursuit of diplomatic efforts with Pyongyang shows the peaceful influence his position as Secretary of State allows him to exert.

Senior administration officials have also restored order within the White House, though to a more limited extent. When Kelly stepped in as chief of staff, he immediately to clean up Trump's messes by firing divisive White House officials Anthony Scaramucci and Sebastian Gorka. Kelly also restricted the air-time of the increasingly unpopular Kellyanne Conway.

Lower-ranking administration officials have also influenced Trump by working silently as opposition officers. Trump's White House has been more prone to leaks than his predecessors'. The leaked transcripts of Trump's phone calls with Mexican President Peña Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull were ridiculed for days.

The internal within the administration between Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, and Trump brought many to that these high-ranking members themselves were leaking information to secure support for their sides. These leaks have drawn public attention to Trump's more erratic behavior behind closed doors, and have allowed dissenting administration officials to hold Trump accountable from within the White House.

In checking the administration from within, dissenters demonstrate what Mark Strand, the president of the Congressional Institute, calls the "guardrail theory." Strand told the HPR that by acting as a "guardrail" to curb Trump's more erratic decisions, officials "prevent the White House from tipping over."
Disobedience in the Streets
These aggressive demonstrations sometimes draw ire from those who favor more "civil" measures of protest. Former Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz told the HPR, "when [disobedience] deteriorates into attacks on individuals and threatening lives, that's a bridge too far. And unfortunately, the violence has been happening more and more often." Furthermore, some argue that the more aggressive forms also harm the cause by drawing negative press.

Nevertheless, the raucous mobilization at the grassroots level proved effective. Sen. Tim Scott (R - S.C.) dismissed the movement as childish, but recognized its impact : "it's unfortunately inconsistent with reality, but it does motivate people, including in [Congress]."Loud protesters prevented Republican leaders from at town halls, and threats of violence prompted many, like Senator Jeff Flake (R - AZ) to their meetings. With the GOP controlling both Congress and the presidency, disobedience was the most effective way to make citizens' voices heard.
The Future of Dissent
According to Harvard Kennedy School senior lecturer Marshall Ganz, dissenters must organize on a national scale in order to continue making a considerable impact on the administration.

Ganz was active in the civil rights and farmworker-union movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and helped structure the 2008 movement behind Barack Obama's presidential campaign. "The priority needs to be how [protestors] unify themselves and reach as deeply as they can into their constituency," Ganz told the HPR. "There is a big difference between a movement of 1000 and 800,000 ."

Furthermore, Ganz emphasized the importance of grassroots organization for building this national coalition of dissent: "they must organize their movement by scaffolding local organizations as part of a national movement." Successful mobilization efforts must be undertaken at the lowest levels to engage ordinary citizens. If people could be engaged at the grassroots level but with one overarching message to unify them, the power of a mobilized citizenry in this bottom-up approach would force elected officials to listen.

The image of Kelly with his hands in his head reflects the strange position many Americans find themselves in today. The influence wielded by some in the White House suggests that they should work within the system to make an impact. But for people outside of the administration, disobedience remains the strongest way to influence lawmakers on the hill.

Ultimately, the size and conviction of the opposition movement will determine the effectiveness of civil disobedience throughout the rest of Trump's term. Whether it's disabled people protesting against legislation or officials within the White House acting as a guardrail against erratic policymaking, successful disobedience will require the persistent efforts of all dissenters, both inside and outside of the administration.
Image Credit: Office of the President of the United States/Wikimedia Commons

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This dilemma has stood at the heart of the civil disobedience debate throughout American history. Today, it is especially pervasive for members of the Trump White House who object to his divisive, intolerant stances.

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Connecting religion to a Vegan lifestyle - Pelle Strindlund

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Connecting religion to a Vegan lifestyle - Pelle Strindlund

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Pelle is a religious activist who has dedicated much of his life to oppose the human consumption of animals or animal products. According to Pelle, these kind of practises are always to be regarded as "slavery."

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Liten etta, fast i lugn och lantlig omgivning. Gratis kost och logi! Vem kan tacka nej till ett sånt erbjudande? Svaret är att det kan nog faktiskt ingen, som råkar vara höna, gris eller mink och inte pratar människospråk.

Varje år inkvarteras miljontals djur i trånga kättar, bås och burar, men vantrivseln med det boendet växer inte ur bortskämdhet eller något missförstånd med kontrakt. Någon överenskommelse att bryta mot existerar ju inte. Att en ko sällan bor mer än fem år på ett och samma ställe, beror helt enkelt på att hon sen är redo för slakt. Hennes naturliga livslängd är tjugo till tjugofem år. Men för att göra mjölken så billig som möjligt för konsumenterna sliter industrin ut djuren. "En svensk mjölkko får sin första kalv när hon är drygt två år gammal och efter två och ett halvt år som mjölkproducent är hon förbrukad", skriver religionsvetaren, journalisten och ickevåldsaktivisten Pelle Strindlund i sin nyutkomna Jordens herrar. Slaveri, djurförtryck och försvarare.

I boken belyser Strindlund de historiska och retoriska kopplingarna mellan djur- och människoexploatering, och de förträngningsmekanismer som är en förutsättning för den blodsbesudlade animalienäringen. Det är ju inte till kultingen eller kossan utan den genomsnittliga kvinnan och mannen, som reklam om glada grisar eller Bregottfabrikens lyckligt betande boskap vänder sig. Marknadsföring av trivselburar (stora som A4-ark) låter som mäklarsvenska för höns. Fast vem är det som egentligen bedras av de idylliska lägesbeskrivningarna från konsumtionssamhällets baksida?

Faktum är, att det gör vi väl alla lite till mans. Med utgångspunkt i egna erfarenheter, skärskådar författaren ett produktionssystem som trots att det bygger på tvång förmår legitimera sig självt genom försäkringar i stil med "tacksamt levererar de både kött och ägg tillbaka till oss människor" ( citerad småbrukare om hjälpsamma djur).

Strindlund minns den dag han petade undan kycklingmedaljongerna från middagstallriken, och beslutade sig för att bli vegetarian. Efter att under uppväxten obekymrat mumsat malda muskler och raljerat över grönsakskost, odlade han ett omvärldsengagemang och upptäckte sin egen blinda, politiska fläck. Det massiva utnyttjandet av andra varelser gick inte längre att rättfärdiga. Om ett ställningstagande per definition är något som kräver medvetande och reflektion, verkar ändå förhållningssätt till mat och dryck att ses som något alldeles särskilt personligt. Den som vill kan säkert avfärda Strindlund som en naiv och känslosam Bror duktig, och samtidigt irritera sig på oviljan att moralisera över den älgjagande pappan, och morfadern som var mjölkbonde. Men det blir i så fall mer angrepp på en position, än argument för ett fortsatt förtingligande av djur.

För trots att de i likhet med såväl abolitionister som feminister beskyllts för omognad, känsloförvirring och fanatism, är det sällan hos djurrättsförespråkarna som de nyktra analyserna av förhållandet mellan människor och andra djur har saknats. Det gäller väl snarare för de köttets försvarare, som i Strindlunds bok motiverar sina matvanor med att de antingen är naturliga eller både uttryck för tradition och personlig frihet. Mer ärligt vore såklart att erkänna sin del av ett förtryck, eller att detta är något man inte bryr sig om. I vilket fall måste den moderna djurindustrin ändå klassas som något slags slavekonomi. Vad som förenar gamla plantageprofitörer med samtida, snälla farmare, är upplevelsen av att göra dem som utsätts för våld och smärta en tjänst.

I Jordens herrar skriver Strindlund om befrielsen från onödigt lidande. För människans del innebär det rätten till liv och självbestämmande, men självklart ingen garanti mot olycka. Fast vad väntar då de andra djuren? Den stora stridsfrågan är väl just vad som räknas som onödiga plågor. För författaren betyder det djur inom bland annat livsmedelsproduktionen, forskningen och underhållningsindustrin. Slapp de därifrån skulle det dock säkert vålla smärta i en och annan plånbok. Den som inte formellt kan protestera mot övergrepp eller välja att sälja sin arbetskraft, får kanske vänja sig vid att vara förslavad. Om nu inte det begreppet ska besparas för den, som både kan underkuvas och befria sig själv.

Oavsett ordval visar Strindlund, hur all sorts exploatering upprätthållits genom (brist på) identifikation och uppenbarat motstridiga intressen.

I centrum står kampen om verklighetsbeskrivningen. "Istället för slavar låt negrerna kallas plantageassistenter ", citerar författaren en brittisk slaverilobbyist, och berättar om den butiksbesökande flickan som föll i gråt framför en grishals. Varför inte kalla detta fläskkarré, undrade efteråt en upprörd moder. Så småningom torkar i alla fall tårarna. Men en gris kan inte hålla sig med förskönande sanningar, eller hoppas att allt blir bra. Vad hon har är däremot en överlevnadsinstinkt.

En människa som företräder djurens rätt riskerar fortfarande att betraktas som löjlig, men Pelle Strindlund är ett övertygande ombud. Hans bok borde bli en tankeställare för dem, som aldrig reflekterat över förhållandet mellan sin egen frihet och förtrycket av andra.

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Liten etta, fast i lugn och lantlig omgivning. Gratis kost och logi! Vem kan tacka nej till ett sånt erbjudande? Svaret är att det kan nog faktiskt ingen, som råkar vara höna, gris eller mink och inte pratar människospråk.

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I believe is extraordinary how certain stress situations can push people to get together and get courage they normally wouldnt have. Also I believe art is a wonderful and very impressing way to express discomfort and "civil disobedience" the case with muralisms, mostly in Latinamerica has been a very important trade mark for this, like this chilean example.

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Walk around the side of the GAM, the main cultural centre in the Chilean capital Santiago, and you come across a striking mural, 25m (80ft) wide and 3m high, covering an entire wall.

In bold, bright colours, it shows a copper miner, a student, a fisherman and a member of Chile's largest indigenous community, the Mapuche.

Wander down the road to the headquarters of the CUT, the country's main trade union federation, and you find another mural overlooking a courtyard. This one tells the history of the country's workers.

Both walls are painted in the same distinctive style. The colours are primary and the faces - often indigenous in their features - are outlined in thick black lines.

The red, white and blue Chilean flag is used as a motif.

Both murals, and many like them elsewhere in Chile, are the work of the Brigada Ramona Parra (BRP), one of Latin America's most remarkable and resilient artistic collectives.

Founded in 1968 by a group of young Chilean communists, the BRP took its name from Ramona Parra, a 19-year-old woman shot dead by the police during a protest in Santiago in 1946.

Inspired by the revolutionary spirit of the late 1960s, the members of the BRP headed out onto Santiago's streets to paint. They saw murals not only as a way of brightening up the city's drab walls, but of fomenting radical social change.

'R' for resistance

In 1970, BRP propaganda helped propel the Socialist candidate Salvador Allende into the presidential palace.

It was only when they started bombing the presidential palace, and corpses started to appear on the streets of Santiago, that we realised how serious it was
Juan Tralma, BRP founding member

But in 1973, their work was cut short. Gen Augusto Pinochet seized power in a military coup and the Communist Party was outlawed.

BRP activists were tortured and driven into exile. The military government painted over their murals.

The BRP went underground but continued to paint in defiance of the dictatorship.

"We worked clandestinely," says Juan Tralma, a founding member of the BRP.

"It was impossible to paint big murals so we would just paint a simple letter R, ringed by a circle with a star next to it. The R stood for resistance, the circle was a sign of unity and the star a symbol of the BRP."

"We had to keep our eyes peeled all the time," recalls Beto Pasten, another veteran member of the BRP. "The police could turn up at any moment.

"They'd come and kick over our paint pots, throw paint on our murals and arrest us. We'd do a mural at the weekend and by Monday they'd painted over it in black. Then the following week we'd come back and paint again, on top of their black paint."

With the return to democracy in 1990, the BRP came out of hiding, painting murals across Chile, Latin America and even as far away as Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and Ireland.

To this day, the collective paints murals in Chile, championing contemporary causes like workers' and indigenous rights and the campaign for education reform.

Memories of the coup

On 11 September, Chile will mark the 40th anniversary of the coup. Mr Tralma, who was 26 at the time, remembers it vividly.

"We went out and chatted to the soldiers. I don't think they knew exactly what was happening. It was only when they started bombing the presidential palace, and corpses started to appear on the streets of Santiago, that we realised how serious it was."

As the coup unfolded, the BRP split. Some young communists wanted to take on the military in open combat while others, including Mr Tralma, said it was too dangerous.

His view won the day and Mr Tralma, like thousands of other Chilean leftists, went underground, moving between safe houses to avoid detection. He finally escaped to Argentina where he lived for a decade.

Reflecting on the coup now, he says the BRP was right to retreat rather than confront General Pinochet's forces.

"It was a powerful, brutal dictatorship," he says.

"It would have been a massacre. We would have sent kids out onto the streets with paint brushes to confront men with machine-guns."

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The Chilean muralists who defied Pinochet

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Walk around the side of the GAM, the main cultural centre in the Chilean capital Santiago, and you come across a striking mural, 25m (80ft) wide and 3m high, covering an entire wall. In bold, bright colours, it shows a copper miner, a student, a fisherman and a member of Chile's largest indigenous community, the Mapuche.

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Here's a website with local resistance to fracking in UK.

http://frack-off.org.uk/

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Legal battles related to civil disobedience

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Legal battles related to civil disobedience

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"Sometimes Fighting Climate Change Means Breaking the Law"

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A woman sees a child fall down a well, so she climbs a fence onto private property to save the child's life. In the unlikely event that the woman were charged with criminal trespassing, her attorney would use a choice-of-evils defense, also known as a necessity defense, to get her acquitted. He would argue that the child faced an immediate physical threat, and that it was necessary for his client to break the law in order to prevent the child from dying. But what if the threat were something less discrete than a well-the air, the water, the very ground beneath our feet? What if it imperilled every child in a neighborhood, or on the planet? Would the necessity defense still hold?

Last week, in a Boston municipal courthouse, thirteen defendants brought that question before Judge Mary Ann Driscoll. They had been arrested, in 2016, while protesting the construction of a high-pressure natural-gas pipeline in the neighborhood of West Roxbury, and claimed that their acts of civil disobedience-trespassing, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest-were necessary to forestall both local and global threats. In their testimony to Driscoll, some of the defendants focussed on community safety. The pipeline route, they noted, went through densely populated streets, past an active quarry where bedrock is regularly blasted. According to calculations made for comparable pipelines, an explosion could incinerate an area of at least thirty city blocks. Others discussed rising greenhouse-gas emissions and the harm that climate change is inflicting on people around the world. Driscoll listened to the defendants silently and, after the last one testified, announced that she found them not guilty-that their actions were justified by reason of necessity. She acquitted them without so much as an administrative fee.

Traditionally, in the law, necessity has been a narrow defense. It can be difficult to prove, and is usually limited to cases in which the threat is clear and concrete. Mark Silverstein, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, told me that, at the start of a civil-disobedience trial, prosecutors often file a motion to bar their opponents from presenting a necessity defense. "They say, 'Don't give us any funny business about why you sat in the road; the issue is whether you sat in the road,' " Silverstein explained. But that hasn't stopped protesters from trying anyway. One common strategy, Silverstein said, is to pursue a jury nullification, in which a jury returns a not-guilty verdict, despite clear and indisputable evidence to the contrary, because the jurors find the charges unjust. In such cases, Silverstein said, "they are putting the law on trial." Even when a necessity defense fails, he continued, it can give protesters a chance to appeal to the public. "It's sometimes considered a victory if they got to present the evidence-why nuclear weapons, or the Vietnam war, or climate change are bad," Silverstein said. "It's a way to bring attention to the issue."

West Roxbury's anti-pipeline movement began in 2015, when Spectra Energy, a Houston-based company, broke ground on a five-mile-long extension of the Algonquin Gas Transmission Pipeline, which carries fracked natural gas from Lambertville, New Jersey, to Boston. (Last February, Spectra was bought by the Canadian multinational Enbridge, which the Obama Administration fined more than sixty million dollars, in 2010, after hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil from one of the company's pipelines spilled into the Kalamazoo River, in Michigan.) City leaders opposed the extension, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had issued Spectra a permit, so the company proceeded to dig up the roads. When it became clear that legal means of protest weren't working-petitions, public comments, an ongoing challenge against the F.E.R.C. permit in federal court-an organization called the Climate Disobedience Center started training hundreds of protesters. Veterans of the antiwar and anti-nuclear demonstrations of the nineteen-seventies joined in.

Over the course of about thirty actions, the protesters sat down in front of backhoes, chained themselves to fences, and dropped into the pipeline's construction trench, decorating it with flowers. They prayed, sang songs, and chanted, "No gasification without representation!" On June 29, 2016, twenty-three of the boldest activists lay down in the trench and refused to move. In Pakistan that summer, people had dug mass graves in advance of a predicted heat wave. "We recognized that trenches like the ones being dug in Pakistan were caused by trenches like the one we were resisting in West Roxbury," Marla Marcum, a Methodist pastor and a co-founder of the Climate Disobedience Center, told me. The Boston Fire Department's technical-rescue squad had to lift or roll the protesters onto stretchers and haul them out of the trench with ropes. By September 29th, the day of the final action, a hundred and ninety-eight people had been arrested. Many pleaded guilty to trespassing or disturbing the peace and were put on a six-month pretrial probation, after which the charges were dropped.

The pipeline entered service on January 5, 2017, but the activists still hoped to bring attention to their fight, this time in the courtroom. From the beginning, the thirteen defendants who appeared before Driscoll planned to present a necessity defense, including testimony from expert witnesses such as James Hansen, the climate scientist who alerted Congress to global warming, in 1988. During the discovery process, which dragged on for more than a year, the defendants and the judge pressed Spectra on a range of issues, including its safety plan for the pipeline. In November, after months of delay, the company's lawyer submitted an affidavit admitting that no such plan existed. Revelations like that, Marcum said, have made the process worthwhile. Last Tuesday, perhaps recognizing that the case had become a boondoggle, the prosecution downgraded the charges from criminal to civil, making the defendants' infractions the equivalent of parking tickets. The case could have been over then, but, in an unusual move, Driscoll allowed the protesters to make their final statements. According to Alice Cherry, a co-founder of the Climate Defense Project, which helped represent the West Roxbury activists, Driscoll's ruling was the first of its kind in a civil case involving climate protesters.

The night after the ruling, the defendants held a public forum in the basement of a church in Jamaica Plain, near West Roxbury. "Communities like this one are fighting these kinds of fights all over the country," the climate activist Tim DeChristopher said. "There is a sustained resistance, and it's shifting the way these companies are doing business." Prior to his involvement in the West Roxbury case, DeChristopher spent almost two years in prison for disrupting a government auction of oil and gas leases on sensitive public lands in Utah. Although his lawyer in that case, Patrick Shea, doesn't anticipate that the necessity defense will become more common in civil-disobedience trials anytime soon, he noted that Driscoll's ruling is consistent with "the drift of the judiciary." Shea cited an ongoing federal lawsuit brought by a group of teen-agers, who argue that the government's actions and inactions on climate change have, in the words of U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken, "so profoundly damaged our home planet that they threaten plaintiffs' fundamental constitutional rights to life and liberty." The suit recently made it through the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, over the Trump Administration's objections. Meanwhile, climate-change activists in Minnesota and Washington State are preparing necessity defenses of their own. "In the beginning, you really didn't have legal standing to challenge environmental matters," Shea said. "But the wonderful thing about common law is that judges can begin to architect changes in it that reflect increasing scientific knowledge."

At one point during the Jamaica Plain forum, Marcum called for a moment of silence, in recognition of the fact that "interactions with the criminal-justice system in this country are not all the same." She noted that Driscoll's ruling had come in the same week that Louisiana's attorney general declined to prosecute a pair of white police officers who fatally shot Alton Sterling, a black man, in 2016. Boston is among the most segregated cities in the country; residents of West Roxbury, which is three-quarters white, tend to emphasize the "West," to distinguish their neighborhood from nearby Roxbury, which is majority black. One of the only African-Americans arrested in West Roxbury was the Reverend Mariama White-Hammond, a climate-justice activist who has been working to bridge Boston's racial divide through environmentalism. At the mass-graves protest, in 2016, she spoke to the crowd. "I debated whether or not it's good to be here today, because all of these officers have to be here, and if I had my choice, I'd rather them be figuring out the sources of violence in our neighborhood and working to stop it," she said. "But I'm here today because I believe we can lay to rest the spirit of exploitation and extraction that has brought us to such a terrible place."

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Sometimes Fighting Climate Change Means Breaking the Law

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A woman sees a child fall down a well, so she climbs a fence onto private property to save the child's life. In the unlikely event that the woman were charged with criminal trespassing, her attorney would use a choice-of-evils defense, also known as a necessity defense, to get her acquitted.

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Recent shooting survivors:
https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2018-02-22/civil-disobedience-teen-shooting-survivors-shake-up-capitol

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While it is true that civil disobedience led to change of governments in Libya, Egypt to mention but a few.  The civil war in Syria started as
a civil disobedience, however, when the government responded with force, the said protesters got the support of the rich countries to fight the government of
Bashar al-Assad. Is civil disobedience different from terrorism? Is the West voice of voiceless?

Narice Ninyesiga

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Why march when you can share a Facebook post?

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Why march when you can share a Facebook post?

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This article is arguing that "slacktivism" is over and that activism and debate are bred in social media but that frustration about current failures in society are making people march and to take action.

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But if that was all it took, thousands of people wouldn't have flooded the streets of cities around the country this weekend to call for gun law reform. They wouldn't have crowded buses and crafted signs and yelled at the top of their lungs and allowed strangers to crash at their houses and squeezed their bodies next to thousands of other bodies in hopes that their collective mass could finally tip the scales of change.

They wouldn't have shown up at all.

As the internet has reinvented the way we socialize and express ourselves, American activism has struggled to stay effective. Why march when you can share a Facebook post? After all, it's easier to discuss your opinions online or sign a virtual petition than it is to stand in line for the voting booth or sit through a town hall meeting.

This assumption is at the heart of slacktivism, the ill-defined and pejorative term that describes social media activism carried out with little personal effort.

But in 2018, that notion is dying with every person who marches and with every student who walks out of class in defiance of gun violence. For the #NeverAgain generation, raised in the age of Columbine and hashtags, the passive gestures of social media activism are not enough. They want tangible political action.

And slacktivism, as we know it, is over.

The March for Our Lives crowd is distinctly bred online. It's not just the SpongeBob memes or their Tumblr-esque homemade signs. It's the way they organize, the way social media is used as a means rather than an end.

That in and of itself is an antidote to slacktivism, which sees no necessary action beyond a post, share or like. The #NeverAgain movement could have gone down that path -- after all, it is literally a hashtag.

But in the days following the February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the persistence of student activists dominated the news cycle and broke the usual pattern of inaction that has stymied gun control activists for decades.

Within days of the tragedy, students from Stoneman Douglas boarded buses and went to Tallahassee, the state's capital, to demand action from lawmakers on gun control. The media, and the public's attention, followed. And within weeks the #NeverAgain movement, a series of school walkouts and Saturday's March for Our Lives rallies were already in the making.

At the March for Our Lives in Washington, Marjory Stoneman Douglas teacher Darren Levine said his students' efforts to organize the massive event were "surreal."

"It is everything that we can hope for as a teacher to see our young people take the steps that are needed to make real change," he said. "This isn't going to stop. I think that it is evident from these kids. They are not going to stop."

In Boston, MSD alumna Leslie Chiu put it simply: "This is not a moment," she said. "This is a movement."

There is no one path to change. But the reality is, in a democratic society the impact of change is ultimately measured by voices and votes.

The people behind the #NeverAgain movement have made it clear their goal is not a march, or some viral fame. It is policy change. And that requires more of everything. More time, more effort, more showing up.

"First-time voters show up 18% of the time in midterm elections. Not anymore," Stoneman Douglas activist David Hogg said from a podium at the Washington march. "If you listen real close, you can hear the people in power shaking. They've gotten used to being protective of their position, the safety of inaction."

"We're going to make sure the best people get in our elections to run not as politicians but as Americans. Because this," he said gesturing to the US Capitol. "This is not cutting it."

To this generation of activists, that four-letter word -- VOTE -- is a battle cry stronger than any hashtag.

"We are too young to vote," 17-year-old Stoneman Douglas survivor Florence Yared told legislators at the Florida State House last month. "But soon we will be able to vote, and we will vote you out."

In Washington and at gatherings across the country, volunteers for HeadCount, a nonpartisan voting rights organization, roamed the crowds registering people to vote.

Jes Distad, a HeadCount team leader, said her team registered 200 people to vote in Atlanta alone. According to Distad, dozens of people also signed up for election alerts, and even more signed up to volunteer with HeadCount at future events.

"The momentum of just getting registered is great, but the next step is to make it out to the polls and actually put that registration to use," she said.

Changing minds, changing policy

So many things have happened since February 14, and so much is left to be done. On April 20, the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine shooting, #NeverAgain activists are planning another nationwide school walkout to follow the walkouts that took place on March 14.

Policy change and increasing voter turnout in the November midterm elections are the biggest, and most complex goals. But if nothing else, the #NeverAgain movement has slowly awakened legislative conversations about gun control that had stubbornly laid dormant even through some of the nation's worst shooting tragedies.

On Friday, Congress passed a $1.3 trillion spending package that incentivizes state and general authorities to report more data to the country's gun background check system. In early March, Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill named after Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that raised the minimum age to purchase a firearm to 21. The Illinois Senate recently passed a similar bill.

Gun rights advocates have tried to redirect the #NeverAgain conversation away from gun control measures and toward more gun-friendly actions, like arming teachers and increasing school security. While it's not the priority of most #NeverAgain activists, there has been movement there as well: The US House of Representatives passed a bill to fund more security at schools, although it didn't include any gun control measures.

Such action has been heartening for Leslie Gunn, a teacher who survived the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Gunn was in the crowd at the Washington March for Our Lives event.

"We lost 20 children and six adults, 154 bullets in five minutes, and nothing was done," she said.

"We had voices and we advocated ... but if these kids now can make the voice that makes the change, we have to do this."

Marching and making signs and shouting in the streets may seem fairly analog, but it's how Americans have gotten things done for decades. It only makes sense that this kind of physical presence would be the antithesis to wishy-washy political activism that begins and ends with a timeline scroll.

That's how the Women's Marches of 2017 did it, as a direct response to the 2016 presidential election. Despite pleas from both parties to show up, CNN estimated only 55% of voting-aged citizens actually cast a ballot that November, a 20-year low in voter turnout. For those devastated by the election's results, it was a wake-up call that whatever was being done for their causes wasn't enough. If the March for Our Lives put an end to slacktivism, it was the Women's March that opened the door for its departure.

And if the March for Our Lives makes any long-term difference, it will do so as a natural evolution of a form of democratic protest that has laid the foundation for change time and time again.

At the Atlanta March for Our Lives, Rep. John Lewis stood shoulder to shoulder with the throng. Lewis, 78, was a Freedom Rider, a civil rights activist who risked his life to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, almost exactly 53 years ago.

"You must never give up. Never give in," he told the Atlanta crowd. "Keep your place and you are going to have a victory."

At the March for Our Lives event in Washington, the past and the future of activism -- of change in America -- converged in one little girl. Stoneman Douglas activist Jaclyn Corin gave the podium over to 9-year-old Yolanda Renee King, the granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr.

"My grandfather had a dream that his four little children will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," she said, a breath away from where King uttered those same words 55 years ago. "I have a dream that enough is enough. And that this should be a gun-free world, period."

Looking at Saturday's marches in the context of Selma and Montgomery is not a perfect comparison. There was no widespread police violence this weekend, and the specter of institutionalized racial hatred was a talking point rather than an immediate threat. The #NeverAgain organizers know they have benefited from the mostly white face of their movement.

In fact, they have benefited from a lot of things: Corporations and celebrities lined up to be involved with the March, and the Womens March enjoyed the same kind of popular support. Both got their own designated Twitter hashtags, an emblem of the slacktivism they sought to exterminate.

John Lewis, on the other hand, got his skull bashed in by a policeman. King later was killed.

But the feeling of resonance between these two moments in time reflect similar visions: To affirm the value of their human lives, to be safe, to be heard.

Make no mistake, the students behind the #NeverAgain movement have succeeded in part because they stand on the shoulders of generations of activists who shrugged off the cloak of apathy, stepped out from behind the safety of platitudes and promises, and did what needed to be done.

CNN's Isabella Gomez contributed to this report.

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slacktivism is over. the #neveragain movement is about what's next - cnn

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Slacktivism is over. The #NeverAgain movement is about what's next

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But if that was all it took, thousands of people wouldn't have flooded the streets of cities around the country this weekend to call for gun law reform.

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The concept of legal personality has been developed in order to extend legal obligations and duties to non-human entities. It traditionally is defined as "one who is a subject of international law so as to enjoy rights, duties or powers established in international law and… the capacity to act on the international plane" (Oppenheim).

Environmental protection has largely been left up to policy, but an alternate approach would be to grant nature legal personality whereby it would confer upon them full rights and obligations in a court of law. J Douglas in the case of Sierra Club v Morton stated:
"contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation".

Giving rights to the rightless is a controversial issue, but is beginning to appear in debates of international environmental law - New Zealand is such example where the Whanganui River is now a legal person.
https://www.parliament.nz/en/get-involved/features/innovative-bill-protects-whanganui-river-with-legal-personhood/

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A voice to the voiceless: what about nature? 

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A voice to the voiceless: what about nature? 

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When talking about giving a voice to the voiceless, green activism is often brought up as a great example of how 'nature' has been given a voice. Yet, this article discusses the representation of nature and questions what it means to speak on behalf of nature and whether this is justifiable and legitimate.

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Giving a voice to animals in England via activist pressure

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Giving a voice to animals in England via activist pressure

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Thanks to a campaign by animal activists, a zoo in Shropshire, England has abandoned its annual Easter sheep race. A petition urging Hoo Farm Animal Kingdom to call off the senseless event was signed by more than 52,000 people concerned about the practice and the animals used in it:

https://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/sheep-race-canceled-thanks-activist-pressure/

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Chad, a country in north-central Africa, is considered to be at extreme risk by the climate change vulnerability index due to “high poverty, frequent conflicts and constant risks of droughts and floods”. David Naibei states that “environmental education is the most powerful weapon to save our world.” Without the knowledge of the environmental impacts of everyday activities and the threats facing their country, the new generation doesn’t have the means to create change and a sustainable future.
Naibei empowers the youth in Chad through education, but also shares the situation of his home country with the rest of the world, giving Chad a voice to be heard.

Naibei has spoken alongside the president of Chad to the UN regarding climate issues, and below is his presentation at ‘One Young World’.
https://youtu.be/Gz6LzwKy1P8

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As someone who gives a voice to the voiceless I would like to present Elaine Eksvärd, a swedish rhetoric expert and author. She uses her own experiences of sexual abuse (her father abused her as a child) to fight for children’s rights. She founded a company called treskablinoll (Three shall be zero - referring to statistics of sexual abuse of children) that is ”a non-profit company that works to combat sexual abuse of children. Through education in integrity and crime prevention efforts, Treskablinoll breaks the silence of sexual offenders and gives the children back their right to a safe childhood” (my translation).

Unfortunately the information I found is all in swedish but feel free to ask me anything if you would like to know more.

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De senaste månaderna har mamas bloggare Elaine Eksvärd jobbat stenhårt med projektet Tre ska bli noll, som verkar för att bekämpa sexualbrott mot barn. Som liten blev Elaine själv sexuellt utnyttjad av sin egen pappa, vilket hon skrivit om i boken "Medan han lever".

"Vi ska inte värna om vuxnas tår - vi ska värna om barnens säkerhet. Tystnaden är pedofilens bästa vän. Nu bryter vi den tystnaden genom att prata om sexuella övergrepp och dessutom lära både barn och vuxna integritet," skriver hon på kampanjens sajt.

Idag utsätts tre barn i varje klass för sexualbrott, och med initiativet Tre ska bli noll är Elaines mål att de ska bli just noll.

- Jag läste någonstans att barn som lär sig integritet har märkbart mindre risk att bli utsatta, och blir de det så ökar chansen att de berättar eftersom de vet rätten till sin kropp, säger hon till mama.nu.

"Många blir hala i frågan om sexualbrott mot barn"

I samband med Tre ska bli noll lanserar Elaine även Förskolebrevet, ett brev med riktlinjer som förskolorna kan följa för att säkra barnens integritet. Tanken är att vi föräldrar ska överlämna brevet till våra barns förskolor.

- Förskolebrevet är också till för att föräldrar på en karta enkelt ska kunna se vilka förskolor som jobbar aktivt för barns integritet.

Skälet till Förskolebrevet är att Elaine har tröttnat på att vara den ständigt tjatande föräldern på föräldraråden.

- Jag ville ta ett större grepp där jag både mobiliserar föräldrar men också samlar sylvassa riktlinjer för förskolorna att följa för att hamna på Förskolekartan. Många blir så hala i frågan om sexualbrott mot barn, det ska inte fungera längre.
Vad kan man som förälder göra för att påverka sin förskola?
- Gå in på Förskolebrevet.se och se om din förskola finns som en blå prick på Förskolekartan. Om den inte gör det så kan du enkelt skicka brevet från sidan.
Vad har du för förväntningar på förskolorna efter att de tagit emot Förskolebrevet?
- Jag älskar förskolor och jag är helt övertygad om att de kommer vara tacksamma för direktiven och dessutom vilja samarbeta i denna fråga. De som jobbar med barn brukar brinna för barnen, därför kommer vi vara ett riktigt bra team.

"Det är förskolans uppgift att hålla barnen trygga"
Hur ska man bemöta en förskolechef som säger att hens förskolor inte behöver jobba mot sexuella övergrepp?
- Du ska presentera statistiken och säga att det inte går att motivera när statistik säger att tre barn i varje klass, i en barngrupp på 30, blir sexuellt utnyttjade. Det betyder rent statistiskt 10 procent av barnen på din förskola. Sedan ska du säga att det är förskolans uppgift att hålla barnen trygga, men då håller inte de uppgiften om de bortser från detta. Sedan tycker jag du ska ta en funderare om du verkligen ska låta dina barn gå på en förskola där sexualbrott mot barn inte är en sak man vill motverka.
Vad är nästa steg efter Förskolebrevet?
- Att hela Förskolekartan ska vara blå av alla förskolor som skrivit under Förskolebrevet. Det ska inte förekomma en enda nyhet där ett barn blivit sexuellt utnyttjat på en förskola i och med att samtlig personal ska ha följt direktiven och respekterar barns integritet. Sedan kommer vi ha den första generationen barn i Sverige som kommer kunna säga och förstå vikten av orden "stopp min kropp". Och denna generation kommer vara framtidens makthavare, skapa nya sunda kulturer där allt integritetskränkande tillhör något konstigt från forntiden. Det är min dröm och mitt mål med tre ska bli noll!

mama är givetvis med och stöttar Tre ska bli noll och Förskolebrevet.

- Det är en självklarhet för oss på mama att hjälpa Elaine att driva detta viktiga projekt. Inga barn ska utsättas för sexualbrott och det är vi vuxna som har skyldighet att se till att detta inte händer, såväl i hemmet som på förskolan, säger chefredaktör Louise Bratt Tidmarsh.

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Elaine Eksvärd bekämpar sexualbrott mot barn: "Tre ska bli noll!"

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De senaste månaderna har mamas bloggare Elaine Eksvärd jobbat stenhårt med projektet Tre ska bli noll, som verkar för att bekämpa sexualbrott mot barn. Som liten blev Elaine själv sexuellt utnyttjad av sin egen pappa, vilket hon skrivit om i boken "Medan han lever".

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I think she is the most succeeded person in terms of giving a voice to the voiceless.

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"Good golly! A few minutes ago a Boston judge acquitted 13 pipeline protesters on the grounds that the climate crisis made it necessary for them to commit civil disobedience." This statement by Bill McKibben nicely summarizes the content of this article. A possible milestone in environmental activism!
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/pipeline-protesters-boston-protest-not-guilty-climate-change-karenna-gore-mary-ann-driscoll-a8276851.html

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One of my favourite women of all time - she is literally a voice for the voiceless through her activism that raises awareness to the perils of commercial whaling.

http://www.origamiwhalesproject.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycB29FkoylE

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Giving a voice to victims of sexual abuse 

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Giving a voice to victims of sexual abuse 

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"The purpose of the event, which was held from 2 to 4 p.m., was to show sexual assault survivors that they were not alone" http://www.dailynebraskan.com/news/end-rape-on-campus-rally-gives-voice-support-to-sexual/article_84b2ceb6-393e-11e8-89b5-f7dab9868e43.html