By Faith Meckley, Assistant News Editor
• April 26, 2015
On April 20th, Heather Doyle plead guilty to her actions at Dominion's Cove Point LNG export terminal in Lusby, Maryland on Feb. 3, in which she trespassed onto a construction site and scaled the arm of...
My participation in the Great March for Climate Action over the course of five months changed my thoughts and perceptions on a lot of things. One thing I didn’t expect it to change was my firmly held plans about motherhood.
While the powers of Reading and Schuyler County have realized that sending the We Are Seneca Lake protesters to jail is costly and only fuels our movement, many in my activist cohort believe that Judge Berry's hesitance to sentence me runs deeper than that. They joke that he sees me as an incarnation of his own young granddaughter, who, according to Berry, refuses to speak to him when he sends people to jail.
College is extremely stressful. It leads us to binge eat junk food, drink spastic amounts of coffee, pull all-nighters and spend countless hours in front of computer screens without exercise. And many of us, myself included, feel our future careers hinge on the quality of our performance in these four years. Talk about pressure.
Just yesterday, about 1,400 workers from two more oil refineries — BP's Whiting and Toledo, Ohio operations — joined the strike, now 11 refineries strong. The Climate March walked through both of these refineries. I imagine some of the very same workers we spoke to in Whiting are now risking their livelihood to demand better working conditions.
Before myself and my comrades began lining up in front of Crestwood Midstream's gates on Route 14 just north of Watkins Glen, I never put much thought into the area jails. I had no clue that there was a jail in Watkins Glen right across the street from the picturesque state park, and I admit to not even knowing that there was a jail in each county. Now I find these various jails to be at an almost constant forefront of my mind.
I looked around the crowd and saw mostly familiar faces. Our words were not falling on any new ears, let alone any ears belonging to a person who had the authority to create immediate action and change.
I clarified to him that our blockade was not going to let anything in or out.
"Well, I'm going to open the gates, then!" He declared in a tone that said, 'alright, you asked for it.' The negotiation phase was over; now, they were using intimidation.
When he opened the gates, the driver climbed into his truck and lurched forward, blaring his horn.
...as the excitement from Flood Wall Street died down, I saw that day much differently. I now see how tightly the police controlled us, and, subsequently, how watered-down our first amendment right to peaceably assemble was.
While walking along Route 65 out of Maumee and toward Toledo, a pick-up truck operated by a sleeping driver struck me head on. Unlike the unfortunate Peace Marcher in 1986, I can live to tell the tale.
...corporations have no right to be exploiting people, whether they live in Nebraska or Texas or the Ecuadorian Rainforest, and I know that this current system cannot last. Although the Tar Sands Blockade failed to stop TransCanada in the south, the northern section of KXL has not been built because of activists.
I sat down beside a bubbling stream near our campsite, dipped my feet into the cool water and wrote Rob a letter. I described to him the beauty of Colorado, the physical challenge of walking 15 to 20 miles each day and the incredible new family I had acquired in the Marchers. I ended the letter by begging him to come out and see it for himself.