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Fighting invasive species with EU regulations – slamming the stable door? Updated for 2026

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Rivers covered entirely by water hyacinth, cracked pavement shifting under the force of sprouting Japanese knotweed, and a dead red squirrel infected by its invader cousin from North America …

These are the most dramatic pictures that drum home the effects of invasive species, and they weren’t missing from the agenda last Tuesday, when some of the biggest stakeholders and government representatives came together in London to discuss the latest step in the fight against alien invaders.

The star speaker at the conference, convened by the European Squirrel Initiative, was François Wakenhut, head of the biodiversity unit in the European Commission’s environmental department, who briefed the attending MPs and organisations on what’s next in the collective effort against the likes of the killer shrimp and the Asian hornet.

But his main focus was on the new EU Regulation that came into force in January. It marks the first effort geared specifically towards the management of invasive exotics across the union’s member states – and hopes to get a grip on the most problematic plants and animals intruding on native wildlife.

A very British problem – and a growing one

Britain is home to at least 2,000 species that are not native to the country and currently sees ten new species cross its borders every year – as documented in the newly published
‘Field Guide to Invasive Plants & Animals in Britain‘.

Only around 15% of non-native species are actually invasive, meaning that they have negative effects on native wildlife and, in some cases, are also a burden on the economy. But they are the second biggest threat to biodiversity and cost the UK more than £1.7bn annually; across Europe, that number grows to €12bn.

Invasive species in Britain are already covered, at least partly, by various bits of existing legislation as well as several EU directives that deal with wildlife and conservation. And as Wakenhut correctly observed,

“The UK has been at the forefront of the invasive alien species fight over the past years and, in this sense, it is probably not a coincidence that one of the first debates on the implementation for the regulation is taking place here.”

The main legislation in the UK is the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, which makes it illegal – and punishable by hefty fines and even prison – to release any non-native plant or animal into the wild and also prohibits the sale of some species, like water fern and floating pennywort.

In addition, in 2008 the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) put together, along with the Scottish and Welsh governments, an Invasive Non-Native Species Framework Strategy for Great Britain that is currently under review and will be updated later this year.

The different government agencies that are affected by invasive species also have representatives on a programme board, which works to coordinate policy throughout the UK.

Its secretariat, a small body within the Animal and Plant Health Agency, maintains an online database of invasive species and action plans against them, and spearheads campaigns like ‘Check, Clean, Dry’, an effort to educate boat and angling clubs on how to avoid importing and spreading aquatic invaders.

More cooperation between member states

Under the new EU regulation, invasive alien species of Union concern will be banned from possession, trade and release into the wild. Additionally, likely pathways across Europe will be increasingly monitored to prevent the spread of new as well as already established species.

In other words, what is already in place in Britain will now be enforced across all member states. How much this sharing of expertise and monitoring will actually change the situation in this country is questionable, at least until effective pathway management becomes measurable, for example by a decreasing rate of new invasions.

“I’m confident that, within two years, we will be able to show what the trend will be”, says Wakenhut. “Whether that trend will go in the right direction or not – too soon to tell.”

Another aspect of the regulation deals with polluters – those rare cases where the source of an introduction, intentional or not, can actually be proven. “If you can demonstrate that a private operator is at the source of the introduction, you will then be able to direct the responsibility and the burden of the restoration effort or the eradication effort to that operator”, says Wakenhut.

Countries will also be able to enforce emergency measures to circumvent the voting and vetting process of the commission when a surprise invasion calls for immediate action.

Which species are of Union concern will be decided over the course of this year. The European Commission will draw up a list of the most threatening species, which can then be managed across borders and, so goes the plan, eradicated or stopped from invading in the first place.

Priority would ideally be divided between those that haven’t arrived yet and those already wreaking havoc on national ecosystems and economies. But the process brings together a variety of different stakeholders, all with their own axe to grind.

Which is the peskiest of them all?

At the conference, three speakers made their case for three very different species to be placed high on the list: the grey squirrel, the American signal crayfish and Japanese knotweed.

All of these have well documented and often devastating effects. The grey squirrel has all but eradicated the British red squirrel since its introduction in 1876 while Japanese knotweed receives by far the most media attention out of all invasive species in Britain.

In fact, the infamous weed, known for cracking its way through concrete and tarmac and decreasing property values, is a good example of a species that has received enough attention and research funding that there is now a direct effort to keep it in check.

In 2010, after years of quarantined testing, a sap-sucking plant louse that exclusively targets Japanese knotweed was introduced at a few target locations throughout the country. It marked the first time an insect had ever been released against a weed in the EU, but five years later it is still too early to assess how successful this attempt at biological control will be.

“It’s a release program that’s been slightly hindered by the regulatory environment under which we work, so we haven’t been able to release on what we would call dream sites”, says Dick Shaw, the UK director of the non-profit research organization CABI, which is behind the knotweed cure.

“For the UK, we can’t do much more than we’re already doing [about Japanese knotweed]. If you go to France and you see tens of kilometres of rivers completely covered by Japanese knotweed and no one’s doing anything, I think there’s an awful lot more that can be done in the EU”, he adds.

During his presentation with the catchy name ‘Don’t ignore the biggest species: weeds are the worst’, Shaw was making the case for more than just Japanese knotweed. The plant he sees as the most threatening in Europe is actually floating pennywort, which is also widespread and close to getting its own bio control agent in the UK.

Himalayan balsam, another well-known invader whose uncontrollable spread has spurred local ‘balsam bashing’ events, now has to deal with a rust fungus that CABI released last year. As with Japanese knotweed, this intentionally introduced species does not affect native plants – and it’s not meant to eradicate Himalayan balsam, which covers an estimated 13% of Britain’s riverbanks, either.

“If it does work, it can at least stop it from spreading and being as competitive. So you wouldn’t get those monocultures [of knotweed or balsam], you would get it more interspersed with competitive native species. And then slowly they would begin to outcompete the knotweed. That’s the long-term goal”, said Shaw.

The most dangerous species will be decided on at the beginning of next year and the initial EU-wide list will likely be limited to species that already have solid risk assessments to prove their worthiness.

Until then, the member states and, at a lower level, organisations like CABI and the European Squirrel Initiative will try to influence the national and EU-wide selection process as much as possible.

“Inevitably, for the initial proposal that we’ll make, there will be a tendency to build upon what’s already been developed”, said Wakenhut. “So in that sense, we will borrow from what has already been peer-reviewed and risk-assessed. But we need to bear in mind that the list will be a dynamic one. Once we adopt it, it can be changed anytime.”

The main focus must be to keep out what has not yet arrived

One risk with this naturally biased process is that too much focus is put on plants and animals that have already invaded or spread, simply because a strong case for them is easily made – but at the cost of neglecting the prevention of future invasions.

During his talk, Wakenhut repeatedly emphasised the need for proportionality; that prevention is, in most cases, more cost-effective and easier to achieve than the eradication of an established species.

When the quagga mussel, a small invader from the Ponto-Caspian region around the Black Sea, was first found in Surrey last fall, it was already too late. As David Aldridge, an ecologist at the University of Cambridge and expert on the mussel, observed at the time: “We’re really just waiting for these pests to arrive. And you can’t do much once they’re here.”

The quagga is believed to have made its way, largely unhindered, through Central Europe and then to the UK from the Netherlands. “At the moment, there’s a number of species, like the Ponto-Caspian ones, that aren’t yet here but might arrive”, Trevor Salmon, who heads the Environment Agency’s native and invasive non-native species team, said at the conference.

Many of these will come to Britain through Europe and vice-versa. Even though Britain is at the forefront of the fight against them in Europe, this nonetheless makes cooperation between countries imperative.

Especially so since 75% of non-native species are introduced unintentionally, meaning that they can only be stopped by controlling their likely pathways. “It’s hitchhikers. It’s not like the problem is someone sticking a squirrel into a suitcase”, as Salmon puts it.

For now, which species will be included and how high they will place on the list is still up in the air. By next January, the commission will have completed a first draft of invasive alien species that are of Union concern. Its current biodiversity strategy envisions that, by 2020, already established species will be eradicated or controlled and new invasions a thing of the past.

But with the huge volume of people and goods crossing Europe every day, does this regulation have any hope of fulfilling its ambitious goal?

Wakenhut stays vague. “Whether we’ll deliver by 2020 is something we will assess then”, he says.

 

 

Yannic Rack is the editor of a hyperlocal news website and a journalism student at City University London who has written for local newspapers in the UK and the US.

Read: ‘Field Guide to Invasive Plants & Animals in Britain‘ by Olaf Booy, Max Wade & Helen Roy, is published by Bloomsbury this month.

 




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Fighting the plastic plague in our oceans Updated for 2026

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Over five trillion pieces of waste plastic are floating in our oceans, weighing 268,940 tonnes and causing damage throughout the marine food chain, according to data collected by a team of scientists from the United States, France, Chile, Australia and New Zealand.

The team went on 24 expeditions between 2007 and 2013 that surveyed all five sub-tropical gyres: North Pacific, North Atlantic, South Pacific, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, and extensive coastal regions and enclosed seas including the Bay of Bengal, Australian coasts and the Mediterranean Sea.

Their work included both surface net tows and visual transects for large plastic debris at 1,571 locations in all oceans. This is the most comprehensive survey to-dat – yet it is most likely a gross under-estimate of the scale of oceanic plastic pollution.

In 2012, the world produced 280 tonnes of plastic. Less than half has been consigned to landfill or recycled, and much of the remaining 150 million tonnes not still in use litters continental shelves and oceans.

Global trends suggest that waste plastics are accumulating exponentially in parallel with trends in plastic production – which has increased 560-fold in just over 60 years.

These by-products of the oil industry are icons of the industrial economy built on the over-exploitation of oil and other fossil fuels that’s turning the planet literally into a terminal wasteland (see Redemption from the Plastics Wasteland).

Waste plastic an escalating environmental hazard

The estimate from the global survey of plastic pollution on the sea surface for all fragment size classes combined is only 0.1% of the world annual production.

The estimates are “highly conservative”, the team acknowledged: they do not account for the potentially massive amounts of plastic washed up on shorelines, submerged on the seabed, suspended in the water column, and inside organisms.

Also, the survey only collected particles larger than 0.33 mm, due to the size of the netting used. Sequestration in the sediment is the likely fate of plastic pollutants after perpetrating numerous impacts on organisms along the way.

Waste plastic in the open ocean is degraded into smaller and smaller fragments through UV radiation, mechanical abrasion, biological degradation, and disintegration. The fragments disperse in the ocean, converging in the subtropical gyres. Generation and accumulation of plastic pollution also occur in closed bays, gulfs and seas surrounded by densely populated coastlines and watersheds.

The impacts through ingestion and entanglement of marine organisms ranging from zooplankton to whales, seabirds and reptiles are well documented, and new studies are showing up harmful effects of nano-size plastic particles that have escaped inventories so far (see Plastic Poisons in the Food Chain).

The data from the global survey showed that during fragmentation plastics are lost from the sea surface [2]. There is a 100-fold discrepancy between the expected microplastics (particles < 4.75 mm) weight and abundance and the actual amounts observed, indicating a tremendous loss of microplastics.

This suggests removal processes are operating, including UV degradation, biodegradation (by microorganisms), ingestion / absorption by organisms, decreased buoyancy due to fouling organisms, entrapment in settled detritus, and beaching.

Fragmentation rates of already brittle microplastics may be very high, breaking them down into ever smaller submicron or nanoparticles, and unrecoverable by the nets.

Numerous studies demonstrate that many more organisms ingest small plastic particles than previously thought, either directly or indirectly via their prey organisms. These are then packaged into faecal pellets which sink to the bottom. Further, there is evidence that some microbes can degrade microplastics.

Plastics at sea the cause of ecological havoc

A team of scientists led by Chelsea Rochman at University of California Davis and Mark Anthony Browne at University of California Santa Barbara in the United States wrote a Commentary in the journal Nature in 2013 calling for the need to classify plastics hazardous waste.

They point out that plastic debris can physically harm wildlife. Many plastics may be chemically harmful either because they are themselves potentially toxic or because they absorb other pollutants.

Waste plastics can kill or damage ecologically and commercially important species including mussels, sea-marsh grasses and corals. Mammals, reptiles and birds can be harmed through ingesting plastic or becoming entangled in it.

In 2012, the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal Canada reported that all sea turtle species, 45% of marine mammal species and 21% of seabird species can be harmed in that way.

Yet in the US, Europe, Australia and Japan, plastics are classified as regular ‘solid waste’ and treated like food scraps or grass clippings. Policies for managing plastic debris are outdated and severely threaten the health of wildlife.

As plastic breaks into smaller pieces, it is more likely to infiltrate food webs. In lab and field studies, fish, invertebrates and microorganisms ingest micrometre sized or smaller particles, which also come from synthetic (polyester or acrylic) clothing and cleaning products containing plastics.

Studies in humans and mussels have found that ingested and inhaled microplastics get into cells and tissues where they can cause harm. In patients who have had their knee or hip joints replaced with plastic implants, such particles can disrupt cellular processes and degrade tissues.

Toxicities of plastics

Plastics are made up of repeating units or monomers that join up to form long chains or polymers. These chains are thought to be generally inert – yet unreacted monomers and other harmful ingredients can be found in plastics.

According to United Nations’ Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals, the chemical ingredients of more than 50% of plastics are hazardous. Studies investigating the transfer of additives in polyvinylchloride (PVC) from medical supplies to humans indicate that these chemicals can accumulate in the blood.

In lab tests, monomers and other ingredients of PVC polystyrene, polyurethane and polycarbonate can be carcinogenic and can affect organisms in similar way to the hormone oestrogen.

The monomers making up some plastics such as polyethylene (used for carrier bags) was thought to be more benign. Yet these materials can still become toxic by picking up other pollutants. Pesticides and organic pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls are consistently found on plastic wastes at harmful concentrations 100 times higher than those found in sediments, and 1 million times those occurring in sea water.

Many of these are ‘priority pollutants’ – chemicals regulated by government agencies, including US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) because of their toxicity or persistence in organisms and food webs. These chemicals can disrupt processes such as cell division and immunity, causing disease or reducing the organisms’ ability to escape from predators or reproduce.

In an unpublished analysis, the authors found that at least 78% of priority pollutants listed by the EPA and 61% listed by the EU are associated with plastic debris. Seabirds that have ingested plastic waste have polychlorinated biphenyls in their tissues at 300% greater than those that have not eaten the plastic.

Classify the most harmful plastics as hazardous!

Governments have struggled for decades to reduce plastic debris. The International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) was signed in 1973, although a complete ban on the disposal of plastics at sea was not enacted until the end of 1988.

Despite 134 nations agreeing to eliminate plastics disposal at sea, ocean sampling suggests that the problem has persisted or worsened since MARPOL was signed.

The scientists wrote: “We feel that the physical dangers of plastic debris are well enough established, and the suggestions of the chemical dangers sufficiently worrying, that the biggest producers of plastic waste – the United States, Europe and China – must act now.

“These countries should agree to classify as hazardous the most harmful plastics, including those that cannot be reused or recycled because they lack durability or contain mixtures of materials that cannot be separated.”

Focusing on the most hazardous plastics is a realistic first step. Currently, just four plastics – PVC, polystyrene, polyurethane and polycarbonate – make up roughly 30% of production. These are made of potentially toxic materials and difficult to recycle.

PVC is used in construction, such as pipes that carry drinking water. Polystyrene is used for food packaging; polyurethane in furniture; and polycarbonate in electronics. Health-care and technology industries are already replacing PVC components in intravenous-drip bags and in computers with materials that are safer, more durable and recyclable, such as polypropylene and aluminium.

With the proposed change in plastics classification, many affected habitats could immediately be cleaned up under national legislation with government funds.

In the United States, for instance, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 would enable the EPA to clear the vast accumulations of plastics that litter the terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats under US jurisdiction.

Ultimately, the scientists want changes in regulation to drive the development of a closed-loop system in which all plastics are reused and recycled, instead of ending up in landfills where chemicals leach from the plastic into surrounding habitats.

“If current consumption rates continue, the planet will hold another 33 billion tonnes of plastic by 2050. This would fill 2.75 billion refuse-collection trucks, which would wrap around the planet roughly 800 times if placed end to end”, the scientists wrote.

“We estimate that this could be reduced to just 4 billion tonnes if the most problematic plastics are classified as hazardous immediately and replaced with safer, reusable materials in the next decade.”

 

 

Dr Mae Wan Ho is the director of the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS), which campaigns against unethical uses of biotechnology.

Action: Beat the Microbead!

This article was originally published by ISIS. A fully referenced version of this article is posted on ISIS members website and otherwise available for download here

Author’s note: Please circulate widely and repost, but you must give the URL of the original and preserve all the links back to articles on our website. If you find this report useful, please support ISIS by subscribing to our magazine Science in Society, and encourage your friends to do so. Or have a look at the ISIS bookstore for other publications. Meanwhile, a solution to cleaning up existing waste and a route of recycling may be turning Waste Plastics into Fuel Oil?

 




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Fighting the ‘Big Club’: blockades, strikes, and the fossil fuel blowback Updated for 2026

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It was said of Rockefeller as he built his prolific infrastructure empire of trains, pipelines, and refineries, that he would enter a community first with a promises of money, and if his kindness was refused, he would resort to other means.

His oft-cited quotation speaks for itself, “the way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.”

Update this position to today, and you have the model for contemporary counterinsurgency (COIN) that plunges a growing pipeline and oil train network through dissenting communities.

As Warren Buffet, owner of Burlington Santa Fe Railroad, once stated, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

But with militant labor strikes shocking the oil industry and blockades halting oil trains throughout the Pacific Northwest and Canada, it would appear that the class war is finally starting to even out.

We cannot tolerate these attacks on our communities!

Burlington Santa Fe Railroad is the largest oil train business in the US, an infrastructural necessity sparked by the fracking boom in the Bakken Shale of North Dakota, and the popular uprising against the network of pipelines projected out of the Alberta tar sands.

After an oil train explosion vaporized nearly half of the downtown area of a Canadian town, Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 people, an outcry against oil trains arose throughout the country.

Ensuing derailments of coal and oil trains, along with explosions propelling fireballs fifty feet into the air, highlighted the increasing urgency of direct action to halt the exploding ‘bomb trains’ as well as other fossil fuel infrastructure

From June to November 2014, around a dozen coal and oil train blockades emerged throughout the Pacific Northwest. From Seattle, where 300 people blocked an oil train after the Peoples Climate March, to Portland, where 100 protestors blocked a train in November, urban populations have increasingly mobilized to join rural dissent against fossil fuel infrastructure in numerous places around a Cascadian bioregion that stretches from Northern California to Idaho to British Columbia.

Many of these demonstrations are organized by a network called Rising Tide North America, which formed in 2005 out of the Earth First! Climate Caucus to combat “the root causes of climate change”.

With its connections to Earth First!, a grassroots environmental group that has drawn the ire of the FBI and DHS on numerous occasions, Rising Tide has faced more than its share of interference from local law enforcement, federal policing agencies, and, curiously, even private contractors.

The same methods of repression have been used against the labor movement, as the longshoremen who have fought against the Port of Longview can testify, but together in solidarity, Rising Tide and the ILWU have fought a common enemy with port shutdowns and blockades.

The ‘Big Club’

Among the most important fossil fuel infrastructure under construction today is an expansive natural gas pipeline network. The gas from wells in Idaho is set to pump through the ‘Pacific Connector’ pipeline through Southern Oregon and across the Pacific, via a terminal in Coos Bay.

The 234-mile pipeline would take land from some 300 private property-owners along the way while passing through pristine riparian areas and National Forest ecosystems.

Thirty-five percent of the landowners have taken deals, but 15 percent have said ‘no’. If they refuse to sign a deal, the Canadian corporation, Veresen, has threatened to work with local officials to use eminent domain to seize their property at a lower value.

Former TransCanada employee David Dodson calls the usage of eminent domain to seize private property a part of the “big club”. “Eminent domain laws were designed to get things built”, Dodson told The Oregonian in August. “It’s a very one-sided process, and it’s not in landowners’ favor.”

The Pacific Connector pipeline would end at the Jordon Cove LNG terminal, which has been praised by the Obama Administration. According to a White House statement issued in March, prior to the conclusion of the environmental approval process for the Pacific Connector pipeline,

“We welcome the prospect of U.S. LNG exports in the future since additional global supplies will benefit Europe and other strategic partners.”

These partners include allies against Chinese hegemony in the South China Sea. The same statement continues:

“We agree on the importance of redoubling transatlantic efforts to support European energy security to further diversify energy sources and suppliers and to allow for reverse natural gas flows to Ukraine from its EU neighbors.”

Fossil fuels and ‘national security’

The reference to Ukraine is crucial, because it suggests underlying reasons for the EU’s militaristic interest in Ukraine (gas pipelines). According to the American Petroleum Institute, which is deeply involved in the utilization of counterinsurgency strategy in the US, the Ukraine crisis is jeopardizing the future of natural gas in Europe, making the US all the more important of a producer.

In would appear from these statements that the White House views the LNG terminals in the Eastern Seaboard and the Pacific Northwest as a national security imperative on a global scale. At the same time, it is questionable as to whether or not profit even matters.

As James C Scott notes with regard to the production of palm oil plantations in Indonesia, the construction of industrial infrastructure stands not so much to rake in profits for the nation, but to make its land and people “legible” to the maps and observers of the state.

In keeping with this connection between the national interests of the counterinsurgency campaign in Ukraine, geopolitical maneuvers in the South China Sea, and industrial interests in the Northwest, the ‘Big Club’ deploys similar public relations networks set up by business and political elites to further the agenda of the gas industry.

They are producing a narrative and a reality of legible, productive force at the same time, and it has already created a situation of war throughout the world. However, the ability of environmental groups to work with people who resist the land grab makes victory a real possibility.

Astroturf, psy-ops and the Democratic Party

To advance the ‘interests of national security’ the Democratic Party developed an intricate PR system, which helps to disguise the iron fist of enforcement of political and economic interest in the velvet glove of social benefits and community participation.

According to executives in the energy industry, networks of private security and intelligence corporations are contracted by the energy industry and law enforcement agencies (from local to federal) to gather information on populations in keeping with COIN doctrine.

These networks consist of Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans and psy-ops specialists, and generally hinge on the idea of monitoring populations in order to find out how to ‘win hearts and minds’.

Such militarized corporate PR tactics are often carried out in tandem with political elites, such as ‘Our Energy Moment‘ (OEM), an insta-PR campaign launched in February with the intention of promoting the Jordon Cove terminal, as well as other terminals around the US.

Spearheaded by Blue Engine Media and Liberty Concepts, two PR groups that act as containers for key initiatives of the Democratic Party and the energy industry, OEM announces itself as a “growing coalition“ including private security corporations, political organizations, and energy companies.

The founder of Blue Engine Media describes himself as a “recovering political hack and aspiring corporate hack” on his Twitter profile, having founded the quasi-NGO, Common Purpose, which helps the Democratic Party apparatchiks dictate media positions to third party groups like MoveOn.org and Change to Win.

In every way, the LNG infrastructure of the Pacific Northwest is set up as a darling of the Democratic Party, and groups like Rising Tide that refuse to toe the PR line of the White House are repaid for exposing the uncomfortable conflicts of interest within such discreet public and private partnerships.

Upset the ‘Big Club’, face the consequences

While OEM is relatively new, their projection of an image that unites political, corporate, and private security together in one coalition is troubling for many anti-LNG activists given the recent history of harassment and politically-motivated witch hunts.

In 2010, a Department of Justice employee and opponent of LNG infrastructure in Oregon named Brent Foster was hounded into resignation through industry tactics.

After being hauled before a grand jury for allegedly telling misinformation to his employer and giving improper LNG advice, a video surfaced on YouTube showing Foster allegedly smoking a joint with another LNG opponent in private.

Though he was cleared of all charges by the grand jury, and the video was largely seen as a joke, Foster was forced to resign from his important position. The proposed Palomar LNG pipeline crossing through Mt. Hood that he had opposed, however, was cancelled.

Aside from being an obvious smear tactic designed to influence the public and a grand jury, the YouTube video came from a ghost account with no other videos. The evidence suggests that, barring a strange coincidence of factors, the two LNG opponents were being followed and monitored by private intelligence corporations working with a public relations group in the pocket of the gas industry.

The harassment and even criminalization of activists has not stopped at LNG and other fossil fuel infrastructure. In April of last year, the Oregon House of Representatives passed two laws declaring all interference with state forest management illegal, while enabling the DA to “charge these terrorists with a crime and make them accountable”, according to Rep. Wayne Krieger.

This as the Pacific Connector is slated to cross through 234 miles of forest and riparian ecosystems. On top of the Pacific Connector, a new propane terminal is slated to be built in Portland, Oregon, and has faced strong opposition.

The political drive to produce fossil fuel infrastructure is such that the Governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, fired the chairwoman of the Oregon Transportation Commission, Catherine Mater, for casting the tie-breaking vote against subsidies to upgrade the Port of St. Helens and enable coal exports by Ambre Energy.

Whether the oil strike will extend to foster a world-historic event is an open question, but those responsible for coal and gas infrastructure will likely not be discouraged from their mission of ‘national security’ absent the overthrow of current, militarized industrial capitalism. Who would lose out from this situation? Certainly not the workers.

Infrastructure, counterinsurgency and the PR industry

Aside from the class war, according to executives with energy companies, there is already a counterinsurgency war being waged against protestors and civil dissent. This war includes the ‘hearts and minds’ strategy, which extends conciliatory olive branches to populations, even as it launches into massive surveillance strategies of all those involved.

A recently leaked strategy document forged in the collaboration between Edelman Public Relations and TransCanada regarding attempts to build the Energy East pipeline out of the Alberta tar sands boasts a “strong heritage in the more aggressive politics and policy fights in the US.”

Their “tactical elements” include “public relations, digital/social [media], grassroots advocacy communication, paid media.” Their “perpetual campaign” involves working with third parties to “pressure Energy East opponents” and “build an echo chamber of aligned voices.”

According to the Edelman / TransCanada document, industry professionals are to work with proxy groups to attack environmentalists in the name of “national security”.

Through “detailed background research on key opposition groups” the energy industry seeks “an assessment of strengths and weaknesses” by “knowledge-sharing” with third parties regarding the financial structure, organizational affiliations, leadership, and political engagement.

As for their media strategy, they claim they prioritize “local > regional > national” in order to proactively reach out to smaller communities and separate the more-emotional opposition from a jobs-based position, while also meeting with the presidents of major newspapers in order to forge collaborative relationships.

Perhaps most ironic is their ideation of the “social media ecosystem”, which fits in line with what is called the “insurgent ecosystem” by counterinsurgency chief theorist David Kilcullen.

Social media becomes the site of insurgency, where environmental NGOs, whether international or locally-based, must be monitored, mimicked, anticipated, and responded to in a shadow game of proxy third-parties.

But what do these third parties look like? In 2011, the ostensibly-grass roots organization Energy In Depth (EID) was outed for being financially backed by the American Petroleum Institute, which worked with Edelman PR to form another astroturfed quasi-NGO called Energy Citizens in 2009.

So deeply ensconced in the counterinsurgency complex is Edelman that they were shortlisted by the Iraqi government in their search for a public relations team in 2013.

Quasi-nonprofits like EID, hoisted into the spotlight through industry funding, disseminate news articles, host community partnership meetings, and generally play a social media turf war with activists attempting to influence things like zoning ordinances to strengthen or maintain environmental regulations.

In fact, it is precisely because the energy industry has extracted its prize at the expense of democracy by means of war that the glut of supply and drop in demand plunged commodity prices into collapse.

Had industry accepted accountability to citizens, its “middle and lower-level producers” may never have faced the shocks they are subjected to today. Under these ongoing conditions of counterinsurgency, an oil workers strike adds a level of agitation to the already-militant environmental movement; a sense that the pendulum is swinging back.

Burnaby Mountain – Edelman plan in action

Although TransCanada has dumped Edelman since being exposed, claiming that they had not begun to implement the practices outlined in the strategic document, it was noted that Edelman had already been conducting meetings with the heads of the Energy East Pipeline.

TransCanada insisted that Edelman’s approach was a particular to the US, and had no place among the Canadian people. Returning to Cascadian resistance against fossil fuels.

However the work of the Texas-based energy infrastructure giant Kinder Morgan (KM) attempting to push the TransMountain Pipeline through Burnaby Mountain suggests that the strategy outlined and proposed by Edelman is, in fact, being deployed.

Facing a community of environmentalists, social justice activists, First Nations, and locals (more than 70% of whom opposed the pipeline), Kinder Morgan attempted to use the velvet glove on the iron fist approach.

Headquartered in Houston, KM emerged in Cascadia only after a stint in the Marcellus Shale, where its operations were embedded in the same system that produced Energy In Depth. In fact, EID features on the KM website as one of just seven linked groups that includes both astroturfed and openly-corporate groups like Laborers’ International Union of North America, The Coalition to Lower Energy Costs, and the American Gas Association.

The TransMountain pipeline webpage also links to a vigilant Twitter presence that retweets promotional materials and attack opponents often using the snarky tone that they think is popular over social media.

At the same time as their public relations screen reached full spectrum, Kinder Morgan contractors turned more aggressive on the ground. Numerous activists reported seeing contractors monitoring, following, and filming them.

At one point, an activist approached a KM vehicle to capture footage of the contractor in the act of filming him, the contractor accelerated his truck into the protestor, bumping him once as a warning, and then accelerating into him. According to the protestor, the driver was going to run him over had he not quickly moved out of the way.

Corporations gain ‘quasi-judicial’ powers

The private-public collusion is also similar. The energy and natural resources industries overlap in a great many ways. Employees cross over, directors often sit on several boards of foundations and institutes fed by the same industries they work for, and go on to work within politics.

In one example, JM Huber’s VP of Environment, Health, Safety, and Sustainability, Don Young, boasts in his LinkedIn profile of “working on quasi-judicial panels including for the TransMountain pipeline expansion project.”

This quasi-judicial panel is also known as the National Energy Board, which is set to rule on the legality of the pipeline expansion program soon. The NRC as a “quasi-judicial” group is set up to represent corporate interests.

Despite corporate pretensions to modern social network monitoring and media involvement, KM’s behavior and the Canadian government’s judicial and quasi-judicial involvement has presented the same old corruption.

JM Huber, which employs Don Young, is a multinational corporation, and its Board of Directors is stacked with industry leaders like Gideo Argov, a director at a large private equity firm, and W Lee Nutter, the former CEO, Chairman, and President of Rayonier, one of the biggest timberlands holders in the US.

Huber and KM share a place in the energy / natural resources sector, and have employees like Liz Simonton, commercial manager at KM in Colorado Springs, who have experience working with both corporations.

The buddy-buddy relationship between industry and the “quasi-judicial panel” set to decide the fate of the pipeline seemed somewhat disrupted in April, when Young, ironically the only member of the three-person panel with any kind of environmental record, left the panel for “personal reasons”.

Young was replaced by Philip Davies, a veteran of EnCana, which just pledged its support for KM’s $3 billion Rockies Express natural gas project. Another panelist, Lyn Mercier, comes to the National Energy Board from Gaz Metro, which is trying to force its own landgrabbing pipeline by claiming eminent domain over resistant farmers.

The clear corruption that permeates the ‘quasi-judicial’ process is familiar to peoples’ movements around the world, as political and economic elites collude to force the productivity of industry through communities and critical habitat.

If those who want to transform the current paradigm work to dismantle the propaganda of the state’s war against the people, rather than the integrity of labor agitation, solidarity could lead to radical potentials. What about a general strike?

Success against the militarized PR machine

As First Nations continued to maintain the sacred fire of the encampment, insisting that their sacred lands remained unceded to the Canadian government, the legal team for the Burnaby Mountain land defenders found out that the injunction granted to KM was illegal from the start.

After Kinder Morgan had received the illegal injunction against the TransMountain protestors Last November, the RCMP immediately began arresting as many protestors as crossed the ‘injunction line’ while KM surveyors performed their tasks.

The RCMP performed their duties brutally, wielding less-than-lethal shotguns at a treesitter, and captured on film throwing an elder woman to the ground. It was not until more than 60 arrests occurred on the mountain and Burnaby Mountain Caretakers locked down to the Supreme Court building in Vancouver that the Supreme Court recognized the illegality of the injunction.

Until the point of mass public participation in civil disobedience, the judicial proceedings manifested the usual process of corporate takeover of Indigenous lands and subversion of activist movements through RCMP brutality. KM attempted to get an injunction extension and failed.

To restate: as KM’s public relations attempted to present the image of a benevolent financial backer of the community, they offered to pay the RCMP directly for enforcing an illegal injunction while their contractors monitored activists movements, threatened, and even assaulted them.

Since the RCMP has already averred that counterinsurgency strategy is necessary for the containment of a First Nations uprising, the fact that Indigenous peoples took the lead in the Burnaby Mountain encampment already foreshadowed that COIN would be at play.

The extent of the resistance, the number of people arrested, including public personalities like David Suzuki, attested to the ultimate failure of COIN in the face of public scrutiny and nonviolent civil disobedience.

Hitting the ‘Big Club’ at its weakest points

While counterinsurgency policing includes the militarization of police forces and the papering over of private-public collusion through quasi-NGOs and quasi-judicial strategies, the ability of activists working with social media, legal paperwrenching tools, and grassroots, nonviolent civil disobedience to halt massive industrial megaprojects throughout Cascadia is a testament to the will and the spirit of popular involvement in the socio-political processes of horizontal networking and direct action.

However, the US and Canada are digging in against social change, with Stephen Harper supporting new legislation in the Canadian government to increase funding to spy agencies and propagandists. Even with the decline of oil prices, it does not appear as though the priority on fossil fuels exports will abate any time soon.

The current oil strike in the midst of mass layoffs from unconventional extraction methods like the tar sands will likely produce greater divisions between the industry and its workers, while at the same time increasing the importance of natural gas.

The fact of the most patriarchal circumstances of oil workers’ ‘man camps’ in North Dakota is linked also to the racist, sexist environment maintained by supervisors in refineries like Shell’s in Martinez, California. Without a system change from fossil fuel economies, these tendencies will persevere unchecked.

It is tremendous that the steelworkers are striking, and the oil industry appears weaker than it has in years. Alternatives exist, and are becoming more important by the day. Labor could join the struggle against fossil fuels by collectivizing in the refineries, and rejecting the oil bosses who have waged class war against ordinary people, dispossessing Indigenous peoples, and spreading the specter of cancer throughout the world.

Can refineries not be re-purposed? Can the fossil fuel system, so important to waging aggressive, pointless international war throughout the world and at home, not be overcome?

Unless we can confront the vast edifice of militarized ‘national interest’ presented by industry-led public relations, we will be totally incapable of asking these questions, let alone stopping the insane expansion of fossil fuels infrastructure, or supporting the advanced class struggle that the regime of extractivism known as the Global Land Grab has brought against itself in North America.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013).

 

 




389765

Fighting the ‘Big Club’: blockades, strikes, and the fossil fuel blowback Updated for 2026

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It was said of Rockefeller as he built his prolific infrastructure empire of trains, pipelines, and refineries, that he would enter a community first with a promises of money, and if his kindness was refused, he would resort to other means.

His oft-cited quotation speaks for itself, “the way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.”

Update this position to today, and you have the model for contemporary counterinsurgency (COIN) that plunges a growing pipeline and oil train network through dissenting communities.

As Warren Buffet, owner of Burlington Santa Fe Railroad, once stated, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

But with militant labor strikes shocking the oil industry and blockades halting oil trains throughout the Pacific Northwest and Canada, it would appear that the class war is finally starting to even out.

We cannot tolerate these attacks on our communities!

Burlington Santa Fe Railroad is the largest oil train business in the US, an infrastructural necessity sparked by the fracking boom in the Bakken Shale of North Dakota, and the popular uprising against the network of pipelines projected out of the Alberta tar sands.

After an oil train explosion vaporized nearly half of the downtown area of a Canadian town, Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 people, an outcry against oil trains arose throughout the country.

Ensuing derailments of coal and oil trains, along with explosions propelling fireballs fifty feet into the air, highlighted the increasing urgency of direct action to halt the exploding ‘bomb trains’ as well as other fossil fuel infrastructure

From June to November 2014, around a dozen coal and oil train blockades emerged throughout the Pacific Northwest. From Seattle, where 300 people blocked an oil train after the Peoples Climate March, to Portland, where 100 protestors blocked a train in November, urban populations have increasingly mobilized to join rural dissent against fossil fuel infrastructure in numerous places around a Cascadian bioregion that stretches from Northern California to Idaho to British Columbia.

Many of these demonstrations are organized by a network called Rising Tide North America, which formed in 2005 out of the Earth First! Climate Caucus to combat “the root causes of climate change”.

With its connections to Earth First!, a grassroots environmental group that has drawn the ire of the FBI and DHS on numerous occasions, Rising Tide has faced more than its share of interference from local law enforcement, federal policing agencies, and, curiously, even private contractors.

The same methods of repression have been used against the labor movement, as the longshoremen who have fought against the Port of Longview can testify, but together in solidarity, Rising Tide and the ILWU have fought a common enemy with port shutdowns and blockades.

The ‘Big Club’

Among the most important fossil fuel infrastructure under construction today is an expansive natural gas pipeline network. The gas from wells in Idaho is set to pump through the ‘Pacific Connector’ pipeline through Southern Oregon and across the Pacific, via a terminal in Coos Bay.

The 234-mile pipeline would take land from some 300 private property-owners along the way while passing through pristine riparian areas and National Forest ecosystems.

Thirty-five percent of the landowners have taken deals, but 15 percent have said ‘no’. If they refuse to sign a deal, the Canadian corporation, Veresen, has threatened to work with local officials to use eminent domain to seize their property at a lower value.

Former TransCanada employee David Dodson calls the usage of eminent domain to seize private property a part of the “big club”. “Eminent domain laws were designed to get things built”, Dodson told The Oregonian in August. “It’s a very one-sided process, and it’s not in landowners’ favor.”

The Pacific Connector pipeline would end at the Jordon Cove LNG terminal, which has been praised by the Obama Administration. According to a White House statement issued in March, prior to the conclusion of the environmental approval process for the Pacific Connector pipeline,

“We welcome the prospect of U.S. LNG exports in the future since additional global supplies will benefit Europe and other strategic partners.”

These partners include allies against Chinese hegemony in the South China Sea. The same statement continues:

“We agree on the importance of redoubling transatlantic efforts to support European energy security to further diversify energy sources and suppliers and to allow for reverse natural gas flows to Ukraine from its EU neighbors.”

Fossil fuels and ‘national security’

The reference to Ukraine is crucial, because it suggests underlying reasons for the EU’s militaristic interest in Ukraine (gas pipelines). According to the American Petroleum Institute, which is deeply involved in the utilization of counterinsurgency strategy in the US, the Ukraine crisis is jeopardizing the future of natural gas in Europe, making the US all the more important of a producer.

In would appear from these statements that the White House views the LNG terminals in the Eastern Seaboard and the Pacific Northwest as a national security imperative on a global scale. At the same time, it is questionable as to whether or not profit even matters.

As James C Scott notes with regard to the production of palm oil plantations in Indonesia, the construction of industrial infrastructure stands not so much to rake in profits for the nation, but to make its land and people “legible” to the maps and observers of the state.

In keeping with this connection between the national interests of the counterinsurgency campaign in Ukraine, geopolitical maneuvers in the South China Sea, and industrial interests in the Northwest, the ‘Big Club’ deploys similar public relations networks set up by business and political elites to further the agenda of the gas industry.

They are producing a narrative and a reality of legible, productive force at the same time, and it has already created a situation of war throughout the world. However, the ability of environmental groups to work with people who resist the land grab makes victory a real possibility.

Astroturf, psy-ops and the Democratic Party

To advance the ‘interests of national security’ the Democratic Party developed an intricate PR system, which helps to disguise the iron fist of enforcement of political and economic interest in the velvet glove of social benefits and community participation.

According to executives in the energy industry, networks of private security and intelligence corporations are contracted by the energy industry and law enforcement agencies (from local to federal) to gather information on populations in keeping with COIN doctrine.

These networks consist of Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans and psy-ops specialists, and generally hinge on the idea of monitoring populations in order to find out how to ‘win hearts and minds’.

Such militarized corporate PR tactics are often carried out in tandem with political elites, such as ‘Our Energy Moment‘ (OEM), an insta-PR campaign launched in February with the intention of promoting the Jordon Cove terminal, as well as other terminals around the US.

Spearheaded by Blue Engine Media and Liberty Concepts, two PR groups that act as containers for key initiatives of the Democratic Party and the energy industry, OEM announces itself as a “growing coalition“ including private security corporations, political organizations, and energy companies.

The founder of Blue Engine Media describes himself as a “recovering political hack and aspiring corporate hack” on his Twitter profile, having founded the quasi-NGO, Common Purpose, which helps the Democratic Party apparatchiks dictate media positions to third party groups like MoveOn.org and Change to Win.

In every way, the LNG infrastructure of the Pacific Northwest is set up as a darling of the Democratic Party, and groups like Rising Tide that refuse to toe the PR line of the White House are repaid for exposing the uncomfortable conflicts of interest within such discreet public and private partnerships.

Upset the ‘Big Club’, face the consequences

While OEM is relatively new, their projection of an image that unites political, corporate, and private security together in one coalition is troubling for many anti-LNG activists given the recent history of harassment and politically-motivated witch hunts.

In 2010, a Department of Justice employee and opponent of LNG infrastructure in Oregon named Brent Foster was hounded into resignation through industry tactics.

After being hauled before a grand jury for allegedly telling misinformation to his employer and giving improper LNG advice, a video surfaced on YouTube showing Foster allegedly smoking a joint with another LNG opponent in private.

Though he was cleared of all charges by the grand jury, and the video was largely seen as a joke, Foster was forced to resign from his important position. The proposed Palomar LNG pipeline crossing through Mt. Hood that he had opposed, however, was cancelled.

Aside from being an obvious smear tactic designed to influence the public and a grand jury, the YouTube video came from a ghost account with no other videos. The evidence suggests that, barring a strange coincidence of factors, the two LNG opponents were being followed and monitored by private intelligence corporations working with a public relations group in the pocket of the gas industry.

The harassment and even criminalization of activists has not stopped at LNG and other fossil fuel infrastructure. In April of last year, the Oregon House of Representatives passed two laws declaring all interference with state forest management illegal, while enabling the DA to “charge these terrorists with a crime and make them accountable”, according to Rep. Wayne Krieger.

This as the Pacific Connector is slated to cross through 234 miles of forest and riparian ecosystems. On top of the Pacific Connector, a new propane terminal is slated to be built in Portland, Oregon, and has faced strong opposition.

The political drive to produce fossil fuel infrastructure is such that the Governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, fired the chairwoman of the Oregon Transportation Commission, Catherine Mater, for casting the tie-breaking vote against subsidies to upgrade the Port of St. Helens and enable coal exports by Ambre Energy.

Whether the oil strike will extend to foster a world-historic event is an open question, but those responsible for coal and gas infrastructure will likely not be discouraged from their mission of ‘national security’ absent the overthrow of current, militarized industrial capitalism. Who would lose out from this situation? Certainly not the workers.

Infrastructure, counterinsurgency and the PR industry

Aside from the class war, according to executives with energy companies, there is already a counterinsurgency war being waged against protestors and civil dissent. This war includes the ‘hearts and minds’ strategy, which extends conciliatory olive branches to populations, even as it launches into massive surveillance strategies of all those involved.

A recently leaked strategy document forged in the collaboration between Edelman Public Relations and TransCanada regarding attempts to build the Energy East pipeline out of the Alberta tar sands boasts a “strong heritage in the more aggressive politics and policy fights in the US.”

Their “tactical elements” include “public relations, digital/social [media], grassroots advocacy communication, paid media.” Their “perpetual campaign” involves working with third parties to “pressure Energy East opponents” and “build an echo chamber of aligned voices.”

According to the Edelman / TransCanada document, industry professionals are to work with proxy groups to attack environmentalists in the name of “national security”.

Through “detailed background research on key opposition groups” the energy industry seeks “an assessment of strengths and weaknesses” by “knowledge-sharing” with third parties regarding the financial structure, organizational affiliations, leadership, and political engagement.

As for their media strategy, they claim they prioritize “local > regional > national” in order to proactively reach out to smaller communities and separate the more-emotional opposition from a jobs-based position, while also meeting with the presidents of major newspapers in order to forge collaborative relationships.

Perhaps most ironic is their ideation of the “social media ecosystem”, which fits in line with what is called the “insurgent ecosystem” by counterinsurgency chief theorist David Kilcullen.

Social media becomes the site of insurgency, where environmental NGOs, whether international or locally-based, must be monitored, mimicked, anticipated, and responded to in a shadow game of proxy third-parties.

But what do these third parties look like? In 2011, the ostensibly-grass roots organization Energy In Depth (EID) was outed for being financially backed by the American Petroleum Institute, which worked with Edelman PR to form another astroturfed quasi-NGO called Energy Citizens in 2009.

So deeply ensconced in the counterinsurgency complex is Edelman that they were shortlisted by the Iraqi government in their search for a public relations team in 2013.

Quasi-nonprofits like EID, hoisted into the spotlight through industry funding, disseminate news articles, host community partnership meetings, and generally play a social media turf war with activists attempting to influence things like zoning ordinances to strengthen or maintain environmental regulations.

In fact, it is precisely because the energy industry has extracted its prize at the expense of democracy by means of war that the glut of supply and drop in demand plunged commodity prices into collapse.

Had industry accepted accountability to citizens, its “middle and lower-level producers” may never have faced the shocks they are subjected to today. Under these ongoing conditions of counterinsurgency, an oil workers strike adds a level of agitation to the already-militant environmental movement; a sense that the pendulum is swinging back.

Burnaby Mountain – Edelman plan in action

Although TransCanada has dumped Edelman since being exposed, claiming that they had not begun to implement the practices outlined in the strategic document, it was noted that Edelman had already been conducting meetings with the heads of the Energy East Pipeline.

TransCanada insisted that Edelman’s approach was a particular to the US, and had no place among the Canadian people. Returning to Cascadian resistance against fossil fuels.

However the work of the Texas-based energy infrastructure giant Kinder Morgan (KM) attempting to push the TransMountain Pipeline through Burnaby Mountain suggests that the strategy outlined and proposed by Edelman is, in fact, being deployed.

Facing a community of environmentalists, social justice activists, First Nations, and locals (more than 70% of whom opposed the pipeline), Kinder Morgan attempted to use the velvet glove on the iron fist approach.

Headquartered in Houston, KM emerged in Cascadia only after a stint in the Marcellus Shale, where its operations were embedded in the same system that produced Energy In Depth. In fact, EID features on the KM website as one of just seven linked groups that includes both astroturfed and openly-corporate groups like Laborers’ International Union of North America, The Coalition to Lower Energy Costs, and the American Gas Association.

The TransMountain pipeline webpage also links to a vigilant Twitter presence that retweets promotional materials and attack opponents often using the snarky tone that they think is popular over social media.

At the same time as their public relations screen reached full spectrum, Kinder Morgan contractors turned more aggressive on the ground. Numerous activists reported seeing contractors monitoring, following, and filming them.

At one point, an activist approached a KM vehicle to capture footage of the contractor in the act of filming him, the contractor accelerated his truck into the protestor, bumping him once as a warning, and then accelerating into him. According to the protestor, the driver was going to run him over had he not quickly moved out of the way.

Corporations gain ‘quasi-judicial’ powers

The private-public collusion is also similar. The energy and natural resources industries overlap in a great many ways. Employees cross over, directors often sit on several boards of foundations and institutes fed by the same industries they work for, and go on to work within politics.

In one example, JM Huber’s VP of Environment, Health, Safety, and Sustainability, Don Young, boasts in his LinkedIn profile of “working on quasi-judicial panels including for the TransMountain pipeline expansion project.”

This quasi-judicial panel is also known as the National Energy Board, which is set to rule on the legality of the pipeline expansion program soon. The NRC as a “quasi-judicial” group is set up to represent corporate interests.

Despite corporate pretensions to modern social network monitoring and media involvement, KM’s behavior and the Canadian government’s judicial and quasi-judicial involvement has presented the same old corruption.

JM Huber, which employs Don Young, is a multinational corporation, and its Board of Directors is stacked with industry leaders like Gideo Argov, a director at a large private equity firm, and W Lee Nutter, the former CEO, Chairman, and President of Rayonier, one of the biggest timberlands holders in the US.

Huber and KM share a place in the energy / natural resources sector, and have employees like Liz Simonton, commercial manager at KM in Colorado Springs, who have experience working with both corporations.

The buddy-buddy relationship between industry and the “quasi-judicial panel” set to decide the fate of the pipeline seemed somewhat disrupted in April, when Young, ironically the only member of the three-person panel with any kind of environmental record, left the panel for “personal reasons”.

Young was replaced by Philip Davies, a veteran of EnCana, which just pledged its support for KM’s $3 billion Rockies Express natural gas project. Another panelist, Lyn Mercier, comes to the National Energy Board from Gaz Metro, which is trying to force its own landgrabbing pipeline by claiming eminent domain over resistant farmers.

The clear corruption that permeates the ‘quasi-judicial’ process is familiar to peoples’ movements around the world, as political and economic elites collude to force the productivity of industry through communities and critical habitat.

If those who want to transform the current paradigm work to dismantle the propaganda of the state’s war against the people, rather than the integrity of labor agitation, solidarity could lead to radical potentials. What about a general strike?

Success against the militarized PR machine

As First Nations continued to maintain the sacred fire of the encampment, insisting that their sacred lands remained unceded to the Canadian government, the legal team for the Burnaby Mountain land defenders found out that the injunction granted to KM was illegal from the start.

After Kinder Morgan had received the illegal injunction against the TransMountain protestors Last November, the RCMP immediately began arresting as many protestors as crossed the ‘injunction line’ while KM surveyors performed their tasks.

The RCMP performed their duties brutally, wielding less-than-lethal shotguns at a treesitter, and captured on film throwing an elder woman to the ground. It was not until more than 60 arrests occurred on the mountain and Burnaby Mountain Caretakers locked down to the Supreme Court building in Vancouver that the Supreme Court recognized the illegality of the injunction.

Until the point of mass public participation in civil disobedience, the judicial proceedings manifested the usual process of corporate takeover of Indigenous lands and subversion of activist movements through RCMP brutality. KM attempted to get an injunction extension and failed.

To restate: as KM’s public relations attempted to present the image of a benevolent financial backer of the community, they offered to pay the RCMP directly for enforcing an illegal injunction while their contractors monitored activists movements, threatened, and even assaulted them.

Since the RCMP has already averred that counterinsurgency strategy is necessary for the containment of a First Nations uprising, the fact that Indigenous peoples took the lead in the Burnaby Mountain encampment already foreshadowed that COIN would be at play.

The extent of the resistance, the number of people arrested, including public personalities like David Suzuki, attested to the ultimate failure of COIN in the face of public scrutiny and nonviolent civil disobedience.

Hitting the ‘Big Club’ at its weakest points

While counterinsurgency policing includes the militarization of police forces and the papering over of private-public collusion through quasi-NGOs and quasi-judicial strategies, the ability of activists working with social media, legal paperwrenching tools, and grassroots, nonviolent civil disobedience to halt massive industrial megaprojects throughout Cascadia is a testament to the will and the spirit of popular involvement in the socio-political processes of horizontal networking and direct action.

However, the US and Canada are digging in against social change, with Stephen Harper supporting new legislation in the Canadian government to increase funding to spy agencies and propagandists. Even with the decline of oil prices, it does not appear as though the priority on fossil fuels exports will abate any time soon.

The current oil strike in the midst of mass layoffs from unconventional extraction methods like the tar sands will likely produce greater divisions between the industry and its workers, while at the same time increasing the importance of natural gas.

The fact of the most patriarchal circumstances of oil workers’ ‘man camps’ in North Dakota is linked also to the racist, sexist environment maintained by supervisors in refineries like Shell’s in Martinez, California. Without a system change from fossil fuel economies, these tendencies will persevere unchecked.

It is tremendous that the steelworkers are striking, and the oil industry appears weaker than it has in years. Alternatives exist, and are becoming more important by the day. Labor could join the struggle against fossil fuels by collectivizing in the refineries, and rejecting the oil bosses who have waged class war against ordinary people, dispossessing Indigenous peoples, and spreading the specter of cancer throughout the world.

Can refineries not be re-purposed? Can the fossil fuel system, so important to waging aggressive, pointless international war throughout the world and at home, not be overcome?

Unless we can confront the vast edifice of militarized ‘national interest’ presented by industry-led public relations, we will be totally incapable of asking these questions, let alone stopping the insane expansion of fossil fuels infrastructure, or supporting the advanced class struggle that the regime of extractivism known as the Global Land Grab has brought against itself in North America.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013).

 

 




389765

Fighting the ‘Big Club’: blockades, strikes, and the fossil fuel blowback Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




It was said of Rockefeller as he built his prolific infrastructure empire of trains, pipelines, and refineries, that he would enter a community first with a promises of money, and if his kindness was refused, he would resort to other means.

His oft-cited quotation speaks for itself, “the way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.”

Update this position to today, and you have the model for contemporary counterinsurgency (COIN) that plunges a growing pipeline and oil train network through dissenting communities.

As Warren Buffet, owner of Burlington Santa Fe Railroad, once stated, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

But with militant labor strikes shocking the oil industry and blockades halting oil trains throughout the Pacific Northwest and Canada, it would appear that the class war is finally starting to even out.

We cannot tolerate these attacks on our communities!

Burlington Santa Fe Railroad is the largest oil train business in the US, an infrastructural necessity sparked by the fracking boom in the Bakken Shale of North Dakota, and the popular uprising against the network of pipelines projected out of the Alberta tar sands.

After an oil train explosion vaporized nearly half of the downtown area of a Canadian town, Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 people, an outcry against oil trains arose throughout the country.

Ensuing derailments of coal and oil trains, along with explosions propelling fireballs fifty feet into the air, highlighted the increasing urgency of direct action to halt the exploding ‘bomb trains’ as well as other fossil fuel infrastructure

From June to November 2014, around a dozen coal and oil train blockades emerged throughout the Pacific Northwest. From Seattle, where 300 people blocked an oil train after the Peoples Climate March, to Portland, where 100 protestors blocked a train in November, urban populations have increasingly mobilized to join rural dissent against fossil fuel infrastructure in numerous places around a Cascadian bioregion that stretches from Northern California to Idaho to British Columbia.

Many of these demonstrations are organized by a network called Rising Tide North America, which formed in 2005 out of the Earth First! Climate Caucus to combat “the root causes of climate change”.

With its connections to Earth First!, a grassroots environmental group that has drawn the ire of the FBI and DHS on numerous occasions, Rising Tide has faced more than its share of interference from local law enforcement, federal policing agencies, and, curiously, even private contractors.

The same methods of repression have been used against the labor movement, as the longshoremen who have fought against the Port of Longview can testify, but together in solidarity, Rising Tide and the ILWU have fought a common enemy with port shutdowns and blockades.

The ‘Big Club’

Among the most important fossil fuel infrastructure under construction today is an expansive natural gas pipeline network. The gas from wells in Idaho is set to pump through the ‘Pacific Connector’ pipeline through Southern Oregon and across the Pacific, via a terminal in Coos Bay.

The 234-mile pipeline would take land from some 300 private property-owners along the way while passing through pristine riparian areas and National Forest ecosystems.

Thirty-five percent of the landowners have taken deals, but 15 percent have said ‘no’. If they refuse to sign a deal, the Canadian corporation, Veresen, has threatened to work with local officials to use eminent domain to seize their property at a lower value.

Former TransCanada employee David Dodson calls the usage of eminent domain to seize private property a part of the “big club”. “Eminent domain laws were designed to get things built”, Dodson told The Oregonian in August. “It’s a very one-sided process, and it’s not in landowners’ favor.”

The Pacific Connector pipeline would end at the Jordon Cove LNG terminal, which has been praised by the Obama Administration. According to a White House statement issued in March, prior to the conclusion of the environmental approval process for the Pacific Connector pipeline,

“We welcome the prospect of U.S. LNG exports in the future since additional global supplies will benefit Europe and other strategic partners.”

These partners include allies against Chinese hegemony in the South China Sea. The same statement continues:

“We agree on the importance of redoubling transatlantic efforts to support European energy security to further diversify energy sources and suppliers and to allow for reverse natural gas flows to Ukraine from its EU neighbors.”

Fossil fuels and ‘national security’

The reference to Ukraine is crucial, because it suggests underlying reasons for the EU’s militaristic interest in Ukraine (gas pipelines). According to the American Petroleum Institute, which is deeply involved in the utilization of counterinsurgency strategy in the US, the Ukraine crisis is jeopardizing the future of natural gas in Europe, making the US all the more important of a producer.

In would appear from these statements that the White House views the LNG terminals in the Eastern Seaboard and the Pacific Northwest as a national security imperative on a global scale. At the same time, it is questionable as to whether or not profit even matters.

As James C Scott notes with regard to the production of palm oil plantations in Indonesia, the construction of industrial infrastructure stands not so much to rake in profits for the nation, but to make its land and people “legible” to the maps and observers of the state.

In keeping with this connection between the national interests of the counterinsurgency campaign in Ukraine, geopolitical maneuvers in the South China Sea, and industrial interests in the Northwest, the ‘Big Club’ deploys similar public relations networks set up by business and political elites to further the agenda of the gas industry.

They are producing a narrative and a reality of legible, productive force at the same time, and it has already created a situation of war throughout the world. However, the ability of environmental groups to work with people who resist the land grab makes victory a real possibility.

Astroturf, psy-ops and the Democratic Party

To advance the ‘interests of national security’ the Democratic Party developed an intricate PR system, which helps to disguise the iron fist of enforcement of political and economic interest in the velvet glove of social benefits and community participation.

According to executives in the energy industry, networks of private security and intelligence corporations are contracted by the energy industry and law enforcement agencies (from local to federal) to gather information on populations in keeping with COIN doctrine.

These networks consist of Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans and psy-ops specialists, and generally hinge on the idea of monitoring populations in order to find out how to ‘win hearts and minds’.

Such militarized corporate PR tactics are often carried out in tandem with political elites, such as ‘Our Energy Moment‘ (OEM), an insta-PR campaign launched in February with the intention of promoting the Jordon Cove terminal, as well as other terminals around the US.

Spearheaded by Blue Engine Media and Liberty Concepts, two PR groups that act as containers for key initiatives of the Democratic Party and the energy industry, OEM announces itself as a “growing coalition“ including private security corporations, political organizations, and energy companies.

The founder of Blue Engine Media describes himself as a “recovering political hack and aspiring corporate hack” on his Twitter profile, having founded the quasi-NGO, Common Purpose, which helps the Democratic Party apparatchiks dictate media positions to third party groups like MoveOn.org and Change to Win.

In every way, the LNG infrastructure of the Pacific Northwest is set up as a darling of the Democratic Party, and groups like Rising Tide that refuse to toe the PR line of the White House are repaid for exposing the uncomfortable conflicts of interest within such discreet public and private partnerships.

Upset the ‘Big Club’, face the consequences

While OEM is relatively new, their projection of an image that unites political, corporate, and private security together in one coalition is troubling for many anti-LNG activists given the recent history of harassment and politically-motivated witch hunts.

In 2010, a Department of Justice employee and opponent of LNG infrastructure in Oregon named Brent Foster was hounded into resignation through industry tactics.

After being hauled before a grand jury for allegedly telling misinformation to his employer and giving improper LNG advice, a video surfaced on YouTube showing Foster allegedly smoking a joint with another LNG opponent in private.

Though he was cleared of all charges by the grand jury, and the video was largely seen as a joke, Foster was forced to resign from his important position. The proposed Palomar LNG pipeline crossing through Mt. Hood that he had opposed, however, was cancelled.

Aside from being an obvious smear tactic designed to influence the public and a grand jury, the YouTube video came from a ghost account with no other videos. The evidence suggests that, barring a strange coincidence of factors, the two LNG opponents were being followed and monitored by private intelligence corporations working with a public relations group in the pocket of the gas industry.

The harassment and even criminalization of activists has not stopped at LNG and other fossil fuel infrastructure. In April of last year, the Oregon House of Representatives passed two laws declaring all interference with state forest management illegal, while enabling the DA to “charge these terrorists with a crime and make them accountable”, according to Rep. Wayne Krieger.

This as the Pacific Connector is slated to cross through 234 miles of forest and riparian ecosystems. On top of the Pacific Connector, a new propane terminal is slated to be built in Portland, Oregon, and has faced strong opposition.

The political drive to produce fossil fuel infrastructure is such that the Governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, fired the chairwoman of the Oregon Transportation Commission, Catherine Mater, for casting the tie-breaking vote against subsidies to upgrade the Port of St. Helens and enable coal exports by Ambre Energy.

Whether the oil strike will extend to foster a world-historic event is an open question, but those responsible for coal and gas infrastructure will likely not be discouraged from their mission of ‘national security’ absent the overthrow of current, militarized industrial capitalism. Who would lose out from this situation? Certainly not the workers.

Infrastructure, counterinsurgency and the PR industry

Aside from the class war, according to executives with energy companies, there is already a counterinsurgency war being waged against protestors and civil dissent. This war includes the ‘hearts and minds’ strategy, which extends conciliatory olive branches to populations, even as it launches into massive surveillance strategies of all those involved.

A recently leaked strategy document forged in the collaboration between Edelman Public Relations and TransCanada regarding attempts to build the Energy East pipeline out of the Alberta tar sands boasts a “strong heritage in the more aggressive politics and policy fights in the US.”

Their “tactical elements” include “public relations, digital/social [media], grassroots advocacy communication, paid media.” Their “perpetual campaign” involves working with third parties to “pressure Energy East opponents” and “build an echo chamber of aligned voices.”

According to the Edelman / TransCanada document, industry professionals are to work with proxy groups to attack environmentalists in the name of “national security”.

Through “detailed background research on key opposition groups” the energy industry seeks “an assessment of strengths and weaknesses” by “knowledge-sharing” with third parties regarding the financial structure, organizational affiliations, leadership, and political engagement.

As for their media strategy, they claim they prioritize “local > regional > national” in order to proactively reach out to smaller communities and separate the more-emotional opposition from a jobs-based position, while also meeting with the presidents of major newspapers in order to forge collaborative relationships.

Perhaps most ironic is their ideation of the “social media ecosystem”, which fits in line with what is called the “insurgent ecosystem” by counterinsurgency chief theorist David Kilcullen.

Social media becomes the site of insurgency, where environmental NGOs, whether international or locally-based, must be monitored, mimicked, anticipated, and responded to in a shadow game of proxy third-parties.

But what do these third parties look like? In 2011, the ostensibly-grass roots organization Energy In Depth (EID) was outed for being financially backed by the American Petroleum Institute, which worked with Edelman PR to form another astroturfed quasi-NGO called Energy Citizens in 2009.

So deeply ensconced in the counterinsurgency complex is Edelman that they were shortlisted by the Iraqi government in their search for a public relations team in 2013.

Quasi-nonprofits like EID, hoisted into the spotlight through industry funding, disseminate news articles, host community partnership meetings, and generally play a social media turf war with activists attempting to influence things like zoning ordinances to strengthen or maintain environmental regulations.

In fact, it is precisely because the energy industry has extracted its prize at the expense of democracy by means of war that the glut of supply and drop in demand plunged commodity prices into collapse.

Had industry accepted accountability to citizens, its “middle and lower-level producers” may never have faced the shocks they are subjected to today. Under these ongoing conditions of counterinsurgency, an oil workers strike adds a level of agitation to the already-militant environmental movement; a sense that the pendulum is swinging back.

Burnaby Mountain – Edelman plan in action

Although TransCanada has dumped Edelman since being exposed, claiming that they had not begun to implement the practices outlined in the strategic document, it was noted that Edelman had already been conducting meetings with the heads of the Energy East Pipeline.

TransCanada insisted that Edelman’s approach was a particular to the US, and had no place among the Canadian people. Returning to Cascadian resistance against fossil fuels.

However the work of the Texas-based energy infrastructure giant Kinder Morgan (KM) attempting to push the TransMountain Pipeline through Burnaby Mountain suggests that the strategy outlined and proposed by Edelman is, in fact, being deployed.

Facing a community of environmentalists, social justice activists, First Nations, and locals (more than 70% of whom opposed the pipeline), Kinder Morgan attempted to use the velvet glove on the iron fist approach.

Headquartered in Houston, KM emerged in Cascadia only after a stint in the Marcellus Shale, where its operations were embedded in the same system that produced Energy In Depth. In fact, EID features on the KM website as one of just seven linked groups that includes both astroturfed and openly-corporate groups like Laborers’ International Union of North America, The Coalition to Lower Energy Costs, and the American Gas Association.

The TransMountain pipeline webpage also links to a vigilant Twitter presence that retweets promotional materials and attack opponents often using the snarky tone that they think is popular over social media.

At the same time as their public relations screen reached full spectrum, Kinder Morgan contractors turned more aggressive on the ground. Numerous activists reported seeing contractors monitoring, following, and filming them.

At one point, an activist approached a KM vehicle to capture footage of the contractor in the act of filming him, the contractor accelerated his truck into the protestor, bumping him once as a warning, and then accelerating into him. According to the protestor, the driver was going to run him over had he not quickly moved out of the way.

Corporations gain ‘quasi-judicial’ powers

The private-public collusion is also similar. The energy and natural resources industries overlap in a great many ways. Employees cross over, directors often sit on several boards of foundations and institutes fed by the same industries they work for, and go on to work within politics.

In one example, JM Huber’s VP of Environment, Health, Safety, and Sustainability, Don Young, boasts in his LinkedIn profile of “working on quasi-judicial panels including for the TransMountain pipeline expansion project.”

This quasi-judicial panel is also known as the National Energy Board, which is set to rule on the legality of the pipeline expansion program soon. The NRC as a “quasi-judicial” group is set up to represent corporate interests.

Despite corporate pretensions to modern social network monitoring and media involvement, KM’s behavior and the Canadian government’s judicial and quasi-judicial involvement has presented the same old corruption.

JM Huber, which employs Don Young, is a multinational corporation, and its Board of Directors is stacked with industry leaders like Gideo Argov, a director at a large private equity firm, and W Lee Nutter, the former CEO, Chairman, and President of Rayonier, one of the biggest timberlands holders in the US.

Huber and KM share a place in the energy / natural resources sector, and have employees like Liz Simonton, commercial manager at KM in Colorado Springs, who have experience working with both corporations.

The buddy-buddy relationship between industry and the “quasi-judicial panel” set to decide the fate of the pipeline seemed somewhat disrupted in April, when Young, ironically the only member of the three-person panel with any kind of environmental record, left the panel for “personal reasons”.

Young was replaced by Philip Davies, a veteran of EnCana, which just pledged its support for KM’s $3 billion Rockies Express natural gas project. Another panelist, Lyn Mercier, comes to the National Energy Board from Gaz Metro, which is trying to force its own landgrabbing pipeline by claiming eminent domain over resistant farmers.

The clear corruption that permeates the ‘quasi-judicial’ process is familiar to peoples’ movements around the world, as political and economic elites collude to force the productivity of industry through communities and critical habitat.

If those who want to transform the current paradigm work to dismantle the propaganda of the state’s war against the people, rather than the integrity of labor agitation, solidarity could lead to radical potentials. What about a general strike?

Success against the militarized PR machine

As First Nations continued to maintain the sacred fire of the encampment, insisting that their sacred lands remained unceded to the Canadian government, the legal team for the Burnaby Mountain land defenders found out that the injunction granted to KM was illegal from the start.

After Kinder Morgan had received the illegal injunction against the TransMountain protestors Last November, the RCMP immediately began arresting as many protestors as crossed the ‘injunction line’ while KM surveyors performed their tasks.

The RCMP performed their duties brutally, wielding less-than-lethal shotguns at a treesitter, and captured on film throwing an elder woman to the ground. It was not until more than 60 arrests occurred on the mountain and Burnaby Mountain Caretakers locked down to the Supreme Court building in Vancouver that the Supreme Court recognized the illegality of the injunction.

Until the point of mass public participation in civil disobedience, the judicial proceedings manifested the usual process of corporate takeover of Indigenous lands and subversion of activist movements through RCMP brutality. KM attempted to get an injunction extension and failed.

To restate: as KM’s public relations attempted to present the image of a benevolent financial backer of the community, they offered to pay the RCMP directly for enforcing an illegal injunction while their contractors monitored activists movements, threatened, and even assaulted them.

Since the RCMP has already averred that counterinsurgency strategy is necessary for the containment of a First Nations uprising, the fact that Indigenous peoples took the lead in the Burnaby Mountain encampment already foreshadowed that COIN would be at play.

The extent of the resistance, the number of people arrested, including public personalities like David Suzuki, attested to the ultimate failure of COIN in the face of public scrutiny and nonviolent civil disobedience.

Hitting the ‘Big Club’ at its weakest points

While counterinsurgency policing includes the militarization of police forces and the papering over of private-public collusion through quasi-NGOs and quasi-judicial strategies, the ability of activists working with social media, legal paperwrenching tools, and grassroots, nonviolent civil disobedience to halt massive industrial megaprojects throughout Cascadia is a testament to the will and the spirit of popular involvement in the socio-political processes of horizontal networking and direct action.

However, the US and Canada are digging in against social change, with Stephen Harper supporting new legislation in the Canadian government to increase funding to spy agencies and propagandists. Even with the decline of oil prices, it does not appear as though the priority on fossil fuels exports will abate any time soon.

The current oil strike in the midst of mass layoffs from unconventional extraction methods like the tar sands will likely produce greater divisions between the industry and its workers, while at the same time increasing the importance of natural gas.

The fact of the most patriarchal circumstances of oil workers’ ‘man camps’ in North Dakota is linked also to the racist, sexist environment maintained by supervisors in refineries like Shell’s in Martinez, California. Without a system change from fossil fuel economies, these tendencies will persevere unchecked.

It is tremendous that the steelworkers are striking, and the oil industry appears weaker than it has in years. Alternatives exist, and are becoming more important by the day. Labor could join the struggle against fossil fuels by collectivizing in the refineries, and rejecting the oil bosses who have waged class war against ordinary people, dispossessing Indigenous peoples, and spreading the specter of cancer throughout the world.

Can refineries not be re-purposed? Can the fossil fuel system, so important to waging aggressive, pointless international war throughout the world and at home, not be overcome?

Unless we can confront the vast edifice of militarized ‘national interest’ presented by industry-led public relations, we will be totally incapable of asking these questions, let alone stopping the insane expansion of fossil fuels infrastructure, or supporting the advanced class struggle that the regime of extractivism known as the Global Land Grab has brought against itself in North America.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013).

 

 




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Fighting the ‘Big Club’: blockades, strikes, and the fossil fuel blowback Updated for 2026

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It was said of Rockefeller as he built his prolific infrastructure empire of trains, pipelines, and refineries, that he would enter a community first with a promises of money, and if his kindness was refused, he would resort to other means.

His oft-cited quotation speaks for itself, “the way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.”

Update this position to today, and you have the model for contemporary counterinsurgency (COIN) that plunges a growing pipeline and oil train network through dissenting communities.

As Warren Buffet, owner of Burlington Santa Fe Railroad, once stated, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

But with militant labor strikes shocking the oil industry and blockades halting oil trains throughout the Pacific Northwest and Canada, it would appear that the class war is finally starting to even out.

We cannot tolerate these attacks on our communities!

Burlington Santa Fe Railroad is the largest oil train business in the US, an infrastructural necessity sparked by the fracking boom in the Bakken Shale of North Dakota, and the popular uprising against the network of pipelines projected out of the Alberta tar sands.

After an oil train explosion vaporized nearly half of the downtown area of a Canadian town, Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 people, an outcry against oil trains arose throughout the country.

Ensuing derailments of coal and oil trains, along with explosions propelling fireballs fifty feet into the air, highlighted the increasing urgency of direct action to halt the exploding ‘bomb trains’ as well as other fossil fuel infrastructure

From June to November 2014, around a dozen coal and oil train blockades emerged throughout the Pacific Northwest. From Seattle, where 300 people blocked an oil train after the Peoples Climate March, to Portland, where 100 protestors blocked a train in November, urban populations have increasingly mobilized to join rural dissent against fossil fuel infrastructure in numerous places around a Cascadian bioregion that stretches from Northern California to Idaho to British Columbia.

Many of these demonstrations are organized by a network called Rising Tide North America, which formed in 2005 out of the Earth First! Climate Caucus to combat “the root causes of climate change”.

With its connections to Earth First!, a grassroots environmental group that has drawn the ire of the FBI and DHS on numerous occasions, Rising Tide has faced more than its share of interference from local law enforcement, federal policing agencies, and, curiously, even private contractors.

The same methods of repression have been used against the labor movement, as the longshoremen who have fought against the Port of Longview can testify, but together in solidarity, Rising Tide and the ILWU have fought a common enemy with port shutdowns and blockades.

The ‘Big Club’

Among the most important fossil fuel infrastructure under construction today is an expansive natural gas pipeline network. The gas from wells in Idaho is set to pump through the ‘Pacific Connector’ pipeline through Southern Oregon and across the Pacific, via a terminal in Coos Bay.

The 234-mile pipeline would take land from some 300 private property-owners along the way while passing through pristine riparian areas and National Forest ecosystems.

Thirty-five percent of the landowners have taken deals, but 15 percent have said ‘no’. If they refuse to sign a deal, the Canadian corporation, Veresen, has threatened to work with local officials to use eminent domain to seize their property at a lower value.

Former TransCanada employee David Dodson calls the usage of eminent domain to seize private property a part of the “big club”. “Eminent domain laws were designed to get things built”, Dodson told The Oregonian in August. “It’s a very one-sided process, and it’s not in landowners’ favor.”

The Pacific Connector pipeline would end at the Jordon Cove LNG terminal, which has been praised by the Obama Administration. According to a White House statement issued in March, prior to the conclusion of the environmental approval process for the Pacific Connector pipeline,

“We welcome the prospect of U.S. LNG exports in the future since additional global supplies will benefit Europe and other strategic partners.”

These partners include allies against Chinese hegemony in the South China Sea. The same statement continues:

“We agree on the importance of redoubling transatlantic efforts to support European energy security to further diversify energy sources and suppliers and to allow for reverse natural gas flows to Ukraine from its EU neighbors.”

Fossil fuels and ‘national security’

The reference to Ukraine is crucial, because it suggests underlying reasons for the EU’s militaristic interest in Ukraine (gas pipelines). According to the American Petroleum Institute, which is deeply involved in the utilization of counterinsurgency strategy in the US, the Ukraine crisis is jeopardizing the future of natural gas in Europe, making the US all the more important of a producer.

In would appear from these statements that the White House views the LNG terminals in the Eastern Seaboard and the Pacific Northwest as a national security imperative on a global scale. At the same time, it is questionable as to whether or not profit even matters.

As James C Scott notes with regard to the production of palm oil plantations in Indonesia, the construction of industrial infrastructure stands not so much to rake in profits for the nation, but to make its land and people “legible” to the maps and observers of the state.

In keeping with this connection between the national interests of the counterinsurgency campaign in Ukraine, geopolitical maneuvers in the South China Sea, and industrial interests in the Northwest, the ‘Big Club’ deploys similar public relations networks set up by business and political elites to further the agenda of the gas industry.

They are producing a narrative and a reality of legible, productive force at the same time, and it has already created a situation of war throughout the world. However, the ability of environmental groups to work with people who resist the land grab makes victory a real possibility.

Astroturf, psy-ops and the Democratic Party

To advance the ‘interests of national security’ the Democratic Party developed an intricate PR system, which helps to disguise the iron fist of enforcement of political and economic interest in the velvet glove of social benefits and community participation.

According to executives in the energy industry, networks of private security and intelligence corporations are contracted by the energy industry and law enforcement agencies (from local to federal) to gather information on populations in keeping with COIN doctrine.

These networks consist of Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans and psy-ops specialists, and generally hinge on the idea of monitoring populations in order to find out how to ‘win hearts and minds’.

Such militarized corporate PR tactics are often carried out in tandem with political elites, such as ‘Our Energy Moment‘ (OEM), an insta-PR campaign launched in February with the intention of promoting the Jordon Cove terminal, as well as other terminals around the US.

Spearheaded by Blue Engine Media and Liberty Concepts, two PR groups that act as containers for key initiatives of the Democratic Party and the energy industry, OEM announces itself as a “growing coalition“ including private security corporations, political organizations, and energy companies.

The founder of Blue Engine Media describes himself as a “recovering political hack and aspiring corporate hack” on his Twitter profile, having founded the quasi-NGO, Common Purpose, which helps the Democratic Party apparatchiks dictate media positions to third party groups like MoveOn.org and Change to Win.

In every way, the LNG infrastructure of the Pacific Northwest is set up as a darling of the Democratic Party, and groups like Rising Tide that refuse to toe the PR line of the White House are repaid for exposing the uncomfortable conflicts of interest within such discreet public and private partnerships.

Upset the ‘Big Club’, face the consequences

While OEM is relatively new, their projection of an image that unites political, corporate, and private security together in one coalition is troubling for many anti-LNG activists given the recent history of harassment and politically-motivated witch hunts.

In 2010, a Department of Justice employee and opponent of LNG infrastructure in Oregon named Brent Foster was hounded into resignation through industry tactics.

After being hauled before a grand jury for allegedly telling misinformation to his employer and giving improper LNG advice, a video surfaced on YouTube showing Foster allegedly smoking a joint with another LNG opponent in private.

Though he was cleared of all charges by the grand jury, and the video was largely seen as a joke, Foster was forced to resign from his important position. The proposed Palomar LNG pipeline crossing through Mt. Hood that he had opposed, however, was cancelled.

Aside from being an obvious smear tactic designed to influence the public and a grand jury, the YouTube video came from a ghost account with no other videos. The evidence suggests that, barring a strange coincidence of factors, the two LNG opponents were being followed and monitored by private intelligence corporations working with a public relations group in the pocket of the gas industry.

The harassment and even criminalization of activists has not stopped at LNG and other fossil fuel infrastructure. In April of last year, the Oregon House of Representatives passed two laws declaring all interference with state forest management illegal, while enabling the DA to “charge these terrorists with a crime and make them accountable”, according to Rep. Wayne Krieger.

This as the Pacific Connector is slated to cross through 234 miles of forest and riparian ecosystems. On top of the Pacific Connector, a new propane terminal is slated to be built in Portland, Oregon, and has faced strong opposition.

The political drive to produce fossil fuel infrastructure is such that the Governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, fired the chairwoman of the Oregon Transportation Commission, Catherine Mater, for casting the tie-breaking vote against subsidies to upgrade the Port of St. Helens and enable coal exports by Ambre Energy.

Whether the oil strike will extend to foster a world-historic event is an open question, but those responsible for coal and gas infrastructure will likely not be discouraged from their mission of ‘national security’ absent the overthrow of current, militarized industrial capitalism. Who would lose out from this situation? Certainly not the workers.

Infrastructure, counterinsurgency and the PR industry

Aside from the class war, according to executives with energy companies, there is already a counterinsurgency war being waged against protestors and civil dissent. This war includes the ‘hearts and minds’ strategy, which extends conciliatory olive branches to populations, even as it launches into massive surveillance strategies of all those involved.

A recently leaked strategy document forged in the collaboration between Edelman Public Relations and TransCanada regarding attempts to build the Energy East pipeline out of the Alberta tar sands boasts a “strong heritage in the more aggressive politics and policy fights in the US.”

Their “tactical elements” include “public relations, digital/social [media], grassroots advocacy communication, paid media.” Their “perpetual campaign” involves working with third parties to “pressure Energy East opponents” and “build an echo chamber of aligned voices.”

According to the Edelman / TransCanada document, industry professionals are to work with proxy groups to attack environmentalists in the name of “national security”.

Through “detailed background research on key opposition groups” the energy industry seeks “an assessment of strengths and weaknesses” by “knowledge-sharing” with third parties regarding the financial structure, organizational affiliations, leadership, and political engagement.

As for their media strategy, they claim they prioritize “local > regional > national” in order to proactively reach out to smaller communities and separate the more-emotional opposition from a jobs-based position, while also meeting with the presidents of major newspapers in order to forge collaborative relationships.

Perhaps most ironic is their ideation of the “social media ecosystem”, which fits in line with what is called the “insurgent ecosystem” by counterinsurgency chief theorist David Kilcullen.

Social media becomes the site of insurgency, where environmental NGOs, whether international or locally-based, must be monitored, mimicked, anticipated, and responded to in a shadow game of proxy third-parties.

But what do these third parties look like? In 2011, the ostensibly-grass roots organization Energy In Depth (EID) was outed for being financially backed by the American Petroleum Institute, which worked with Edelman PR to form another astroturfed quasi-NGO called Energy Citizens in 2009.

So deeply ensconced in the counterinsurgency complex is Edelman that they were shortlisted by the Iraqi government in their search for a public relations team in 2013.

Quasi-nonprofits like EID, hoisted into the spotlight through industry funding, disseminate news articles, host community partnership meetings, and generally play a social media turf war with activists attempting to influence things like zoning ordinances to strengthen or maintain environmental regulations.

In fact, it is precisely because the energy industry has extracted its prize at the expense of democracy by means of war that the glut of supply and drop in demand plunged commodity prices into collapse.

Had industry accepted accountability to citizens, its “middle and lower-level producers” may never have faced the shocks they are subjected to today. Under these ongoing conditions of counterinsurgency, an oil workers strike adds a level of agitation to the already-militant environmental movement; a sense that the pendulum is swinging back.

Burnaby Mountain – Edelman plan in action

Although TransCanada has dumped Edelman since being exposed, claiming that they had not begun to implement the practices outlined in the strategic document, it was noted that Edelman had already been conducting meetings with the heads of the Energy East Pipeline.

TransCanada insisted that Edelman’s approach was a particular to the US, and had no place among the Canadian people. Returning to Cascadian resistance against fossil fuels.

However the work of the Texas-based energy infrastructure giant Kinder Morgan (KM) attempting to push the TransMountain Pipeline through Burnaby Mountain suggests that the strategy outlined and proposed by Edelman is, in fact, being deployed.

Facing a community of environmentalists, social justice activists, First Nations, and locals (more than 70% of whom opposed the pipeline), Kinder Morgan attempted to use the velvet glove on the iron fist approach.

Headquartered in Houston, KM emerged in Cascadia only after a stint in the Marcellus Shale, where its operations were embedded in the same system that produced Energy In Depth. In fact, EID features on the KM website as one of just seven linked groups that includes both astroturfed and openly-corporate groups like Laborers’ International Union of North America, The Coalition to Lower Energy Costs, and the American Gas Association.

The TransMountain pipeline webpage also links to a vigilant Twitter presence that retweets promotional materials and attack opponents often using the snarky tone that they think is popular over social media.

At the same time as their public relations screen reached full spectrum, Kinder Morgan contractors turned more aggressive on the ground. Numerous activists reported seeing contractors monitoring, following, and filming them.

At one point, an activist approached a KM vehicle to capture footage of the contractor in the act of filming him, the contractor accelerated his truck into the protestor, bumping him once as a warning, and then accelerating into him. According to the protestor, the driver was going to run him over had he not quickly moved out of the way.

Corporations gain ‘quasi-judicial’ powers

The private-public collusion is also similar. The energy and natural resources industries overlap in a great many ways. Employees cross over, directors often sit on several boards of foundations and institutes fed by the same industries they work for, and go on to work within politics.

In one example, JM Huber’s VP of Environment, Health, Safety, and Sustainability, Don Young, boasts in his LinkedIn profile of “working on quasi-judicial panels including for the TransMountain pipeline expansion project.”

This quasi-judicial panel is also known as the National Energy Board, which is set to rule on the legality of the pipeline expansion program soon. The NRC as a “quasi-judicial” group is set up to represent corporate interests.

Despite corporate pretensions to modern social network monitoring and media involvement, KM’s behavior and the Canadian government’s judicial and quasi-judicial involvement has presented the same old corruption.

JM Huber, which employs Don Young, is a multinational corporation, and its Board of Directors is stacked with industry leaders like Gideo Argov, a director at a large private equity firm, and W Lee Nutter, the former CEO, Chairman, and President of Rayonier, one of the biggest timberlands holders in the US.

Huber and KM share a place in the energy / natural resources sector, and have employees like Liz Simonton, commercial manager at KM in Colorado Springs, who have experience working with both corporations.

The buddy-buddy relationship between industry and the “quasi-judicial panel” set to decide the fate of the pipeline seemed somewhat disrupted in April, when Young, ironically the only member of the three-person panel with any kind of environmental record, left the panel for “personal reasons”.

Young was replaced by Philip Davies, a veteran of EnCana, which just pledged its support for KM’s $3 billion Rockies Express natural gas project. Another panelist, Lyn Mercier, comes to the National Energy Board from Gaz Metro, which is trying to force its own landgrabbing pipeline by claiming eminent domain over resistant farmers.

The clear corruption that permeates the ‘quasi-judicial’ process is familiar to peoples’ movements around the world, as political and economic elites collude to force the productivity of industry through communities and critical habitat.

If those who want to transform the current paradigm work to dismantle the propaganda of the state’s war against the people, rather than the integrity of labor agitation, solidarity could lead to radical potentials. What about a general strike?

Success against the militarized PR machine

As First Nations continued to maintain the sacred fire of the encampment, insisting that their sacred lands remained unceded to the Canadian government, the legal team for the Burnaby Mountain land defenders found out that the injunction granted to KM was illegal from the start.

After Kinder Morgan had received the illegal injunction against the TransMountain protestors Last November, the RCMP immediately began arresting as many protestors as crossed the ‘injunction line’ while KM surveyors performed their tasks.

The RCMP performed their duties brutally, wielding less-than-lethal shotguns at a treesitter, and captured on film throwing an elder woman to the ground. It was not until more than 60 arrests occurred on the mountain and Burnaby Mountain Caretakers locked down to the Supreme Court building in Vancouver that the Supreme Court recognized the illegality of the injunction.

Until the point of mass public participation in civil disobedience, the judicial proceedings manifested the usual process of corporate takeover of Indigenous lands and subversion of activist movements through RCMP brutality. KM attempted to get an injunction extension and failed.

To restate: as KM’s public relations attempted to present the image of a benevolent financial backer of the community, they offered to pay the RCMP directly for enforcing an illegal injunction while their contractors monitored activists movements, threatened, and even assaulted them.

Since the RCMP has already averred that counterinsurgency strategy is necessary for the containment of a First Nations uprising, the fact that Indigenous peoples took the lead in the Burnaby Mountain encampment already foreshadowed that COIN would be at play.

The extent of the resistance, the number of people arrested, including public personalities like David Suzuki, attested to the ultimate failure of COIN in the face of public scrutiny and nonviolent civil disobedience.

Hitting the ‘Big Club’ at its weakest points

While counterinsurgency policing includes the militarization of police forces and the papering over of private-public collusion through quasi-NGOs and quasi-judicial strategies, the ability of activists working with social media, legal paperwrenching tools, and grassroots, nonviolent civil disobedience to halt massive industrial megaprojects throughout Cascadia is a testament to the will and the spirit of popular involvement in the socio-political processes of horizontal networking and direct action.

However, the US and Canada are digging in against social change, with Stephen Harper supporting new legislation in the Canadian government to increase funding to spy agencies and propagandists. Even with the decline of oil prices, it does not appear as though the priority on fossil fuels exports will abate any time soon.

The current oil strike in the midst of mass layoffs from unconventional extraction methods like the tar sands will likely produce greater divisions between the industry and its workers, while at the same time increasing the importance of natural gas.

The fact of the most patriarchal circumstances of oil workers’ ‘man camps’ in North Dakota is linked also to the racist, sexist environment maintained by supervisors in refineries like Shell’s in Martinez, California. Without a system change from fossil fuel economies, these tendencies will persevere unchecked.

It is tremendous that the steelworkers are striking, and the oil industry appears weaker than it has in years. Alternatives exist, and are becoming more important by the day. Labor could join the struggle against fossil fuels by collectivizing in the refineries, and rejecting the oil bosses who have waged class war against ordinary people, dispossessing Indigenous peoples, and spreading the specter of cancer throughout the world.

Can refineries not be re-purposed? Can the fossil fuel system, so important to waging aggressive, pointless international war throughout the world and at home, not be overcome?

Unless we can confront the vast edifice of militarized ‘national interest’ presented by industry-led public relations, we will be totally incapable of asking these questions, let alone stopping the insane expansion of fossil fuels infrastructure, or supporting the advanced class struggle that the regime of extractivism known as the Global Land Grab has brought against itself in North America.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013).

 

 




389765

Fighting the ‘Big Club’: blockades, strikes, and the fossil fuel blowback Updated for 2026

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It was said of Rockefeller as he built his prolific infrastructure empire of trains, pipelines, and refineries, that he would enter a community first with a promises of money, and if his kindness was refused, he would resort to other means.

His oft-cited quotation speaks for itself, “the way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.”

Update this position to today, and you have the model for contemporary counterinsurgency (COIN) that plunges a growing pipeline and oil train network through dissenting communities.

As Warren Buffet, owner of Burlington Santa Fe Railroad, once stated, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

But with militant labor strikes shocking the oil industry and blockades halting oil trains throughout the Pacific Northwest and Canada, it would appear that the class war is finally starting to even out.

We cannot tolerate these attacks on our communities!

Burlington Santa Fe Railroad is the largest oil train business in the US, an infrastructural necessity sparked by the fracking boom in the Bakken Shale of North Dakota, and the popular uprising against the network of pipelines projected out of the Alberta tar sands.

After an oil train explosion vaporized nearly half of the downtown area of a Canadian town, Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 people, an outcry against oil trains arose throughout the country.

Ensuing derailments of coal and oil trains, along with explosions propelling fireballs fifty feet into the air, highlighted the increasing urgency of direct action to halt the exploding ‘bomb trains’ as well as other fossil fuel infrastructure

From June to November 2014, around a dozen coal and oil train blockades emerged throughout the Pacific Northwest. From Seattle, where 300 people blocked an oil train after the Peoples Climate March, to Portland, where 100 protestors blocked a train in November, urban populations have increasingly mobilized to join rural dissent against fossil fuel infrastructure in numerous places around a Cascadian bioregion that stretches from Northern California to Idaho to British Columbia.

Many of these demonstrations are organized by a network called Rising Tide North America, which formed in 2005 out of the Earth First! Climate Caucus to combat “the root causes of climate change”.

With its connections to Earth First!, a grassroots environmental group that has drawn the ire of the FBI and DHS on numerous occasions, Rising Tide has faced more than its share of interference from local law enforcement, federal policing agencies, and, curiously, even private contractors.

The same methods of repression have been used against the labor movement, as the longshoremen who have fought against the Port of Longview can testify, but together in solidarity, Rising Tide and the ILWU have fought a common enemy with port shutdowns and blockades.

The ‘Big Club’

Among the most important fossil fuel infrastructure under construction today is an expansive natural gas pipeline network. The gas from wells in Idaho is set to pump through the ‘Pacific Connector’ pipeline through Southern Oregon and across the Pacific, via a terminal in Coos Bay.

The 234-mile pipeline would take land from some 300 private property-owners along the way while passing through pristine riparian areas and National Forest ecosystems.

Thirty-five percent of the landowners have taken deals, but 15 percent have said ‘no’. If they refuse to sign a deal, the Canadian corporation, Veresen, has threatened to work with local officials to use eminent domain to seize their property at a lower value.

Former TransCanada employee David Dodson calls the usage of eminent domain to seize private property a part of the “big club”. “Eminent domain laws were designed to get things built”, Dodson told The Oregonian in August. “It’s a very one-sided process, and it’s not in landowners’ favor.”

The Pacific Connector pipeline would end at the Jordon Cove LNG terminal, which has been praised by the Obama Administration. According to a White House statement issued in March, prior to the conclusion of the environmental approval process for the Pacific Connector pipeline,

“We welcome the prospect of U.S. LNG exports in the future since additional global supplies will benefit Europe and other strategic partners.”

These partners include allies against Chinese hegemony in the South China Sea. The same statement continues:

“We agree on the importance of redoubling transatlantic efforts to support European energy security to further diversify energy sources and suppliers and to allow for reverse natural gas flows to Ukraine from its EU neighbors.”

Fossil fuels and ‘national security’

The reference to Ukraine is crucial, because it suggests underlying reasons for the EU’s militaristic interest in Ukraine (gas pipelines). According to the American Petroleum Institute, which is deeply involved in the utilization of counterinsurgency strategy in the US, the Ukraine crisis is jeopardizing the future of natural gas in Europe, making the US all the more important of a producer.

In would appear from these statements that the White House views the LNG terminals in the Eastern Seaboard and the Pacific Northwest as a national security imperative on a global scale. At the same time, it is questionable as to whether or not profit even matters.

As James C Scott notes with regard to the production of palm oil plantations in Indonesia, the construction of industrial infrastructure stands not so much to rake in profits for the nation, but to make its land and people “legible” to the maps and observers of the state.

In keeping with this connection between the national interests of the counterinsurgency campaign in Ukraine, geopolitical maneuvers in the South China Sea, and industrial interests in the Northwest, the ‘Big Club’ deploys similar public relations networks set up by business and political elites to further the agenda of the gas industry.

They are producing a narrative and a reality of legible, productive force at the same time, and it has already created a situation of war throughout the world. However, the ability of environmental groups to work with people who resist the land grab makes victory a real possibility.

Astroturf, psy-ops and the Democratic Party

To advance the ‘interests of national security’ the Democratic Party developed an intricate PR system, which helps to disguise the iron fist of enforcement of political and economic interest in the velvet glove of social benefits and community participation.

According to executives in the energy industry, networks of private security and intelligence corporations are contracted by the energy industry and law enforcement agencies (from local to federal) to gather information on populations in keeping with COIN doctrine.

These networks consist of Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans and psy-ops specialists, and generally hinge on the idea of monitoring populations in order to find out how to ‘win hearts and minds’.

Such militarized corporate PR tactics are often carried out in tandem with political elites, such as ‘Our Energy Moment‘ (OEM), an insta-PR campaign launched in February with the intention of promoting the Jordon Cove terminal, as well as other terminals around the US.

Spearheaded by Blue Engine Media and Liberty Concepts, two PR groups that act as containers for key initiatives of the Democratic Party and the energy industry, OEM announces itself as a “growing coalition“ including private security corporations, political organizations, and energy companies.

The founder of Blue Engine Media describes himself as a “recovering political hack and aspiring corporate hack” on his Twitter profile, having founded the quasi-NGO, Common Purpose, which helps the Democratic Party apparatchiks dictate media positions to third party groups like MoveOn.org and Change to Win.

In every way, the LNG infrastructure of the Pacific Northwest is set up as a darling of the Democratic Party, and groups like Rising Tide that refuse to toe the PR line of the White House are repaid for exposing the uncomfortable conflicts of interest within such discreet public and private partnerships.

Upset the ‘Big Club’, face the consequences

While OEM is relatively new, their projection of an image that unites political, corporate, and private security together in one coalition is troubling for many anti-LNG activists given the recent history of harassment and politically-motivated witch hunts.

In 2010, a Department of Justice employee and opponent of LNG infrastructure in Oregon named Brent Foster was hounded into resignation through industry tactics.

After being hauled before a grand jury for allegedly telling misinformation to his employer and giving improper LNG advice, a video surfaced on YouTube showing Foster allegedly smoking a joint with another LNG opponent in private.

Though he was cleared of all charges by the grand jury, and the video was largely seen as a joke, Foster was forced to resign from his important position. The proposed Palomar LNG pipeline crossing through Mt. Hood that he had opposed, however, was cancelled.

Aside from being an obvious smear tactic designed to influence the public and a grand jury, the YouTube video came from a ghost account with no other videos. The evidence suggests that, barring a strange coincidence of factors, the two LNG opponents were being followed and monitored by private intelligence corporations working with a public relations group in the pocket of the gas industry.

The harassment and even criminalization of activists has not stopped at LNG and other fossil fuel infrastructure. In April of last year, the Oregon House of Representatives passed two laws declaring all interference with state forest management illegal, while enabling the DA to “charge these terrorists with a crime and make them accountable”, according to Rep. Wayne Krieger.

This as the Pacific Connector is slated to cross through 234 miles of forest and riparian ecosystems. On top of the Pacific Connector, a new propane terminal is slated to be built in Portland, Oregon, and has faced strong opposition.

The political drive to produce fossil fuel infrastructure is such that the Governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, fired the chairwoman of the Oregon Transportation Commission, Catherine Mater, for casting the tie-breaking vote against subsidies to upgrade the Port of St. Helens and enable coal exports by Ambre Energy.

Whether the oil strike will extend to foster a world-historic event is an open question, but those responsible for coal and gas infrastructure will likely not be discouraged from their mission of ‘national security’ absent the overthrow of current, militarized industrial capitalism. Who would lose out from this situation? Certainly not the workers.

Infrastructure, counterinsurgency and the PR industry

Aside from the class war, according to executives with energy companies, there is already a counterinsurgency war being waged against protestors and civil dissent. This war includes the ‘hearts and minds’ strategy, which extends conciliatory olive branches to populations, even as it launches into massive surveillance strategies of all those involved.

A recently leaked strategy document forged in the collaboration between Edelman Public Relations and TransCanada regarding attempts to build the Energy East pipeline out of the Alberta tar sands boasts a “strong heritage in the more aggressive politics and policy fights in the US.”

Their “tactical elements” include “public relations, digital/social [media], grassroots advocacy communication, paid media.” Their “perpetual campaign” involves working with third parties to “pressure Energy East opponents” and “build an echo chamber of aligned voices.”

According to the Edelman / TransCanada document, industry professionals are to work with proxy groups to attack environmentalists in the name of “national security”.

Through “detailed background research on key opposition groups” the energy industry seeks “an assessment of strengths and weaknesses” by “knowledge-sharing” with third parties regarding the financial structure, organizational affiliations, leadership, and political engagement.

As for their media strategy, they claim they prioritize “local > regional > national” in order to proactively reach out to smaller communities and separate the more-emotional opposition from a jobs-based position, while also meeting with the presidents of major newspapers in order to forge collaborative relationships.

Perhaps most ironic is their ideation of the “social media ecosystem”, which fits in line with what is called the “insurgent ecosystem” by counterinsurgency chief theorist David Kilcullen.

Social media becomes the site of insurgency, where environmental NGOs, whether international or locally-based, must be monitored, mimicked, anticipated, and responded to in a shadow game of proxy third-parties.

But what do these third parties look like? In 2011, the ostensibly-grass roots organization Energy In Depth (EID) was outed for being financially backed by the American Petroleum Institute, which worked with Edelman PR to form another astroturfed quasi-NGO called Energy Citizens in 2009.

So deeply ensconced in the counterinsurgency complex is Edelman that they were shortlisted by the Iraqi government in their search for a public relations team in 2013.

Quasi-nonprofits like EID, hoisted into the spotlight through industry funding, disseminate news articles, host community partnership meetings, and generally play a social media turf war with activists attempting to influence things like zoning ordinances to strengthen or maintain environmental regulations.

In fact, it is precisely because the energy industry has extracted its prize at the expense of democracy by means of war that the glut of supply and drop in demand plunged commodity prices into collapse.

Had industry accepted accountability to citizens, its “middle and lower-level producers” may never have faced the shocks they are subjected to today. Under these ongoing conditions of counterinsurgency, an oil workers strike adds a level of agitation to the already-militant environmental movement; a sense that the pendulum is swinging back.

Burnaby Mountain – Edelman plan in action

Although TransCanada has dumped Edelman since being exposed, claiming that they had not begun to implement the practices outlined in the strategic document, it was noted that Edelman had already been conducting meetings with the heads of the Energy East Pipeline.

TransCanada insisted that Edelman’s approach was a particular to the US, and had no place among the Canadian people. Returning to Cascadian resistance against fossil fuels.

However the work of the Texas-based energy infrastructure giant Kinder Morgan (KM) attempting to push the TransMountain Pipeline through Burnaby Mountain suggests that the strategy outlined and proposed by Edelman is, in fact, being deployed.

Facing a community of environmentalists, social justice activists, First Nations, and locals (more than 70% of whom opposed the pipeline), Kinder Morgan attempted to use the velvet glove on the iron fist approach.

Headquartered in Houston, KM emerged in Cascadia only after a stint in the Marcellus Shale, where its operations were embedded in the same system that produced Energy In Depth. In fact, EID features on the KM website as one of just seven linked groups that includes both astroturfed and openly-corporate groups like Laborers’ International Union of North America, The Coalition to Lower Energy Costs, and the American Gas Association.

The TransMountain pipeline webpage also links to a vigilant Twitter presence that retweets promotional materials and attack opponents often using the snarky tone that they think is popular over social media.

At the same time as their public relations screen reached full spectrum, Kinder Morgan contractors turned more aggressive on the ground. Numerous activists reported seeing contractors monitoring, following, and filming them.

At one point, an activist approached a KM vehicle to capture footage of the contractor in the act of filming him, the contractor accelerated his truck into the protestor, bumping him once as a warning, and then accelerating into him. According to the protestor, the driver was going to run him over had he not quickly moved out of the way.

Corporations gain ‘quasi-judicial’ powers

The private-public collusion is also similar. The energy and natural resources industries overlap in a great many ways. Employees cross over, directors often sit on several boards of foundations and institutes fed by the same industries they work for, and go on to work within politics.

In one example, JM Huber’s VP of Environment, Health, Safety, and Sustainability, Don Young, boasts in his LinkedIn profile of “working on quasi-judicial panels including for the TransMountain pipeline expansion project.”

This quasi-judicial panel is also known as the National Energy Board, which is set to rule on the legality of the pipeline expansion program soon. The NRC as a “quasi-judicial” group is set up to represent corporate interests.

Despite corporate pretensions to modern social network monitoring and media involvement, KM’s behavior and the Canadian government’s judicial and quasi-judicial involvement has presented the same old corruption.

JM Huber, which employs Don Young, is a multinational corporation, and its Board of Directors is stacked with industry leaders like Gideo Argov, a director at a large private equity firm, and W Lee Nutter, the former CEO, Chairman, and President of Rayonier, one of the biggest timberlands holders in the US.

Huber and KM share a place in the energy / natural resources sector, and have employees like Liz Simonton, commercial manager at KM in Colorado Springs, who have experience working with both corporations.

The buddy-buddy relationship between industry and the “quasi-judicial panel” set to decide the fate of the pipeline seemed somewhat disrupted in April, when Young, ironically the only member of the three-person panel with any kind of environmental record, left the panel for “personal reasons”.

Young was replaced by Philip Davies, a veteran of EnCana, which just pledged its support for KM’s $3 billion Rockies Express natural gas project. Another panelist, Lyn Mercier, comes to the National Energy Board from Gaz Metro, which is trying to force its own landgrabbing pipeline by claiming eminent domain over resistant farmers.

The clear corruption that permeates the ‘quasi-judicial’ process is familiar to peoples’ movements around the world, as political and economic elites collude to force the productivity of industry through communities and critical habitat.

If those who want to transform the current paradigm work to dismantle the propaganda of the state’s war against the people, rather than the integrity of labor agitation, solidarity could lead to radical potentials. What about a general strike?

Success against the militarized PR machine

As First Nations continued to maintain the sacred fire of the encampment, insisting that their sacred lands remained unceded to the Canadian government, the legal team for the Burnaby Mountain land defenders found out that the injunction granted to KM was illegal from the start.

After Kinder Morgan had received the illegal injunction against the TransMountain protestors Last November, the RCMP immediately began arresting as many protestors as crossed the ‘injunction line’ while KM surveyors performed their tasks.

The RCMP performed their duties brutally, wielding less-than-lethal shotguns at a treesitter, and captured on film throwing an elder woman to the ground. It was not until more than 60 arrests occurred on the mountain and Burnaby Mountain Caretakers locked down to the Supreme Court building in Vancouver that the Supreme Court recognized the illegality of the injunction.

Until the point of mass public participation in civil disobedience, the judicial proceedings manifested the usual process of corporate takeover of Indigenous lands and subversion of activist movements through RCMP brutality. KM attempted to get an injunction extension and failed.

To restate: as KM’s public relations attempted to present the image of a benevolent financial backer of the community, they offered to pay the RCMP directly for enforcing an illegal injunction while their contractors monitored activists movements, threatened, and even assaulted them.

Since the RCMP has already averred that counterinsurgency strategy is necessary for the containment of a First Nations uprising, the fact that Indigenous peoples took the lead in the Burnaby Mountain encampment already foreshadowed that COIN would be at play.

The extent of the resistance, the number of people arrested, including public personalities like David Suzuki, attested to the ultimate failure of COIN in the face of public scrutiny and nonviolent civil disobedience.

Hitting the ‘Big Club’ at its weakest points

While counterinsurgency policing includes the militarization of police forces and the papering over of private-public collusion through quasi-NGOs and quasi-judicial strategies, the ability of activists working with social media, legal paperwrenching tools, and grassroots, nonviolent civil disobedience to halt massive industrial megaprojects throughout Cascadia is a testament to the will and the spirit of popular involvement in the socio-political processes of horizontal networking and direct action.

However, the US and Canada are digging in against social change, with Stephen Harper supporting new legislation in the Canadian government to increase funding to spy agencies and propagandists. Even with the decline of oil prices, it does not appear as though the priority on fossil fuels exports will abate any time soon.

The current oil strike in the midst of mass layoffs from unconventional extraction methods like the tar sands will likely produce greater divisions between the industry and its workers, while at the same time increasing the importance of natural gas.

The fact of the most patriarchal circumstances of oil workers’ ‘man camps’ in North Dakota is linked also to the racist, sexist environment maintained by supervisors in refineries like Shell’s in Martinez, California. Without a system change from fossil fuel economies, these tendencies will persevere unchecked.

It is tremendous that the steelworkers are striking, and the oil industry appears weaker than it has in years. Alternatives exist, and are becoming more important by the day. Labor could join the struggle against fossil fuels by collectivizing in the refineries, and rejecting the oil bosses who have waged class war against ordinary people, dispossessing Indigenous peoples, and spreading the specter of cancer throughout the world.

Can refineries not be re-purposed? Can the fossil fuel system, so important to waging aggressive, pointless international war throughout the world and at home, not be overcome?

Unless we can confront the vast edifice of militarized ‘national interest’ presented by industry-led public relations, we will be totally incapable of asking these questions, let alone stopping the insane expansion of fossil fuels infrastructure, or supporting the advanced class struggle that the regime of extractivism known as the Global Land Grab has brought against itself in North America.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013).

 

 




389765

Fighting the ‘Big Club’: blockades, strikes, and the fossil fuel blowback Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




It was said of Rockefeller as he built his prolific infrastructure empire of trains, pipelines, and refineries, that he would enter a community first with a promises of money, and if his kindness was refused, he would resort to other means.

His oft-cited quotation speaks for itself, “the way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.”

Update this position to today, and you have the model for contemporary counterinsurgency (COIN) that plunges a growing pipeline and oil train network through dissenting communities.

As Warren Buffet, owner of Burlington Santa Fe Railroad, once stated, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

But with militant labor strikes shocking the oil industry and blockades halting oil trains throughout the Pacific Northwest and Canada, it would appear that the class war is finally starting to even out.

We cannot tolerate these attacks on our communities!

Burlington Santa Fe Railroad is the largest oil train business in the US, an infrastructural necessity sparked by the fracking boom in the Bakken Shale of North Dakota, and the popular uprising against the network of pipelines projected out of the Alberta tar sands.

After an oil train explosion vaporized nearly half of the downtown area of a Canadian town, Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 people, an outcry against oil trains arose throughout the country.

Ensuing derailments of coal and oil trains, along with explosions propelling fireballs fifty feet into the air, highlighted the increasing urgency of direct action to halt the exploding ‘bomb trains’ as well as other fossil fuel infrastructure

From June to November 2014, around a dozen coal and oil train blockades emerged throughout the Pacific Northwest. From Seattle, where 300 people blocked an oil train after the Peoples Climate March, to Portland, where 100 protestors blocked a train in November, urban populations have increasingly mobilized to join rural dissent against fossil fuel infrastructure in numerous places around a Cascadian bioregion that stretches from Northern California to Idaho to British Columbia.

Many of these demonstrations are organized by a network called Rising Tide North America, which formed in 2005 out of the Earth First! Climate Caucus to combat “the root causes of climate change”.

With its connections to Earth First!, a grassroots environmental group that has drawn the ire of the FBI and DHS on numerous occasions, Rising Tide has faced more than its share of interference from local law enforcement, federal policing agencies, and, curiously, even private contractors.

The same methods of repression have been used against the labor movement, as the longshoremen who have fought against the Port of Longview can testify, but together in solidarity, Rising Tide and the ILWU have fought a common enemy with port shutdowns and blockades.

The ‘Big Club’

Among the most important fossil fuel infrastructure under construction today is an expansive natural gas pipeline network. The gas from wells in Idaho is set to pump through the ‘Pacific Connector’ pipeline through Southern Oregon and across the Pacific, via a terminal in Coos Bay.

The 234-mile pipeline would take land from some 300 private property-owners along the way while passing through pristine riparian areas and National Forest ecosystems.

Thirty-five percent of the landowners have taken deals, but 15 percent have said ‘no’. If they refuse to sign a deal, the Canadian corporation, Veresen, has threatened to work with local officials to use eminent domain to seize their property at a lower value.

Former TransCanada employee David Dodson calls the usage of eminent domain to seize private property a part of the “big club”. “Eminent domain laws were designed to get things built”, Dodson told The Oregonian in August. “It’s a very one-sided process, and it’s not in landowners’ favor.”

The Pacific Connector pipeline would end at the Jordon Cove LNG terminal, which has been praised by the Obama Administration. According to a White House statement issued in March, prior to the conclusion of the environmental approval process for the Pacific Connector pipeline,

“We welcome the prospect of U.S. LNG exports in the future since additional global supplies will benefit Europe and other strategic partners.”

These partners include allies against Chinese hegemony in the South China Sea. The same statement continues:

“We agree on the importance of redoubling transatlantic efforts to support European energy security to further diversify energy sources and suppliers and to allow for reverse natural gas flows to Ukraine from its EU neighbors.”

Fossil fuels and ‘national security’

The reference to Ukraine is crucial, because it suggests underlying reasons for the EU’s militaristic interest in Ukraine (gas pipelines). According to the American Petroleum Institute, which is deeply involved in the utilization of counterinsurgency strategy in the US, the Ukraine crisis is jeopardizing the future of natural gas in Europe, making the US all the more important of a producer.

In would appear from these statements that the White House views the LNG terminals in the Eastern Seaboard and the Pacific Northwest as a national security imperative on a global scale. At the same time, it is questionable as to whether or not profit even matters.

As James C Scott notes with regard to the production of palm oil plantations in Indonesia, the construction of industrial infrastructure stands not so much to rake in profits for the nation, but to make its land and people “legible” to the maps and observers of the state.

In keeping with this connection between the national interests of the counterinsurgency campaign in Ukraine, geopolitical maneuvers in the South China Sea, and industrial interests in the Northwest, the ‘Big Club’ deploys similar public relations networks set up by business and political elites to further the agenda of the gas industry.

They are producing a narrative and a reality of legible, productive force at the same time, and it has already created a situation of war throughout the world. However, the ability of environmental groups to work with people who resist the land grab makes victory a real possibility.

Astroturf, psy-ops and the Democratic Party

To advance the ‘interests of national security’ the Democratic Party developed an intricate PR system, which helps to disguise the iron fist of enforcement of political and economic interest in the velvet glove of social benefits and community participation.

According to executives in the energy industry, networks of private security and intelligence corporations are contracted by the energy industry and law enforcement agencies (from local to federal) to gather information on populations in keeping with COIN doctrine.

These networks consist of Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans and psy-ops specialists, and generally hinge on the idea of monitoring populations in order to find out how to ‘win hearts and minds’.

Such militarized corporate PR tactics are often carried out in tandem with political elites, such as ‘Our Energy Moment‘ (OEM), an insta-PR campaign launched in February with the intention of promoting the Jordon Cove terminal, as well as other terminals around the US.

Spearheaded by Blue Engine Media and Liberty Concepts, two PR groups that act as containers for key initiatives of the Democratic Party and the energy industry, OEM announces itself as a “growing coalition“ including private security corporations, political organizations, and energy companies.

The founder of Blue Engine Media describes himself as a “recovering political hack and aspiring corporate hack” on his Twitter profile, having founded the quasi-NGO, Common Purpose, which helps the Democratic Party apparatchiks dictate media positions to third party groups like MoveOn.org and Change to Win.

In every way, the LNG infrastructure of the Pacific Northwest is set up as a darling of the Democratic Party, and groups like Rising Tide that refuse to toe the PR line of the White House are repaid for exposing the uncomfortable conflicts of interest within such discreet public and private partnerships.

Upset the ‘Big Club’, face the consequences

While OEM is relatively new, their projection of an image that unites political, corporate, and private security together in one coalition is troubling for many anti-LNG activists given the recent history of harassment and politically-motivated witch hunts.

In 2010, a Department of Justice employee and opponent of LNG infrastructure in Oregon named Brent Foster was hounded into resignation through industry tactics.

After being hauled before a grand jury for allegedly telling misinformation to his employer and giving improper LNG advice, a video surfaced on YouTube showing Foster allegedly smoking a joint with another LNG opponent in private.

Though he was cleared of all charges by the grand jury, and the video was largely seen as a joke, Foster was forced to resign from his important position. The proposed Palomar LNG pipeline crossing through Mt. Hood that he had opposed, however, was cancelled.

Aside from being an obvious smear tactic designed to influence the public and a grand jury, the YouTube video came from a ghost account with no other videos. The evidence suggests that, barring a strange coincidence of factors, the two LNG opponents were being followed and monitored by private intelligence corporations working with a public relations group in the pocket of the gas industry.

The harassment and even criminalization of activists has not stopped at LNG and other fossil fuel infrastructure. In April of last year, the Oregon House of Representatives passed two laws declaring all interference with state forest management illegal, while enabling the DA to “charge these terrorists with a crime and make them accountable”, according to Rep. Wayne Krieger.

This as the Pacific Connector is slated to cross through 234 miles of forest and riparian ecosystems. On top of the Pacific Connector, a new propane terminal is slated to be built in Portland, Oregon, and has faced strong opposition.

The political drive to produce fossil fuel infrastructure is such that the Governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, fired the chairwoman of the Oregon Transportation Commission, Catherine Mater, for casting the tie-breaking vote against subsidies to upgrade the Port of St. Helens and enable coal exports by Ambre Energy.

Whether the oil strike will extend to foster a world-historic event is an open question, but those responsible for coal and gas infrastructure will likely not be discouraged from their mission of ‘national security’ absent the overthrow of current, militarized industrial capitalism. Who would lose out from this situation? Certainly not the workers.

Infrastructure, counterinsurgency and the PR industry

Aside from the class war, according to executives with energy companies, there is already a counterinsurgency war being waged against protestors and civil dissent. This war includes the ‘hearts and minds’ strategy, which extends conciliatory olive branches to populations, even as it launches into massive surveillance strategies of all those involved.

A recently leaked strategy document forged in the collaboration between Edelman Public Relations and TransCanada regarding attempts to build the Energy East pipeline out of the Alberta tar sands boasts a “strong heritage in the more aggressive politics and policy fights in the US.”

Their “tactical elements” include “public relations, digital/social [media], grassroots advocacy communication, paid media.” Their “perpetual campaign” involves working with third parties to “pressure Energy East opponents” and “build an echo chamber of aligned voices.”

According to the Edelman / TransCanada document, industry professionals are to work with proxy groups to attack environmentalists in the name of “national security”.

Through “detailed background research on key opposition groups” the energy industry seeks “an assessment of strengths and weaknesses” by “knowledge-sharing” with third parties regarding the financial structure, organizational affiliations, leadership, and political engagement.

As for their media strategy, they claim they prioritize “local > regional > national” in order to proactively reach out to smaller communities and separate the more-emotional opposition from a jobs-based position, while also meeting with the presidents of major newspapers in order to forge collaborative relationships.

Perhaps most ironic is their ideation of the “social media ecosystem”, which fits in line with what is called the “insurgent ecosystem” by counterinsurgency chief theorist David Kilcullen.

Social media becomes the site of insurgency, where environmental NGOs, whether international or locally-based, must be monitored, mimicked, anticipated, and responded to in a shadow game of proxy third-parties.

But what do these third parties look like? In 2011, the ostensibly-grass roots organization Energy In Depth (EID) was outed for being financially backed by the American Petroleum Institute, which worked with Edelman PR to form another astroturfed quasi-NGO called Energy Citizens in 2009.

So deeply ensconced in the counterinsurgency complex is Edelman that they were shortlisted by the Iraqi government in their search for a public relations team in 2013.

Quasi-nonprofits like EID, hoisted into the spotlight through industry funding, disseminate news articles, host community partnership meetings, and generally play a social media turf war with activists attempting to influence things like zoning ordinances to strengthen or maintain environmental regulations.

In fact, it is precisely because the energy industry has extracted its prize at the expense of democracy by means of war that the glut of supply and drop in demand plunged commodity prices into collapse.

Had industry accepted accountability to citizens, its “middle and lower-level producers” may never have faced the shocks they are subjected to today. Under these ongoing conditions of counterinsurgency, an oil workers strike adds a level of agitation to the already-militant environmental movement; a sense that the pendulum is swinging back.

Burnaby Mountain – Edelman plan in action

Although TransCanada has dumped Edelman since being exposed, claiming that they had not begun to implement the practices outlined in the strategic document, it was noted that Edelman had already been conducting meetings with the heads of the Energy East Pipeline.

TransCanada insisted that Edelman’s approach was a particular to the US, and had no place among the Canadian people. Returning to Cascadian resistance against fossil fuels.

However the work of the Texas-based energy infrastructure giant Kinder Morgan (KM) attempting to push the TransMountain Pipeline through Burnaby Mountain suggests that the strategy outlined and proposed by Edelman is, in fact, being deployed.

Facing a community of environmentalists, social justice activists, First Nations, and locals (more than 70% of whom opposed the pipeline), Kinder Morgan attempted to use the velvet glove on the iron fist approach.

Headquartered in Houston, KM emerged in Cascadia only after a stint in the Marcellus Shale, where its operations were embedded in the same system that produced Energy In Depth. In fact, EID features on the KM website as one of just seven linked groups that includes both astroturfed and openly-corporate groups like Laborers’ International Union of North America, The Coalition to Lower Energy Costs, and the American Gas Association.

The TransMountain pipeline webpage also links to a vigilant Twitter presence that retweets promotional materials and attack opponents often using the snarky tone that they think is popular over social media.

At the same time as their public relations screen reached full spectrum, Kinder Morgan contractors turned more aggressive on the ground. Numerous activists reported seeing contractors monitoring, following, and filming them.

At one point, an activist approached a KM vehicle to capture footage of the contractor in the act of filming him, the contractor accelerated his truck into the protestor, bumping him once as a warning, and then accelerating into him. According to the protestor, the driver was going to run him over had he not quickly moved out of the way.

Corporations gain ‘quasi-judicial’ powers

The private-public collusion is also similar. The energy and natural resources industries overlap in a great many ways. Employees cross over, directors often sit on several boards of foundations and institutes fed by the same industries they work for, and go on to work within politics.

In one example, JM Huber’s VP of Environment, Health, Safety, and Sustainability, Don Young, boasts in his LinkedIn profile of “working on quasi-judicial panels including for the TransMountain pipeline expansion project.”

This quasi-judicial panel is also known as the National Energy Board, which is set to rule on the legality of the pipeline expansion program soon. The NRC as a “quasi-judicial” group is set up to represent corporate interests.

Despite corporate pretensions to modern social network monitoring and media involvement, KM’s behavior and the Canadian government’s judicial and quasi-judicial involvement has presented the same old corruption.

JM Huber, which employs Don Young, is a multinational corporation, and its Board of Directors is stacked with industry leaders like Gideo Argov, a director at a large private equity firm, and W Lee Nutter, the former CEO, Chairman, and President of Rayonier, one of the biggest timberlands holders in the US.

Huber and KM share a place in the energy / natural resources sector, and have employees like Liz Simonton, commercial manager at KM in Colorado Springs, who have experience working with both corporations.

The buddy-buddy relationship between industry and the “quasi-judicial panel” set to decide the fate of the pipeline seemed somewhat disrupted in April, when Young, ironically the only member of the three-person panel with any kind of environmental record, left the panel for “personal reasons”.

Young was replaced by Philip Davies, a veteran of EnCana, which just pledged its support for KM’s $3 billion Rockies Express natural gas project. Another panelist, Lyn Mercier, comes to the National Energy Board from Gaz Metro, which is trying to force its own landgrabbing pipeline by claiming eminent domain over resistant farmers.

The clear corruption that permeates the ‘quasi-judicial’ process is familiar to peoples’ movements around the world, as political and economic elites collude to force the productivity of industry through communities and critical habitat.

If those who want to transform the current paradigm work to dismantle the propaganda of the state’s war against the people, rather than the integrity of labor agitation, solidarity could lead to radical potentials. What about a general strike?

Success against the militarized PR machine

As First Nations continued to maintain the sacred fire of the encampment, insisting that their sacred lands remained unceded to the Canadian government, the legal team for the Burnaby Mountain land defenders found out that the injunction granted to KM was illegal from the start.

After Kinder Morgan had received the illegal injunction against the TransMountain protestors Last November, the RCMP immediately began arresting as many protestors as crossed the ‘injunction line’ while KM surveyors performed their tasks.

The RCMP performed their duties brutally, wielding less-than-lethal shotguns at a treesitter, and captured on film throwing an elder woman to the ground. It was not until more than 60 arrests occurred on the mountain and Burnaby Mountain Caretakers locked down to the Supreme Court building in Vancouver that the Supreme Court recognized the illegality of the injunction.

Until the point of mass public participation in civil disobedience, the judicial proceedings manifested the usual process of corporate takeover of Indigenous lands and subversion of activist movements through RCMP brutality. KM attempted to get an injunction extension and failed.

To restate: as KM’s public relations attempted to present the image of a benevolent financial backer of the community, they offered to pay the RCMP directly for enforcing an illegal injunction while their contractors monitored activists movements, threatened, and even assaulted them.

Since the RCMP has already averred that counterinsurgency strategy is necessary for the containment of a First Nations uprising, the fact that Indigenous peoples took the lead in the Burnaby Mountain encampment already foreshadowed that COIN would be at play.

The extent of the resistance, the number of people arrested, including public personalities like David Suzuki, attested to the ultimate failure of COIN in the face of public scrutiny and nonviolent civil disobedience.

Hitting the ‘Big Club’ at its weakest points

While counterinsurgency policing includes the militarization of police forces and the papering over of private-public collusion through quasi-NGOs and quasi-judicial strategies, the ability of activists working with social media, legal paperwrenching tools, and grassroots, nonviolent civil disobedience to halt massive industrial megaprojects throughout Cascadia is a testament to the will and the spirit of popular involvement in the socio-political processes of horizontal networking and direct action.

However, the US and Canada are digging in against social change, with Stephen Harper supporting new legislation in the Canadian government to increase funding to spy agencies and propagandists. Even with the decline of oil prices, it does not appear as though the priority on fossil fuels exports will abate any time soon.

The current oil strike in the midst of mass layoffs from unconventional extraction methods like the tar sands will likely produce greater divisions between the industry and its workers, while at the same time increasing the importance of natural gas.

The fact of the most patriarchal circumstances of oil workers’ ‘man camps’ in North Dakota is linked also to the racist, sexist environment maintained by supervisors in refineries like Shell’s in Martinez, California. Without a system change from fossil fuel economies, these tendencies will persevere unchecked.

It is tremendous that the steelworkers are striking, and the oil industry appears weaker than it has in years. Alternatives exist, and are becoming more important by the day. Labor could join the struggle against fossil fuels by collectivizing in the refineries, and rejecting the oil bosses who have waged class war against ordinary people, dispossessing Indigenous peoples, and spreading the specter of cancer throughout the world.

Can refineries not be re-purposed? Can the fossil fuel system, so important to waging aggressive, pointless international war throughout the world and at home, not be overcome?

Unless we can confront the vast edifice of militarized ‘national interest’ presented by industry-led public relations, we will be totally incapable of asking these questions, let alone stopping the insane expansion of fossil fuels infrastructure, or supporting the advanced class struggle that the regime of extractivism known as the Global Land Grab has brought against itself in North America.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013).

 

 




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