Tar Sands

This morning, ten people with Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance were arrested blockading the construction of a Keystone XL pump station in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, dozens with the Detroit Coalition Against Tar Sands stopped dump trucks in their tracks from adding to a massive mound of toxic petcoke, a byproduct of tar sands mining, that’s piling up along the Detroit River. And in Marshall, Michigan, a brave activist climbed into a segment of an Enbridge pipeline to protest the pipeline giant’s failed clean-up of the biggest tar sands spill in U.S. history in Kalamazoo, MI -- and its plans to expand construction on the very pipeline that spilled.

“As a part of a direct action coalition working and living in an area that has been historically sacrificed for the benefit of petroleum infrastructure and industry, we believe that building a movement that can resist all infrastructure expansion at the point of construction is a necessity. In this country, over half of all pipeline spills happen in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Looking at the mainstream keystone opposition, this fact is invisible—just like the communities affected by toxic refining and toxic extraction,” said Eric Whelan, spokesperson for Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance. “We’re through with appealing to a broken political system that has consistently sacrificed human and nonhuman communities for the benefit of industry and capital.”

With all the focus on blocking the Obama administration’s approval of Keystone XL, the general public has mostly missed a project plugging along at 8,000 feet atop the Tavaputs Plateau in Eastern Utah (part of the ever-larger Colorado Plateau), and not far from beloved Arches and Canyonlands national parks. This fall a Canadian company named U.S Oil Sands (formerly Earth Energy Resources) leapt another legal hurdle on its multi-year journey to becoming the first large-scale tar sands mine in the U.S. Local and regional activists have been fighting the development for years, but it has somehow missed the national conversation, which is odd because the potential for tar sands and oil shale development in Utah could be massive.