OPIRG BROCK
WEEKLY EVENTS NEWSLETTER
July 4-July 10
People from all walks of life are invited to participate in the research, education, and action facilitated through OPIRG Brock – including not only students but interested community members. All events listed occur in St. Catharines unless indicated otherwise. For a map of the Brock Campus please see: http://www.brocku.ca/parking-services/campus-map. To learn more about OPIRG Brock please see our website at: www.opirgbrock.org. To submit events for inclusion in the newsletter please email opirgbu@gmail.com the Thursday of the week before the event; we’d love to hear from you!
Volunteer Opportunities!
Migrant Workers Open House – Bike Fixer Uppers and Table Handlers Needed
July 10, 2-6pm, Agricultural Workers Alliance Office, Virgil, 1501 Niagara Stone Rd. Unit 8
OPIRG will be hosting an information table and bike maintenance station at this year’s Migrant Workers Open House in Virgil. This promises to be an exciting event full of important information, a chance to meet and speak with season workers, and a time to get to know the Agricultural Workers Alliance, and meet fellow social justice activities and allies!
OPIRG will also be presenting the Agricultural Workers Alliance banner created by the Art of Breaking Boundaries FreeSkool Class!
If you are interested in volunteering to staff the OPIRG information table, or to help with bike repair the day of the event please send an email to opirgbu@gmail.com
Dis-Orientation Week Committee Call Out!
OPIRG Brock volunteers are striking a committee to start planning for Dis-Orientation Week at Brock this year! If you’ve got ideas we’d love to hear them. Please contact opirgbu@gmail.com to get involved!
Calling all artists!
OPIRG has paired up with the Agricultural Workers Center in Virgil for their Open House. It is a time to welcome back returning migrant workers and to extend a welcome to first time workers! We will be needing artists to collaborate in creating a very large banner to specifically represent female migrant workers in the Niagara region!
If you are interested in making art and learning more about the migrant worker community get in touch by emailing opirgbu@gmail.com!
Food Not Bombs - Niagara serves every Sunday from 3-5pm in Montebello Park.
If you would like to help, please email foodnotbombsniagara@gmail.com about the following:
Food pick-up: Saturdays at 2/2:30pm at the market and other local businesses (2 volunteers needed/once or twice a month)
Cooking: Sundays at 12-2:45 at 10 Bellevue (volunteers needed, you need not come out every week, but we appreciate a heads-up)
Serving: Sundays at 3-5pm at Montebello (we are currently not in dire need of volunteers for serving, but all are welcome, especially those willing to wash a few dishes)
Clean-up: Sundays 5:30-6pm at 10 Bellevue (2 volunteers needed whenever possible, a notice of when you're planning on helping out would be appreciated)
Outreach: help w/ posters, flyers, zines, information; help w/ media (notices in BrockPress, perhaps classified?, rants in the view; help with the webpage, email, or fb site, etc.)
Inventory: We are in need of a bike cart.
Website: http://foodnotbombs-niagara.weebly.com/
Events!
Free! Documentary Screening: Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train
Tuesday July 5, 8 pm, OPIRG Brock InfoShop, 10 Summer St.
Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train is a film about the life of Howard Zinn, a social justice advocate, and author of A People's History of the United States.
To help raise funds for the OPIRG InfoShop, we have gourmet vegan pizza and donuts available for sale each Tuesday! Local Summer Street shops Bella Noella's and Rise Above Bakery will be supplying the food for us, and all proceeds will go towards keeping the InfoShop running.
Community Bike Ride to Virgil
Sunday July 10, 1pm, Meeting at the OPIRG InfoShop, 10 Summer St.
Join students and community members for a bike delivery ride to migrant workers in Virgil! OPIRG has spent its winter and spring months collecting bikes for agricultural workers as a way to supply sustainable transportation and to empower mobility.
To help celebrate the Virgil Agricultural Center’s Open House OPIRG will be delivering over 12 bikes to seasonal workers! We need your help in getting the bikes there! If you are interested in sustainable transportation, labor issues, or if you just want to enjoy the outdoors for a fun, community bike ride email OPIRG at opirgbu@gmail.com.
Agricultural Workers Alliance Open House
Sunday July 10, 2pm, Agricultural Workers Alliance Office, Virgil, 1501 Niagara Stone Rd. Unit 8
Join the AWA on July 10th for an open house BBQ! This is time set aside to celebrate the return of workers from Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala, and a number of other Caribbean and Central American countries! This is also a chance to welcome new workers to the Niagara Region.
*Refreshments will be served.
Take Action Now!
Published on Thursday, June 23, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Environmental Leaders Call for Civil Disobedience to Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline
by Naomi Klein, Wendell Berry, Maude Barlow, Bill McKibben and Others
Dear Friends,
This will be a slightly longer letter than common for the internet age—it’s serious stuff.
The short version is we want you to consider doing something hard: coming to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer and engaging in civil disobedience that will likely get you arrested.
The full version goes like this:
As you know, the planet is steadily warming: 2010 was the warmest year on record, and we’ve seen the resulting chaos in almost every corner of the earth.
And as you also know, our democracy is increasingly controlled by special interests interested only in their short-term profit.
These two trends collide this summer in Washington, where the State Department and the White House have to decide whether to grant a certificate of ‘national interest’ to some of the biggest fossil fuel players on earth. These corporations want to build the so-called ‘Keystone XL Pipeline’ from Canada’s tar sands to Texas refineries.
To call this project a horror is serious understatement. The tar sands have wrecked huge parts of Alberta, disrupting ways of life in indigenous communities—First Nations communities in Canada, and tribes along the pipeline route in the U.S. have demanded the destruction cease. The pipeline crosses crucial areas like the Oglalla Aquifer where a spill would be disastrous—and though the pipeline companies insist they are using ‘state of the art’ technologies that should leak only once every 7 years, the precursor pipeline and its pumping stations have leaked a dozen times in the past year. These local impacts alone would be cause enough to block such a plan. But the Keystone Pipeline would also be a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous.
How much carbon lies in the recoverable tar sands of Alberta? A recent calculation from some of our foremost scientists puts the figure at about 200 parts per million. Even with the new pipeline they won’t be able to burn that much overnight—but each development like this makes it easier to get more oil out. As the climatologist Jim Hansen (one of the signatories to this letter) explained, if we have any chance of getting back to a stable climate “the principal requirement is that coal emissions must be phased out by 2030 and unconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands, must be left in the ground.” In other words, he added, “if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over.” The Keystone pipeline is an essential part of the game. "Unless we get increased market access, like with Keystone XL, we're going to be stuck," said Ralph Glass, an economist and vice-president at AJM Petroleum Consultants in Calgary, told a Canadian newspaper last week.
Given all that, you’d suspect that there’s no way the Obama administration would ever permit this pipeline. But in the last few months the president has signed pieces of paper opening much of Alaska to oil drilling, and permitting coal-mining on federal land in Wyoming that will produce as much CO2 as 300 power plants operating at full bore.
And Secretary of State Clinton has already said she’s ‘inclined’ to recommend the pipeline go forward. Partly it’s because of the political commotion over high gas prices, though more tar sands oil would do nothing to change that picture. But it’s also because of intense pressure from industry. TransCanada Pipeline, the company behind Keystone, has hired as its chief lobbyist for the project a man named Paul Elliott, who served as deputy national director of Clinton’s presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the US Chamber of Commerce—a bigger funder of political campaigns than the RNC and DNC combined—has demanded that the administration “move quickly to approve the Keystone XL pipeline,” which is not so surprising—they’ve also told the U.S. EPA that if the planet warms that will be okay because humans can ‘adapt their physiology’ to cope. The Koch Brothers, needless to say, are also backing the plan, and may reap huge profits from it.
So we’re pretty sure that without serious pressure the Keystone Pipeline will get its permit from Washington. A wonderful coalition of environmental groups has built a strong campaign across the continent—from Cree and Dene indigenous leaders to Nebraska farmers, they’ve spoken out strongly against the destruction of their land. We need to join them, and to say even if our own homes won’t be crossed by this pipeline, our joint home—the earth—will be wrecked by the carbon that pours down it.
And we need to say something else, too: it’s time to stop letting corporate power make the most important decisions our planet faces.
We don’t have the money to compete with those corporations, but we do have our bodies, and beginning in mid August many of us will use them. We will, each day through Labor Day, march on the White House, risking arrest with our trespass. We will do it in dignified fashion, demonstrating that in this case we are the conservatives, and that our foes—who would change the composition of the atmosphere are dangerous radicals. Come dressed as if for a business meeting—this is, in fact, serious business. And another sartorial tip—if you wore an Obama button during the 2008 campaign, why not wear it again? We very much still want to believe in the promise of that young Senator who told us that with his election the ‘rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet start to heal.’ We don’t understand what combination of bureaucratic obstinacy and insider dealing has derailed those efforts, but we remember his request that his supporters continue on after the election to pressure the government for change. We’ll do what we can.
And one more thing: we don’t want college kids to be the only cannon fodder in this fight. They’ve led the way so far on climate change—10,000 came to DC for the Powershift gathering earlier this spring. They’ve marched this month in West Virginia to protest mountaintop removal; Tim DeChristopher faces sentencing this summer in Utah for his creative protest. Now it’s time for people who’ve spent their lives pouring carbon into the atmosphere (and whose careers won’t be as damaged by an arrest record) to step up too. Most of us signing this letter are veterans of this work, and we think it’s past time for elders to behave like elders. One thing we don’t want is a smash up: if you can’t control your passions, this action is not for you.
This won’t be a one-shot day of action. We plan for it to continue for several weeks, to the date in September when by law the administration can either grant or deny the permit for the pipeline. Not all of us can actually get arrested—half the signatories to this letter live in Canada, and might well find our entry into the U.S. barred. But we will be making plans for sympathy demonstrations outside Canadian consulates in the U.S., and U.S. consulates in Canada—the decision-makers need to know they’re being watched.
Winning this battle won’t save the climate. But losing it will mean the chances of runaway climate change go way up—that we’ll endure an endless future of the floods and droughts we’ve seen this year. And we’re fighting for the political future too—for the premise that we should make decisions based on science and reason, not political connection. You have to start somewhere, and this is where we choose to begin.
If you think you might want to be a part of this action, we need you to sign up here. As plans solidify in the next few weeks we’ll be in touch with you to arrange nonviolence training; our colleagues at a variety of environmental and democracy campaigns will be coordinating the actual arrangements.
We know we’re asking a lot. You should think long and hard on it, and pray if you’re the praying type. But to us, it’s as much privilege as burden to get to join this fight in the most serious possible way. We hope you’ll join us.
Maude Barlow
Wendell Berry
Tom Goldtooth
Danny Glover
James Hansen
Wes Jackson
Naomi Klein
Bill McKibben
George Poitras
David Suzuki
Gus Speth
P.S.—Please pass this letter on to anyone else you think might be interested. We realize that what we’re asking isn’t easy, and we’re very grateful that you’re willing even to consider it.
WEEKLY EVENTS NEWSLETTER
July 4-July 10
People from all walks of life are invited to participate in the research, education, and action facilitated through OPIRG Brock – including not only students but interested community members. All events listed occur in St. Catharines unless indicated otherwise. For a map of the Brock Campus please see: http://www.brocku.ca/parking-services/campus-map. To learn more about OPIRG Brock please see our website at: www.opirgbrock.org. To submit events for inclusion in the newsletter please email opirgbu@gmail.com the Thursday of the week before the event; we’d love to hear from you!
Volunteer Opportunities!
Migrant Workers Open House – Bike Fixer Uppers and Table Handlers Needed
July 10, 2-6pm, Agricultural Workers Alliance Office, Virgil, 1501 Niagara Stone Rd. Unit 8
OPIRG will be hosting an information table and bike maintenance station at this year’s Migrant Workers Open House in Virgil. This promises to be an exciting event full of important information, a chance to meet and speak with season workers, and a time to get to know the Agricultural Workers Alliance, and meet fellow social justice activities and allies!
OPIRG will also be presenting the Agricultural Workers Alliance banner created by the Art of Breaking Boundaries FreeSkool Class!
If you are interested in volunteering to staff the OPIRG information table, or to help with bike repair the day of the event please send an email to opirgbu@gmail.com
Dis-Orientation Week Committee Call Out!
OPIRG Brock volunteers are striking a committee to start planning for Dis-Orientation Week at Brock this year! If you’ve got ideas we’d love to hear them. Please contact opirgbu@gmail.com to get involved!
Calling all artists!
OPIRG has paired up with the Agricultural Workers Center in Virgil for their Open House. It is a time to welcome back returning migrant workers and to extend a welcome to first time workers! We will be needing artists to collaborate in creating a very large banner to specifically represent female migrant workers in the Niagara region!
If you are interested in making art and learning more about the migrant worker community get in touch by emailing opirgbu@gmail.com!
Food Not Bombs - Niagara serves every Sunday from 3-5pm in Montebello Park.
If you would like to help, please email foodnotbombsniagara@gmail.com about the following:
Food pick-up: Saturdays at 2/2:30pm at the market and other local businesses (2 volunteers needed/once or twice a month)
Cooking: Sundays at 12-2:45 at 10 Bellevue (volunteers needed, you need not come out every week, but we appreciate a heads-up)
Serving: Sundays at 3-5pm at Montebello (we are currently not in dire need of volunteers for serving, but all are welcome, especially those willing to wash a few dishes)
Clean-up: Sundays 5:30-6pm at 10 Bellevue (2 volunteers needed whenever possible, a notice of when you're planning on helping out would be appreciated)
Outreach: help w/ posters, flyers, zines, information; help w/ media (notices in BrockPress, perhaps classified?, rants in the view; help with the webpage, email, or fb site, etc.)
Inventory: We are in need of a bike cart.
Website: http://foodnotbombs-niagara.weebly.com/
Events!
Free! Documentary Screening: Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train
Tuesday July 5, 8 pm, OPIRG Brock InfoShop, 10 Summer St.
Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train is a film about the life of Howard Zinn, a social justice advocate, and author of A People's History of the United States.
To help raise funds for the OPIRG InfoShop, we have gourmet vegan pizza and donuts available for sale each Tuesday! Local Summer Street shops Bella Noella's and Rise Above Bakery will be supplying the food for us, and all proceeds will go towards keeping the InfoShop running.
Community Bike Ride to Virgil
Sunday July 10, 1pm, Meeting at the OPIRG InfoShop, 10 Summer St.
Join students and community members for a bike delivery ride to migrant workers in Virgil! OPIRG has spent its winter and spring months collecting bikes for agricultural workers as a way to supply sustainable transportation and to empower mobility.
To help celebrate the Virgil Agricultural Center’s Open House OPIRG will be delivering over 12 bikes to seasonal workers! We need your help in getting the bikes there! If you are interested in sustainable transportation, labor issues, or if you just want to enjoy the outdoors for a fun, community bike ride email OPIRG at opirgbu@gmail.com.
Agricultural Workers Alliance Open House
Sunday July 10, 2pm, Agricultural Workers Alliance Office, Virgil, 1501 Niagara Stone Rd. Unit 8
Join the AWA on July 10th for an open house BBQ! This is time set aside to celebrate the return of workers from Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala, and a number of other Caribbean and Central American countries! This is also a chance to welcome new workers to the Niagara Region.
*Refreshments will be served.
Take Action Now!
Published on Thursday, June 23, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Environmental Leaders Call for Civil Disobedience to Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline
by Naomi Klein, Wendell Berry, Maude Barlow, Bill McKibben and Others
Dear Friends,
This will be a slightly longer letter than common for the internet age—it’s serious stuff.
The short version is we want you to consider doing something hard: coming to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer and engaging in civil disobedience that will likely get you arrested.
The full version goes like this:
As you know, the planet is steadily warming: 2010 was the warmest year on record, and we’ve seen the resulting chaos in almost every corner of the earth.
And as you also know, our democracy is increasingly controlled by special interests interested only in their short-term profit.
These two trends collide this summer in Washington, where the State Department and the White House have to decide whether to grant a certificate of ‘national interest’ to some of the biggest fossil fuel players on earth. These corporations want to build the so-called ‘Keystone XL Pipeline’ from Canada’s tar sands to Texas refineries.
To call this project a horror is serious understatement. The tar sands have wrecked huge parts of Alberta, disrupting ways of life in indigenous communities—First Nations communities in Canada, and tribes along the pipeline route in the U.S. have demanded the destruction cease. The pipeline crosses crucial areas like the Oglalla Aquifer where a spill would be disastrous—and though the pipeline companies insist they are using ‘state of the art’ technologies that should leak only once every 7 years, the precursor pipeline and its pumping stations have leaked a dozen times in the past year. These local impacts alone would be cause enough to block such a plan. But the Keystone Pipeline would also be a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous.
How much carbon lies in the recoverable tar sands of Alberta? A recent calculation from some of our foremost scientists puts the figure at about 200 parts per million. Even with the new pipeline they won’t be able to burn that much overnight—but each development like this makes it easier to get more oil out. As the climatologist Jim Hansen (one of the signatories to this letter) explained, if we have any chance of getting back to a stable climate “the principal requirement is that coal emissions must be phased out by 2030 and unconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands, must be left in the ground.” In other words, he added, “if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over.” The Keystone pipeline is an essential part of the game. "Unless we get increased market access, like with Keystone XL, we're going to be stuck," said Ralph Glass, an economist and vice-president at AJM Petroleum Consultants in Calgary, told a Canadian newspaper last week.
Given all that, you’d suspect that there’s no way the Obama administration would ever permit this pipeline. But in the last few months the president has signed pieces of paper opening much of Alaska to oil drilling, and permitting coal-mining on federal land in Wyoming that will produce as much CO2 as 300 power plants operating at full bore.
And Secretary of State Clinton has already said she’s ‘inclined’ to recommend the pipeline go forward. Partly it’s because of the political commotion over high gas prices, though more tar sands oil would do nothing to change that picture. But it’s also because of intense pressure from industry. TransCanada Pipeline, the company behind Keystone, has hired as its chief lobbyist for the project a man named Paul Elliott, who served as deputy national director of Clinton’s presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the US Chamber of Commerce—a bigger funder of political campaigns than the RNC and DNC combined—has demanded that the administration “move quickly to approve the Keystone XL pipeline,” which is not so surprising—they’ve also told the U.S. EPA that if the planet warms that will be okay because humans can ‘adapt their physiology’ to cope. The Koch Brothers, needless to say, are also backing the plan, and may reap huge profits from it.
So we’re pretty sure that without serious pressure the Keystone Pipeline will get its permit from Washington. A wonderful coalition of environmental groups has built a strong campaign across the continent—from Cree and Dene indigenous leaders to Nebraska farmers, they’ve spoken out strongly against the destruction of their land. We need to join them, and to say even if our own homes won’t be crossed by this pipeline, our joint home—the earth—will be wrecked by the carbon that pours down it.
And we need to say something else, too: it’s time to stop letting corporate power make the most important decisions our planet faces.
We don’t have the money to compete with those corporations, but we do have our bodies, and beginning in mid August many of us will use them. We will, each day through Labor Day, march on the White House, risking arrest with our trespass. We will do it in dignified fashion, demonstrating that in this case we are the conservatives, and that our foes—who would change the composition of the atmosphere are dangerous radicals. Come dressed as if for a business meeting—this is, in fact, serious business. And another sartorial tip—if you wore an Obama button during the 2008 campaign, why not wear it again? We very much still want to believe in the promise of that young Senator who told us that with his election the ‘rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet start to heal.’ We don’t understand what combination of bureaucratic obstinacy and insider dealing has derailed those efforts, but we remember his request that his supporters continue on after the election to pressure the government for change. We’ll do what we can.
And one more thing: we don’t want college kids to be the only cannon fodder in this fight. They’ve led the way so far on climate change—10,000 came to DC for the Powershift gathering earlier this spring. They’ve marched this month in West Virginia to protest mountaintop removal; Tim DeChristopher faces sentencing this summer in Utah for his creative protest. Now it’s time for people who’ve spent their lives pouring carbon into the atmosphere (and whose careers won’t be as damaged by an arrest record) to step up too. Most of us signing this letter are veterans of this work, and we think it’s past time for elders to behave like elders. One thing we don’t want is a smash up: if you can’t control your passions, this action is not for you.
This won’t be a one-shot day of action. We plan for it to continue for several weeks, to the date in September when by law the administration can either grant or deny the permit for the pipeline. Not all of us can actually get arrested—half the signatories to this letter live in Canada, and might well find our entry into the U.S. barred. But we will be making plans for sympathy demonstrations outside Canadian consulates in the U.S., and U.S. consulates in Canada—the decision-makers need to know they’re being watched.
Winning this battle won’t save the climate. But losing it will mean the chances of runaway climate change go way up—that we’ll endure an endless future of the floods and droughts we’ve seen this year. And we’re fighting for the political future too—for the premise that we should make decisions based on science and reason, not political connection. You have to start somewhere, and this is where we choose to begin.
If you think you might want to be a part of this action, we need you to sign up here. As plans solidify in the next few weeks we’ll be in touch with you to arrange nonviolence training; our colleagues at a variety of environmental and democracy campaigns will be coordinating the actual arrangements.
We know we’re asking a lot. You should think long and hard on it, and pray if you’re the praying type. But to us, it’s as much privilege as burden to get to join this fight in the most serious possible way. We hope you’ll join us.
Maude Barlow
Wendell Berry
Tom Goldtooth
Danny Glover
James Hansen
Wes Jackson
Naomi Klein
Bill McKibben
George Poitras
David Suzuki
Gus Speth
P.S.—Please pass this letter on to anyone else you think might be interested. We realize that what we’re asking isn’t easy, and we’re very grateful that you’re willing even to consider it.
