New Laws Would Make Environmental Protest “Terrorism”

[Fire Walk With Me]

Courtney Harrop ?@CourtneyPFB

New Laws Would Make Environmental Protest “Terrorism” | VICE United States http://www.vice.com/read/new-laws-would-make-protesting-environmental-devastation-terrorism …

Most people have heard of tree-sitting—a tactic environmentalists use to prevent old-growth trees from being cut down and whole forests decimated. In its heyday, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, members of groups like Earth First! climbed 100-foot-tall Redwoods and stayed there to save them. Beginning in 1997, one woman in Humboldt, California, named her tree Luna and stayed in it for two years, until enough money could be raised to prevent it from being axed. In 1998, in a Northern California old-growth forest, another treesitter named David Gypsy Chain was “accidentally” killed when loggers felled a tree that came crashing into the protester. He died instantly of massive head trauma.

This style of protest was also hugely successful—that is, until a series of arrests in 2005 against radical environmentalists who were labeled “terrorists.” It scared the shit out of the environmental-activist community, and folks started drifting away.

Now, there's a vibrant national protest movement reviving those "direct action" tactics of civil disobedience again, and adding a new political savvy to the mix. They, too, have been incredibly effective. In Oregon, in the summer of 2011, one blockade took 50 cops, a backhoe, and a 125-foot-crane to remove treesitters. A few days later, activists locked themselves together in an Oregon Department of Forestry office. The group responsible, the Cascadia Forest Defenders, say they won't stop until the Elliott State Forest is protected from clearcutting.

As a result—surprise, surprise—politicians are trying to create new laws that make tree-sits and other direct-action techniques illegal. The bills even single out the Elliott State Forest campaign by name and allow corporations to sue protesters for costing them money.

(More at the link.)

[villager]

1. It's what the corporate owners of the political system want -- all protest is "terrorism" to them

All dissent, all refusal to go along with their agenda....

[limpyhobbler]

2. Exxon-Mobil is the number one environmental terrorist.

People are starting to resist the destruction of our habitat in a serious way.

Instead of adjusting policies, the corporate state is responding in the language of violence, as seen with these ridiculous laws and penalties proposed for non-violence protesters.

That's a very bad sign. It would be better if the system would adjust a little bit to let us into the political conversation. Instead it's criminalizing dissent.

bad news.