Jessica Reznicek, a 39-year-old environmental activist and Catholic Worker from Des Moines, Iowa, was sentenced in federal court June 30 to eight years in prison for her efforts to sabotage construction of the Dakota Access pipeline.
In November 2016, Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, a former preschool teacher, set fire to heavy construction equipment at a pipeline worksite in Buena Vista County, Iowa.
Over the next several months, the women used oxyacetylene torches, tires and gasoline-soaked rags to burn equipment and damage pipeline valves along the line from Iowa to South Dakota. Their actions reportedly caused several million dollars’ worth of damage and delayed construction for weeks.
For this fascinating Green Flame episode Jennifer Murnan interviews Hanna Bohman. Hanna Bohman is a Canadian civilian who spent time volunteering in the effort to support women’s rights in the middle east, including battling ISIS and liberating women in Syria. Motivated to fight, Hanna joined an all-female Kurdish army, the YPJ. A film, Fear Us Women, was made about Hanna’s experiences as a member of the YPJ. She is an ongoing supporter of her YPJ sisters.
Hanna is a Canadian civilian who went to Syria and volunteered to battle ISIS. She joined an all-female Kurdish army called the YPJ. YPJ is pushing against the ISIS and their women hating ideology. It is liberating women forced into sex slavery by the Islamic State and participating in the education and liberation.
The Islamic State is often portrayed as a monolithic issue of terrorism and counterterrrorism. In reality, there are multiple aspects to this issue. Hanna’s interview sheds light to some complexities of this issue.
The YPJ is also part of a promising experiment in a new form of society. The model of society that they are working to build is called democratic confederation. It is a grassroots democracy, where people make direct decision of the direction of their lives, their communities and their societies. It is also incorporating the liberation of women, in an extremely conservative and religious fundamentalist area.
Hanna was smuggled into Syria, trained to be a sniper, and put into the frontlines, to defend this project and to support this liberation of women
In this episode, Hanna talks about her experience in the YPJ. She discusses patriarchy and feminism in both the Western context and in the YPJ. Hanna also talks about Jineology, the study of women. Finally, the experience also changed how it changed how she relates to women.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
Hundreds of Indonesian fishers have seized a dredging vessel from state-owned PT Timah in protest against offshore tin mining in what they say is their fishing zone.
The incident on July 12 is the latest development in a standoff that has been simmering since 2015, when fishers began opposing the mining in the Bangka-Belitung Islands off Sumatra.
Tin mining is the biggest industry in Bangka-Belitung, which accounts for 90% of the tin produced in Indonesia, with the metal winding up in items like Apple’s iPhone, among others.
But mining here, both onshore and offshore, has resulted in extensive forest degradation and deforestation, been associated with worker fatalities and child labor, and been tainted with corruption.
JAKARTA — Hundreds of Indonesian fishers protesting against an offshore tin mining operation in Sumatra have seized a dredging vessel they deemed to be operating within their fishing zone.
The development on July 12 is the latest escalation in a standoff simmering since 2015, when fishers in the Bangka-Belitung Islands began opposing mining by state-owned company PT Timah along the 70-kilometer (43-mile) Matras-Pesaren coastline.
Despite the years of opposition, Timah continues to mine, which the government has deemed it is legally permitted to do. As of July 13, the group of around 300 fishers still had control of the Timah dredging vessel.
The fishers say the mining has had a detrimental impact on the underwater ecosystem, which has subsequently reduced their catches. They have also complained of fuel and metal waste from the dredging vessel being dumped into the sea. The fishers have brought their grievances before local and national government officials, but say that in return they have been subjected to intimidation and criminalization.
“We can’t just stay quiet because our families will die of hunger if the sea gets destroyed,” Suhardi, head of the group Traditional Fishers for the Environment (NTPL), said as quoted by local newspaper Kompas.
Timah is said to have reported the seizure of its vessel to the mining ministry and might file a police report as well.
Indonesia is one of the world’s top producers of tin, mining 90% of it in the Bangka-Belitung Islands off the southwestern coast of Sumatra. Tin mining has long been the islands’ main economic driver. However, tin mining, both onshore and offshore, has resulted in extensive forest degradation and deforestation, impacting particularly tens of thousands traditional fishers whose livelihoods depend on the sustainability of coastal and marine ecosystems, according to the Mining Advocacy Network (Jatam).
Jatam calculates that three-quarters of Bangka-Belitung’s total area of 1.6 million hectares (4 million acres) has been licensed out as tin-mining concessions. Nearly two-thirds of that total area is considered to be either damaged or critically degraded, it adds.
Mining has also proven deadly for workers, and exploitative for local children. The Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), the country’s biggest green NGO, recorded 40 deaths linked to the tin mines between 2017 and 2020, more than half of them in 2019 alone. In 2014, a BBC documentary traced the solder used in Apple’s iPhones to tin mined by children in Bangka.
Tin mining in Bangka-Belitung is also heavily tainted by corruption: Indonesia’s antigraft agency, the KPK, has found irregularities in more than half of the 1,085 business permits issued in the province. Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW), an NGO, also reported 68 trillion rupiah ($4.7 billion) in tax, reclamation costs, royalties, export taxes and other revenue that the state failed to claim between 2004 and 2014 from the province’s tin industry.
“This is an emergency. The local and state governments must do their part and resolve this problem,” Merah Johansyah, national coordinator of Jatam, said as quoted by Kompas.
This episode of Muse Ecology is a terrific podcast with interviews with members of the People of Red Mountain, local community members, campers at Thacker Pass, and other supporters of Protect Thacker Pass.
In this episode in the Water, Life, Climate, and Civilization series, we hear diverse voices from the resistance to the proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass in northern Nevada, on Paiute and Shoshone ancestral lands.
Community activists in Memphis, Tennessee and northwest Mississippi celebrated a grassroots victory on Saturday after two oil companies canceled plans to build a pipeline that would have run through wetlands and several low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods.
Valero and Plains All American Pipeline had long planned to construct the Byhalia Connection pipeline, which would have been 49 miles long and linked two pipelines that transport crude oil to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.
The two companies announced they were canceling the project “due to lower U.S. oil production resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic,” but opponents of the pipeline noted that the announcement followed grassroots organizing by climate action advocates, homeowners, and elected officials at the local and federal levels.
“This is a win for the entire community of Memphis, Tennessee, but especially those in the Black community who fought it courageously,” Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, tweeted.
Community members in Memphis neighborhoods including White Chapel, Westwood, and Boxtown objected to the pipeline project, which would have run over the Memphis Sand Aquifer—leading to fears that an oil spill would pollute the drinking water of about one million people.
Local organizations Protect Our Aquifer and Memphis Community Against the Pipeline (MCAP) led rallies and garnered the support of former Vice President Al Gore and Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), while the Memphis City Council weighed an ordinance to make it harder for the companies to begin construction.
MCAP leader Justin J. Pearson organized canvassers and lobbied the city council, and called Friday’s announcement “an extraordinary testament to what Memphis and Shelby County can do when citizens build power toward justice.”
A representative of the two oil companies sparked local outrage when they said South Memphis, where the Boxtown community was established in the 1860s by people who had been enslaved, had been identified as “the point of least resistance.”
“We’ve shown them that we aren’t the path of least resistance,” said Pearson. “We are the path of resilience.”
Lawyers for the two companies began legal proceedings against local landowners who refused to make deals with project officials; they planned to invoke eminent domain against the property owners. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in a separate case in New Jersey that a company could use eminent domain to build a natural gas pipeline on state land.
“Their playbooks are the same everywhere,” Pearson said on Twitter on Friday. “Find the poor. Appease the rich and politically powerful. Misinform the community. Make local leaders afraid to stop them. Exploit the poor. Reap billions in profits from the deaths of the poor and marginalized.”
The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), which helped landowners fight the two companies in the legal battle, called Friday’s announcement “a triumph for environmental justice.”
“We are so inspired by the people of Boxtown, Westwood, and White Chapel, and the work of our amazing partners MCAP and Protect Our Aquifer, for showing what is possible when a community stands together,” said Amanda Garcia, director of the SELC’s Tennessee office.
Editor’s note: If anyone should still have any doubts that we are living in CORPORATE FASCISM, this is imminent proof.
From the statement by Jessica and Ruby when they openly admitted and took full credit for carrying out eco-sabotage: “Some may view these actions as violent, but be not mistaken. We acted from our hearts and never threatened human life nor personal property,” Montoya said. “What we did do was fight a private corporation that has run rampant across our country, seizing land and polluting our nation’s water supply. You may not agree with our tactics, but you can clearly see their necessity in light of the broken federal government and the corporations they represent.”
Des Moines, IA –On Wednesday Federal Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger sentenced Jessica Reznicek to 8 years in prison, followed by 3 years supervised probation, and a restitution of $3,198,512.70 paid to Energy Transfer LLC for the actions she took in 2016 to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline.
“I am saddened to be preparing for prison following today’s sentencing hearing. My spirit remains strong, however, as I feel held in love, support and prayer by so many near and far. Regardless of my sentence I am hopeful that movements to protect the water live on in the struggles against Line 3 and the Mountain Valley Pipelines.”
Jessica Reznicek
The judge sided with the Federal prosecutors and applied a domestic terrorism enhancement to Jessica’s case. The enhancement originated in the Bush era Patriot Act, which expanded the definition of terrorism to cover “domestic,” as opposed to international, terrorism. Theprosecutor requested the enhancement claiming that Jessica’s acts of resistance were “violent”, “dangerous”, and sought to “intimidate the government”. The judge decided that this argument provided enough evidence to substantiate the enhancement, saying it was necessary to discourage others from taking similar actions.
The enhancement increases Jessica’s sentence, but also has far reaching implications for broader social justice movements. This use of this enhancement interprets non-violent actions that challenge corporate profit as acts of terror against the government.
On today’s decision one of Jessica’s attorneys Bill Quigley stated, “Unfortunately, actions to protect our human right to water were found to be less important than the profit and property of corporations which are destroying our lands and waters. For a country which was founded by the rebellion of the Boston Tea Party this is extremely disappointing. But the community of resistance will no doubt carry on. And history will judge if Jessica Reznicek is a criminal or a prophet. Many of us are betting she’s a prophet.”
In her statement to the court Jessica highlighted how the water system for her hometown of Des Moines is on the verge of collapse. The city water department has admitted that both the Des Moines and Racoon rivers are so polluted and low that in the upcoming weeks they might not be able to continue to use them to supply the capital with drinking water. Meanwhile “victim” in this case Energy Transfer Partners and its subsidiaries are responsible for 313 reported spills since 2012 on liquid lines, 35 caused water contamination. In the last 5 years the company had more accidents harming people or the environment than any other operator.
Jessica will remain on house arrest until she has to self-report for her sentence and plans to file an appeal within the 14 day window allowed by the court.
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