Rail

Featured image: The blockade. This is the first time the Awá have initiated a protest of this kind on their own. © Survival International By Survival International Members of Brazil’s Awá tribe have blockaded a railroad owned by Vale mining company in the eastern Amazon. The company has moved to expand the railroad, but the Awá say the expansion will increase the number and size of trains which transport iron ore from the Carajás mine to the port of São Luis – and that this will make it harder for them to hunt for food. ...

Stopping Coal and Oil Trains Through Civil Disobedience: Stories of Courage on the Front Lines of Climate Change Saturday, April 23rd at 7pm Spokane Community College - Lair Student Center Free admission Featured speakers: Dillon Thomson - Deep Green Resistance Eugene Ken Ward - founder of the Climate Disobedience Center: http://www.climatedisobedience.org/ Jackie Minchew - Delta 5 member: http://delta5trial.org/ Matt Fuller - Shell NO direct action: http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/05/23/22269804/shellno-activists-have-been-attached-to-a-shell-arctic-vessels-anchor-chain-in-bellingham-since-last-night Event host - Direct Action Spokane

By Thomas Linzey / CELDF Four years ago, as we were leaving Spokane to help rural Pennsylvania communities stop frack injection wells and gas pipelines, this region’s environmental groups couldn’t stop talking about “stopping the coal trains.” After people in British Columbia - including NASA’s top climate scientist James Hansen - were arrested for blocking oil trains; and after people in Columbia County, Oregon have now proposed a countywide ban on new fossil fuel trains, one would think that both the Spokane City Council and the region’s environmental groups would have begun to take strong steps here to, well, actually stop the coal trains. ...

By Soumya Karlamangla / Los Angeles Times A 90-car train derailed and exploded in rural Alabama early Friday morning, spilling its crude oil cargo into the surrounding wetlands and igniting a fire so intense that officials said it will take 24 hours to burn out. No one was injured. The train was crossing a timber trestle above a wetland near Aliceville late Thursday night when 20 railcars and two of three locomotives derailed. Earlier reports said fewer cars had derailed. ...

By Generation Alpha Environmental activist group Generation Alpha has released a video of their confrontation with Aurizon CEO Lance Hockridge. The group’s Over Our Dead Bodies campaign has started targeting Aurizon over their crucial financial and infrastructure role in mining the Galilee Basin in Australia. The coal mining complex planned for the Galilee Basin is the biggest in the world, and will challenge the Tar Sands as the most damaging resource project on the planet. Mining the Galilee would produce 330 million tonnes of coal, enough to fill a train wrapped around the world one and half times. ...

Industrial civilization is killing the planet. It is, by its very nature, entirely dependent upon tearing & rending apart the fabric of the living world for the raw materials which sustain industrial society. As civilization fells ever more forests, blows apart ever more mountains, dams ever more rivers, vacuums ever more fisheries, drains ever more wetlands, plows ever more prairies, and replaces ever more of the natural world with concrete and fields growing food for solely human use, the bloody hands of empire must reach ever further afield to grasp for new pockets of wilderness to seize. ...

By Jorge Barrera / APTN First Nations leaders have discussed plans to launch country-wide economic disruptions by the middle of January if Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn’t agree to hunger-striking Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s demand for a treaty meeting, APTN National News has learned. During three days of meetings and teleconferences, chiefs from across the country discussed a plan setting Jan. 16 as the day to launch a campaign of indefinite economic disruptions, including railway and highway blockades, according to two chiefs who were involved in the talks who requested anonymity. ...

By Survival International A protest involving Earth’s most threatened tribe, the Awá, has forced the world’s largest iron ore mine to suspend operations along its main railway line. On Tuesday, hundreds of Indians including the Awá, took to the tracks of Vale’s Carajás railway to voice their opposition to Brazilian government plans that could weaken their land rights, if legalized. The demonstration follows months of anger surrounding a draft text called Directive 303, which prohibits the expansion of indigenous territories. ...

By Rising Tide Australia Activists entered the Hunter 8 Alliance compound at Rutherford before dawn today, erecting a wooden tripod to block access to the site, which is part of a Federally funded project to increase coal haulage capacity in the Hunter Valley. Activist Ned Haughton scaled the 10 metre high structure, where he remained for the next five and a half hours. Haughton has now been arrested, and will be charged with obstruction. ...

By Steve Lyttle / Charlotte Observer Six people were arrested Thursday morning in Catawba County after a group of protesters from Greenpeace and three other organizations blocked a train from entering Duke Energy’s steam-powered plant in Catawba County by chaining themselves to the tracks. The group aimed the protest at Duke Energy, for its use of coal-powered plants, and at technology giant Apple. Leaders of the action said they are protesting Apple because it is using Duke Energy power for the expansion of its data center at Maiden in Catawba County. ...