Editor’s Note From Rivera Sun
The student climate strike movement, Fridays For The Future, is back with 1,400 rallies in 80 countries. Over a million people participated, with close to 800,000 protesters in Berlin, alone. Other campaigns also mobilized this week, including direct actions to halt the Mountain Valley Pipeline and Line 3 Pipeline. A bit of good news happened, too: the PennEast Pipeline was cancelled after years of citizen-led opposition.
Meanwhile, a new climate justice campaign is taking the United Kingdom by storm. #InsulateBritain is shutting down roads and doing direct action to get the government to insulate all social housing by 2025, and all private housing by 2030. And, they’re not the only ones shutting down traffic – India’s farmers are back in action, blockading the main roads to thwart the continued injustices of the new agricultural laws. Forest defenders in Humboldt County, California, are blocking logging roads to halt the logging of old-growth redwoods. Immigration activists blocked the Golden Gate Bridge with a multi-vehicle shut-down demanding massive reform of the immigration system.
Canada marked its first National Day of Truth and Reconciliation aimed at addressing the pain of stolen Indigenous children forced to attend residential schools. With the uncovering of mass graves at Kamloops and other residential schools, thousands of people gathered locally to march, mourn, hold ceremonies, and follow First Nation leadership in acknowledging the injustice. Settler-colonialism is an on-going process, however. On the same day, First Nation land defenders were met with excessive use of force by the police at the Wet’suwet’en blockade of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which the hereditary chiefs have not granted permission to be built on unceded territory.
Taking the “street heat” to the powerholders’ doorstep, an activist flotilla protested at the yacht Sen. Manchin lives on in DC. Meanwhile, in California, farmworkers seeking voting rights marched along a route highlighting the luxuries of Governor Newsom from an expensive restaurant he went to in violation of pandemic lockdowns to his boutique winery.
There’s a number of hopeful surges of resistance this week: Berlin voted to take back 240,000 apartments from corporate landlords. In Liverpool, 3,000 people marched against a weapons fair. An entire high school sports team walked out on a game when a teammate was faced with racist discrimination. And, as people across the United States took action for affordable health care, a group that abolishes medical debt announced that they have cancelled $5 billion for people in the last ten years. People are standing up for the rights, helping one another, and drawing a (nonviolent) line in the sand to stop the abuses of people and planet. It’s heartening.
In solidarity,
Rivera Sun
Photo Credit: Student climate strike in Berlin with Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.
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