How blind are those who refuse to see? Or perhaps their blindness is
due to the shine off the piles of gold.
The best definition of Bully that I can think of is: One whose bottom
line is everything you have.
Capitalism, especially what is now Corporate Capitalism must be set
aside for a more equitable system.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/25/16, S. Kashdan <skashdan@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Northwest Tribes Band Together to Stop Oil-by-Rail
By Ralph Schwartz
YES! Magazine Sunday, July 24, 2016
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36952-northwest-tribes-band-together-to-stop-oil-by-rail?tmpl=component&print=1
There's no such thing as a good place for an oil-train derailment, but this
year's June 3 spill outside Mosier, Oregon, could have been worse if the 16
oil cars had derailed and caught fire even a few hundred feet in either
direction. The derailment was just far enough away from populated areas,
including a nearby school and mobile home park, that no injuries resulted,
and the amount of oil that spilled into the river was limited. If it had
happened another mile-and-a-half down the tracks, the damaged tank cars
would have tumbled directly into the Columbia river during the peak of the
spring Chinook salmon run.
"This derailment right along the Columbia River is... a reminder that oil
trains mean an ever-present risk of an oil spill into our waterways,
threatening fisheries and livelihoods for Quinault Indian Nation members and
our neighbors in Grays Harbor," Quinault Vice President Tyson Johnston
said.
There are massive oil train ports planned for Anacortes, Grays Harbor, and
Vancouver in Washington state. They have not yet broken ground, but if they
ever do get built, the indigenous tribes that need healthy salmon to sustain
their communities got a preview of what could go wrong.
The communities that live and fish along the Northwest's most important
waterways have been working to bring these proposals to a screeching halt.
"Proposed crude oil terminals in Grays Harbor are a threat to our treaty
rights to fish in our usual and accustomed places," Johnston said. "Our
safety, way of life, and economic future is on the line."
The 96-car train that derailed in Mosier was headed to Tacoma from the
Bakken oil fields. Bakken oil train traffic to the West Coast spiked from
practically nothing in 2012 to almost 200,000 barrels a day at the start of
2015, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
While production in the Bakken fields is off its late-2014 peak, terminal
developers are betting on the long-term prospects of oil pumped from the
Bakken region and from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. If the proposed
facilities for Anacortes, Grays Harbor, and Vancouver ever operate at full
capacity, that 2014 peak for crude oil by rail will look like a drop in the
bucket:
* In Grays Harbor, Westway Terminal's proposed expansion would outfit the
company's port to move crude oil from trains onto ships. The crude oil
terminal could bring in nearly five trains per week to the harbor.
* In Vancouver, the proposed Tesoro-Savage oil terminal would be the largest
rail-to-vessel shipping facility in North America. It would bring in another
36 loaded trains per week, or about 360,000 barrels of oil.
* In Anacortes, the Shell Refinery aims to build out a rail loop and
additional unloading equipment in order to facilitate six more oil trains
weekly than it already handles.
Significantly, weeks before the Mosier derailment, the Lummi Nation in the
coastal northwest corner of Washington won a years-long battle against a
massive coal export terminal proposed for the tribe's shores.
Gateway Pacific Terminal (GPT), a project of marine shipping corporation SSA
Marine, would have been the largest coal export facility anywhere in North
America, large enough to handle 48 million metric tons of coal annually. It
had the backing of two major players in the Powder River Basin coal
industry, Peabody Energy and Cloud Peak Energy, to build a 3,000-foot-long
wharf extending into waters fished by generations of Lummis.
Burning the coal proposed to ship through GPT would have produced 96 million
metric tons per year of carbon pollution. Even the unburned coal at the
terminal would have posed spill risks to the local aquatic ecosystem, an
important economic, cultural, and spiritual resource for the Lummi Nation.
An environmental impact analysis, begun in February 2014, had been
slow-moving and its outcome uncertain.
How did the Lummi stop Gateway Pacific? They took a bold and unusual stand
in January 2015, when they asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to protect
their right to fish their "usual and accustomed grounds and stations," as
written in the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott. Treaties are powerful legal
instruments with the force of federal law and the potential to preempt
inconsistent state laws. If successful, they would win a decisive,
precedent-setting victory. A failure would open the door to weakening treaty
protections.
After 16 months of increasingly well-organized and visible public opposition
to the project, the Corps decided the tribe was right: The coal port would
impede tribal fishing practices. The Corps rejected SSA Marine's application
to build the pier.
The victory resounded throughout the region, increasing support and
bolstering the resolve of other tribes embroiled in their own energy
development battles.
"Today was a victory not only for tribes but for everyone in the Salish Sea.
I hope we are reversing a 100-year trend of a pollution-based economy, one
victory at a time," Brian Cladoosby, chairman of the Swinomish Indian Tribal
Community and president of the National Congress of American Indians, told
the Seattle Times.
"The Corps' decision is a victory for the Yakama Nation and all other treaty
tribes," JoDe Goudy, chairman of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the
Yakama Nation, said in a written statement. "The fight, however, is not
over. The threat of the coal movement remains, and the Yakama Nation will
not abide these threats."
Sure enough, the Yakama have joined with the Confederated Tribes of the
Umatilla Indian Reservation and others to protest the massive Tesoro-Savage
oil-by-rail terminal proposed for the banks of the Columbia River in
Vancouver. In contrast to the Lummi, the Umatilla and Yakama are willing to
let the environmental review process play out before taking overt action to
protect their treaty rights.
In 2014, both tribes asked that the environmental impact statement (EIS) for
the Tesoro-Savage project consider impacts to treaty rights. However, as the
Lummi fight illustrated, treaty rights may be considered separately from the
EIS, which remains the centerpiece of any major environmental review and is
intended to outline all the potential environmental problems and ways to
handle them.
Still, Yakama officials clearly rejected the notion that impacts to their
land and treaty rights could be mitigated. "To be clear," wrote Chairman of
the Yakama Nation Tribal Council Harry Smiskin in a 2014 comment to the
Corps, "Yakama Nation will not negotiate nor agree to so-called mitigation
for any violations or actions resulting in the diminishment or destruction
of its treaty-reserved rights."
Cladoosby, the Swinomish chairman, struck the same note in a statement to
the media earlier this year about the GPT: "There is no mitigation. We have
to make a stand before this very destructive poison they want to introduce
into our backyards. We say no."
In another tactic, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community sued BNSF Railways
in April last year for violating a contract between the tribe and the
railroad that limited the length of trains that passed through the Swinomish
reservation to 25 cars each and required the tribe be informed of changes in
cargo. The Swinomish had learned from the media that BNSF was delivering
crude oil on trains with 100 cars or more to the Shell and Tesoro refineries
in Anacortes.
The tribe won an early decision in the lawsuit when a federal judge denied a
BNSF motion to bring the issue before the Surface Transportation Board. The
case is properly heard in federal court, the tribe said in a September 2015
statement, "The STB has no jurisdiction over tribal rights."
It's worth noting the basis for the Corps' decision in the Lummi case. While
the Lummi Nation was prompted to make its request to the Corps by a vessel
traffic study that concluded the coal port would bring 487 more vessels
through the tribe's fishing grounds, the Corps did not rely on busier
vessel-traffic lanes through Lummi fishing territory to make its decision.
Instead, it referred only to the disruption of fishing that would occur at
the dock site itself--about 122 acres total.
While the main area of concern for the Yakama and Umatilla is away from the
proposed Vancouver oil terminal site--their main fishing grounds are the 150
miles of the Columbia River between Bonneville Dam and McNary Dam--the
Quinault Indian Nation fishes out of Grays Harbor, where it has notable
success fishing where ships would dock at the Westway expansion.
That fishing spot would be disrupted. The completed draft EIS for Westway
describes how tribal fishers would need to either work around the increased
number of vessels or fish elsewhere. But here's an important legal point: In
the Lummi Nation's case, the Corps' Colonel Buck found that just going
somewhere else to fish, as long as the tribe could hit its catch quota, was
not an adequate protection of treaty rights.
Tribes are not confronting fossil-fuel projects alone and in a vacuum. They
have been sharing resources and lobbying together in Washington, D.C., to
oppose the many fossil-fuel projects proposed for the Pacific Northwest.
"Working with the Lummis and seeing what they've gone through with the Army
Corps of Engineers was definitely helpful, because it sets a precedent,"
said Johnston, the Quinault Indian Nation vice president.
Unlike the Lummi, the Quinault approach has been to focus the fight at the
state rather than the federal level. Even with the different approach, the
Quinault tribe believes the Lummi decision "bolsters and strengthens the
position we have," Johnston said.
Could the Lummi Nation's assertion of treaty rights be a magic bullet other
tribes could use to stop fossil-fuel projects?
"There's no direct answer to the question, except--maybe," said Robert
Anderson, director of the Native American Law Center at the University of
Washington School of Law. "The Cherry Point decision rested on evidence of
direct interference with Lummi fishing by increased shipping traffic (at the
terminal). The less direct the connection between such interference and
environmental harm, the more difficult any case will be."
For the Lummi, fishing is such an integral part of their identity that they
decided to sidestep the long, drawn-out EIS process and pull out all the
stops to save their way of life. The Quinault, Umatilla, and Yakama appear
willing to see the environmental reviews for Tesoro-Savage and Westway
through to the end.
If this approach seems more conservative, keep in mind the Lummi strategy
was risky. If the decision had been appealed in federal court, a judge
somewhere down the line could reverse the Corps' ruling and, by doing so,
unravel some of the treaty protections the Lummi Nation and other tribes
rely on for their survival.
"I definitely think there should be concern from all tribal leadership
because we don't know what the results would be if it went to a higher
court," reflected Lummi council member Jeremiah "Jay" Julius a few days
before the Corps released its decision.
But even a setback for treaty rights through a decision by, say, a
conservative U.S. Supreme Court wouldn't be daunting for the Lummi Nation,
said Darrell Hillaire, a former tribal chairman. "You think that this one
issue is going to extinguish that belief? No, it's going to strengthen us."
Like other tribal members interviewed for this article, Hillaire takes a
long view, both when looking forward and looking back. He pointed out that
White settlers thought they might eradicate Lummi members after the
introduction of alcohol and smallpox, or force them to assimilate after
sending Lummi children to boarding schools where they couldn't learn their
own language. Hillaire said Lummi believe they are survivors.
The Lummi Nation showed remarkable unity in its opposition to the terminal,
which helped members get through the long fight. Likewise, other tribes are
united in opposition to fossil fuel projects across the region. Whatever the
end game might be for tribes such as the Yakama and Swinomish, there's a
sense that the tide is turning in their favor. Hillaire sees the current
times as empowering for tribes.
"What we have now is an emergence," he said. "Not just Lummi, but there are
a lot of First Nations people--their culture and their social structures,
their government itself... they're all emerging. I think they see that as a
continuation of their sacred responsibility."
RALPH SCHWARTZ worked for 13 years at newspapers in north-central and
northwest Washington. He covered the Gateway Pacific Terminal proposal for
The Bellingham Herald, which he left in November 2015. He now works as an
environmental consultant and freelance writer, and lives in Bellingham.
RELATED STORIES
Oil on the Tracks: Pacific Northwest Rises for Rail Safety
By Martha Baskin, Truthout | Report
Oil Train Civil Disobedience Case Puts Climate Destruction on Trial, a First
in the US
By Martha Baskin, Truthout | Report
Oil Train Regulations Fail to Address Known Risks
By Justin Mikulka, DeSmogBlog | News Analysis
