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STEVENS POINT, WI — Recently, something wonderful happened. It all started about a year ago when Bruce Noble imagined a summit held to shed light on the black snake that is winding its way through our backyards, in the shadow of Keystone’s controversy. Enbridge is this black snake; it severs the state in two halves as it transports tar sand oil that has been extracted from the fragile boreal forests in Alberta, making Wisconsin “tarmageddon” when the barrels per day increase to over one million.
Many people are unaware of this and thus, with the help of Mary Beth Elliot and Carl Whiting from 350 Madison, as well as Elizabeth Ward from Sierra Club, this power team was able to make this idea come to a most magnificent fruition. Filled to capacity with concerned humans from all walks of life, we convened for a day in Madison, WI, complete with speakers from across the nation. Ed Fallon spoke of his Climate March Odyssey that took him from Los Angeles to New York as a means of protest against the pipelines in America.
Jane Kleeb from Bold Nebraska made the journey to bring the story of Keystone to the Midwest as a foreshadowing of what could be in Wisconsin with Enbridge’s expansion. One of the most renowned speakers of the evening was
Winona LaDuke. A Native American activist, author, and founder of Honor the Earth, Winona held a presence in the room that had the audience gripping to her every word. As she spoke of fracking as an act of rape upon Mother Earth, the personified attributes of the environment became a cathartic image of a living being in dire need of rescuing . . . a message that transcended throughout the entire summit.
As the environment and ourselves are one in the same, if Mother Earth dies, we too shall perish.
Cailie Kafura is President of 350 Stevens Point, a climate change activist group working to reduce the dangerous levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million.
