A view of Alberta's tar sands, which were once covered by lush boreal forests

In a statement released this afternoon, President Obama rejected the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would have linked Canada’s tar sands to Texas’s refineries. Obama had already effectively rejected the pipeline in early November, when he put off a ruling until after the 2013 elections. But the fossil fuel lobby and their allies in Congress pushed through legislation in mid December that forced the president to make a decision within 60 days. The White House seems to have taken such bullying as an opportunity to reiterate its earlier point: a decision will not be made this year.

While environmentalists should be excited that their efforts played a clear role in making the pipeline a complex campaign issue, there is no indication that Obama won’t eventually allow a tar sands pipeline, if reelected. Congress gave the Obama administration a huge out by allowing him to  reject the pipeline on procedural grounds, which he more-or-less noted in his statement today:

“This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people,” Obama said. “I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my administration’s commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil.”

Had he been forced to reject the pipeline on the sole basis of environmental concerns, the news today might be very different. Obama can’t be seen as too anti-pipeline these days–even though it has been proven to be a jobs bust.

The 234 Congress members who voted to expedite the pipeline, however, won’t be so generous (or shortsighted) in the future, which is why tar sands activists have made them their next target. On January 24, the day after Congress returns to Washington, tar sands opponents will be converging on Capitol Hill and processing to the headquarters of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s #1 lobby, dressed as referees.

As organizer Bill McKibben explained in an email earlier this week:

We’re going to call penalties—forget facemasking, this is vote-buying. Forget unsportsmanlike conduct—this is undemocratic conduct.

This time we plan to get up close and personal with some of the worst folks on Capitol Hill. Not only will we be sending an unavoidable message (I don’t think a gaggle of refs is a common sight in DC), we also hope to make a media stir that will be a counterbalance to the flood of ads and propaganda unleashed by the industry over the past two weeks.

Warning: it won’t work right away. These guys have been having their way for so long that it won’t dawn on them quickly that the game is us. We’ll have to fight them all spring long to prevent Keystone, and to take away the billions in subsidies that they present each year to the oil industry (with our money). But if we’re going to take back our country we’ve got to start somewhere, and January 24 is the day.

For more information on the action visit 350.org.

As complex as this unraveling chain of events may seem, it’s not nature, but politicians–particularly those in Washington–who have made it so. Although they exhale the same amount of carbon dioxide as the average human being, theirs is just as potent and polluting as the gas bubbling out of that lake. The latest example of this can be seen in the Senate’s passage of a bill that requires the president to make a decision within 60 days on the Keystone XL pipeline–which would link Canada’s tar sands to Texas’s oil refineries or, more accurately, the dangerous melting of Arctic permafrost.

The bill is a rather duplicitous effort by Republicans to link an issue the president would prefer not to deal with (Keystone XL) to one that’s close to his heart: payroll tax breaks. As Grist explained, “They have nothing to do with tar sands. But the president wants them, so the House [and now the Senate] is taking them hostage and using them to bargain for the pipeline.”

What does this mean for Tar Sands Action, the campaign that raised the pipeline issue to a national level and pushed the president to initially delay a decision until after the election? It means the gears are churning among the organizers. They’ve been on a week-long retreat to figure out the next moves for this campaign–after a month of local and regional brainstorming–but were no doubt caught by surprise with the quick emergence and passage of this bill.

In an email to Tar Sands Action campaigners yesterday, Bill McKibben did his best to outline immediate steps to be taken:

Our hope — and what you should ask the President for when you write him — is that when he signs the bill he will say the obvious thing:

“Two months is not long enough to review the pipeline. The Canadians themselves have just delayed review of their tar sands pipelines over safety concerns, and we’ve just come through a year that set a record for billion-dollar climate-related disasters; I’m not going to do a rush job just to please the oil industry lobbyists. So this pipeline is dead.”

Since the State Department has already, in essence, said two months is not enough time, this should be straightforward.

We should know how it’s going to play out within 48 hours or so. We’re of course ready to fight like heck.

But for this weekend? If you haven’t gotten through to the White House, or you think you can round up some friends, you can send them a message here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments (the switchboard is now closed for the weekend) – and click here to spread the word on Facebook and Twitter.

Even if the president says the right thing, it seems inevitable that TSA will have to get back out on the streets. If discussions over the past month from the local level on up are any indication of what’s to come, possible courses of action include targeting Obama campaign centers as sites for protest and civil disobedience, starting divestment campaigns against the banks that finance the pipeline project, and occupying the pipeline’s endpoints in Texas and Alberta.

Washington may be far removed from the chain of events it’s facilitating up in the Arctic, but climate activists and the broad range of other folks opposed to this pipeline–including Nebraska farmers and Texas ranchers–are already catalyzing another chain of events that politicians will have a much harder time ignoring.

Environmental victories are so rare that apparently even environmentalists don’t quite know how to kick back and rejoice. At a rally in Trenton, New Jersey on Monday, discussion veered between joyous celebration of Friday’s announcement by the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) to indefinitely postpone a vote that would have paved the way for 20,000 natural gas wells in the region and serious preparation to one day block their construction through nonviolent direct action.

These activists can be excused, however, for mixing business with pleasure because even more rare than an environmental victory is one that’s complete and total. Much like the recent announcement by the Obama administration to delay a decision on the KeystoneXL pipeline that would transport tar sands oil from Canada to Texas, the DRBC vote delay was hardly an indictment of extreme carbon-based extraction that poisons water and the atmosphere. If anything, it’s a temporary roadblock to something government seems all too happy to allow.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie have already promised to vote “yes” for drilling in the Delaware River Basin–a region that provides drinking water to 15 million people. Corbett is no surprise because drilling–or fracking as it’s more commonly called–is already a common practice in Pennsylvania. New Jersey, on the other hand, does not have any natural gas deposits. But it does have Christie, who earned nearly $30,000 last year from selling his shares in a company whose clients include gas drilling operators.

The holdouts as of now are New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Delaware Governor Jack Markell–neither of whom are sure bets to stay that way. Both would apparently switch their vote if the right regulatory processes were put in place. Nevertheless, Markell’s decision to vote “no” came as a surprise, since it is believed that the Obama administration–DRBC’s fifth and final voting member–was pushing the Delaware governor to vote “yes” so that it wouldn’t have to and thereby tarnish its environmental image.

Shrewd as that may sound, it’s not hard to believe given Obama’s tar sands pipeline non-decision. He has demonstrated a clear intention to avoid angering either side of the issue, as he enters campaign season. But it was only until recently that Obama realized he had to worry about environmentalists. As actor Marc Ruffalo told the crowd of several hundred gathered in front of Trenton’s Patriots Theater, “There’s no doubt that President Obama chose not to take this vote today because of what we did with the Keystone pipeline action in Washington D.C.”

Fittingly, perhaps, these two issues overlap in ways beyond just the activists and politicians involved. They represent desperate efforts to wring the planet of its remaining fossil fuels, which have until recently been cost prohibitive due to their inaccessibility. Fracking, which is short for hydraulic fracturing, is a process that requires mass amounts of water and chemicals to tap into natural gas reserves. Methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas, is usually released as a byproduct, effectively counterbalancing any benefits of switching from coal. In turn, the tar sands industry uses enormous amounts of fracked gas and water to extract the oil from its reserves, which are second only in size to Saudi Arabia. Given that every barrel of tar sands oil emits three times the amount of greenhouse gases as conventional oil, it’s no wonder NASA scientist James Hansen has warned that further development would be “game over” for the climate.

Furthermore, the tar sands and fracking processes are known to contaminate water, poison the air, and, in general, diminish the quality of life. For many, these environmental health factors are the most pressing. Craig Sauter–a resident of Dimock, Pensylvania, which has been called natural gas drilling’s ground zero–spoke of his troubles getting Cabot Oil & Gas, the company that drilled on his land, to pay for poisoning his well water with methane, arsenic, barium, and uranium. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has also refused to help despite Sauter’s exhaustive efforts to engage them. The state capitol police are now threatening to arrest him if he calls the DEP one more time.

Upon hearing this, the crowd chanted, “We will call for you.” Plans are also in the works to for a protest in Dimock at the end of the month, when Cabot takes away the drinking water tank they provided Sauter, before shirking any responsibility.

Another stirring account was rendered by Stephen Cleghorn–an organic farmer from Pennsylvania’s Jefferson County, whose land was leased for natural gas extraction without his knowing. He offered a heartfelt, if not wrenching, story of testifying before an impotent Department of Energy subcommittee on natural gas, while his wife was dying of cancer.

“I have a power in my soul now to enforce a moratorium of one if I have to,” he said. “But I don’t have to, because we are building a mighty movement to stop this.”

Immediately following these testimonials, the crowd marched to the New Jersey State Legislature, demanding they “ban fracking now.” Of course, New Jersey’s legislature was the first of any state in the country to ban fracking. It passed overwhelming, but Governor Christie vetoed it, proposing a one-year moratorium instead. Nevertheless, activists seem hopeful that the legislature might overturn Christie’s ruling. And why not? They’re starting to get the kind of momentum leaders were hoping for years ago.

In his address, Oscar-nominated director Josh Fox, whose 2010 documentary Gasland made fracking a national issue, reminded the crowd of one such leader, the recently imprisoned Tim DeChristopher.

“Three days ago, I got a call from a guy named Tim DeChristopher in a federal penitentiary on his 30th birthday… He says to me, ‘I feel really isolated in here. I feel one step behind everybody.’ And I said, ‘You were five steps ahead to begin with. And he was looking at all the things that have happened, the victory of the KeystoneXL. And his birthday happened to be the day that we won this [the fracking vote delay]. And he was looking at Occupy Wall Street. And he said, ‘I feel like we’re headed toward something much much bigger than this.’ And we are. He said, ‘You know that sound when you walk into the opera house and you hear all the violins and everybody tuning up? And everybody’s starting on a little bit of a different note, but they’re trying to get to the same note. All these strands are coming together. We’re fighting extreme energy. We’re fighting KeystoneXL. We’re fighting mountaintop removal. We’re fighting the banks that finance these things. So we’re tuning up this orchestra and we’re going to be here for a really long time.’”

In keeping with the mood, however, Fox made sure to follow up this feel-good sentiment with a hard-hitting call to action, saying, “When it comes time to blockade the well-sites, we’ll blockade the well-sites.” And before the day was over, the crowd retreated to a nearby Quaker meeting house, where nonviolent direct action trainings began–assuring that this movement, if the time has come to call it that, is not about to let any amount of success go to its head.

Since last week’s “victory” against the tar sands industry, the question circulating among this growing climate movement has been, “What to do next?” When 350.org polled its supporters, twice as many people voted to fight oil and gas fracking than for any other cause.

While it’s hard to prioritize any one threat to the climate, there is a certain pragmatism to the fracking issue. Much like the tar sands and the process to approve the KeystoneXL pipeline, there’s a hard deadline fast approaching to approve drilling in the Delaware River Basin. At least there was, until an announcement was made today by the Delaware River Basin Commission that Monday’s planned vote in Trenton would be postponed indefinitely.

In a message to the many people across New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey who were planning to rally outside the commission’s meeting, filmmaker Josh Fox–whose 2010 documentary Gasland made fracking a national issue–called the announcement “a big win,” as well as “a drop in the bucket.”

You stopped fracking in the Delaware River Basin for now.  You won this round.  It is not a complete victory but it is a huge victory.  You brought us back from the brink of total devastation.

BUT WE ARE STILL GOING TO RALLY IN TRENTON ON MONDAY!

Buses have been chartered, Amtrak tickets have been bought, hotels have been booked.  Great speakers will be there and we have a hugely important moment on our hands to push the momentum forward.

We have just had a major victory, that is true. But there is immense suffering happening and irreparable damage being done across Pennsylvania, across the US and across the world from fracking. New York state is in the process of holding crucial hearings on it’s drilling regulations and we must weigh in. We are not stopping now, we must redouble our efforts, encouraged by this significant and symbolic but momentary win. Stopping fracking in the Delaware River Basin, even just for this moment is huge but it is also a drop in the bucket. We must push ahead.

While it is no doubt encouraging to see the proliferation of these small, but significant victories, the bigger news is that organizers are realizing the pressure they are building cannot relent. Perhaps this a sign of a new activist logic taking hold in the occupy era.

This seems like an accurate read on the situation. On the positive side, as McKibben noted:

It’s important to understand how unlikely this victory is. Six months ago, almost no one outside the pipeline route even knew about Keystone. One month ago, a poll of “energy insiders” by National Journal found that “virtually all” expected easy approval of the pipeline by year’s end. As late as last week, CBC reported that TransCanada was moving huge quantities of pipe across the border and seizing land by eminent domain, certain that its permit would be granted. A done deal has come spectacularly undone.

Additionally, and perhaps more telling, TransCanada CEO Russ Girling thinks the delay will kill the pipeline:

“How long will those customers wait for Canadian crude oil to get to the marketplace before they sort of throw up their hands and say this is just never going to happen?” he asked.

On the less hopeful side of things, McKibben mentioned the possibility that Obama made the announcement because he merely “wanted us off the streets — and off his front lawn — until after the election, at which point the administration can approve the pipeline, alienating its supporters without electoral consequence.” While that may have been a factor, McKibben doesn’t seem to think it should matter.

The president should know that if this pipeline proposal somehow reemerges from the review process, we will use every tool at our disposal to keep it from ever being built; if there’s a lesson of the last few months, both in our work and in the Occupy encampments around the world, it’s that sometimes we have to put our bodies on the line.

We need to let the president and oil companies know that we’re ready to take action should they try to push this pipeline through in a couple of years. There’s a pledge to take nonviolent action against the pipeline up on the Tar Sands Action site; if you sign it, you’ll be the first to know about anything we need to do down the road.

It’s also important to note that TransCanada doesn’t have all its eggs in one basket. They are looking to build pipelines west from the tar sands to Canada’s Pacific coastline. Canadians, led in large part by indigenous peoples, are fighting to stop this and are in need of support.

At the same time, there are other battles on the climate front, including mountaintop-removal coal mining, deep-sea oil drilling, and fracking for gas and oil. None of these can be ignored, especially — as the International Energy Agency put it in new study — with the point of no return approaching in just five years.

Were such news to be announced any other time than on the heels of this Tar Sands victory or the growing Occupy Wall Street movement, it might be reason to give in to despair. But now, let’s hope it’s a clarion call.

“We don’t know how many people it takes to encircle the White House, but we’re about to find out,” Bill McKibben told a crowd of over 12,000 gathered in Lafayette Square on Sunday afternoon.

Such a prospect would have been hard to imagine eleven weeks earlier, when McKibben was standing in the same park with no more than a hundred people listening. It was the first day of what would become a two-week long campaign of mass civil disobedience targeting the planned construction of TransCanada’s 1,700-mile KeystoneXL oil pipeline from the tar sands of Northern Alberta to the refineries of the Texas Gulf Coast.

Shortly before leading a group of 65 people (including this author) into the DC jail system for the next two nights, McKibben told the small crowd, “We’ve already succeeded in nationalizing this fight in a way no one thought was possible. It’s not just a group of people along the pipeline route who are opposing this project anymore. People from all 50 states will be joining us over the coming weeks.”

He was right. Over 1,200 people from across the United States and Canada with all different kinds of backgrounds—farmers, ranchers, Gulf Coast residents, faith leaders, indigenous people and climate activists—came to put their bodies on the line and send a clear message to the president that tar sands oil is a death sentence for the planet. Many echoed the words of NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who said further development of the tar sands would be “game over for the planet.”

What no one could have expected on that day in August was the explosion of mass sustained protest that would soon follow in this country. Occupy Wall Street was only in the planning stages at that point, but its emergence weeks later helped foster the sense that change is only going to come through dedication and relentless pressure.

In the two months since the last tar sands protester was arrested, a series of calamitous events has befallen the pipeline and what seemed like a rubber-stamped process leading up to its construction. First a scandal emerged, detailing a cozy relationship between TransCanada and the State Department, the US Agency tasked with determining whether the pipeline is in the “national interest.” Uncovered emails show that the State Department allowed TransCanada to play a major role in choosing the firm that conducted the pipeline’s environmental impact study.

Then, last week, it was revealed that the State Department lost tens of thousands of public comments on the pipeline and wouldn’t say how the remaining will be handled. And finally, just days ago, the Washington Post did a little digging into the industry’s reports on job creation only to discover that the numbers are based on fabrication and fuzzy math.

There’s little doubt these trip-ups would have occurred—let alone surfaced—if not for the continued pressure of the tar sands organizers and protesters. Over the course of those two months, they protested at Obama campaign events, gained the support of the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and seven other Nobel Peace Laureates, and found allies in Congress and the Senate. Even celebrities like Robert Redford and Marc Ruffalo took up their cause.

Perhaps sensing the shift in winds and it’s potential blowback effect on the 2012 presidential elections, President Obama stepped forward last week and addressed the issue for the first time, saying that he would take full ownership for the final decision—something that only a day earlier his press secretary said would be made by the State Department. He also made it clear that he was not going to let the red herring that is the jobs versus the environment debate cloud his decision, adding, “I think folks in Nebraska, like all across the country, aren’t going to say to themselves, “We’ll take a few thousand jobs if it means that our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health…”

This was all just in time for Sunday’s Surround the White House action, which had the stated objective of showing the president that “he has the support needed to reject the pipeline – and that there will be real consequences if he doesn’t.” Tim DeChristopher, the imprisoned climate activist who may be more responsible than anyone for the recent radical shift toward civil disobedience within the environmental movement, said something similar in a message released last week. “There’s a deep instinctual sense of intimidation,” he wrote, “that comes from being completely surrounded, and that might be healthy for our president right now.”

Unfortunately, as rumor had it, the president was out golfing, perhaps to return home later in the day. In the meantime, McKibben dispatched a third of the crowd toward the south side of the White House. Throngs of people, young and old, paraded behind a snaking DIY-KeystoneXL pipeline that was hundreds of feet long. There were chants—such as “leave the tar sands in the soil, we don’t want your dirt oil”—and group sing-a longs. Most popular was a rendition of “Stand By Me” directed at Obama.

Within 40 minutes a text had been sent out by the organizers saying, “We are completely circling the White House!” It ended up taking far less than 12,000 people to do it. One organizer said there were enough people that the lines around the White House were “four deep.”

The stunt was over after an hour and everyone returned to the rally staging ground in Lafayette Square for series of concluding speeches. The general mood was uplifting, almost party-like. And while the celebration may have been warranted, there wasn’t a single speaker who didn’t hint at the prospect of challenges to come.

Earlier in the day, Canadian author Naomi Klein spoke with a hardened realism, saying “If this pipeline isn’t built, they’re going to build another one in my country across the Rockies and ship the oil to China. We must stop any pipeline that they try to build.” With a note of optimism, she added, “We have the tar sands surrounded, not just the White House.”

No one seemed more surprised by the momentum supporting such a statement than McKibben himself. In his closing remarks, he went back to that first day of action:

When they arrested that first bunch of us on August 20th and took us off to Central Cell Block in DC, where we spent three days, I was a little worried. I was worried about being in Central Cell Block—that’s about as much fun as it sounds like it might be—but I was more worried because the guys who were doing it, the police, said to us, ‘We’re going to try to deter other people from coming. We don’t want to deal with two weeks of people getting arrested and we figured if we treat you tough no one else will come.’

McKibben was suddenly interrupted by a whisper in his ear. “There goes the president’s motorcade,” he said, pointing toward H Street. The crowd immediately followed in unison: “Yes we can. Stop the pipeline.” McKibben settled them down, saying, “Alright, he’s heard us. We’ve given him his chance.” Then he returned to the story.

That day in the jail, the main thing I was worried about was that maybe they were right… I was only able to get out one little scrawled message, and I knew that people were worried about us in jail and the note just said, ‘We don’t need sympathy, we need company.’ The next day people showed up to get arrested and the next day and then all over the country and now this unbelievable crowd here today… We are in the middle of this game now. We are in this fight so deep and so hard that if we’re going to win it, we need you to go home today and fight like hell… This is the definition of a grassroots, wildflower movement. Nobody knew, nobody in that building [the White House] paid the slightest attention to the Keystone pipeline until August and now it is the biggest environmental and political flashpoint that they have to deal with and if we do our jobs, all of us right, then they are going to have to deal with it in the deepest way and that’s what we need. Damn it, we are going to win this thing if we do it right!

Only time will tell, of course, and that time is fast drawing close, with a decision that must be rendered by the president before the end of the year. There have been hints that the period may be extended, but the longer it takes, the more money it’s costing TransCanada. More importantly, though, the longer it takes, the more it plays into the newfound strength of protesters in this country.

Momentum kept rolling throughout September with protests popping up at Obama campaign events and an impressive day of civil disobedience where over 200 people were arrested on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. As attention continued to swirl around an issue that had only weeks prior been known by environmentalists and people living along the proposed pipeline route, cracks within government began to emerge.

By early October emails surfaced detailing a scandalous relationship between State Department employees and a former Hillary Clinton presidential campaign leader turned pipeline lobbyist. The New York Times called this discovery a “flouting of environmental law.” Not long thereafter, 20 members of Congress and three high-ranking senators expressed “serious concerns” about the pipeline and the State Department’s tainted approval process.

Continuing its reckless behavior, the State Department announced this week that it had lost tens of thousands of public comments on the pipeline and wouldn’t say how the remaining will be handled. Perhaps this level of inaction and the negative press that followed led President Obama to step forward on Tuesday and assume full ownership of the ultimate decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. He even went as far as to downplay the importance of jobs the pipeline might bring, saying, “I think folks in Nebraska, like all across the country, aren’t going to say to themselves, “We’ll take a few thousand jobs if it means that our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health …”

Author Bill McKibben, de-facto leader of the Tar Sands Action movement, called Obama’s first comments on the pipeline a major turning point:

Only a day ago the President’s press secretary said the State Department would make the call. Now, it’s very good to see the President taking full ownership of this decision and indicating that the environment will be the top priority going forward.

Of course, it’s not just people in Nebraska that are upset about this project. People from all 50 states were arrested in Washington this August protesting the pipeline and they will be coming back to the White House this Sunday because this pipeline is also a conduit for climate change.

Not only will they be coming back to the White House, but this time they’ll be encircling it. Over 4,000 people have signed up to show the president, as the organizers put it, that “he has the support needed to reject the pipeline – and that there will be real consequences if he doesn’t.”

According to Reuters, President Obama’s advisers are already worried that approval of the pipeline could cost him political support from Democrats in 2012.

Senior officials at the White House and Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters have fielded complaints from supporters who are unhappy about TransCanada Corp’s plan to build a massive pipeline to transport crude from Alberta to Texas, sources familiar with the situation said.

The concerns could contribute to a delay in the approval process for the Keystone XL pipeline just as the 2012 presidential campaign heats up.

This is a good sign, but obviously for anyone involved in the campaign, anything short of a rejection will be unacceptable. As environmental activist Tim DeChristopher noted in a letter from prison last week, there’s another way to look at Sunday’s action: “It’s an opportunity to meet the people you will be linking hands with in front of a bulldozer if Obama actually signs off on this misguided pipeline.”

If you can be in Washington DC on Sunday sign up to take part in this assuredly momentous day. Here are the details, according to the Tar Sands Action website:

We will meet at the center fountain of Lafayette Square Park. The rally begins at 2 PM, with a little bit of live music starting at 1:30.

The rally will be MC’d by Bill McKibben, featuring speakers from across the movement to stop the pipeline. After the rally, we’ll receive direction on how to get in to position around the White House. We have a team of over 100 monitors and marshals ready to make sure everything goes smoothly.

After we surround the White House, we’ll head back to the park, and hopefully wrap up just as the sun sets at 5:30.

One of the organizers of the event, President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, Dave Coles, is the first to climb the fence and be arrested. Maude Barlow (far left) was in the first wave over the fence and was led away by police.

Ever feel like you aren’t where you should be? It’s okay, we all do. Yet, sometimes, we feel, without a single doubt, we are in precisely the right place at precisely the right moment.

A meticulously-planned civil disobedience uprising demanding climate justice and the honoring of the rights of indigenous people, felt just like that. Even before the drums.

The right place is a hill which belonged to the Algonquin First Nation for centuries, yet is currently occupied by Canada’s capitol buildings and is known as Parliament Hill.

The right time is the blue sky morning of Monday, September 26th. Clayton Thomas-Muller, of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation and organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, opens a solidarity rally by thanking the Algonquin First Nation for use of their land.

Elder Terry McKay, of the Tsimshian Nation, leads the rally in prayer.

Speakers filled with passion and conviction against tar sands development and pipelines include First Nation Elders, climate activist leaders, and others. Unlike any other day on the hill, the air was thick with sounds of courage, respect, solidarity, strength, and hope. Seagulls circled overhead.

The first participant to cross over a 3-foot fence marked with a yellow ribbon that read “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS,” was David Coles, the President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union. “What blooming idiot came up with the idea of ‘ethical oil’?” Coles had rhetorically asked the crowd minutes before.

“Ethical oil” is a notion that first originated in mid-2010 from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration, whereby reliance on oil from Saudi Arabia is intrinsically unethical, due to the oppression of their women. And tar sands or “oil sands” as Harper prefers, is ethical, because Canadian women are less oppressed. Whether the carbon dioxide emissions from Saudi oil is more or less ethical than the carbon dioxide emissions from the dirtier-burning tar sands oil is left to the imagination.

Cree Nation Elder Roland Woodward escorted away by police

Coles is followed over the fence by Cree Nation Elder Roland Woodward, a community organizer born in a small town located on the banks of Alberta’s Athabasca River called Fort McMurray.

The water from his hometown’s river is considered essential for tar sands production. As a result, tailings ponds holding the toxic waste created by production are scattered alongside and often within hundreds of feet of the Athabasca. Before the outbreak of high cancer rates, the Cree would drink water directly from their river as they canoed.

Third over the fence was Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians.

“I’m doing it cause I love my grandkids,” Barlow had told the crowd earlier. “In my opinion, those crossing the line today are not breaking the law. The people breaking the law is the Harper government in that building behind us.”

Next across was Julie Burke, Chairperson of the Keepers of the Athabasca. Five years ago, Keepers of the Athabasca and its parent organization, Keepers of the Water, were formed by the Deh Cho First Nation Declaration, recognizing water as sacred and essential to life, with the duty to protect it an obligation shared by all people. Naively, the previous day, I had asked Burke how long the First Nations had been fighting to keep the the Athabasca River clean?

“Since forever,” she had replied.

While the initial wave of participants to cross over the fence were arrested immediately, subsequent waves were respectfully instructed by police to sit down until officers were available to arrest them.

The arrests and crossings continued for hours, as did the solidarity rally. Drum sounds, battle cries, indigenous song and dance, became the new pulse of the hill.

According to Article 32 of the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Harper is required to cooperate in good faith to obtain:

free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utilization or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources.

“We’ve been informed and we do not consent.” said Chief Jackie Thomas of the Saik’uz First Nation, to the crowd during the rally. Her Nation is one of five nations making up the Yinka Dene Alliance. Enbridge Pipeline offered to give the Alliance a 10-per-cent ownership stake in the proposed $5.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline, and the Alliance declined.

After hours in the full sun on a warm day, police simply quit arresting participants, effectively ending the action.

Up until that point, no matter how many were arrested, the number awaiting arrest continued to grow. Were participants extremely fast procreators, or was Earth itself experiencing a Darwinian adaptation allowing for the spontaneous generation of climate activists? Neither.

With each wave of participants climbing over the fence, the legal table set up by the Centennial Flame had received new enlistees wanting to also be on the “right” side of the fence.

The day before, Thomas-Muller said, “You can’t buy into tar sands oil, without buying into ecocide.”

Likewise, you can’t buy into “ethical oil,” without buying into the oppression of indigenous rights.

The drum beat sounds of the Ottawa Action were powerful, but the heartbeats of the warriors climbing that 3-foot fence were thunderous.

• In Ottawa, over 200 protesters objecting to the federal government’s enthusiastic support for Alberta’s tar sands and the Keystone pipeline XL were arrested Monday morning as they attempted to stage a sit-in in the House of Commons.

• Postal workers held rallies across the country on Tuesday to back legislation that would repeal a benefit-funding mandate they say lies behind the U.S. Postal Service’s financial woes.

• Bahraini clerics staged a protest sit-in on Monday over the recent mass arrests of women and minors by the Khalifa regime.

• Tens of thousands of French teachers and their supporters took to the streets Tuesday for a national strike and protests over education job cuts under President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government.

• In California, at least 100 prisoners at Calipatria’s Adminstrative Segregation Unit (ASU) and 50-100 prisoners at Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) resumed their hunger strike to protest conditions on Monday.

• Philippine Airlines suspended all its early flights Tuesday after some of its workers walked out of their jobs to protest the flag carrier’s plan to outsource airport services, catering and call-center operations.

• On Tuesday, Palestinian and Arab prisoners currently held in 23 prisons and detention camps in Israel and in the West Bank went on a hunger strike to protest the Israeli Prison Service’s (IPS) measures against them and their families.

• Bolivian President Evo Morales has halted construction on a road project through a national park and indigenous land following more than a month of protests.

• More than 2,000 “Moving Planet” clean-energy demonstrations took place on Saturday around the world – at UN Headquarters in New York, in all 50 U.S. states and in 175 countries.

• Tens of thousands of Greek public transport workers, teachers, civil servants and air traffic controllers walked out Thursday to protest the latest round of austerity measures announced the day before by the PASOK government of George Papandreou.

• Thousands of registered nurses, clad in bright red scrubs, marched across Oakland Thursday in what organizers called the largest nursing strike in U.S. history.

• Around 10,000 Moroccans demonstrated against the government in Casablanca on Sunday, threatening to boycott the upcoming elections.

• Thousands of students in Manila walked out of their classes to protest against the looming education budget cuts Friday.

• Around 5,000 teachers gathered outside the cabinet headquarters in Cairo on Saturday to demand better pay, vowing to pursue a strike that has crippled several schools around the country.

• Saudi activists in the eastern city of Qatif took to the streets on Friday to rally against police harassing female protesters and in support for the ongoing Bahraini revolution.

• Thousands of Palestinians flocked to Yasser Arafat Square in central Ramallah on Wednesday for a rally in support of the Palestinian bid for full United Nations membership.

• In Montreal, several hundred people gathered downtown Saturday to protest Premier Charest’s refusal to appoint public hearings into corruption in the construction industry.

• In Indonesia, six activists camped outside the Yogyakarta provincial legislature marked the third day of their hunger strike on Friday in protest against the detention of Tukijo, a farmer arrested for opposing an iron mine in Kulon Progo in Yogyakarta.

Although the White House has not yet made any official statement regarding the two-week Tar Sands Action that came to an end in Washington DC yesterday with a total of 1,252 arrests, President Obama’s decision to abandon a new air pollution rule on Friday spoke volumes. He affirmed his willingness to ignore the advice of his own government scientists in favor of business lobbyists—even at the expense of the environment and health of the American people.

How could the Tar Sands Action organizers leave Washington on that note? Sure, they had just completed the largest environmental civil disobedience in decades. But such an admirable feat would be pointless if all the energy that went in to pulling it off were allowed to dissipate. Thankfully, Bill McKibben announced that the movement will continue organizing, with a Phase Two announcement within 48 hours.

“Given yesterday’s baffling cave on ozone standards, the need for a fighting environmental movement has never been more clear,” said Bill McKibben, who spearheaded the protest. “That movement is being born right here in front of the White House and reverberating around the country.”

The only hint that’s being given so far comes with the advice, “Start by circling October 7th on your calendar.” That date would seem to suggest that the Tar Sands Action and this broader “fighting environmental movement” will be joining the occupation of Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington DC. What started as a protest to mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan and oppose American militarism abroad may be evolving into something far bigger—perhaps this so-called American Autumn some have talked about?

Stay tuned…

The Tar Sands Action that’s resulted in over 1,000 arrests in front of the White House for the better part of two weeks will be wrapping up Saturday with what’s expected to be the largest sit-in yet. A rally that’s been separately organized by the Sierra Club, 350.org and Interfaith Power and Light will also be taking place across the street in Lafayette Square Park. All this will be a capstone to what’s been an undeniably historic moment for climate activism, if not American activism in general.

There aren’t many issues that have inspired so many people to take such a bold stand. And as Bill McKibben has pointed out several times, it’s not just the usual suspects. Those risking arrest have included young and old, people from all walks of life and parts of the country—including actress Daryl Hannah and the nation’s top climate scientist James Hansen, who invoked science royalty as part of his reasoning when he told reporters “Einstein said to think and not act is a crime.”

Despite all this, the White House has yet to really comment on the action—even with the press corps pushing for answers, the New York Times running a favorable front page story, Google News giving the action top billing, and Al Gore offering his seal of approval. One has to ask what it will take for the president and his administration to take notice publicly. This silence may be due to the fact that the action is set to wrap up tomorrow. Without the prospect of continued pressure, the Obama administration may think it simply rode out the storm.

If so, that means the ball is still in the organizers’ court. But considering all they’ve managed to pull off, that isn’t a bad thing. It just means that starting Sunday the next phase of action had better begin.

Since the start of Saturday’s Tar Sands Action in Washington DC, 275 people have been arrested in front of the White House—with nearly 2,000 more expected to follow—as part of an effort to pressure the president into rejecting a 1,700-mile oil pipeline from Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast. Already, there are signs that it’s succeeding. The New York Times has published an editorial opposing the pipeline, and the nation’s largest environmental organizations—which rarely endorse protest action—are calling on President Obama to block it, saying, “There is not an inch of daylight between our policy position on the Keystone XL pipeline, and those of the protesters being arrested daily outside the White House.”

While this by no means guarantees a favorable decision—given that the oil industry usually gets its way—the odds are improving, as many more people across the nation, and not just along the route of the pipeline, know about the issue. However, this mounting pressure on Obama, completely absent a week ago, isn’t due to just the sheer number of arrests, or the fact that it’s now the largest civil disobedience protest in the history of the climate movement. Impressive as that may sound, we should all know by now, given the ongoing wars and myriad other injustices, that the size of a protest is not always the determining factor.

Having been a part of the first group to be arrested—an honor that quickly became a test of will and inner strength—I learned that power lies in the personal sacrifice that often accompanies risk. Everyone who took part in the training session the night before the launch of the action understood what it meant to be risking arrest—at least on a very factual level. It meant that we would be handcuffed, processed, charged, and released, likely all within a few hours. Tremendous efforts were made to ease the fears of those who were risking arrest for the first time, which was the majority of participants. We were told that the long tradition of civil disobedience in DC ensured a relatively smooth experience. Even so, we practiced getting arrested by role-playing in small groups.

While this certainly eased tensions, it also rubbed some people the wrong way. The point, after all, was not to normalize civil disobedience by making it seem routine, but to draw upon the power of its abnormality and selflessness. Having been arrested once before during a civil disobedience protest, which resulted in a rather unexpected and difficult night in jail, I knew that risking arrest really did carry a risk—one of discomfort, anxiety, and even fear. Rather than brush those feelings away, the organizers might have presented them as hurdles on the way to empowerment.

When my group found out that we would not be released within a few hours, but rather after two nights in jail, many started to wonder if the action would collapse. That certainly was what the police hoped by making an example of us. But at the same time as we tried to put ourselves in the shoes of those who would be risking arrest the next day, wondering whether our situation would scare them away, we found ourselves getting fired up. We realized that, if it were us, we wouldn’t be intimidated into silence or let the efforts of those who came before us go to waste.

Still, there was no way of knowing if the others would truly feel that way. So Bill McKibben, who gracefully took on the role of an imprisoned leader, sent a message of pointed inspiration with his one phone call: “We don’t need sympathy, we need company.” And then we waited.

We passed the time with jokes, intense conversation, singing, made-up games, recitations of famous quotes, and even a prophetic lecture on the promise of a no-growth/sustaining economy from James Gustave (Gus) Speth—the former dean of the Yale School of Forestry, among other incredible accomplishments. But the unforgiving conditions of jail were ever-present. Ultimately, one needs some sign of hope. We got that when word filtered in that the next group of protesters, 50 in total, were undeterred by our plight and showed up to get arrested.

With their bluff called, the police had no choice but to quickly release the second day’s protesters. We had already crowded their jail and there simply wasn’t enough room for more. Nevertheless, they saw to it that we, the first group, stayed in jail as along as possible, which ended up being about 52 hours. Strangely, our charges, which amounted to a simple traffic fine, seem to have been dropped perhaps even a day before our release, which we were granted with some sort of “time served” reprieve.

Such legal discrepancies and frustrations were of small consequence, though. Everyone agreed the sacrifice was worth it if it meant jump-starting a potentially powerful campaign—one that needs only the president’s acquiescence to prevent what NASA scientist James Hansen called “game over for the planet.”

Still, that sort of realization remains distant and uncertain. With only 10 days before the planned end of the action, organizers and participants will have to work hard to ensure that their efforts do not become normalized in the wake of this initial victory. The media may soon get bored with arrests that are a matter of routine. It will take some experimenting and ingenuity to keep attention on the protesters and pressure on Obama. Most of all, though, it will take real risk and real sacrifice. Without those, we can’t expect to force the kind of change that’s needed.

As Martin Luther King, whose national memorial ever-so-poignantly had its first public viewing on the day of our release, once said about nonviolent direct action, “It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

• Hundreds of thousands of Syrians defied a violent government crackdown Friday, insisting they will not be terrified into submission through bullets, mass arrests and more than four months of attacks by security forces. At least five people were killed, activists said.

• Alpha Natural Resources Inc. halted blasting operations on Coal River Mountain for hours Wednesday as it searched for two mountaintop removal mining protesters with the group Radical Action for Mountain People’s Survival who erected platforms in trees 80 feet above ground within 300 feet of a blasting site. They are now on day three of the tree sit.

• Russian police beat and arrested activists trying to save Khimki Forest from being destroyed by the controversial Moscow-St.Petersburg Motorway project.

• 1,000 cyclists took part in a rally on Wednesday night in Toronto to protest the City’s decision to remove a number of bike lanes.

• Union workers at the world’s top copper mine, Chile’s Escondida, started a 24-hour strike on Thursday over a series of wage contract demands that if not met could lead to an indefinite work stoppage.

• Several hundred protesters are rallying in Cairo and other cities, keeping pressure on Egypt’s military rulers and government to uproot and try former regime officials.

• Twenty students in Chile are on a hunger strike to support demands for improvements to the country’s education system.

• About a thousand Turks and Kurds demonstrated in central Istanbul on Thursday, calling for peace and an end to Turkey’s longstanding Kurdish problem.

• Greek taxi drivers blocked ports and airports on the popular tourist islands of Crete and Corfu on Thursday, in a strike to protest government plans to open up their trade to competition.

• 34 people were arrested during a march to the statehouse in Nairobi on Tuesday, where demonstrators attempted to petition the President to sack corrupt senior government officials.

• Hundreds of union and nonunion workers protested in front of the Grand Hyatt hotel in San Francisco on Thursday to protest the abuse of workers and a clause in their contract that takes away their right to go on strike. 80 people were cited for civil disobedience.

• Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets across Yemen on Sunday, demanding that a transitional presidential council be created to replace embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh and that his sons and relatives leave the country.

• Thousands of Greek demonstrators have begun gathering in front of the parliament in Athens at the start of a 48-hour general strike to protest against deep budget cuts demanded by international lenders as the price for more financial aid.

• Spain’s “indignant” activists began their last and longest protest march on Saturday, leaving from the northeastern city of Barcelona to cover 650 kilometres on their way to a major Madrid rally on July 24.

• Tens of thousands of people demonstrated around Morocco both for and against a proposed new constitution on Sunday, just a week before it is to be voted on in a referendum.

• About 3,000 people marched through downtown Montreal on Saturday to call for an end in Quebec to shale gas exploitation and a technique known as “fracking” that has triggered strong opposition from environmental groups.

• Thousands of people joined hands on Saturday across beaches from Florida to California to form a human chain to protest offshore oil drilling and promote clean energy.

• Police arrested 12 D.C. voting rights activists in front of the White House Saturday afternoon.

• Hamas prisoners being held in Israeli jails on Monday began a hunger strike after seven of their number were put in solitary confinement.

• Seoul National University student council members ended their 28-day sit-in against the university’s privatization plan on Sunday after 40 of 61 students voted to accept a tentative agreement between the council and the university.

• Russian police have arrested and charged up to 14 LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans) activists who were attempting to hold a demonstration in St Petersburg.

• Last Wednesday, Zimbabwe’s public workers began an indefinite strike to press the cash-strapped coalition government of President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai to more than double wages.