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.

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“We won. You won.” Those were Bill McKibben’s first words after the Obama administration’s announcement yesterday that it would delay a decision on the Canada-to-Texas KeystoneXL oil pipeline until after the 2012 election. His next words, however, were slightly less uplifting: “Not completely.”

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.

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“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.

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A lot has happened since 65 people (myself included) were arrested in front of the White House on August 20th during a protest of the planned 1,400-mile pipeline carrying tar sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. For starters, over a thousand more people from across the country were arrested in the subsequent two weeks, including big names like NASA climate scientist James Hansen, author Naomi Klein and actress Daryl Hannah. Support from high places soon followed, from the New York Times editorial page to nine Nobel Peace Laureates.

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.

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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.

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• 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.

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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.

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