Street roots., December 02, 2016, Page 9, Image 9

Street Roots •
Dec. 2-8, 2016
News
Page 9
PHO TO S C O URTESY O F C LIM A TE DIRECT A C T IO N
Leonard Higgins after he closed a block valve Oct. 11 on
Spectra Energy Corp.’s Express pipeline in Montana.
Out o f options
(continued from page 8)
^■i he plot to stop the flow of Alberta Tar
I Sands oil was hatched among a group of
I friends arid fellow climate activists earlier
this year, not long after they had all
participated in the Break Free from Fossil Fuel
events in Anacortes, Wash.
All five of the Valve Turners live in Oregon
and Washington, and all had become
increasingly frustrated with the failure of the
U.S. government to take actions to steer the
country away from the impending climate
catastrophe.
The activists wanted to
" I a the Pacific
escalate
their actions.
Northwest, we've been
“In the Pacific Northwest,
whack-a-mole light«
we’ve been whack-a-mole fighting
sag the huge num ber
the huge number of proposals
of proposals fo r fossil for fossil fuel infrastructure, and
one at a time, stopping them,”
fu e l Infrastructure,
Higgins said, “but that doesn’t
and one at a tim e,
even start to get to the fact that
stopping them, hut
we need to begin ramping back
th a t doesn't even
on emissions.”
start to get to the fact
He said society’s overall
th a t we need to begin
complacency to the changing
climate is an example of the
ram p ing back on
bystander effect, famously
em issions."
demonstrated in Bibb Latané’s
LEONARD HIGGINS,
and John Darley’s 1969
C L IM A T E A C T IV IS T A N D V A L V E
TU R NER
experiment. The subject of that
experiment was told to fill out
paperwork in a waiting room. As they sat there,
the waiting room slowly began to fill with
smoke. Other people in the room had been told
to act as if nothing was wrong. In each trial,
the subject looked around the room to see if
anyone else was alarmed, and upon seeing
complacency, 90 percent of the time they did
nothing.
“It’s an emergency, and people are not
acting as though it is an emergency, and so
people don’t believe that there is one,” Higgins
said.
He and the Valve Turners hoped their
actions would alert others to the urgent need
to take action to roll back emissions.
“We are already in climate catastrophe, and
we are headed into much worse,” said
Klapstein, one of the two Valve Turners
deployed to Minnesota. “Our political system
has proved itself unwilling and unable to deal
Higgins is escorted from the site in handcuffs. He had shown the deputies the bolt cutters
and broken chains and explained to them what he had done.
with i t It’s utterly unresponsive.”
As an activist who’s been in the climate fight
for some time as a member of the Seattle
Raging Grannies, she said she feels she has
run out of legal options. As an older retired
person, she said it’s her obligation to put
herself and her body on the line.
“I don’t have a job to worry about anymore;
my kids are grown and independent,” she said.
“There is nothing more important to me than
trying to ensure there is some level of
habitability on this Earth for my children, all
children and all future generations. If we don’t
turn it around now, there won’t be future
generations. We have gone so far down the
road with climate change that civilization
collapse is very nearly inevitable at this point,
at some point in this century, and if we keep
going down this road, I think human extinction
becomes more and more probable. We will no
longer exist as a species, and I find that beyond
horrifying.”
Klapstein is facing felony charges punishable
by up to 20 years in prison for her part in the
pipeline shutdown.
The Valve Turners’ desperation is at the
core of their legal defense. Before they closed
the valves that morning, they already had a
plan for their criminal defense. They hope it
will set precedent for other activists.
Two law firms specializing in the
representation of nonviolent activists are
coordinating with the Climate Disobedience
Center and defense attorneys in each state to
put together a uniform necessity defense.
Cooper Brinson is an attorney with one of
those law firms, nonprofit Civil Liberties
Defense Center in Eugene, which has
represented more than 2,000 nonviolent,
disobedient protesters since it was founded 13
years ago. Its primary client is Ward, who is
facing up to 30 years in prison and $46,000 in
fines for shutting down the pipeline in
Washington.
Brinson explained there are three
components to qualifying for the necessity
defense:
First, the defendant must show they were
facing “serious, imminent danger or harm,” he
said. With a lineup of climate scientists and
other experts they hope to pull from for
testimony, they believe they can prove that
climate change poses that th reat
Second, they have to show that they believed
the action they took would avert that danger in
some capacity. «
Finally, the defendants must also show there
were no legal alternatives to address the harm.
“For the last 50 years,” he said, “people have
been asking nicely, and things have only gotten
worse.”
The Valve Turners say that if the pipes they
shut down remained off, it would put the U.S.
on track with emission reductions that former
NASA climate scientist James Hansen and
current NASA scientist Pushker Kharecha say
could help to avert climate change from leading
to an uninhabitable Earth.
Foster pointed out their recommendations
alone may not be enough because climate
change is an uncontrolled experiment
“But anything less than that amount is a
crime against this generation and all life to
come,” he said.
If the necessity defense gets
them off the hook, it will be the
first time it has worked in a
Visit ShutltDown.today to
climate activist Case in the U.S.
learn more about the Valve
The Climate Defense Project
Turners or to contribute to
a legal startup founded by a
their legal defense fund.
group of Harvard Law
graduates, is working with
Brinson’s firm on the Valve
Turners’ defense.
The Climate Disobedience Center, founded
by several people involved in the pipeline
shutdown, argues on its website that if the
necessity defense can be applied to climate
activists, it could be a powerful tool for change.
But it has only worked for a climate activist
once, in the United Kingdom in 2008.
However, activists have been found not guilty
for reason of necessity in the past for
protesting nuclear weapons, CIA recruitment
and apartheid.
The Valve Turners, who are all out on bail,
plan to take their cases to trial, coordinating
with climate activists in each jurisdiction to
hold events in conjunction with their court
appearances.
“We’ve been so careful not to appear as
alarmists, I think that we’ve gone too far in the
other direction,” Higgins said.
“It’s so clear that we’re losing our life
support system, and it’s really at a visceral
level of trying to break through that
complacency that so many of us have been
living in for these decades,” he said. “We don’t
have decades anymore.”
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