This land is sacred to the Apache, and they are fighting to save it

Native Americans want to protect Oak Flat, a sacred site 60 miles east of Phoenix, from a mining operation

As reported by the Washington Post.

As the article reports:

Kevin Allis, former chief executive of the National Congress of American Indians, the largest lobbying group for tribes in the country, said lawmakers, federal agency officials and private businesses often overlook that tribes are land-based people and that where they’re from has a “spiritual significance” that is “not transferrable.”

“Our ancestral traditions and customs are tied to special places that are unique to that community,” said Allis, who is also a tribal member of the Forest County Potawatomi Community in Wisconsin and now runs Thunderbird Strategic, a consulting firm for tribes. “You can’t move that somewhere else. You can’t say move Oak Flat to Utah, Chicago or Kansas and it have the same significance.”

“When you want to mine for copper or uranium or poke holes for gas, you’re going to destroy that community,” Allis said. “Any alteration is a permanent scar on that spot that is so sensitive and sacred to that tribal community.

“You destroy it, and it’s forever gone.”

[Emphasis added]

Last of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 is sentenced

MARK COLVILLE SENTENCED TO 21 MONTHS

On April 9, Mark Colville, (pictured), the last of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 to be sentenced for a collective act of civil disobedience at the Kings Bay Trident nuclear submarine base in Georgia on April 4, 2018, was ordered by Judge Lisa Godbey Wood to report to federal prison in 60 days to serve his sentence. He has already served about 15 months.

He also was ordered to share restitution of $33,503.51 with his co-defendants. He also received three years of supervised probation following prison. 

In case you missed it --- view Resistance on Film

Our program Resistance on Film, held in conjunction with the Goethe-Institut DC and the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, DC, can now be viewed on line and below.

Hear from filmmakers Roswitha Ziegler (33 Days of Utopia) and Will McGregor (The Beekeeper) and those who lived the stories; Rebecca Harms and Attila Dézsi (33 Days) and Katie Hayward (Beekeeper). 33 Days of Utopia tells the story of the 1980 Gorleben encampment in Germany, an effort to block a nuclear waste dump there, and the site's excavation 40 years later. The Beekeeper shows the lonely struggle of Hayward to stop her farm being siezed and torn down to make way for a new nuclear power plant in Wales. The latter was recently canceled. The former never happened either.

"This is environmental racism"

How a protest in a North Carolina farming town sparked a national movement.

As reported by the Washington Post.

HALEU IN PORTSMOUTH, OH? Nuclear weapons proliferation and other grave risks!

U.S. Department of Energy info. graphic on HALEU. For legible size, see link in web post.The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is poised to forego a more comprehensive National Environmental Policy Act review of American Centrifuge Plant/Centrus's scheme to generate High Assay Low Enriched Uranium in Portsmouth, OH, containing up to nearly 20% Uranium-235, considered weapons-grade. This HALEU "demonstration" is intended for use in so-called Small Modular Reactors or other "advanced" designs, by both the military and commercial nuclear power industry, both domestically and overseas. However, Tom Clements of Savannah River Site Watch alerted Ohio Nuclear Free Network legal counsel Terry Lodge of Toledo, who, along with 104 endorsing groups, has demanded NRC undertake a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, to address the scheme's grave proliferation, security, safety, health, and environmental risks.

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