A News Brief from Doug Draper, Niagara At Large
Good news for those who believe in civil disobedience around issues like climate change and countries like Canada and Russia that want to go on screwing our climate around with more mining and drilling for tar sands crud.
Paul Ruzychi, a Niagara, Ontario native and Greenpeace activist, charged with piracy while in a Russian jail. He may finally be released on bail.
Paul Ruzycki, one of 30 Greenpeace activists and journalists on a boat called the Arctic Sunrise, arrested while protesting Russia’s interest in drilling for oil on waters in the Artic, has been released on bail, according to news from the CBC.
That means Paul may be home in Port Coblrone, Ontario in time for Christmas and let’s hope he meets with any members of the media willing to discuss what this Greenpeace mission was really all about. .What has been lost in mainstream media reports that have been more focused on treating this as another cop and robbers story is that Greenpeace was there, trying to draw more attention to relentlessly more drilling for oil – this time in an Arctic already melting from climate change – at a time when countless millions of us in regions all over the world are beginning too experience the severe impacts of climate change through drought, floods, loses of their homes, etc.
I mean here we are. More violent weather blow-outs in the Philippines and in Illinois and other mid-west communities, not to mention the floods, damaging winds, etc,, on both sides of the Canada/U.S. border over the past year alone, and we’ve still got these evangelical and ideological assholes in Canada and the United States, including Canada’s current prime minister Stephen Harper, denying that anything our proliferating emisisons of carbon gases into the atmosphere has anything to do with climate change.
That is where we are at. In Canada, we have a Harper government that goes to a global climate change summit in Warsaw, Polland this November and, in so many ways and words, tells the rest of the world; ‘Go fig yourselves. Canada is all about the tar sands.’
Canadians ought to feel ashamed to see Canada, once a leader on environmental and humanitarian matters, show so little heart on an issue like this. But how many of us ,s give a shit any more, just so long as Harper and company scrapes that tar crud out of the ground andkeeps our taxes down.
Having said all that, it is great that Paul Ruzycki may be home with his loving family by this Christmas. Hopefully, he might meet with some of us and make a statement that even the Sun and Metroland media organizations may print if it might finally dawns on them that this is not just another one of their cop stories, but has something to do with the future of this planet.
Let’s hope so. There are high stakes for our environment and for the future of our children and grandchildren, and we should get back to what Canada has always been at its best and aspire to somethingmuch higher than d Harper and his Tar Sand Party.
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