This post is by Greg Sutherland, a Keystone XL Pledge of Resistance Volunteer.
When the march began, I was nervous. I had never done anything like this before, but by the time we reached the Houston office of TransCanada, the company trying to build the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, my nervousness had washed away. I was resolved and ready to be arrested for blocking the entrance to TransCanada’s office. When the police came for me, my voice was hoarse from chanting for President Obama to stop the pipeline.
I decided to risk arrest because I don’t want to leave my four grandchildren with a hellish world of climate disasters and resource wars. I hate that they might have to live in a much more dangerous, polluted and inhospitable world when they are my age. To protect the climate and usher in the future they deserve, we must collectively take on hundreds of tasks to transition to a clean energy economy in next five years. And stopping Keystone XL is one very concrete thing that we can do to protect the climate RIGHT NOW.
Will you help me stop the pipeline by joining the Keystone XL Pledge of Resistance?
The Keystone XL Pledge of Resistance is a project bringing together tens of thousands of people to risk arrest in peaceful civil disobedience, if necessary, to make it politically unfeasible for President Obama to approve the pipeline.
As for myself, I am organizing a Pledge of Resistance action in Atlanta because I want to demonstrate to the President that people all across the country are commited to fighting climate change, even in conservative Georgia, where I live. Hundreds of other volunteers are organizing actions in every part of the country. We need your help to make the actions as big as possible. If we do that, we can demand the President represent the people and not the corporations and reject Keystone XL.
The bonds I formed with the twelve others arrested in Houston are some of the most powerful I’ve ever made in such a short time. Those bonds, along with the tens of thousands coming together in the Pledge of Resistance, have made clear to me that we are finally ready to take the urgent stand necessary to protect the climate. If we take that stand, President Obama will not be able to ignore us.
Join the Pledge of Resistance to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.