Standing with Future Generations - Join Us!
Standing with Future Generations - Join Us!
SEHN, December 2015
As you read this, dear friend of SEHN, something remarkable is happening in a small town in Iowa. A lawyer and witnesses will present testimony opposing a large, crude oil pipeline that will cross the Heartland.
What makes these witnesses so unique is that they will be representing future generations.
The Science & Environmental Health Network was granted intervener status in the hearing before the Iowa Utility Board that will determine whether Dakota Access, a subsidiary of Texas-based Energy Transfer Crude Oil Company, receives a permit to site a Bakken crude oil pipeline from North Dakota, across South Dakota and Iowa to Illinois.
Why is this such a big deal?
The Bakken Pipeline rivals the Keystone XL pipeline and is designed to replace Keystone. If the Bakken pipeline is permitted, all that it will require to carry tar sands from Canada is a short connector from northern North Dakota over the border.
We're engaging in this struggle in Iowa but it is one that has ramifications far beyond the state. It is our best hope to keep some of the dirtiest oil in the ground and to protect future generations from contaminated water and a chaotic climate.
While some organizations have brought court cases on behalf of children in climate change lawsuits, this is the first time that future generations have been represented in an executive branch hearing. This is the kind of groundbreaking, system changing work that defines SEHN.
But we need your help. SEHN works with communities and coalitions through the exchange of new ideas and points of intervention rather than currency. Every dollar that you give will go to amplify the voice of future generations and help SEHN resist dirty fossil fuels from destroying the future.
Will you stand with us?
As you well know, the Bakken pipeline is not the only environmental threat to our health and wellbeing as individuals and communities. Every day we at SEHN are working to bring new scientific and legal strategies to bear in struggles for environmental health and economic justice and to develop new frameworks that will change the rules of the game.
- We're bringing together coalitions like the Bakken Pipeline Resistance Coalition, a collection of diverse interests all committed to stopping environmentally disastrous development in their community.
- We're working with a coalition of groups in the upper Midwest to determine how to use innovative scientific tools like biomonitoring to combat toxic agricultural pesticide use.
- Our climate change program is participating in local efforts to foster more dialogue about the impacts from energy extraction, as well as working with local organizers to block the expansion of dirty energy extraction in Utah. (Did you know that the U.S. has its own tar sands project? Environmentalists stopped the Keystone pipeline, which would have carried Canadian tar sand oil into the U.S. Now we have to stop the mining of tar sands in Utah.)
- And we're building on the tremendous work of the 2014 Women's Congress by bringing together study groups of committed community activists like yourself to test the "Women's Congress Companion for Political Change", a community guide to legal principles that reframe the debates on mining, fracking, drilling, and pipelines.
Please. We need your financial contributions to continue doing this work. Whatever you have to share with us, will be used wisely on behalf of environmental sanity.
Thank you. Thank you for two things. Thank you for what you are doing in your own sphere that we might not know about. There is so much good work going on and we know that you are part of it.
And thank you, thank you, thank you for the support and dollars you can share with us.
For future generations,
Carolyn Raffensperger Executive Director
Thanks for sharing in this challenging, important work. If you prefer to send a check, please send it to:
SEHN, PO Box 50733, Eugene, OR 97405.
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