@lovendures hoping you have a sump pump. Hoping you will be okay, and glad you get to enjoy the cooler weather.
I bought a sump pump ten years ago after a flood and am so glad we had it a few weeks ago when it rained nearly every day for ten days. If we hadn't been home or hadn't had a pump, we would have seen four feet of water in our basement. We will be installing an automatic sump pump with a back up in the future because I have no doubt that we will see worse down the road.
@lovendures A rollercoaster of weather is quite weird! And reminds me of how all of our lives have been up and down so often. Sigh.
I’m happy for your temperate 80s days bc those reprieves are so necessary. I see you in an oasis of temperance and envision your home and family’s protection ??
Monsoon in Tucson. My daughter in Tucson said it rained for two days. It was so nice. She said the birds had a party in her yard. Her yard is one of the few yards with real grass. She has sprinklers, and said after the yard is watered, birds come to get water from the sprinklers.
I also have grass and am sometimes conflicted about it. I know water is a precious resource. However I watch all the animals taking refuge in my yard and know it is important to them to have a little oasis where they can find water, shade and survival habitat.
I especially love a pair of owls who often call my trees home and will actually sit on my grass during the day when it is super hot. The grass lowers the temperature significantly. This is the first year I have seen owls sit on grass in broad daylight. They also play mind games with my 40 pound dog who will run annoyed back and forth between them as they hoot to each other.
@lovendures @elaineg I love these animal stories!
I needed this story today. Some 8 and 9 year old boys in a small Iowa town have been saving turtles all summer from getting squashed by cars. A small local paper picked it up and then the Washington Post covered it. These boys found turtles squashed on the road. Now they spend their days helping other turtles get across.
Reminds me of the movie, Stand by Me, of a bunch of boys having an adventure. May their love of animals remain.
Line 3 water protector news!
We really need to support these protectors. I will be keeping them front and center in my prayers and meditations. We MUST keep our precious water resources CLEAN!!
After five years of constant protests, the movement to Stop Line 3, a proposed pipeline in Canada and the Midwest, has been rapidly escalating in the last couple of months. Made up primarily of Indigenous organizers, tribal governments, and climate justice organizers, the group is dedicated to fighting against the Canadian multinational fossil fuel company Enbridge, which is building the pipeline. A supposed replacement of the existing Line 3—a crude oil pipeline which stretches from Alberta, Canada to northwest Wisconsin—the new, bigger Line 3 is Enbridge’s largest ever project. If constructed, it would cut through three different Indigenous reservations in Minnesota, including land that the Treaty of 1855 gave the Ojibwe people the right to use for hunting, fishing, and gathering wild rice.
The climate and Indigenous justice groups cite Indigenous sovereignty, land and water rights, treaty rights, climate change, the financial risk of investing in a dying industry, and the harmful impacts of construction and spills on both Indigenous communities and the environment all as reasons to put a halt to the pipeline’s construction. But the state police force and Enbridge itself have been responding aggressively to their actions. Just this past week, Minnesota law enforcement (to which Enbridge has paid a hefty sum of about $750,000 as of April in order to police Line 3 protesters) arrested seven elder women protesting the pipeline in Wadena County.
A former Green Party vice presidential candidate and activist who has been fighting the construction of the new Line 3 pipeline replacement for nearly a decade, Winona LaDuke has been appointed guardian ad litem for Shell River—which the completed pipeline would cross in five places—by both the 1855 Treaty Commission and her tribe.
Slate spoke with LaDuke about organizing on the frontlines of Stop Line 3 and about protesters’ demands for the Biden administration when it comes to climate justice and Indigenous rights. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Sofia Andrade: What’s it like to be on the frontlines protesting Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline right now?
Winona LaDuke: Here’s kind of how I’m describing it right now: This is the place where the wild things are. The place where rivers are clear. … It’s our place. Wild rice, it’s the only place in the world that grows it. And Enbridge wants to put the last tar sands pipeline through this. … It’s the last tar sands pipeline because everybody’s divesting. … It’s like the end of the tar sands era. And it’s this Canadian multinational that is running roughshod over northern states and the … people who live there, because we’re the people that live in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan where the Enbridge main line is. We’re the people here, and they’re running over us [and] a fifth of the world’s [fresh] water. And we’re saying, “it’s time to quit.” … [It’s] basically selling our human rights, our water, our political rights, everything, our land to a Canadian multinational. I think they’re crazy.
We’re gonna stand here and fight it out, man. I’ve been living on Shell River for the past two months. … I spent most of my life around Shell Lake, right, but this is a river that comes from the lake and the lake is pristine. It has the best wild rice. Now I’ve been living in the river and it’s the driest here in history, in known in history. The river is 50, 60 percent lower than it’s supposed to be. And [Minnesota] just gave 5 billion gallons of water to this Canadian multinational to [build] the last tar sands pipeline. Now that’s crazy. … They’re basically putting an entire ecosystem at risk so that they can make a buck. I mean this pipeline is worse than Keystone
More can be found at this link. Let me tell you, the water protectors are non to happy with Biden right now.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/07/line-3-protest-pipeline-biden.html
@lovendures My prayers join yours. Also please remember the women. https://www.fcnl.org/issues/native-americans
A good read to see what we face. My neck of the woods has abundant springs, rivers, creeks ...that has been misused and polluted and industry has done it for years. It has to stop.. our water is precious.. our water? is LIFE. This is why so many people in this area... myself included.. have auto-immune thyroid issues as well as other health problems like cancer and liver dysfunction.