Jerry O’Brien and Cat Ripley are two young heroes we should celebrate for bravely working to stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas.

At the protest in Victoria on October 22, Maude Barlow said to more than 3,500 people: “We have to stand in solidarity with struggles in other parts of this country and in other parts of the continent. A special shout out to the people who are sitting in trees, risking arrest, putting their lives on the line in Texas. We’ve been in touch with the people in Texas and they know this is happening today and they’re very excited and they send their love and solidarity from sitting in the trees high above those bulldozers – and they will not come down!”

Tar Sands Blockade reports, “Jerry O’Brien and Cat Ripley managed to sneak past the security perimeter in open defiance of TransCanada’s police repression. After one month of sustained resistance there are now a total of four blockaders in the trees despite TransCanada’s recent moves to build the toxic pipeline around them. Cat Ripley, 20, is no stranger to TransCanada’s toxic pipelines and helped stop one of their proposed Liquified Natural Gas pipelines outside Portland. ‘I’ve stopped pipelines before. I came out here two weeks ago to help stop TransCanada’s latest toxic pipeline,’ said Cat. ‘I look forward to going up into the trees in solidarity with everyone in the blockade.’ …Read Cat and Jerry’s story plus the email that Cat sent us at 4 am, here: http://tarsandsblockade.org/day32/.”

For Council of Canadians blogs in support of the blockade in Texas, please see http://canadians.org/blog/?s=%22tar+sands%22+%2B+%22texas%22.

www.canadians.org/pipelines

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Brent Patterson

Brent Patterson is a political activist, writer and the executive director of Peace Brigades International-Canada. He lives in Ottawa on the traditional, unceded and unsurrendered territories of the Algonquin...