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Daryl Hannah & Eleanor Fairchild (Photo by Tar Sands Blockade)
On the eleventh day of action against TransCanada’s demolition of forest, land and family farm property in East Texas, actress Daryl Hannah joined Eleanor Fairchild to defend her farm from the heavy machinery TransCanada is using to prepare the environment for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The two ran out and put their hands up in front of the machinery.
Fairchild, who the Tar Sands Blockade describes as a “feisty 78-year-old great-grandmother,” put her hands up in the air, along with Hannah, to say, “Stop!” While standing in the way of an excavator there to clear trees, she declared:
…Get off my land, period. And, I don’t want tar sands anywhere in the United States.
I am mad. This land is my land and it’s been our land since ’83. Our home is on it. They’re going to destroy the woods and also they could destroy the springs.
It is just devastating but it is also not good to have that tar sands anywhere in the United States. This is not just about my land. It’s about all of our country.
It needs to be stopped…
The two were arrested. Fairchild was charged with “trespassing” on her own land. Hannah was arrested for “trespassing” on Fairchild’s land. And the machinery continued into the night, clearing away trees and destroying the land for TransCanada’s tar sands pipeline.
According to an Environmental News Service report, Fairchild bought her property “when her husband retired as an oil industry geologist.” The pipeline “will permanently bisect the 300 acre ranch, which includes undeveloped wetland areas and natural springs producing over 400 gallons of fresh water per minute from her property.” So, Fairchild has not been in favor of the pipeline since she became aware of TransCanada’s plans years ago.
Fairchild has not signed a contract. The multinational corporation “expropriated her ranch through Texas eminent domain legal proceedings. She turned down the one-time settlement offered by the company.” TransCanada has also threatened land owners, who have changed their mind about turning over property to TransCanada for construction. The corporation faces multiple lawsuits for doing this to land owners.
Maggie, a young girl who had been sitting atop a 40-foot-pole, inspired Fairchild, who had participated in Tar Sands Action protests at the White House last year. She decided she may not be able to climb a pole but, if she could “raise hell by sitting down,” she was going to because “what this foreign corporation is doing just isn’t right.”
Hannah told KLTV she was there to peacefully protest the “unwanted advances of TransCanada on Eleanor Fairchild’s land.” She has “stated very clearly that she doesn’t want them there and they insist on bullying her and taking away her land through eminent domain.” They stood together in front of the excavator, held their hands up and then were arrested. A “private security guard hired by TransCanada” injured her wrist during the arrest.
The actress shared how she had traveled up and down the path, where TransCanada intends to build the pipeline. She has met a “lot of the farmers, ranchers and landowners who are fighting this battle.” She even “did a horseback ride with four chiefs of the Lacoda Rosebud in different Native American nations in North Dakota” and hopes that her action will have some impact on how Americans’ perceive the construction of this toxic pipeline.
VIDEO:
*For more, go to the Tar Sands Blockade’s website here.
21 Comments
You can beat the time but you can’t beat the ride. Obviously she and Hannah won’t be convicted of anything but their arrest served to get them out of the way of the people raping her land. Government of the rich, by the rich but only for the rich is here and if the response to Occupy didn’t convince you of that, this had better.
And they’ve retroactively charged and arrested Shannon Beebe with an archaic felony, “use of a criminal instrument,” for locking herself to a piece of TransCanada-leased excavating machinery on September 6th:
How is it that eminent domain can be used for a purely private venture. Wasn’t there a recent Supreme Court decision that stopped that practice?
LMAO! Money changes everything.
they charged the occupiers at the houston port with the same felony.
Thank you, David.
People Are Standing Up.
Gives me a sense of encouragement.
Tweeted.
Recommended.
Ah, that’s a fine Orwellian charge.
Good for Hannah — these things always get more visibility when a celebrity is involved.
I believe you’re referring to this case.
Permissable public use. Gotcha. Didn’t even require additional money. See, Margaret. The system works. (Ducks)
Silly Rabbit, rights are for the rich.
Leave it to Daryl to stand up for what’s right.
This extraordinary woman has been fighting for the disenfranchised and the planet for years. Who remembers her sitting in a tree for weeks in LA to protest the leveling of a community garden for buildings and a parking lot? That’s just one of many things she’s done. A child of privilege with a very wealthy stepfather, Daryl has always been on the side of the less fortunate. I can say from personal knowledge this is not a trivial matter to her.
If you ever met her, even when she was younger and a big star famed for her beauty, which was not insignificant, you couldn’t help but notice that her greatest beauty came from within.
Actually, the opposite. The Supremes validated taking the land for a business purpose.
There is actually some controversy in Texas about this pipeline-taking of private land, since the bulldozers showed up.
Up til then, it was “drill here drill now”(and ship it across any part of the US you want to).
But privateproperty is a sacred cow here, and it seems some folks might be having second thoughts. There is a lawsuit right now.
Meantime, of course, they go on bulldozing. Peggy had it just right in comment 1.
Though I suppose, if they have proceeded with the eminent domain action, the land might technically belong to them now, instead of to Fairchild. Not sure.
There was a lot of talk about passing state laws to overturn Kelo; only a few states got around to it, I think.
Oh crap. I may get brickbats virtually thrown at me, but I believe strongly in being absolutely factual about this sort of thing:
Let’s just leave out the part about Shannon Beebe being arrested “retroactively” on a felony charge. The word doesn’t mean much in this context.
Felonies are charged “retroactively,” in the sense that some time passes between the events that constitute the alleged crime and the charge being filed.
That generally means some investigation was done before the charge is filed.
In this case, maybe it means prosecutors were racking their brains and searching their old copies of the Penal Code to dig up a charge they could use…but it’s not retroactive. It’s just the way it works, as far as that goes.
That doesn’t mean I support charging this crime, or any crime. Just that I think throwing in words that don’t apply to the situation just makes us sound hysterical, and I hate that. Let’s leave it to the right-wingnuts, okay?
I checked 350.org and they and other Big Green Orgs are now standing in solidarity but not in person with the Blockaders. They have hitched their Green Wagons to a certain Donkey until after the election and then maybe they will join a real Grassroots Action.
So far we have four gutsy Ladies leading from the Front Line maybe the boys from Big Green will follow soon.
By far not her first arrest, and she walks the walk, too.
I always thought she and JFK, Jr. should have stayed together. Supposedly, Jackie did not want her son involved with an actress.
On the other hand, I am glad Hannah was not the one in that plane when it went down. (I wish no one had been.)
If you are referring to Kelo v. New London, that 2005 SCOTUS case allowed use of the purely governmental power of eminent domain for purposes of private development.
It was a 5-4 decision with–wait for it–the Justices nominated by Democrats, along with Justice Stevens, a Republican nominee who turned out to be a liberal Justice, and often swing vote Justice Kennedy forming the majority.
The other Republican nominees, Rehnquist, O’Connor, Scalia and Thomas dissented, calling the decision “Robin Hood in reverse,” robbing the poor to benefit the rich.
*drops jaw*
Less well-known is the aftermath of the case. Read it and weep.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
Oops. Sorry, I did not notice the link to the same wiki article in one of the posts above.
EdwardTeller did not choose the word “retroactively.” It was in the headline of article to which he linked us, which was an update to an earlier article about torture.
The earlier article had reported that Beebe was tortured, peppered sprayed and tasered at the scene, while she attempting to obstruct.
The update article uses the word “retroactively” in an attempt to convey that, while Beebe had not been charged with anything before she was tortured (as described in the earlier article), she had been stopped on the road and charged and arrested days after she had already been tortured.
Perhaps the author of the article could have substituted a different word in the term “‘retroactively’ charged” in the headline, but I don’t see a misstatement of any fact or see any extra word(s).
Make it more expensive to operate, start sabotaging their equipment every night!
I’ll bet President Frackenstein’s drone finger gets itchy when he sees stuff like this.
The bookend to these women’s brave and ongoing fight to prevent the tarsands project from bisecting their land and our country is an ongoing protest in Pakistan against the use of drones. You can go to commondreams.org to click on the headline and follow tweets from this historic march. Brave people are defying the odds against peace – it is most uplifting and will go on the entire weekend. Bravo, Codepink!