By Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

Earlier today, the County Commission of Mora County, located in Northeastern New Mexico, became the first county in the United States to pass an ordinance banning all oil and gas extraction.

Drafted with assistance from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), the Mora County Community Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance establishes a local Bill of Rights – including a right to clean air and water, a right to a healthy environment, and the rights of nature – while prohibiting activities which would interfere with those rights, including oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” for shale gas.

By Alex Budd / Deep Green Resistance Redwood Coast

The Keystone XL Pipeline is without question the largest environmental issue we in North America face today. It’s not the largest in the sense that it is the most destructive, or the largest in terms of size. But it has been a definitive struggle for the movement; it has brought together a wide variety of groups, from mainstream liberals to radicals and indigenous peoples to fight against a single issue continuously for several years.

Firm will now go to state for approval of two wells

By Emery Cowan, The Durango Herald

The national debate about shale drilling and hydraulic facturing played out Tuesday in La Plata County Courthouse as county commissioners considered signing a memorandum of understanding with a Texas energy company that has plans to drill two exploratory shale-oil wells in the southwest part of the county.

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By Jordyn Dahl, The Durango Herald

For the first time, La Plata County could see horizontal shale drilling.

Swift Energy Co. has filed an exploratory drilling and spacing application for two units near Kline and Marvel – an area of the county that has not previously experienced heavy gas development.

One unit would encompass 643.4 acres, while the other would encompass 587.8 acres on privately owned land.

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In response to the Tar Sands Blockade call out for Solidarity on January 7th, radical groups and organizations from across the Colorado Front Range are joining forces on January 5th and 6th to raise donations and material support in the fight against the tar sands and industrial extraction. Deep Green Resistance, Denver Anarchist Black Cross, and other local groups are collaborating to organize Extraction Resistance: Solidarity with the Tar Sands Blockade & Unis’tot’en Camp.

By Alex Budd / Deep Green Resistance Cascadia

Wherever there has been oppression, there has been resistance.

Despite the narratives that are drilled and forced into our heads—narratives of the exceptionality and futility of resistance—the history of civilization is chalk full of individuals, groups, movements that stood in the face of subjugation and cruelty to fight for a better world.

Opponents say “the last thing we need is to destroy our public lands.”

From The Salt Lake Tribune:

Environmental groups filed a protest this week of a Bureau of Land Management plan to allocate more than 800,000 acres in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming for oil shale and tar sands development.

The Center for Biological Diversity, the Grand Canyon Trust, Living Rivers and the Sierra Club sent the protest Monday to BLM protest coordinator Brenda Hudgens-Williams.

By Alex Budd / Deep Green Resistance Cascadia

It is important to note that this analysis and perspective is not meant to be authoritative on, nor instructive towards the objectives, organization and operation of Agenda 21; those are always their own to determine, as they see fit. This is definitively an outsider’s perspective, gleaned from publicly available information, and is undoubtedly lacking insight in various ways.