For 125 days anti-racist Black Lives Matter protests have been taking to the streets here in Portland demanding racial justice. These protests have been met with some of the most repressive measures by local police and federal agents in recent history.

Protesters have regularly been subject to massive, indiscriminate deployments of teargas, pepper spray, and other chemical munitions including toxic smoke grenades linked to cancer and kidney and liver damage. With no regard for health or safety, the federal government blatantly violated federal environmental law when it flooded Portland and the surrounding communities with an unprecedented amount of dangerous chemical weapons.

A broad coalition of environmental justice and civil rights advocates, including 350PDX, have filed a legal challenge against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today. The lawsuit cites the federal agency’s failure to analyze the potentially severe human health and environmental impacts before deploying chemical munitions against anti-racist protesters in Portland as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). We seek a court order forcing the DHS to halt their use of chemical munitions, including tear gas, until the DHS performs a thorough analysis of the health and environmental impacts of these chemicals, and makes this information available to the public. Read more here.

The broad coalition of environmental justice and public health organizations includes Neighbors for Clean Air, Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides, Cascadia Wildlands, 350PDX and Willamette Riverkeeper, and we are represented by the attorneys from ACLU of Oregon, Cascadia Wildlands, Willamette Riverkeeper and Markowitz Herbold.

350PDX has decided to get involved in this lawsuit for several reasons.

– We can’t have climate justice without racial justice. We will use every tool we have available to protect those fighting for Black lives and liberation.

– Protecting the right to protest. We believe in people power, and street protest is one of our best tools to bring about transformative change. In the coming months and years we will need protest more than ever, and we need to take a stand now to affirm that protesting is not terrorism, but is a right that needs protecting.

– Everyone has a right to know what the feds have been doing to protesters and to public and environmental health. The media backlash against the protests has relentlessly mischaracterized the protests as violent riots. The public deserves to know that the vast majority of the violence and escalation has come from law enforcement, including DHS’s chemical warfare. The public has a right to know the risks DHS has been taking with our health and environment in order to put down the protests for Black lives.

“We came out here dressed in T-shirts, using hula hoops and stuff — they started gassing us,” he said. “So we came back with respirators — they started shooting us. So we came back with vests — they started aiming for the head. So we started wearing helmets. And now they call us terrorists. Who’s escalating this? It’s not us.” – Mac Smiff, prominent Black activist in Portland

Our 350PDX Coalition Manager, Indi Namkoong, said:

“I’ve been on the ground facing tear gas and police brutality for months because racial justice and climate justice are faces of the same struggle for a just and livable future, one that as a young person of color I expect to be in all my life. The price of justice shouldn’t be further harm to public health and to the Black, Indigenous, and other people of color who are already out here fighting for their lives. Everyone has a right to know the impacts of the toxic chemicals we’re being subjected to by our government.”

What you can do

• Share our social media posts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) to get the word out and raise the temperature on this lawsuit.
• Have you been impacted from exposure to chemical munitions? Let teargas@350pdx.org know as it may be useful to hear and share more accounts of the impacts on local people.

Thank you,

Ashley, Chris, Chuck, Dineen, Indi, & Lucy – the 350PDX Staff

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Stop the Plunder of the Philippines! Defend Cordillera!

September 25, 2020

On this day of global climate action, ICHRP-US and 350PDX join in solidarity with the people of the Cordilleras in the fight against corporate plunder and attacks from President Duterte’s militarized government!

In a recent address to the United Nations, President Duterte boasted of the role of the Philippines in addressing the climate crisis vis a vis the Paris Climate Accord, as the Philippines is on the frontlines of increasing extreme weather events each year. Duterte’s remarks on the climate crisis serve as mere posturing, as Duterte has shown he will sell the abundance of natural resources in the Philippines and the ancestral lands of Indigenous people to multinational corporations for the sake of his own profit.

Included in Duterte’s selling of Philippine land is the Cordillera region. For a long time, multinational corporations and the Philipine military have ravaged the Cordilleras with destructive large-scale mining projects, dams, and other energy projects, which have resulted in devastating impacts on indigenous and the livelihood of small farmers. Indigenous peoples’ ancestral lands continue to be treated as a resource base for profit by the State and private corporations at the expense of their self-determination and human rights. Despite the Indigenous communities’ organized opposition against Chevron’s Kalinga Geothermal Project, Duterte has illegally forced this project through Executive Order 30 which threatens massive destruction of the Cordillera people’s land environment.

With the passage of Duterte’s Anti-Terror Law (ATL) in July 2020, the repressive and militarist rule of the Philippine government will only worsen the situation of Cordillera peoples and all land defenders in the Philippines. The ATL is a graveyard for activists and innocent civilians, and a serious threat to ancestral land and resources since it will pave the way for the full implementation of destructive projects like large-scale mining dams.

Despite documentation of state sanctioned violence, including the shooting of Chinese American Brandon Lee in August 2019, the US continues to enable these fascistic attacks by providing security assistance to the Duterte government. Since 2016, the US has given a total of 550 million dollars in military aid to the Philippines. The bullet that shot Brandon Lee and paralyzed him from the neck down, and the thousands of bullets that have murdered indigenous peoples fighting for their right to land and self-determination were paid for by US tax dollars.

As state fascism of the Duterte regime and development aggression intensifies amid COVID-19 global health crisis, the Filipino people have not relented in protection of the land and their communities. As environmental, land and climate defenders in the US it is our duty to unite in solidarity with land defenders in the Philippines in their struggle for self-determination and their right to land!

We call on the people of the US to support the Philippine Human Rights Act, and demand our legislators take a stand by suspending security assistance to the Philippines until such time as human rights violations by Philippine security forces cease and the responsible state forces are held accountable. Further, we demand foreign corporations like Chevron to withdraw from these destructive projects that continue without the consent of indigenous people.

Stop corporate plunder of the Philippines! Defend Cordillera! Support the Philippine Human Rights Act!

Endorse the Philippine Human Rights Act: humanrightsph.org
Join the to the global pact to Defend Cordillera: tinyurl.com/defendcordi

Advice for showing up to protest

*Note* This is advice specifically for attending protests that are likely to escalate with police violence, like many of the Black Lives Matter protests we’ve seen over the past months. We believe that protesting is a human right and should be accessible to all, and so should not require these precautions, however we also don’t want people to get themselves into a bad situation by showing up unprepared.

• Mask up!
• Wear a helmet
• Bring lots of water
• Bring a buddy, if you can
• Memorize the two National Lawyers’ Guild hotlines, or write it on your body:
  — (971) 247-1072 if you’re *in* jail
  — (833) 680-1312 if you were released from jail, saw someone get arrested, a friend was arrested, experienced police brutality, or were directly contacted by law enforcement.
• Don’t film other people’s faces. The cops love to retaliate.

(Lilith Sinclair has a much more thorough protest preparation guide that we highly recommend.)

See a few more resources about what to wear, what apps to use, etc. at this link here.

Video: Keeping Yourself Healthy & Safe at a Protest – Check out this recent recorded training from 350Seattle about Protest Safety — How to Keep Yourself and Your Comrades Safe in the Streets

Friend,

As many folks and organizations are aware, 350PDX is a white dominant organization, by a large margin. Our mission states that we want to build a movement that is “diverse” and focused on “justice.” However, in the wake of a national and global outcry around the injustices that are perpetuated on a daily basis against African Americans in this country, we recognize that we have failed to show up and need to do better. The movement building, community organizing and models of activism that fuel our organization are modeled after the Civil Rights Movement, yet we haven’t put much effort into supporting that continuing battle that is raging right outside our doors.

We need to do better. We need to not just acknowledge that white supremacy culture exists, but do the hard detailed work of eradicating it from within ourselves, our workplace, our organizing teams, our campaigns. To our black and brown volunteers, staff, and partner organizations that we have harmed in our perpetuation of white supremacy cultural norms, we sincerely apologize. We promise to hold ourselves accountable to doing the hard work that needs to be done to dismantle white supremacy and create a safe and just place for you, not just within the 350PDX community or in the climate justice movement, but systemically within our governmental institutions.

Here is what we commit to:

• What we’re doing for the moment
  • Continue to share and organize our base behind the demands of black-led local organizations, including to reduce and redistribute the police budget, defund transit police, defund the Gun Violence Reduction Team, and other demands – [take action here]
  • Respect that this is not only one moment, but that the success of the climate movement will always be tied to Black liberation, and our campaigns should be influenced appropriately [more about this connection in this article and this video]
• What we’re doing internally
  • Interrogate how anti-Black bias shows up in our staff, board, and volunteer spaces, and prioritize organization-wide training and education on uprooting it
  • Continue to implement our JEDI Plan, but with priority given to holding ourselves accountable to centering frontline leadership & plans for how to carry forward some of the work that we don’t have the skills to implement
  • Asking all of our teams to examine how white supremacy cultural traits show up in our organization, and uproot them by prioritizing learning/unlearning, training and action
  • Revisiting our values as part of our strategic planning process, recognizing where we’ve erred from them and planning how we can better live them

We are grateful to all those who push us to be better. We know that is hard, exhausting work, and we will live up to the faith you have shown in us. Thank you, and let’s keep up the fight together!

In true solidarity,
350PDX

Black. Lives. Matter. 

The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and far, far, far too many more are the latest unconscionable acts of violence against Black people in this country. We live in a country where harms large and small, frustrating to fatal, have been repeated for hundreds of years in more ways than can be counted, but that are felt by Black people every day of their lives.

350PDX condemns these brutal murders, and we demand that the police officers and murderers be held accountable and that severe, lasting, and bold police reform and defunding begin immediately.

Climate justice is racial justice. These crises are inextricably linked. Black people and Indigenous people in America have been living under crisis and emergency for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. As environmental justice advocates have emphasized for decades, racism is imbued in the business model of the fossil fuel industry – there is always a “sacrifice zone,” usually a Black and Brown and lower-class community deemed unworthy of protection from pollution and economic disinvestment. Many of the same communities overrun by coal, oil, and gas extraction and pollution are also facing health disparities (and reflected in higher COVID-19 cases and deaths) and racist violence from police and civilians. This is a despicable injustice.

Honor and make space for Black people to grieve and express very, very legitimate rage. Be an active supporter and acknowledge the ongoing trauma Black people face everyday. This is a lifelong journey. More than just in this moment, adopt anti-racism as a lived value that you bring into every space throughout your life. Question yourself, and question who is centered and benefits from any work that you do or relationships you hold.

350PDX is committed to supporting the Black activists, communities, friends and family members who are threatened and grieving, today and every day, in the best way we can. We are committed to learning and engaging continuously, and we hope you will join us on this journey. Here are some actions we encourage you to take in this moment and always:

1. SPEAK UP
   • Support the Movement 4 Black Lives: National Week of Action In Defense of Black Life, all this week.
   • Call and email Mayor Wheeler demanding that the City demilitarize and defund the Portland Police Bureau, and to keep the National Guard out of our community.
     • 503-823-4127, mayorwheeler@portlandoregon.gov 
     • The Portland Police Bureau contract is expiring in the next year. We must keep pushing Mayor Wheeler and the City for demilitarization of the PPB, civilian oversight with actual ability to impact the PPB, and defunding their overall budget. For more information and talking points, please refer to this Police Reform Network letter from Unite Oregon, signed by 350PDX as members of the Portland Metro People’s Coalition at the end of last year.
   • Call Governor Kate Brown to demand she convene a special short legislative session right now to tackle both the COVID-19 crisis, as well as police accountability, reforms, and directly supporting Oregon’s communities of color.
     • 503-378-4582
     • For example, in the words of Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, “The Officer’s Bill of Rights is the state law that protects police officers engaged in misconduct. If you’re wondering how to impact a system where police officers avoid reprimand, we must demand our State Legislators and Governor change this on the state level. In addition to responding to the COVID-19 crisis, the Governor should make police accountability and support for Oregon’s communities of color a priority that the state must act on now.”
2. DONATE
   • Don’t Shoot PDX organizes critical community work against police brutality through arts, education, legal aid clinics and more.
   • Don’t Shoot PDX’s George Floyd Mutual Aid Resources List
   • Black Resilience Fund, to provide immediate support to Black Portlanders during this time, from paying for warm meals to student loans and rent, this is a direct way to give reparations to Black members of our community.
   • Support Black-owned small businesses in Portland
   • Portland Bail Fund, to help cover bail for recently-arrested protestors
   • The Movement for Black Lives national coalition
3. EDUCATE YOURSELF & YOUR COMMUNITY
   • Of Course There Are Protests. The State Is Failing Black People, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
   • America’s Protests Won’t Stop Until Police Brutality Does, NYT Editorial Board
   • Webinar: What We Must Do to Dismantle White Supremacy, a panel discussion organized by 350.org happening this Thursday (June 4th) at 5pm
   • How to respond to “Riots never solve anything”
   • Letters for Black Lives, an open letter project on anti-Blackness started by South Asians, which includes a letter explaining why Black Lives Matter in English and multiple Asian languages and in audio format
   • Anti-Racism Resource List, for white people and parents.
   • Please visit our 350PDX Environmental Justice & White Supremacy Resource List for many more
4. STAY SAFE
   • Know Your Rights while protesting right now, from the ALCU
   • How to Protest Safely During a Pandemic: NY Magazine and Vox have articles full of information and tips
   • Webinar: Digital Security for Activists, an online training from our partners at the Civil Liberties Defense Center this Thursday (June 4th) from 3-5pm

Let this moment hurt⁠—it should. And let’s take care of each other and our community through our action, so that some of that hurt can stop. Let us wake up each morning more committed than ever to the fight to dismantle white supremacy, against police violence, and to build a world and society that values human life and dignity above all else.

In commitment and solidarity,
The 350PDX Team

Photos – protesters in downtown Portland last night. (Dave Killen, The Oregonian)