Days after the Colorado Supreme Court denied two cities local authority to regulate fracking, hundreds of climate activists descended Thursday on a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oil and gas lease auction in Lakewood, just outside Denver, kicking off four days of major direct actions against fossil fuels across the United States.
In addition to the Lakewood demonstration and a larger mobilization elsewhere in Colorado on Saturday, protests and civil disobedience actions are scheduled to take place between Thursday and Sunday in and around Anacortes, Washington; Albany, New York; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C., and Chicago, all under the Break Free banner.
Already, the movement has touched down in Philadelphia, upstate New York, and other locations around the globe.
“The right that corporations have to [extract fossil fuels] does not usurp our most basic rights to an atmosphere that can sustain life as we know it,” said Micah Parkin, executive director of 350 Colorado, the state affiliate for grassroots group 350.org, which is backing the global movement.
“The idea behind Break Free,” she said, “is that it’s time for the people to step up and escalate and really create more of a global wave of resistance to keep fossil fuels in the ground.”
“Colorado and the public lands of the West are being treated as a sacrifice zone, with corporations profiting from the destruction of our communities, the landscape, and the people’s health,” said Remy, a Boulder-based artist and activist with First Seven Design Labs who took part in the BLM protest. “As an Indigenous person, the language behind ‘keep it in the ground’ has been passed down to me from my elders. It’s about respecting the land and the earth, and it’s about justice for people who are being denied it.”
Similar demonstrations have successfully shut down or disrupted recent BLM auctions in Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and other states.
Thursday’s action will be followed on Saturday by Break Free Colorado’s “Frontline Fracking Defense” rally in Thornton, featuring 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben among other speakers. Parkin, who told Boulder Weekly there are four sites in the area set to start drilling operations in June, predicted the event will be the state’s “largest ever climate and clean energy mobilization.”
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