Update from Camp White Pine

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Recently we’ve been watching ETP’s heavy machinery prepare the sites for this destructive pipeline project on both sides of Camp White Pine. To the east along the ME2 easement, the work is closer than ever before and still closing in. In the days leading up to Halloween workers began clearing and chipping logs (along the easement where the trees had already been cut last year) to the east of camp, less than a mile away. Soon they were working on the ridge nearest to camp, and now they are in the small valley even closer to us, the machines clearly visible from the wetlands near the east edge of the Gerhart property. The first photo shows this area, with bulldozers perched on the top of the hill and two excavators partially visible moving logs in the valley. Clearly visible from the treesits, on and near the site for proposed HDD across the road, workers are active as the site changes from day to day.

It’s been a long time since camp first formed in February. ETP, sometimes working through their infamous contractor Tigerswan, has come after us with a writ of possession, an injunction, smear campaigns and surveillance and harassment and threats. Still we’re here, continuing to build and survive in the face of oncoming winter and advancing machines. We can never be sure of when ETP will finally come and try to evict the treesits; we’ve thought they would come before, especially when the company made legal moves against camp. ETP could wait even longer as they’ve pushed back their timeline for pipeline completion into later 2018 amid repeated drilling fluid spills and other unsafe practices. However the equipment they need to conduct the next phase of work on the land we’re defending – clearing away and chipping the remaining logs as well as cutting the treesit trees to prepare to turn the hillside into an HDD pad and work site – is close enough that it could reach us any day.

As confrontation (possibly) approaches imminently, we ask folks to please continue sharing and donating to camp’s legal and bail fund and spreading the word about the struggle against the Mariner East 2 and all extractive infrastructure projects.