Letter to Bay Area Air Quality Management Board

March 30, 2018

Dear Board Members,

We hope this email finds you well. I am writing on behalf of Idle No More SF Bay idlenomoresfbay.org. We are a group of volunteerNative Americans and allies who stand for clean air, water, soil and a vibrantly healthy world for life in perpetuity. All the Indigenous women of Idle No More SF Bay are signatories on the Indigenous Women of the Americas Defending Mother Earth Treaty indigenouswomenrising.org. We know that you have a history of caring about the air quality in the Bay Area and we are grateful for your leadership.

We are writing to you because we are concerned about tar sands (also known as heavy crude, oil sands and dilbit) coming through the San Francisco Bay to the Phillips 66 refinery and other refineries. As concerned citizens we want to help the BAAQMD Board have a broad understanding of how different tar sands oil is from conventional oil and the serious dangers it presents. It appears that the Board also shared our concerns by writing the attached RESOLUTION No. 2013 – 08, a Resolution of the Board of Directors of BAAQMD regarding the transportation of tar sands. Additionally, here are links to “A Tar Sands Backgrounder” and “Unique concerns about extracting, transporting, and refining diluted bitumen (“tar sands”) and similar heavy crudes”.

We also would like you to know a bit more about who we are. As mentioned, the Indigenous women of Idle No More SF Bay are signatories on the Indigenous Women of the Americas Defending Mother Earth Treaty. Additional signatories on the Treaty include women from as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far South as Peru. This is a treaty between the nations of Indigenous women who are concerned by what we see happening in the world which is destroying the system of life that we all need to simply survive. This includes Treaty sisters who have traditionally lived sustainably in the Amazon rainforest, women whose traditional territory is in the middle of the Bakken fracking fields in North Dakota, women whose traditional territory has been devastated by tar sands destruction in Alberta, Canada, and women of the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma which is the epicenter of the fracking industry and which has an average of one tribal member dying from cancers and autoimmune diseases a month since fracking in their territory began. All their water is poisoned, and men can no longer rely on hunting or fishing to feed their families. We understand the harms the fossil fuel industry is perpetrating upon people around the world, including our own communities here in the Bay Area.

Idle No More SF Bay organized the Connect the Dots Refinery Corridor Healing Walks from 2014 through 2017. This was a series of four walks each year for four years to connect one fossil fuel impacted community to another. There were over 1,100 walkers who joined us for these walks which were between 9 and 14 miles long. Not an insignificant commitment.

We want you to know us. We want you to understand that we are educated about the harms being caused by the fossil fuel industry to people, lands and the climate. And, in good faith, we offer these links to studies about tar sands from the extraction sites in Alberta to movement through pipelines, waterways and trucks, to the high sulfur content which erodes pipes more quickly and is more toxic to refine and has additional health impacts for people living in communities along the refinery corridor.

We put our trust in you as elected officials to make the hard decisions during this time which must include acknowledging the tenuous period in which we find ourselves where elected officials are called upon to make decisions that will impact the future of generations to come. We all know that the peak of fossil fuels is over. We all know that is why fossil fuel corporations are extracting the most difficult and costly fossil fuels. Imagine encouraging them to a transition model sooner, rather than later, toward to a fossil free business plan. Imagine standing with communities like ours for a just transition off fossil fuels.

With Gratitude,

*Pennie Opal Plant*

Idle No More SF Bay