Over the past four or five years I’ve designed and produced a series of banners, signs, stickers and posters to support the ongoing struggle against the Jordan Cove Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminal in Coos Bay, ORegon, and the accompanying Pacific Gas Connector Pipeline. The terminal is a last-ditch effort to build a gas-export facility on the west coats of the United States. After similar facilities were banned from the coasts of California and Washington and driven from the mouth of the Columbia River, the gas industry has set its sights on the small coastal Oregon community of Coos Bay, where they plan to construct a massive facility to compress and load LNG onto transoceanic freighters for shipment to markets in Asia. To make that facility work they will have to use eminent domain to capture and condemn thousands of acres of national forest and private land in order to build a connecting pipeline between the coast and the extant trunk pipeline that runs north to south east of the Cascade mountains. This new Pacific Connector pipeline would cross over and beneath hundreds of rivers and creeks and threaten massive stretches of land with sudden disaster and catastrophic ignition in an already fire-prone landscape. Suffice to say, it’s a terrible idea, and it’s faced a surge of popular resistance from tribes, small landowners, and environmental organizations in its path.

One of the most effective of those organizations is Rogue Climate, a small group based in the Rogue Valley of southern Oregon, whose tenacity and effective organizing has led to a series of major victories in the planning process, severely limiting the likelihood that the pipeline and terminal will be built. Rogue Climate has worked closely with organizers from the Klamath, Modoc, and Yurok tribes to defend the landscape of the Klamath river basin from these projects, and has built a resilient network of people dedicated to a fierce opposition to these projects. It was shocking to hear, this summer, that their offices had burned to the ground in the Almeda wildfire, which torched through the center of the Rogue Valley, burning whole towns to the ground and shattering communities. The loss of their offices also meant the loss of all of the art, banners, signs, and visual political tools that they had accumulated in the past decade of struggle.

The cruel irony of a small, independent climate organization losing their facilities and their tools of visual political communication in a climate-driven wildfire should be lost on nobody, and it comes just as the fight against LNG exports is reaching a critical stage.

If you’d like to support Rogue Climate in their ongoing efforts to rebuild and offer emergency assistance to Rogue Valley communities, as well as their continuing fight against Jordan Cove and the PCGP, you can visit their website and make a donation. You should also check out this website for ongoing updates about the fight against pipelines, and against fossil fuel exports in Oregon. I’ll be working over the next month to help replace some of these banners, and hopefully collaborate on some victory designs.