Dawn Paley

Hey folks I’m teaching an online journalism course this fall. Will be a good opportunity for learning the basics of journalism and online publishing. More info after the jump!

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Hello friends!

Been busy doing some writing on happenings in occupied BC lately. First, I’d like to point you towards a new series of articles on the Vancouver Media Co-op, produced by the Downtown Eastside’s Power of Women Group. I wrote an overview of what this inspiring writing project is all about that appeared just before the series kicked off, you can read it here.

I’ve also been doing a little work for The Tyee, and recently prepared a bunch of shorter pieces for them, ranging from a note about  State Department cables about Vancouver to a push for healthy smiles for all to de-growing the economy, and not to forget, the ongoing campaign for a living wage.

Finally, I had the chance to turn my attention to northern BC, where the push for resource extraction continues, the focus of the piece below is a proposed natural gas pipeline from Summit Lake to Kitimat. Regardless of the defeatist and demoralizing attitude of some Environmental NGOs, folks defending their land have made it clear that they will not stand down.

Finally, I’d just like to express my support for striking postal workers and reiterate my disappointment in Magazines Canada for their statement supporting back-to-work legislation.

More anon,

Dawn

In BC, Pipes Spell Double Trouble
KSL gas pipeline is low profile, high threat

Dawn Paley, The Dominion, June 20, 2011

VANCOUVER—The struggle against the proposed Enbridge pipeline, which has galvanized First Nations throughout northern BC and earned popular support from people across the country, has become one of the highest profile Indigenous and environmental issues in Canada. Concerns are mounting that in Enbridge’s shadow, other energy projects are slipping under the radar—with potentially explosive consequences.

The Kitimat Summit Lake (KSL) gas pipeline, also called the Pacific Trails Pipeline, is of emerging concern to Wet’suwet’en land defenders and local residents. If built, this pipeline would connect to an existing Westcoast Energy Pipeline at Summit Lake, near the geographical centre of BC, and cut west to Kitimat.

“The general location of the pipeline was the first phase of BC’s new and controversial Energy Corridor discussions; other phases…included the Enbridge oil pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands to Kitimat, which many First Nations strongly opposed in early 2011,” reads a recent report prepared by the BC Tap Water Alliance about the KSL pipeline proposal. (more…)

Hello dear readers!

I’ve just come back to the ether after seven days without powerlines or roads in the Yalakom Valley, near Lillooet, BC. You can check out some pictures of the house I worked on with a crew of women (and a couple guys) as part of a Mud Girls workshop.

Meanwhile, The Dominion finally published a piece I wrote a while ago now on the impacts of the implementation of REDD in Chiapas and Central America.

More anon,

dawn

Hello friends,

Well it’s been a busy month. I’ve made my way back to Vancouver, setting up shop in a rickety 106 year old house in an area that was once known as Khanamoot. It’s been amazing to be back and I’m looking forward to spending the summer here.

The Vancouver Media Co-op is humming along, every day there’s inspiring new articles and posts. I recently posted a story on a deal between St’át’imc negotiators/chiefs and BC Hydro, which was picked up today by The Dominion.

I’ve been working away on a couple of other projects, including writing a history of the Media Co-op Network, and following up on some of the stories I was researching in Mexico.

If you click here, you can listen to a talk I gave on Monday about northeast Mexico. I only used half of the time allotted, as the panel was supposed to be about uprisings, and I couldn’t bring myself to talk about anything other than the worsening state-organized-crime assault on Mexican people and migrants.  The other speakers on the panel were excellent, uplifting even… Definitely worth a listen.

More soon,

dawn

P.S. After my last post, Wikileaks went over two weeks without posting a new cable, so my schedule got thrown off a little… I’m still tracking cables, but the access site has changed, it is now: http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html

So as folks may be aware I’m a cable junkie, and have started sending out weekly updates of Latin American cables.

A couple readers have asked me how I go about looking at the Wikileaks cables I send out every week, so I thought I would include a short note on my methodology.

Multiple times a week, I go to this link: http://213.251.145.96/cablegate.html

I scroll down the page to “Browse Latest Releases” and find that day’s cables.

I then scroll through all the cables manually, and read as many of the Latin America ones as I can handle. If there’s only a couple dozen, I generally read them all. If there’s over say fifty in a day, I try and make sure to read one from every series of cables (multiple cables with similar names).

If I find something interesting, I’ll tweet it. There’s nothing more to it: I force feed myself warehouse sized quantities of diplomatic blah blah on an almost daily basis.

On a somewhat related note, I do my best to ignore Julian Assange. Bradley Manning, on the other hand, deserves all of our support.

Hey folks, quick update…

I just finished a review of Ramor Ryan’s forthcoming book Zapatista Spring for Upside Down World.

Also, the Global Report on Status of Women in News Media was just released. It’s a 400 page report, covering newsrooms all around the world. I worked as a researcher on this project, and really had no idea what the scale and scope was going to be until I checked through the PDF. Pretty impressive.

More soon,

Dawn

I recently did an interview with Montréal based journalist Stefan Christoff about the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Big thanks to Stefan for taking the time to transform our rambling conversation into something coherent!

Click here to listen to the interview.

Here’s the text that accompanied the audio clip from the Bilaterals.org website:

Listen to an interview with journalist Dawn Paley speaking on the Canada-Colombia ‘free trade’ agreement and the impacts of U.S./Canada-backed trade policy in Colombia at the grassroots level in the country. Canada’s Conservative government signed the contraversial trade accord with Colombia despite the wide spread political killings across the country targeting progressive activists, union organizers, student leaders and indigenous people, killings linked to right-wing paramilitary groups that maintain political links with multiple members of the current government of Juan Manuel Santos. A bilateral trade agreement between Colombia/U.S. is currently pending despite the reality of political violence in Colombia and mass internal displacement in the country often driven by multinational corporations that stand to benefit for a U.S.-backed bilateral agreement. — Stefan Christoff

Here’s a piece I did with my dear friend Sandra Cuffe for this month’s Canadian Dimension magazine.

Oil pipelines have been likened to a 21st century version of the railway: opening up new lands for state and corporate control in order to move valuable commodities that keep the economic motor of the nation running. Corporate publicity materials confirm the comparison: “We’re building Canada, bringing growth to the north,” reads an Enbridge brochure.

The explosion of oil production in the Alberta tar sands has created a new push to build pipelines throughout North America. In northern British Columbia, most of which is unceded indigenous land, there are overlapping proposals for new ports and pipelines to transport tar sands oil. These come hand in hand with new proposals for mining mega projects, dams, roads, power lines, shale gas and other infrastructure that would crisscross important ecosystems through out the north. (more…)