13 Arrested Blockading Crestwood Gate With Giant Replica of Pope Francis' Encyclical

In an act of civil disobedience against gas storage in Seneca Lake salt caverns, 13 Finger Lakes residents, led by local members of the Ithaca Catholic Worker Movement, formed a human blockade shortly after sunrise this morning at the north entrance of Crestwood Midstream on Route 14.
Carrying with them a 7-foot tall replica of Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si! On Care for Our Common Home, they blocked traffic from entering or leaving the facility.
Schuyler County deputies arrested the 13 people shortly after 9:30 a.m. as they sang and read from the Pontifical document. Their recitation continued the read-aloud from the encyclical that began on June 30, as part of earlier blockade that led to the arrests of 19 individuals, which continued on July 7, as part of an all-day blockade of 11 individuals that resulted in no arrests.
Immediately after their arrest, a large tanker truck labeled “TRADEBE—Emergency Response” sped through the gates. According to the Tradebe website, "TRADEBE’s Emergency Response Team is trained, equipped and ready to respond to hazmat, oil spills and other emergencies.”
As before, the protesters were taken into custody, charged with trespassing and released.
Today’s blockaders held banners that said, “Catholic Workers Against Crestwood” and “Caring for Our Common Home,” which references the title of the Pope’s letter.
The Catholic Worker Movement was founded by journalist Dorothy Day and social activist Peter Maurin in 1933. Its purpose is to “live in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ.”
Delivering a statement on behalf of the Ithaca Catholic Worker Movement, blockader Ellen Grady said:
“Today members of the Ithaca Catholic Worker join the Seneca Lake Defenders in their effort to resist the desecration of this beautiful Finger Lakes region. We bring with us a seven and a half foot tall replica of Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si! On Care For Our Common Home, to the gates of Crestwood Gas Storage facility ... Creation is a gift from God. It is our duty to care for it and not misuse it.”
Barbara Smith, 61, a Catholic Worker, mother of nine children and dairy farmer from the Town of Lodi in Seneca County, said:
“No one has the right to risk damaging this lake in any way for the short term gain of one company. Seneca Lake is only on loan to us but belongs ultimately to God, and we have been charged to protect it for the common good of future generations.”
The total number of arrests in the nine-month-old civil disobedience campaign now stands at 309, which has been ongoing since October 2014.
None of the protesters this morning had been previously arrested as part of the We Are Seneca Lake campaign, which opposes Crestwood’s plans for methane and LPG storage in lakeside salt caverns.
Crestwood’s methane gas storage expansion project was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last October in the face of broad public opposition and unresolved questions about geological instabilities, fault lines and possible salinization of Seneca Lake, which serves as a source of drinking water for 100,000 people.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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