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Thousands of protesters organized by 350.org are gearing up for a massive demonstration outside the White House on Sunday against the Keystone XL pipeline. While many people breathed a sigh of relief back in January when President Obama rejected TransCanada’s 1700 mile pipeline because it was routed through Nebraska’s Ogallala Aquifer, TransCanada filed a new application in May. The company, undeterred by public outcry over their project, has now proposed a new route to haul the highly toxic tar sands from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Environmentalists around the world are again rallying to demand a complete halt to the project.

Aside from the danger of the tar sands leaking into soil and waterways, the extraction of the tar sands themselves poses a huge environmental catastrophe. Large swaths of Boreal forests would need to be dug up in Canada in order to get to the tar sands deposits. The Boreal Forest makes up 29% of the world’s forest cover and soaks up about 22% of the world’s carbon. Eliminating these forests in order to mine for tar sands would release up to 47 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere and also displace large numbers of Indigenous people living in the area. Native hunting and fishing lands would be permanently destroyed through the tar sands extraction process.

To bring more awareness of the devastating effects of tar sands extraction, KPFK is hosting a teach in on Saturday November 17th at 2pm at the All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. The event features Clayton Thomas-Muller the co-Director of the Tar Sands campaign of the Indigenous Environmental Network. He’s also a member of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation in Northern Manitoba, Canada, and Anne Petermann the executive director of the Global Justice Ecology Project, who is also the coordinator of the campaign to stop the planting of genetically engineered trees.

GUESTS: Clayton Thomas-Muller, co-Director of the Tar Sands campaign of the Indigenous Environmental Network, and a member of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation in Northern Manitoba, Canada, and Anne Petermann the executive director of the Global Justice Ecology Project, who is also the coordinator of the campaign to stop the planting of genetically engineered trees.

The Teach-in on the Environment is on Saturday November 17th at 2 pm at All Saints Episcopal, 132 N Euclid Ave, Pasadena CA 91101. The event will be moderated by Sojourner Truth host Margaret Prescod.