Mother Jones
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As Royal Dutch Shell prepares for its summer Arctic drilling plans, environmentalists, indigenous communities, and concerned citizens alike are ramping up their efforts to stop it. Last month, “kayaktivists”—that is, activists in kayaks—surrounded one of Shell’s oil drilling rigs while it temporarily docked in the Port of Seattle, and earlier this past week, a group of environmentalists and native Alaskans challenged the sufficiency of the operation’s environmental analysis in the federal court of appeals.
But over Memorial Day weekend, two environmental activists took things to a new extreme, literally putting their bodies between Shell’s operation and its destination in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea. On the evening of Friday, May 22nd, Chiara Rose D’Angelo, 20, climbed onto the anchor of the Arctic Challenger, a support ship for Shell’s exploratory drilling operation, docked 90 miles north of Seattle in Bellingham Bay, in an attempt to prevent it from leaving for the Arctic. The next morning, Matthew Fuller, 37, joined her.
“The Arctic is an extremely sacred place,” D’Angelo told me. “I did it because it’s extremely important that we protect the remaining natural food sources that we have. As long as there is something to do about it, I’ll do it.”
It turned out that the ship did not leave right away, and Fuller ended up dangling from the anchor chain for 22 hours, while D’Angelo stayed on for 63 hours—nearly three days. The two may be facing financial repercussions, as well. While the US Coast Guard did not force them to get off of the ship, on Thursday they mailed D’Angelo, Fuller, and two others penalty notices for violating a 100-yard safety zone around the ship that could amount to as much as $40,000 in fines per person.
While dealing with the fallout of their protest, Fuller, a graduate student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wa., and D’Angelo, an undergraduate student at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wa., spoke to me separately about their time on the Arctic Challenger. I combined their responses and edited them for clarity and length below:
Excerpt from:
This Is What It’s Like To Hang Onto the Anchor of a Shell Oil Ship For 63 Hours
