Radio — Local organizing against local development: Against Port Expansion in Delta, B.C.

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On this week’s episode of Talking Radical Radio, executive director Roger Emsley of the community group Against Port Expansion talks about their past and present work to protect ecosystems and their community in the face of efforts by Port Metro Vancouver to significantly expand cargo facilities in Delta, British Columbia.

At the moment, the kind of environmental organizing that’s getting the most attention, is, quite understandably, work that is directly connected to threats of a planetary scale — often work that is in one way or another about climate change, either directly or via connections to tar sands, pipelines, fracking, and so on. Yet local struggles in the context of local issues continue to be a crucial way in which people’s concern for the earth gets expressed. And one form that takes is opposition to local development projects — projects that are often about making a buck, whatever the impact on local ecosystems and communities. Against Port Expansion initially came together more than decade ago in a vigorous but ultimately unsuccessful bid to oppose the expansion of Port Metro Vancouver’s facilities in their community. They’ve known all along that further expansions — with all the ecosystem destruction and increased pollution they entail — were in the works, and they are now fighting hard against a project by the Port to once again significantly expand their facilities in a way that would more than double the number of cargo containers passing through Delta. Emsley talks about the history of their group, the dangers of the Port’s current plan, and their pesent struggle for the environment and for their community.

For more about the work of Against Port Expansion, click here.

Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada through in-depth interviews that concentrate not on current events or the crisis of the moment, but on giving people involved in a broad range of social change work a chance to take a longer view as they talk about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. To learn more about the show in general, click here.

You can also learn more about ways to listen or go to the show’s page on rabble.ca. To learn more about suggesting grassroots groups and organizations for future shows, click here. For details on the show’s theme music, click here.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Sudbury, Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

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