Rethink STAMP

Critical habitat and Tonawanda Seneca territory is being threatened by mega-industrial development STAMP in Erie Niagara.

In his Awakening Lands interview, Marcus Rosten shared the exciting potential of the Western New York Wildway - a network of connecting corridors and contiguous native habitats embedded within the larger Eastern Wildway. This collaboration of landscape-scale projects provides “an ecological vision for the future of Eastern North America”. A key connecting corridor lying within the Erie Niagara region is Alabama Swamp, an area that includes the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, people who have stewarded this land for centuries, and multiple Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs).

In the video below, Dr. Margaret Wooster, who we previously interviewed, and Dr. Catherine Landis, postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, share why Alabama Swamp is so vital to the Tonawanda Seneca and the local ecosystem, as well as the overwhelming concerns that the Science, Technology, and Advanced Manufacturing Park (STAMP) mega-industrial development raise.

If we are to regenerate our communities, we need to protect the lands that are still healthy and full of life. And we need to honor the sovereignty and wellbeing of the people who live harmoniously with it. We need to awaken Erie Niagara, and understand how that's a process of awakening ourselves, all of us.

To learn more about the STAMP project and the land and communities it is impacting, visit Allies of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation. Take action by calling and emailing our electeds.

#AwakeningLands #AwakeningErieNiagara

If you’d like to support Anna and Benji in this work, every bit goes a long ways. We’re still far from being fully funded. The next goal is to bring in enough money so that Benji can afford to rent a place in Buffalo for the summer to be with Anna on-the-ground. We have workshops to co-facilitate! We want to bring in key voices in Erie Niagara to tell stories of the whole system.

We also have dreams of bringing resources to regenerative storytellers, artists, workshop facilitators, media producers, weavers, leaders, and more. We so badly want to build Awakening Lands into a richly dynamic ecosystem of learning and inspiration sharing. Please, help us to form a flow of energy towards the kinds of things we all want to see more of.

Many thanks to Kula Applied Research Institute for helping us to unlock funding sources and providing wisdom, collaboration, and friendship.