Here’s a report from Cally Carswell writing for The High Country News. Click through and read the whole article. Here’s an excerpt:
An unusual coalition is fighting new fossil fuel infrastructure, and they’re starting to win.
On Earth Day 2014, a group of farmers, ranchers and Native Americans who live along the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route marched and rode horseback through Washington, D.C., wearing cowboy hats and feather headdresses. On the National Mall, they erected tipis and held ceremonies; a couple of days later, they gave a hand-painted tipi to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, in President Barack Obama’s honor. They gave the tipi the same names that the Lakota and Crow gave Obama in 2008 — “Man Who Helps the People” and “One Who Helps People Throughout the Land.” The message was implicit: The man who helps the people rejects the Keystone pipeline. This month, Obama did just that, handing the climate movement its clearest political victory yet.
The fight over Keystone XL gained national attention when prominent environmentalists like Bill McKibben positioned it as a litmus test of Obama’s commitment to fighting climate change. The pipeline would have connected the Canadian tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries, and most environmentalists argued that it shouldn’t be built because it would lock in the continued exploitation of one of the dirtiest fuels on earth.
But for those who marched on Washington last year, the battle was more personal. Farmers and ranchers in Nebraska feared the pipeline would leak, polluting their land and water and jeopardizing their livelihoods. Tribes worried about water contamination, disturbances to treaty lands, and the possibility of man camps popping up near their communities and increasing crime. Many landowners said TransCanada, the company behind Keystone, tried to bully them into signing easements. “They didn’t like that a private corporation could use eminent domain for their own gain,” says Jane Kleeb, who organized opposition in Nebraska. “And they really didn’t like that it was a foreign corporation.”
Together, the self-described cowboys and Indians and the climate crusaders proved a potent political force. Here was a project that could be framed as a high-stakes climate issue that got regular folks fired up, too — something the 2010 effort to pass federal carbon legislation achieved only insofar as it provoked rabid opposition from Tea Partiers. That cap-and-trade bill was designed by a handful of big green groups to be palatable to big business, but included little to inspire popular support, and environmentalists made scant effort to build a broad coalition to fight for it.
Check out Allen Best’s story about Keystone from November, 15, 2015 running on The Mountain Town News.
