Stopping the Keystone XL Pipeline Is Just the First Step Toward Environmental Justice
by Tina Gerhardt \ January 27, 2021
by Tina Gerhardt January 27, 2021
"On his first day in office, President Joe Biden canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline, which has been a pendulum swinging back and forth since Obama denied a key permit for the pipeline in 2015 and Trump reversed that decision in 2017. Now, Sioux tribes are calling on Biden to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and Anishinaabe tribes are calling on him to stop the Enbridge Line 3, thereby taking the next steps to ensure justice for future generations.”
A coalition of environmental groups known as Oil Change International argues that Line 3 would be equivalent to adding fifty new coal-fired power plants and would “wipe out any gains our state [of Minnesota] plans to make to reverse climate change, setting us back further in the transition away from burning fossil fuels.”
Ojibwe oppose the project as it runs through lands they ceded to the United States with the understanding that, as the 1837 Treaty states: “The privilege of hunting, fishing, and gathering the wild rice, upon the lands, the rivers and the lakes included in the territory ceded, is guaranteed to the Indians.”
Winona LaDuke, executive director and co-founder of Honor the Earth, a national Native-led environmental organization, tells The Progressive: “Keystone and Line 3 reflect the twilight of the fossil fuel era. As investors flee oil for renewables, Governor Walz picked the wrong time to jam through a massive new pipeline opposed by tribal governments, Minnesotans, his own Commerce Department, and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flannagan, who is also a member of the White Earth reservation. We hope President Biden will nullify the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ permit for Line 3 to prevent any further destruction of our lands and end the tar sands oil threat to Minnesota’s drinking water and climate. It’s time to make the just transition.”
Pressure is sure to continue. In December, two Ojibwe bands, together with Honor the Earth and the Sierra Club, filed a federal lawsuit to stop construction on Enbridge Line 3. Two weeks ago, more than seventy-five Indigenous female leaders from across the country called for President Biden to stop all fossil fuel projects on their lands.
To Be A Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers By Winona LaDuke
For this book, Winona discusses several elements of a New Green Economy and the lessons we can take from activists outside the US and Canada. In her unique way of storytelling, Winona LaDuke is inspiring, always a teacher and an utterly fearless activist, writer and speaker.
This book is written in the spirit of acknowledging that Water is Life. This book is a testimony of the resistance and defeat of the Wiindigoo. The term, “Water Protector,” became mainstream under a hail of rubber bullets at Standing Rock. This book is about that spirit, and that spirit is forever.