Texas Keystone XL Pipeline Protests Continue Unabated

Inside Climate News reports tree-sitters blockading the path of the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas closed the first month of their campaign on Wednesday with fortitude and a fresh arrest. The blockade is part of a larger protest around the state that has seen lawsuits, restraining orders and 32 arrests—and that shows no sign of abating.

The tree protesters, ensconced on 80-foot-high platforms, passed the misty Wednesday morning in calm, receiving encouraging text messages and walkie-talkie calls from activists outside their encampment in Winnsboro, a tiny town about 100 miles east of Dallas.

A half-hour's drive away, the day began with much more activity. Cherri Foytlin, a 40-year-old mother of six, approached the entrance to a pipe yard storing construction materials for the Keystone XL. She swung shut two metal gates, looped thick metal chains around her waist and locked herself to both doors. For about an hour and a half Foytlin sat chained on the ground before being arrested. According to Ramsey Sprague, a spokesperson for the Tar Sands Blockade, the activist group behind the tree encampment and other Texas protests, Foytlin hindered several trucks from entering and exiting the site.

TransCanada, the pipeline's builder, told InsideClimate News construction is moving along as planned.

"These efforts by protestors to keep hard working Americans from getting to their jobs is not impacting construction," David Dodson, a spokesperson, said.

Foytlin, whose husband is an offshore oil rig worker, is an environmental justice advocate from Louisiana known for her criticism of recovery efforts following the 2010 BP oil spill.

Sprague, the blockade spokesperson, was driving to meet Foytlin at the county jail when he spoke with InsideClimate News. He said she was charged with criminal trespassing on a "critical infrastructure facility," a Class A misdemeanor, which carries the highest penalty for that offense. Sprague said it was the first Class A charge against the protesters, and that bail had been posted at $2,500. As with the other 31 arrests, the Tar Sands Blockade raised money to pay the bail.

The protestors—who are mainly Texas residents and landowners—launched the civil disobedience in mid-August around Houston and in Oklahoma. Work on the pipeline's southern leg, renamed the Gulf Coast Pipeline Project, started in Texas on Aug. 9 after it received government approval in July. The tree blockade began on Sept. 24. A handful of activists have been arrested at the tree site. The other arrests took place on properties along the pipeline's route.


The protests have drawn increasing attention around the country, particularly following the Oct. 4 arrests of actress Daryl Hannah and Eleanor Fairchild, a 78-year-old Texas landowner. The pair stood in front a bulldozer that was clearing a path for the pipe on Fairchild's farm in Winnsboro. The women were charged with criminal trespassing. A week later, two reporters for the New York Times were handcuffed and detained by an off-duty police officer working as a security guard for TransCanada.

Foytlin, the latest person arrested, spoke with InsideClimate News shortly after she left the Titus County jail on Wednesday evening. She explained that she flew to Houston three days earlier to learn how Texas landowners were being affected by the pipeline construction.

Texas landowners join environmentalists to block Keystone XL pipeline

Protests continue in Texas over construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which, if constructed, would run oil from the Canadian tar sands fields to refineries on the Gulf Coast. In a blockade now entering its fourth week, dozens of environmental activists working with local Texas landowners have set up camp in the pipeline’s path with tree sits and other nonviolent protests.

The landowners made the move to join the protests against the pipeline after it became clear their private property would be overtaken by eminent domain lawyer teams working for Transcanada, but the controversy over the pipeline is not simple. 

Proponents, like Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, say the $7 billion pipeline will bring new jobs to Texas and lessen national dependence on foreign oil. The pipeline will stretch from Canada to Texas and be capable of moving 830,000 barrels a day of a crude form of oil called tar sands. 

“I’ve recently learned that a bunch of out-of-state, self-appointed ‘eco-anarchists’ think they know better than Texans and have arrived to save us from ourselves,” Paterson wrote in a recent editorial defending the Keystone XL Pipeline. “They’re trying to block the Keystone Pipeline Gulf Coast Project, the pipeline that’s under construction in East Texas that will create thousands of jobs and lessen our dependence on foreign oil.”

Over the last four weeks, environmentalists and homeowners have built seven elevated platforms and chained themselves to trees to protest the pipeline, while officials from TransCanada Inc., the company building the pipeline, have installed floodlights and loud generators, which have disrupted the protesters and prevented them from sleeping.

Property rights lawyer working with the movement have said the unfavorable conditions can create a dangerous atmosphere for people who live in trees, possibly making them fall from lack of sleep.

Nine protesters, surviving on canned food and bottled water, have been carrying out a tree-sit for more than two weeks to block the path of the pipeline near Winnsboro, Texas. Other Occupiers have chained themselves to logging equipment, locked themselves in trucks carrying pipe to construction sites and hung banners at equipment staging areas.

The pipeline has sparked a wave of challenges to Texas' eminent domain laws by condemnation lawyer teams, which TransCanada used to acquire some land for the project. The Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of Texas homeowners last month, according to Texas StateImpact. Still, the protests rage on.

Keystone pipeline re-routed, activists continue blockade at Texas site

The battle over the controversial Keystone oil pipeline continues after TransCanada Corp said they will avoid constructing on the Nebraska Sandhills, a fragile region of prairie and sand dunes that is home to various plants and wildlife, with thousands of ponds and lakes.

Earlier in the year President Barack Obama delayed a decision on the pipeline, citing environmental concerns over the pipeline’s planned route near a major aquifer and the Sandhills in Nebraska.

“Based on feedback from the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality and the public, we have refined our proposed routing,” Russ Girling, TransCanada’s president and chief executive officer, said in a press release.

Regardless, environmental activists have vowed to continue battling the pipeline and chained themselves to bulldozers in Texas last Wednesday, temporarily stopping route-clearance work TransCanada, meanwhile, has pressed forward. The company came out Wednesday with the proposed new routing.

Environmental concerns are only part of the controversy that has been brewing over the Keystone pipeline, which is being constructed to transport tar sands oil to texas refineries. To build such a massive project through the heartland of North America, TransCanada has slowly been acquiring property rights to build each section of the pipeline, sometimes employing state power to overtake private property through eminent domain, and paying property owners through condemnation compensation.

The new route will avoid some of the areas about which residents and the state Department of Environmental Quality had expressed their greatest concern. Among them are a wellhead protection area in the town of Clarks and other areas not technically within the Sandhills but which have the same sandy, erodible soils with thin topsoil that are characteristic of the Sandhills.

A public affairs official with the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality said he expected the state to publish maps of the new route on its website later on Wednesday. Construction on the 700,000 barrels per day southern part of the line, renamed the Gulf Coast project, has already begun after Obama gave his support for that section.

The Gulf Coast project will drain a glut of crude in the U.S. midsection fed mostly by the oil boom in North Dakota.

In addition to submitting the supplemental review to Nebraskan officials, the company says it will also provide an environmental report to the State Department on Friday. The northern section of the line needs approval from the State Department because it crosses the national border.