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.

Texas judge rules Keystone pipeline has eminent domain

TransCanada, the Canadian energy company behind the Keystone XL pipeline can take over land owned by independent Texas farmers, a county judge has ruled. In a short ruling sent from his iPhone, Judge Bill Harris of Lamar County Court upheld TransCanada’s condemnation lawyer of a 50-foot strip of land across Julia Trigg Crawford’s ranch property. The pipeline is being built to carry oil from Canada to Texas refineries.

A defiant Crawford said plans to appeal the ruling. “We may have lost this one battle here in Paris, Texas, but we are far from done,” she said in a written statement. “I will continue to proudly stand up for my own personal rights, the property rights of my family, and those of other Texans fighting to protect their land.”

The ruling by Judge Bill Harris removes yet another potential obstacle for TransCanada, which already has permits from the Army Corps of Engineers for the southern leg of the pipeline, which starts in Cushing, Okla., and runs to Port Arthur, Texas. TransCanada has said it will start building as soon as possible.

In March, President Obama endorsed the construction of the southern leg of the pipeline. He said it would alleviate a supply bottleneck at Cushing, where the benchmark price of oil is set for the U.S. market.

The ruling is the latest legal victory for TransCanada, whose plan to transport heavy oil sands crude through a 1,600-kilometer pipeline across the United States to Texas Gulf Coast refineries has been mired in controversy nearly every step of the way.

But some landowners and environmental groups have been building a campaign to put a halt to construction because of the threat a petroleum leak might pose to rivers, wetlands and humans.

Crawford had asserted that the Keystone XL pipeline was not entitled to eminent domain attorney because the pipeline would not be a common carrier, open to a variety of oil companies. She said that as a private project, it needed to negotiate rights of way without compelling landowners to enter agreements.

The Keystone project took a political tone when Republicans in Congress forced a two-month deadline on President Barack Obama to sign off on the international pipeline. Mr. Obama rejected TransCanada’s proposed route earlier this year, suggesting it direct the pipeline around a sensitive aquifer in Nebraska’s Sandhills region. But he encouraged the company to pursue in the meantime a shorter project from Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast.