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.