In a defiant act of civil disobedience, protestors stage a sit-in at the White House to implore Obama to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.
At 11 a.m. on Aug. 20, 65 people, many dressed in their Sunday best, walked single file across Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House gate and turned their backs to it, facing Lafayette Park. This group of peaceful protesters is in Washington to petition for U.S. President Barack Obama to prevent construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.
As the crowd of protesters formed, a well-briefed police squad cordoned the area with black fences and yellow tape. By Parks Service regulation, a person holding a sign, or a group of more than 25, may not linger in front of the central White House sidewalk longer than 10 minutes; after three warnings, the Parks Police cuffed and led people, one-by-one, away to Anacostia to process them for central holding.
By today's standards of civil disobedience, a protesting group of 65 – the number of people arrested Saturday morning – is large. Saturday's protest, the first of more than a dozen planned every morning through Labour Day, was organized by a broad front of environmental, indigenous, and religious climate-change activists, coming to Washington from all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Canada with a succinct, urgent message for President Obama: Make the Keystone pipeline a line in the sand.
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International groundswell for this organized civil disobedience evolved after the prominent environmental writer Bill McKibben circulated an old-fashioned letter, co-signed by Canadian writer Naomi Klein; the U.S. government's top climate scientist, James Hansen; and other environmentalists. It calls for a grassroots movement to resist further development of Alberta's oil sands. These oil deposits, they note, are the second-largest source of carbon on earth; choosing to burn them is the equivalent of igniting a "carbon bomb."
By staging the demonstration at the White House, the protesters have deliberately targeted Obama as the recipient of their message. The decision to grant a transboundary pipeline permit is an executive decision, not a legislative one: Unlike climate-change law or raising taxes on the rich, the president needs neither to negotiate with, nor consult, Congress in order to take action. "It is Obama alone with the ball at the foul line," McKibben stated in a brief talk before the sit-in, using a basketball metaphor he repeated frequently to reporters in the days leading up to his arrest. "Will he take the 20-foot jump shot, or will he pass?"
Since June, more than 2,000 people have signed up to participate in a movement of non-violent disobedience to stop TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline, which will connect the oil sands of northern Alberta to the refineries of Port Arthur, TX, on the Gulf of Mexico. It is a movement built on local and regional activities spanning indigenous communities from Alberta to Oklahoma, activists in Utah, landowners along the Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska, and climate-justice advocates on the Eastern Seaboard.
On Sunday (Day 2 of the action), another 66 protesters prepared to stand and sit in the so-called picture-postcard area in front of the White House. With McKibben and the Saturday gang jailed until Monday, Jane Klebb, a mother from Nebraska who was part of her state's delegation coming to protest on Monday, rallied the group before its march. "TransCanada tries to paint us as radicals," she said. "They intimidate landowners. But in Nebraska, there are a lot of conservatives who oppose this pipeline as much as anybody. For them to think they can run this pipeline across our land is pure arrogance!"
Arrests began faster this time. Before the third and final warning, 20 people removed themselves from the line, leaving 46 to be carted to Anacostia. But 46 or 66, the participation is impressive. Other climate-justice protests, action co-ordinator Matt Leonard told me, have maxed out around 10.
Are Canada's Energy Pipelines Safe? Greenpeace and the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association debate here.
Among prominent environmentalists, only Gus Speth – who has administered the United Nations Development Program, chaired Jimmy Carter's Council on Environmental Quality, founded the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Resources Institute, and is Dean of the Yale School of Forestry – was arrested alongside McKibben.
Still, tepid support from Beltway environmentalists points to one obstacle to transforming these protests into a broad front of opposition to the pipeline. To the layperson, environmentalism seems like a single, uniform movement. But environmentalists are sectarians just like everyone else – divided by ideology, money, and compromises with power – and they have rarely sustained popular, as opposed to policy, strength.
"There was tremendous success at the beginning," Speth told me shortly before his arrest. He was referring to the passage of clean-air and water laws, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency to administer them, in the early 1970s. The problem, he continued, was that the success led environmentalists (too deep, too fast) into a wonkish and litigious role in Washington, and the step of investing in a popular movement was overlooked. "We were lawyers," Speth confessed.
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If wrangling environmental interests is one concern, another is the differences among subgroups over the principal outrage of the Keystone pipeline. For some, it is greenhouse-gas accumulation in the atmosphere; for others, it is the toxic impact that mining has on their communities, the conservation of Canada's boreal forests, or spills along the pipeline that will devastate vital watersheds and agricultural land.
All these concerns are elements of one problem: the costs of mining, moving, refining, and using minerals and fuels. From the Alberta oil sands to the gold rush in Colombia, we are prospecting resources whose values were considered, a generation – or even a decade – ago, too "marginal" to exploit. Whether it was low demand or inadequate technology, the calculations did not work out for extractive companies. This is no longer true, and the more marginal the exploration, the higher the costs.
Writing in the New Republic on June 27, McKibben made a solemn case that exploiting the oil sands is "a crime, pure and simple." "Given the stakes," he observed, "it is one of the most staggering [crimes] the world has ever seen."
"What I mean by 'crime,'" he explained when I asked him to elaborate, "is that when we discovered the Saudi deposits, we didn't know the consequences. Now we do."
To some, including himself, McKibben may seem an unlikely leader. Sometimes, at talks or book-signings, he self-deprecates by joking that his original concept of a movement was writing a book, people reading it, and things changing. In 1989, while he was still in his 20s, McKibben illuminated a crack in environmental politics by writing The End of Nature, a book often dubbed, correctly, as the first popular account of climate change. "Twenty years ago?" he repeats the question. "No, I could not have imagined myself in this role."
McKibben's writing, deep and articulate, is more polemical than inspirational. One gets a feeling, with him, that he might prefer to be walking, probably alone, in the mountains of New York or Vermont – that his ecological self is more loner Thoreau than preacher Emerson (though Thoreau, too, practised civil disobedience). Introspection, however, should not be mistaken for mildness. As he is wont to point out, McKibben is Methodist. There is a compelling pastoral quality to his speech, less in chapter and verse or Baptist enthusiasm than in a spirit of universal fixing – what Jews call tikkun olam. McKibben is credal. Despite decades of setback and attack, his commitment to climate change as a universal moral cause never blows with the prevailing wind.
For a critical look at the oil spill in Alberta click here.
Until the 1990s, environmentalism was principally a 1960s anti-pollution movement, borne of smog over Los Angeles, radioactive poison in breast milk, and industrial chemicals dumped in the Hudson River. That ecological literature scarcely mentions climate. ( Only One Earth (1972), for example, devotes exactly five pages to the topic.) By reading the emerging climate science of the 1980s, McKibben helped expose the fact that the paramount environmental pressure – mining and burning fossil fuels –had not yet been faced.
By the time he was arrested Saturday, Bill McKibben was hoarse from repeating a refrain sure to leave him parched once more when he is released on Monday: Barack Obama promised that, during his time in government, the "rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet start to heal."
The decision of whether to grant TransCanada a presidential permit to build the Keystone pipeline falls under the State Department’s jurisdiction. As the pipeline’s chief lobbyist, TransCanada employs Hilary Clinton's former national campaign director. The optics, one could say, are poor.
The administration’s decision regarding the Keystone XL pipeline is not expected until the end of the year, by which time these two weeks of civil disobedience will be long over.
"We hope this action will send a jolt of electricity through Obama's base," McKibben said.
I’m not much of a Washington person, but it's true that there’s a surge, emotionally, from being in the midst of action. But, what will it take to sustain action?
As I was searching for clever words to follow this question, the power went out in my aunt and uncle's house where I am staying in Maryland. Minutes later, my smartphone malfunctioned. It was a shock. I panicked, fearing missed deadlines and worrying about those neat sentences I would lose.
Nobody was home. It got dark. In the quiet, I realized: While writing this essay, I had not paused for even a moment to contemplate the 65 people – a few well-known, but most not – still locked in central holding. Nor had I stopped to consider that only a harsh cynic calls being arrested a political stunt. To surrender your body means believing a truth is so bold there is no longer much to say. I recalled a line from Saint Francis of Assisi, shared with me earlier in the day by a writer, Rose Berger, from Sojourners magazine – "Preach gospel at all times, use words when necessary" – and waited for the blackout to end.
Origin
Source: the Mark
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