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Posted Oct. 3, 2012
Interview with Ron Seifert, spokesperson with Tar Sands Blockade, conducted by Melinda Tuhus
Last week, a group of local Texas environmental activists and their supporters from around the country began a nonviolent direct action protest to stop construction of the 435-mile southern leg of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which is scheduled to be built between Cushing, Okla. and Port Arthur, Texas. The pipeline is being built to bring tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Some protesters have been arrested, while others are maintaining a tree-sit on the property where TransCanada is starting construction.
The Keystone pipeline is organized into a four-phase project. The first two phases were completed a few years ago. The company constructing the pipeline, TransCanada hoped to build phase 3 – the portion from Texas to Oklahoma – and then move on to build phase 4, the pipeline that will extend into Canada. The Obama administration delayed approval of phase 4 pending further environmental review. That was in response to one of the largest environment-themed protest campaigns in many years that included the arrest of more than 1,200 persons in a series of nonviolent civil disobedience actions in front of the White House just over a year ago. That protest was followed by a November action where some 10,000 activists surrounded the White House in order to persuade Obama to put a hold on the project.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Ron Seifert, a spokesperson with the Tar Sands Blockade coalition, who talks about support for and opposition to the pipeline project in Texas – and the latest news on the protest actions there.
RON SEIFERT: One of the primary concerns we face from East Texans, and Texans in general, is how this pipeline will affect their limited water supply. We all know Texas is a drought-stricken region, although East Texas tends to be a little greener and have a little more water; it's not the typical desert environment we're used to seeing in all the cowboy movies. Nonetheless, this pipeline will cross all the major water sources for the big metro areas in Texas; the aquifer that feeds the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, as well as Houston and most all of east Texas are directly along the lines of the proposed pipeline. Not to mention the sandy soil that exists in East Texas would be easily permeated by an oil spill. People don't necessarily know that this product, tar sands, is not crude oil. It's a different substance, a synthetic slurry. Tar sands is solid in its natural state; it has to be boiled and diluted with chemicals, gas condensates and all sorts of nasty, carcinogenic, toxic chemicals. And additionally it's pumped at very high pressure, at roughly 1,200 psi – 50 percent higher pressure than a conventional pipeline. It's being blasted at high pressure through a steel pipe; it's a recipe for disaster. So, clean water and arable soil in East Texas are part of our commons that Texans hold near and dear, not only because of what it means to them as farmers and ranchers and landowners in the area, but what it means for their collective communities and their future overall.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Ron Seifert, in terms of jobs, in terms of energy security – importing energy from Canada rather than the Middle East – has the project generated much support among the local population. Are the protesters out of the mainstream, or are locals behind it?
RON SEIFERT: Well, there's an interesting conflict of traditionally conservative values that exist around this pipeline battle. Yes, it's true that in Texas and Oklahoma there's a lot of support from the ground up for the oil and gas industry and the value of unfettered energy expansion – that mankind has the right to cultivate any energy and the earth, to bend the environment to our will without consequence. But there's also this strong traditional conservative value of land rights and property ownership, and now these values are at conflict because of the pipeline. What's going on is a multinational company is unilaterally taking land, whether you want to give it or not, to run this pipeline through. So what has been constitutionally protected land rights are being trampled in the interest of energy expansion.
So when it comes down to it, when local community folk, small town everyday people, that traditionally do support oil and gas, have to choose between their own homes and their own ranches, and the oil and gas industry – especially at the multinational level that's not bringing any local support for their economy, you find a lot of folks think this idea of using eminent domain to bolster and increase private gain for a private corporation is unacceptable.
From a land rights point of view, you have a lot of folks turning away from this project and supporting eminent domain reforms, taking a stand against the idea that a foreign corporation can seize American property for its own private gain, and that the government is going to be complicit in that transaction. It's really unconscionable and it's offensive to a lot of people around here. So we do have this kind of unique alliance – so you have environmentalists and climate activists coming at this from one angle, and conservatives – folks who affiliate more with Tea Party politics – feeling that big government or big corporate multinational industry having these powers, having these tools of eminent domain is unacceptable, that it's a freedom that we're entitled as Americans the right to our properties and they should not be imperiled with such nonchalance.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Can you please just summarize what's been happening with the protest on the ground?
RON SEIFERT: So the Tar Sands Blockade is a rolling, nonviolent civil disobedience campaign, and on multiple occasions individual blockaders have put themselves in the way of construction, to literally stop the Keystone XL Pipeline from being built. That's been met with different levels of police response, from, on one occasion, the police doing nothing and washing their hands of it and walking away and leaving the blockaders to hold the construction site; to the worst case, police brutalizing blockaders, choking them, putting them in stress positions, pepper-spraying them, tazing them – virtually torturing them. What's going on now and has been going on for the last week is our aerial tree blockade – tree village – and a timber wall have been constructed standing over 500 feet of the proposed pipeline route, tying in more than a dozen old-growth trees; nine different blockaders are sitting in trees or along a catwalk of this free-standing wall of wood that was constructed in the middle of the forest. And those folks have dug in, they have ample food and supplies for weeks, and they're willing to do whatever they can to stay as long as it takes to stop the pipeline, and raise enough awareness not only to encourage folks to come and join them in Texas, but to send the message: Resistance is possible.
Find more information on the campaign to stop the Keystone XL pipeline by visiting Tar Sands Blockade's website at tarsandsblockade.org.
Producer’s note: Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus participated in and was arrested at a nonviolent civil disobedience protest action against the Keystone XL Pipeline project at the White House in September 2011.
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