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Rebellion on the Plains
I.
2005 - 2010
The New Energy
In the early 2000s, two energy revolutions rocked the Americas. The first was shale gas, or "fracking": the result of the marriage of decades' old technologies for pulverizing underground rock and drilling horizontally with digital age computing tools that allowed oilmen to steer their bits underground like a military kill team with a drone. The second was the boom in the Canadian tar sands, sludgy deposits of bitumen, an oily sand rather like asphalt, that—if "cracked" under high enough heat in expensive state-of-the-art refineries—flowed like traditional crude oil.
These two booms were harbingers of the age of the New Energy, in which the "traditional" fossil fuels Americans had become used to — think the bursting derrick at Spindletop, or scenes from There Will Be Blood—had given way to exotic new forms out of the realm of science fiction. The New Energy revolution opened up vast swaths of the North American heartland to corporate exploration and exploitation the likes of which it had never seen.
A map of major oil pipelines throughout the United States; the Dakota Access is highlighted in red.
(Image credit of National Geographic Magazine
II
2016- 2017
The Road to Standing Rock
In the summer of 2016, as America entered its strangest and most contentious political season in a generation, a group of youth activists, spurred by their older mentors, began to agitate against the pipelines snaking across the Midwest. They kicked off America’s most violent — and inspiring— land battle in a generation, and changed the way a nation talked about the environment.
Portrait
The Seventh Generation
The New York Times Magazine
January 31, 2017
In the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline, Native American activists sparked a cultural and political uprising that ignited the Midwest -- and it all began with a group of teenagers.
Dispatch
Meet the Defiant "Water Protectors" of Standing Rock
National Geographic
January 31, 2017
As temperatures at Standing Rock hovered below zero, the anti-pipeline movement dug in.
Argument
"America Deserves Trump"
Rolling Stone
January 31, 2017
At Standing Rock's Kul Wicasa camp, "water protectors" prepare for life under Trump.
Credit Peter Van Agtmael, for the New York Times Magazine.
III.
2010 - 2012
From Provocation to Revolt
But let's go back. The reaction at Standing Rock didn't come out of nowhere. The youth movement provided the spark, but that spark caught because the tinder was dry and the firepit prepared. The uprising at Standing Rock was the latest flash point in a long-simmering conflict over land rights in the Midwest, as the shale and tar sands booms bound white and native communities in shared outrage. Americans like to believe that their home is their castle, their land is their kingdom. But in Texas and across the Great Plains, farmers came to discover that their land was only theirs until an oil company wanted it—even when that company is foreign.
Portrait
Here's the Drill
The Texas Monthly
October 1, 2011
The fracking boom served as the dress rehearsal for the later battle over the tar sands. The Ruggiero family thought they had built their dream home — until a fracking company set up shop in their front yard.
Portrait
"Go Get Your Teeth Kicked In"
The New York Times
May 7, 2012
When the Canadian pipeline company came to the Crawford farm in North Texas, they started out friendly. Things didn't stay that way.
Analysis
In Texas, Pipeline Companies Seize Land at Will
The Texas Observer
August 22, 2012
Inside the bizarre eminent domain laws that give pipeline companies carte-blanche to take over land.
The national shale boom, as of 2011. (Courtesy of the Energy Information Administration)
III.
2012 - 2014
A Spreading Fire
As the spiderweb of tar sands pipelines carrying "dilbit" — bitumen mixed with natural gas byproducts — spread out of the Canadian North, it met resistance from a new climate movement in unlikely alliance with hyper-conservative rural ranchers and old-style Midwestern populists. In 2012, this reached a fever pitch with the battle over the Keystone XL.
POSTCARD
Texas Judge Rules TransCanada Can Seize Land
The New York Times
August 23, 2012
A court battle to keep TransCanada from seizing Texas land reveals the power structure behind the pipeline system — and the strange alliance dedicated to opposing it.
Analysis
How Canada Provoked a Texas Revolt
The Tyee
August 21, 2012
A piece I did for the Vancouver-based magazine The Tyee trying to explain the movement sweeping East Texas to a bunch of Canadians.
Dispatch
Iron Hands Behind the Pine Curtain
The Texas Observer
January 10, 2013
In deep East Texas, landowners in conjunction with an activist group called the Tar Sands Blockade launched an innovative guerrilla battle against the Keystone XL. In the fall of 2012, local police, working in conjunction with the oil company, brought the hammer down. (See this companion piece in the New York Times.)
Jane Kleeb: the progressive organizer who, perhaps more than anything else, doomed the Keystone XL with her innovative grassroots stragey. (Photo courtesy of Getty News and Lucas Oleniuk.)
Dispatch
This Land is Our Land
The New York Times Sunday Magazine
May 16, 2014
After Texas fell to TransCanada and the Keystone XL, the focus of the battle became the pipeline corridor through Nebraska — a place where the project would ultimately meet its end. The reason for its defeat was Jane Kleeb, a progressive activist who figured out how to rally Republican farmers behind a taboo cause: environmentalism.
Narrative
Crossing the Line
The Texas Observer
September 17, 2014
In the fall of 2015, Barack Obama finally ruled that the Keystone XL pipeline would not get federal approval — dooming the northern half of the project. This was widely reported as a victory for the climate movement. But it was also the result of a breathtaking hearts-and-minds failure by the oil industry, in which companies like TransCanada pushed former supporters into the arms of their opponents. Supporters like the Collins family of Paris, Texas, who were conservative, pro-oil and pro-pipeline — at least, until TransCanada contractors abandoned them for 18 months in a lake of sewage.
Dispatch
A Final Fight for the Keystone XL
Rolling Stone
October 11, 2017
When Donald J. Trump won the presidency, one of the first things he did was approve the Keystone XL, long thought dead. I went to Nebraska, where local organizers, faced with a man without sympathies to appeal to, turned their attention to dusty, often-forgotten American civic offices: the office of the Public Utilities Commission, county government, and local zoning boards.
They have been extraordinarily successful. As I write this, near the end of 2018, the Keystone XL — despite the support of the President of the United States — is no closer to being built than it was in 2014; repeatedly stopped by judges and local elected officials. The lesson, to me, is clear: a small group of committed organizers, with a keen understanding of the levers of power and a good message, can win, even when far greater money and forces are arrayed against them.