We knew, in the broadest terms, that we had to carry through on that promise I’d made to that White House aide—that we’d need to fan out across the country for the next few months. The president, after all, had promised he’d make a decision on the pipeline by year’s end. But the country is … large. Deprived of our focus on the White House, how would we keep momentum? So we knew we’d have to come back to D.C., too. Some pushed for a new round of arrests—even more civil disobedience. But my sense was that we were walking a fine line between pushing the president and pushing him against a wall—too much pressure and he wouldn’t be able to give in, lest he look weak. Still, just coming back to Washington for a rally was likely to be anticlimatic—it had been decades since a “march on Washington” had really accomplished much. “What if we surrounded the White House with people?” I asked, mouth full of tom yum soup. It wasn’t a great idea, perhaps, but it was an idea: something fresh enough that it might interest both supporters and reporters. Everyone was intrigued, but we made no decisions, except to head across the street to a club where hundreds were gathering for an after-party. Beer was the order of the evening, as were many toasts to our general fineness.
* * *
It turned out that we needn’t have worried too much about surrendering our White House rallying spot. Not for the last time our luck held, and the president chose that very week to set out across the country in what amounted to the start of his reelection campaign. He headed to college campuses in swing states, confident of the same happy reception that had greeted him in 2008. And for the most part he got it—big crowds of kids eager to see the president. But everywhere he went he also found growing numbers with a new chant: “Yes We Can … Stop the Pipeline.” It began at North Carolina State University in Raleigh—a blog post from a student captured the scene: “Never in all my years at NCSU has such a rally occurred—a goosebumpy moment.” The same thing happened the next day in Columbus, Ohio, when six locals who’d been arrested in Washington gathered a large crowd to line the motorcade route. The president didn’t go to Harvard that first week, but his campaign manager Jim Messina did—and he was greeted by twenty-five students who had volunteered for his campaign but now were chanting, “Obama Can Stop the Tar Sands.” The blogger John Chandley was at the scene, and he watched Messina duck through a side door to avoid the peaceful demonstration. “That’s your base, Jim,” he wrote. “You’re losing them. Time to listen up and pay attention.” As the Nation put it in an editorial: “Candidates for president routinely make promises they don’t keep. But voters aren’t stupid. What matters is why a candidate breaks a promise: is it because he won’t deliver, or he can’t? Obama has 13 months to persuade voters that they should blame not him but the GOP for his presidency’s shortcomings. He has much less time to convince the thousands of activists nationwide—who do the grunt work of getting out the vote—that he’s worth their sweat and sacrifice one more time.”
The Nation and Harvard are one thing. But the mood was spreading. Nebraska had long been a focus of opposition, because plans called for the pipeline to cross the state’s cherished Sandhills and the Ogallala Aquifer. Jane Kleeb, the founder of Bold Nebraska, had been building a movement there for more than a year, strong enough that even the state’s Republican governor and U.S. senator had come out in opposition to the Keystone project (a fact that would prove tactically crucial). Her efforts were reaching a crescendo in early September 2011. The state university’s beloved Cornhuskers were playing Fresno State in Lincoln when a halftime video of highlights from the 1978 Big Eight football championship squad came up on the Jumbotron. At the end, the logo for the video’s sponsor flashed on the giant screen—TransCanada, touting what it was calling the Husker Pipeline. As one reporter described the scene, “Tens of thousands of fans proceeded to swallow their beer, put down their food, and boo. It was actually more than booing. It was more like loudly seething. I don’t think the Oklahoma Sooners ever produced a reaction like this.” The next day Nebraska’s athletic director (and former legendary coach and Republican congressman) Tom Osborne announced that the university was rescinding its $200,000 agreement with TransCanada: “We have certain principles regarding advertising in the stadium such as no alcohol, tobacco, or gambling advertisements. We also avoid ads of a political nature. Over the last two or three months, the pipeline issue has been increasingly politicized. Our athletic events are intended to entertain and unify our fan base by providing an experience that is not divisive.” Nebraska is literally a red state—bright tomato Cornhusker red. I read the accounts in the Nebraska papers that Jane sent my way and I thought: “Huh. Maybe we’ve got a chance.”
Not a great chance, of course. As the fall wore on, we learned an awful lot about how effectively TransCanada’s lobbyists had done their job. The State Department was supposed to be conducting the official review, and documents obtained by Friends of the Earth showed not only that TransCanada had hired Hillary Clinton’s former deputy campaign manager, Paul Elliott, as its chief lobbyist, but that his old colleagues were rooting him on. “Go Paul!” one high-level State Department staffer e-mailed her old friend whenever he sent out news that a senator had come out in support of the pipeline. As a New York Times account put it, “The exchanges provide a rare glimpse into how Washington works and the access familiarity can bring.” One of the e-mails put it even more succinctly. Marja Verloop, an official at the U.S. embassy in Ottawa, consoled Elliott when he groused that environmentalists had been complaining about his efforts. “Sorry about the stomach pains,” she wrote. “But at the end of the day it’s precisely because you have connections that you’re sought after and hired.”
Indeed, TransCanada’s connections were so good that the State Department allowed it to choose the company that would review the pipeline’s environmental impact. TransCanada chose a company called Cardno ENTRIX, which boasted on the front page of its Web site that TransCanada was one of its “major clients.” In effect, TransCanada was allowed to review itself—not surprisingly, it found that a project that NASA scientists said would speed us toward “game over for the climate” would have “minimal” environmental impact. This is how it works in Washington—we weren’t naïfs, but I confess I was a little shocked by how blatant it all was. We’d picked this one project to focus on, and every closet we opened was a boneyard. And the more we protested, the more the people who knew how the game worked told us we would lose.
We didn’t slacken the pace, though. Obama in Seattle? So were hundreds of protesters. Obama in San Francisco? Thousands, including some of the big Silicon Valley donors who’d backed his campaign in 2008. In Atlanta they picketed Obama campaign offices, and in Oregon they gathered outside fund-raisers: “Hey Michelle—No XL,” people chanted as the First Lady’s motorcade arrived in Portland. And while all this was happening, the Occupy movement was growing fast across the nation. It had begun in New York exactly two weeks after we’d finished our Washington sit-in. I’d taken the train to Manhattan as soon as I could and spoke through the mighty human microphone, each ring of listeners repeating my words till they reached the edge of the throng. “Wall Street’s been occupying the atmosphere for decades,” I said. “It’s about time we returned the favor.” Before the fall was out I’d spoken at nine Occupy encampments across the country. (They were true to their roots. In San Luis Obispo, statistically America’s happiest city, there was a man with a sign that read “Free Hugs.” In Boulder the Occupiers were as handsome and fit as all their neighbors; it looked like they were shooting an Occupy catalog, and after my talk they gave me a gift bag of herbal teas.) Our messages synched easily, since the oil companies were the 1 percent of the 1 percent, and since the corruption around the approval process was a poster child for complaints about the unfairness of our political system. Journalists complained that Occupy didn’t take positions, but in our case it simply wasn’t true—the New York City General Assembly enthusiastically endorsed the fight against Keystone. Out west, meanwhile, r
anchers and indigenous leaders were holding a session of their own on the Rosebud Sioux reservation, producing my favorite headline of the fall: “Cowboys, Indians Unite Against Pipeline.” (Not politically correct, perhaps, but politically potent.) In Washington, D.C., “Tar Sands Students” formed—and a hundred of these high school leaders went to the State Department to meet with an assistant secretary of state—the picture of them standing sweetly in their good clothes on the Foggy Bottom sidewalk and clenching their fists for the camera made my day.
Every day there was something like that. Our crew was spread out across the country, but in constant digital touch. We’d open the e-mail and there’d be a picture from the Midwest—a young couple who’d spearheaded a drive to carve Obama jack-o’-lanterns during the 2008 campaign (“Yes We Carve”) was now producing anti-Keystone pumpkins. Or there was a photo from St. Louis—a pair of young volunteers who’d gone to an Obama fund-raiser in their sharpest outfits, only to open their jacket and shawl when the president began to speak to reveal their anti-Keystone banners. The president didn’t respond immediately, but during his remarks he said, “We’ve got a couple of people here who are concerned about the environment.” We seized on remarks like that as proof that we were getting the president’s attention, and we knew it for sure a couple of weeks later when the president gave a big talk in Denver. Speaking at the University of Colorado, he was greeted by the now-usual throng with an anti-pipeline banner. But he was also interrupted midspeech by Tom Poor Bear, vice president of the Oglala Lakota Nation. He told the president to stop Keystone, or at least he tried to—security guards hauled him away before he could get very far, so we did our best to spread his statement: “As our great leader Crazy Horse once said, ‘You cannot sell the land your people are buried on.’ I believe today he would say, ‘You cannot desecrate the land your people are buried on.’”
Before the hour was out I got a call from a steamed White House aide explaining that it was not okay to interrupt the president. I was surprised, actually, at his real anger—at the idea that we’d committed some act of lèse-majesté. I could truthfully assure him that while we hadn’t told Tom what to yell, we weren’t going to tell him to shut up. (It seemed to me as if American history had earned the Sioux the right to say a word or two.) For the most part, though, we kept true to our plan of not attacking the president—a plan that reached its zenith on November 6, 2011.
That was the day—precisely one year before the election—that we returned to Washington, intent on encircling the White House. I’d convinced my colleagues that it was a decent plan and then they’d done all the work, figuring out the logistical challenge of surrounding the mile and a half of security perimeter around the executive mansion. (Depending on your militancy level, we said we were either putting Obama under house arrest, or giving him an O-shaped hug.) The day dawned perfectly blue, and with all kinds of good omens: the Washington Post had a piece demolishing the industry claim that the pipeline would create jobs, a Julia Louis-Dreyfus video recruiting protesters was going viral, and the three thousand bright orange safety vests we’d ordered had arrived just in time. Three thousand people was what we were hoping for—close scrutiny of Google Earth had convinced our crew that, hands outstretched, that many folks would make it all the way around. As it turned out, we needn’t have worried—such a crush of people descended on Lafayette Square for the rally that we immediately knew our problem would be to deploy them without knots and jams. As speaker after speaker gave crisp calls to action, we divided the crowd into fourths and then sent them to each side of the perimeter fence, following giant colored flags. Within half an hour, the word from our observers on every edge was that the White House was fully ringed, and that most of the way people were standing shoulder to shoulder five deep.
Michael Brune, the director of the Sierra Club, grabbed my arm and said, “Let’s do a lap,” and it was the most fun half hour of the whole fall, high-fives nonstop till my hand was swollen. It had been, in fact, a nonstop autumn (someone on our team calculated at some point that I’d spent more nights in jail than I had in Vermont), but we’d done what we could. If there was ever a happy protest, this was it—every banner was a quotation from President Obama, every chant a hopeful call for him to act. We’d played our hand as best we could.
But how would we keep the pressure on? We sat up late that night, hammering out a tentative plan. If we didn’t hear from the president we’d have to go a little harder, this time visiting campaign offices in all fifty states. But we knew it would be tough to keep the positive vibe, we knew that our tone would start to slip. We knew we risked pushing in a way that would make it impossible for Obama to give in.
So relief hardly begins to describe my feeling two days later when a call from the White House alerted me that “something’s in the works—something you’re going to like.” The relief still came with some tension. We knew that the president wasn’t going to veto the pipeline outright—that the most we could hope for was that he’d delay the decision for a year. And we knew he wouldn’t cite our pressure. From the beginning we’d encouraged the White House to grab the lifeline that the Nebraska Republicans had given him, a scant cover to pretend this was a bipartisan action. But we also needed more than that. If the only issue he cited was possible spills as the pipe crossed the Sandhills, then TransCanada would be able to chart a new course and the pipeline would certainly be built. To have a chance in the long run, we needed the president to promise that when he made the final determination, which now seemed likely to come no earlier than 2013, that he’d take climate change into account.
That was the bargain I kept pushing as the week wore on and I wandered across New Mexico, in and out of cell range. I’d speak to students at United World College and then talk to our White House contacts; one crucial e-mail came while I was at Occupy Santa Fe—as stereotypically beautiful as you might expect, with a full moon rising over a campfire. On Wednesday night I spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at the gorgeous old Lensic Theater in downtown Santa Fe; the next morning I was at the Albuquerque airport, and I knew the news was starting to leak because my in-box was filling with calls from reporters. First the State Department and then the White House put out their releases: the review would last another year, and in the end a number of factors would be considered, including “climate.” So.
As I told reporter after reporter, environmentalists never win permanent victories, and this was obviously no exception. It wasn’t exactly what we wanted—but damn. I kept thinking of that National Journal poll with 91 percent of those in the know certain that the permit would go through. And I kept thinking of the huge piles of steel pipe TransCanada had already prepositioned in fields across the Midwest—hell, they were so confident they’d mowed the whole pipeline strip a few weeks before so they’d be ready to go the second the president gave them what they’d paid for.
But he didn’t. The pipeline might get built someday, but not that day. We hadn’t stopped global warming. But for once we’d shown that people could actually stand up to the richest industry the world has ever known. I answered as many phone calls as I could and then sunk into my seat on the airplane and slept. For the first time since those nights in jail I wasn’t tense—wasn’t trying to figure out the next move.
* * *
For about a week I managed to maintain the illusion that the worst of the fight was over—that we’d really have a year of quiet on the Keystone front.
I went home for the first time in weeks. People always say it’s a pleasure to sleep in your own bed, which is true, but it’s also a pleasure not to dispense your Raisin Bran from a plastic cylinder by turning a knob. I’ve learned to tolerate the Courtyard by Marriott and the Homewood Suites and the Days Inn—if there’s an Internet connection then I’m okay. But, oh, the eternal view of the parking lot, and the automated morning wakeup call, and the plastic cup in its plastic wrap, and the sign explaining that the environment is being saved by not washing your towels. Hilton
should open a budget division called Purgatory.
So maybe some of the delight in seeing Kirk’s new home was simply that it was a home. All summer and fall I’d kept in touch with the ongoing construction via phone calls, and if I got to Vermont for a day I’d stop by. He’d started in late spring by building the workshop/barn—twenty-six by seventy feet. “That was the most important job,” he said. “As long as I got the barn finished I could always move into the double-wide,” referring to the trailer the previous owner had left on the edge of the driveway. “But I needed the barn space to run the apiary.”
He had to buy a tractor first, an orange Kubota, so he could cut the road and do other excavation. “I really enjoyed digging the conduit for the electric line,” he said. “It only took a day and a half in the tractor. You understand why fossil fuel can be a good thing.” With electric service in place at the barn site, he assembled his small crew: his godson, Heath; one of my former students named Corinne, who had no carpentry experience; her boyfriend, Nick, who had some; and a woman from Oregon named Kat, who had a Chihuahua named Anigo who guarded against visitors.
As the summer wore on, the frame went up, and then the walls and roof—it’s a tall barn, with a full loft above the workshop floor, all laid out to make it easy to load and unload wooden hive boxes. By late summer everything was done but the shingles, and since it’s well known that tar paper can get you through a single winter, Kirk had a moment to pause. Irene blew through at that point, but on the western side of the Green Mountains it was just a bad rainstorm. (“I didn’t have my antenna up so I wasn’t listening to the radio, and it was a few days before I found out what had happened,” Kirk said. I marveled to think of the hours he hadn’t wasted tracking the storm up the coast on the Internet, or staring at YouTube pictures of floating barns.) The end of summer was also the moment to collect the year’s honey, but there wasn’t much of a crop—even before the hurricane, the weather had been cool and damp. So there wasn’t much money coming in.
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