Alliance Magazine
by Katie Redford
Last month, I went to northern Minnesota to stand with water protectors and land defenders in protest against Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline, which cuts through their sacred lands, disrupting unique ecosystems and ignoring treaty rights of the indigenous communities who have lived there for thousands of years.
If completed, Line 3 will lock in decades of crude oil production in the Alberta tar sands that the carbon budget simply cannot afford. I saw the earth torn apart and the construction machinery ready to burrow under the headwaters of the Mississippi. I saw law enforcement officers abusing their power to restrict First Amendment rights of American citizens. And I saw communities and grassroots organisers who have been resisting Line 3 for years, putting their bodies on the line between Enbridge’s construction equipment and their sacred lands.
For more than 50 years, the fossil fuel industry has known about, covered up, profited from, and driven the climate crisis. It drills carbon out of the ground, burns it and sells it to be burned again by consumers. The more we burn, the more the industry supplies. It works the other way, too: the more the industry drills, the more it needs to sell, and the more it invests in generating demand and expansion to foreign markets…