In The Arena Cowboys and Indians Against Keystone

Bill McKibben is co-founder and president of 350.org, an international climate campaign.

The fight over the Keystone XL pipeline is entering its final phases—a 60-day public comment period is about to end, at which point John Kerry and Barack Obama will be free to decide whether the giant project is in America’s national interest.

Oil companies and the Koch brothers have said yes; a huge array of groups from the nurses union to the Nobel Peace Prize laureates, economists to climate scientists, clergy to solar entrepreneurs have opposed it, making it one of the biggest and most contentious political clashes in decades.


But it’s fitting that what may be the final arguments will come from the two groups that have fought longest and most powerfully: ranchers and farmers along the route, and Native Americans on both sides of the border. The members of this so-called CIA (Cowboy Indian Alliance) are bringing their tipis and horses to the Washington Mall later this month; they’ll host an encampment for a week, rallying under the nose of the White House and attempting to buck up the president who once promised he would end the “tyranny of oil.”

As a late arrival to this fight, I’ve gotten to watch these ranchers, farmers and indigenous leaders at work for the last three years. It’s been remarkable to see not only their political skill but the way their arguments have gathered power and force.

Ranchers and farmers began by defending their land from TransCanada, the company that has been trying to exercise eminent domain to run its 1,700-mile pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. They cited the danger to treasures like the Ogallala Aquifer and Nebraska’s Sand Hills, and they succeeded where “environmentalists” probably would have failed in rallying red-state support. In the fall of 2011, for instance, near the start of the campaign, a huge crowd at a University of Nebraska football game stood and booed a halftime TransCanada commercial on the stadium’s Jumbotron. It was an amazing moment.

The next year, 2012, saw the hottest annual temperature ever recorded in the United States, and a drought so deep that Nebraska recorded its driest summer temperatures ever; because of the Keystone fight, ranchers and farmers had spent time in paddy wagons and jail cells with climate scientists, and knew that there was another reason to be fighting the pipeline. Randy Thompson, the iconic Nebraska rancher helping lead the fight, circulated a picture of his tow-headed grandchildren holding signs calling for “green energy.” Meanwhile, Jane Kleeb, the remarkable organizer behind BoldNebraska who will be center stage at the D.C. encampment this month, explained that autumn that “the pipeline fight has changed my mind about climate change.”

Even before ranchers and farmers got involved in the battle, however, native leaders were sounding the alarm. That’s because the pipeline doesn’t just cross reservations and native territories, but finds its source in the Cree and Athabasca land of northern Alberta. This is beautiful boreal forest—and much of it has now been turned into a hellscape, complete with all the cancer deaths, social dislocations and ecological destruction that goes with mega-mines. That’s why native leaders like George Poitras and Bill Erasmus sounded the alarm, why indefatigable campaigners like Clayton Thomas-Muller and Melina Laboucan-Massimo have traveled the world trying to tell the story of the planet’s dirtiest oil. It’s why leaders south of the border like Debra White Plume, Faith Spotted Eagle, Tom Poor Bear and Winona LaDuke have been crucial to carrying the fight forward.

If the ranchers represent everyone who will have to grow our food in an overheated world, then the aboriginal leaders represent all who have borne witness for centuries to the pretty much unchecked drive to dominate this continent. These native leaders have rooted their opposition to Keystone in straightforward ways: the risk to the human health, encroachment on tribal sovereignty and so on. But, without being romantic or sentimental, there’s also the discernible echo of all those ignored warnings over the 500 years of European settlement on these shores. Indian leaders have said, time and again, that those who immigrated here showed insufficient respect to the land they conquered; the “black snake” of the Keystone pipeline is one more insult. Or, perhaps, a turning point.

The conventional wisdom has always held that Keystone will be built, and indeed Obama “expedited” construction of the southern half of the pipeline, pushing through permits so that oil could begin flowing earlier this year to refineries in the gutted refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas. In the speech he gave that day, he boasted about approving so many pipelines that they could encircle the earth at the equator. But maybe, just maybe, his heart is still open; if so, there’s no one better to reach it than the cowboys and Indians arriving on horseback in a few days’ time.