“Expend your energy to find out what is the one thing you can agree on with a political enemy,” General Colin Powell told me years ago. “Think about it and you can do a lot.”
We see this in evidence across the Midwest from Illinois to North Dakota, where unlikely allies with different interests and perspectives have come together to fight multiple multi-state carbon pipelines proposed by giant agri-food and fossil fuel companies.
For some, it's as simple as private companies trying to take private land that belongs to someone else to make a profit for themselves. For others, pipelines will expand our reliance on dirty fuels and prolong pollution from industrial agriculture and the ethanol producers it supplies. Together, they see pipelines as unnecessary, destructive to precious land, and potentially dangerous.
“We may not agree on a lot of things, but that's one thing we're all going to oppose, these pipelines,” says Kim Yunker, who with her husband in Butler County, Iowa, is farming land she could grab for it called the Navigator project. . “We're going to lock arms on this.”
Juncker calls herself a “constitutional conservative” and simply explains her political leanings and, in her opinion, many landowners: “We like our property rights and we like our freedom.”
Environmental activists have seen that opposition to pipelines requires the voice of people who own land they don't want to sell to developers.
For their part, landowners appreciate that environmental groups bring their organizational experience and ability to attend to the smallest details to the fight. One of the biggest challenges is that farmers are busy with farming and cannot do full-time opposition.
Tim Baughman, who owns land with his sister in Crawford County, Iowa, that could be disrupted by the Summit Pipeline, attended a safety meeting with the developer last week. the only reason he knew about the session was that he heard about it from a farmer in another part of the state. In turn, he does what he can to keep two other landowners informed. They are among nine in the county that have not signed voluntary deeds for the pipeline to cross their land and are less connected to the digital world, he says.
More than 150 landowners now participate in weekly Zoom calls with environmentalists to share information and strategy. One result is that more than 460 landowners have filed to intervene when the Iowa Utilities Board holds its hearing in a few weeks on the Summit Pipeline's request to take land through eminent domain. This is no small feat, as Baughman's own motion to intervene was 51 pages long.
Our system allows the power of several people to block the power of money, which the pipeline developers certainly have. So the opponents managed to claim some big wins.
In North Dakota, the public service commission last week denied Summit the permission it needs to move forward, citing issues ranging from impacts on cultural sites and wildlife areas to concerns about property values. the company can reapply. In Iowa, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would greatly limit the ability of lawsuits to take land involuntarily, with nearly two-thirds of Democrats and 80% of Republicans supporting it. The bill was unfortunately defeated in the state Senate.
To truly harness this people power, we must build coalitions that are uncomfortably large. That's what pipeline opponents have done. People who will question whether coal harms the climate are fighting alongside people who will question the role of biofuels in prolonging our addiction to fossil fuels.
In a country that can feel so divided, there is promise in this beyond the pipeline battle. As General Powell told me, “As you win a victory together, you may discover along the way that there is something else you agree on.”
Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
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