Introduction
There were a few hundred of us gathered in St. Stephen’s Church in Washington, DC, the night before our first wave of sit-ins at the White House. “Make some noise if you are in your teens! Okay, who is in their twenties? Thirties? Forties? Fifties? Who here is older than sixty?” The most thunderous applause came at the end, from all the elders in the room. The next day, after hundreds participated in a sit-in in front of the White House to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, we greeted people with hugs and water as they got out of jail. A woman in her eighties approached one of us. “When I saw you young people leading the trainings for this, I thought, ‘Yes, the youth are going to save us!’ … But as I sat in with people in their seventies and eighties, I thought, ‘No, we have to do this together!’” We embraced, moved by the intergenerational collaboration of a series of actions designed to be a gateway into the movement for people who had never taken action before.
It was just one moment in one series of actions to stop Keystone XL, but for us it indicated the potential of these protests—that they could serve as a catalyst to reinvigorate the US climate movement. Keystone XL (or KXL) is a pipeline project undertaken by the energy firm TransCanada. It is designed to carry tar sands bitumen through roughly 1,500 miles (about 2,400 kilometres) of pipeline from the tar sands in Alberta to the US Gulf Coast for refinement and export. In the time since the White House sit-ins, campaigns to stop KXL have been diverse in strategies, tactics, actors, and approaches. The campaigns are complex, marked by both losses and hope.
While we do not have space (nor are we necessarily the right people) to offer a reflection of the full campaign, in this chapter we aim to highlight some lessons we’ve learned from one style of direct action that helped propel the campaign in the United States in 2011: the fourteen days of White House sit-ins called the Tar Sands Action.
In the mid- to late 2000s, the US climate movement was flailing and fractured, and had not unified around common opponents. With the lead-up to the United Nations ministerial negotiations of 2009 in Copenhagen, and with a climate bill in the US Congress, many large environmental NGOs were pouring resources into the Washington, DC, “beltway” and striving for legislative action on such efforts as emissions standards, carbon markets, and other provisions in the climate bill. However, many environmental justice groups were positioned on the other side of the fence, opposing those same policy proposals relating to offsets and polluter giveaways. The dividing lines tended to hinge around differing theories of change and analyses of impacts, and the role that “green capitalist” markets should play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which mattered a lot when there were concrete policy proposals on the table that had real consequences for communities on the frontlines of fossil fuel extraction. Environmental justice groups argued that such bills threw communities of colour, Indigenous communities, and low-income communities under the bus, and that national NGOs were pursuing goals that actively hurt the communities they served.
That landscape shifted dramatically in 2010. Copenhagen was a dismal failure from a policy perspective, after weak, non-binding agreements were settled on—with the United States and Canada both central forces working to water down any substantive commitments. From a movement-building perspective, however, the international demonstrations in Copenhagen engaged a wide diversity of Southern peoples’ movements and grassroots forces, and pointed the way to a deepening consensus about the urgency of fighting climate change. Later that year, the US climate bill was also killed, and some US NGOs found themselves re-evaluating their tunnel-vision “inside-the-beltway” strategy. Between 2007 and 2010, climate justice groups, such as grassroots activists in the Navajo Nation, community groups in Appalachia, Western Mining Action Network, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL), community groups in Richmond, CA, Klamath River Native organizing, and Southwest Workers Union (and many more),1 seemed more capable of keeping carbon in the ground than the lobbying efforts in Washington; the political frameworks of grassroots movements gained much greater legitimacy among younger demographics. For many years, some of the Big Greens had acknowledged the need to deepen their relationships with and accountability to the environmental justice community, but often struggled around how. This new moment opened up new possibilities. One lesson seemed clear: people must organize where they have power, and at that moment, peoples’ power was certainly not in the halls of Congress.
Across the political spectrum of US environmentalism, a focus on fighting the fossil fuel industry was intensifying and becoming entwined with renewed interest in grassroots organizing. This led many campaigners to seek opportunities to create a so-called “big tent” that could pull a range of groups into alignment over a common struggle.
Strategy Lessons from the Tar Sands Action to Stop Keystone XL
In the autumn and winter of 2010, a number of experienced direct action organizers had been circulating ideas and proposals with various people in the climate movement, aimed principally at the hope of building bridges through escalated climate-centred direct actions. Many of us had worked professionally at organizations such as Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace, had roles as trainers and action coordinators with the Ruckus Society, and had been part of grassroots efforts like Direct Action Network, Earth First!, Mobilization for Climate Justice, Direct Action to Stop the War, Rising Tide North America, and others. We were inspired by the impressive mass actions of the Climate Camps in the UK and Europe, which drew thousands of people; the growth of the anti-globalization movement in the US in the late 1990s and early 2000s; and the powerful organizing of the antinuclear movement in previous decades.
By contrast, the climate movement in North America was mainly active at a relatively small scale. Some grassroots groups were effectively using actions to win local campaigns and build power, such as in forcing the cancellation of the Life of Mine permit in Black Mesa, Arizona, resisting the construction of the Desert Rock coal plant, and halting refinery expansion in Richmond, California; and some NGOs were successfully using targeted, campaign-specific direct actions (often involving highly trained people taking a very technical action), such as banner drops off of Bank of America skyscrapers and other funders of fossil fuels. But outside of a few experiences in the US (such as the 2009 Capitol Climate Action that many of us organized), we were lacking “movement moments”2 that escalated into bigger and broader connections and could open up political space in a way that nuanced campaigning on short-term struggles often cannot do.
That winter, 350.org invited some of us in the San Francisco Bay Area into a more concerted conversation on this topic. During the brainstorm, Bill McKibben and others at 350.org highlighted the upcoming proposal for the Keystone XL pipeline as a key objective for climate organizing in the US. Tribal communities had been fighting the tar sands across the continent for years, with little support or attention from national groups. Some of us had already worked for a few years on solidarity campaigns focused on fighting the tar sands in Canada, but this issue had yet to gain much traction among broader movements in the US. Many US climate activists had never even heard of the tar sands. While there was already organized resistance to the tar sands, which had primarily been led by Indigenous groups north of our border, US environmental organizations saw it largely as a “Canadian issue” and, with a few exceptions (such as reports, basic press support, and online campaigns), were unsure of how to engage inside our own country. It was an uphill battle to show the relevance of the tar sands fight for people in the United States. On top of this, some Washington insiders told us that the approval of Keystone XL was a “done deal,” essentially already rubber-stamped, and encouraged us to focus our attention elsewhere. We were also warned that many liberals were not ready to embrace full-on campaigning against the Obama administration—that we would only be able to mobilize radicals from the margins.
While we appreciated the advice, we came to a wholly different conclusion with some of our other allies. Far from wasting energy on a lost cause, we hoped that this project could be the catalyst that the climate movement was looking for to grow into something bigger, and demonstrate that we need not be held hostage to the politics of what is considered “reasonable” in DC. We thought we could thread a needle that would mobilize Obama’s own base to confront him on the pipeline as a campaign target. We were excited and hopeful, but we did not really know what we were doing.
It would be impossible to chronicle the entire span of the multiple campaigns confronting KXL over the last three years, but we are convinced of the importance of seven basic lessons that we have learned from this initial set of Washington sit-ins, and its direct consequences.
Lesson 1: Collaboration Requires Flexibility and Leading with Action
We came to 350.org as unaffiliated activists, but relied on consultation with a lot of groups that had been opposing the tar sands, such as the Indigenous Environmental Network. We worked with 350 to set up an independent campaigning group called Tar Sands Action, which was connected to 350.org via shared resources, organizers, and spokespeople, but which had autonomy. We did not call a huge coalition meeting of groups who disagreed with each other, only to slog through the “lowest-common-denominator politics” that are commonplace when trying to get different actors to agree on an overarching strategy. Instead, we put out a call to action to see who would join with us, while continuing to do our best to take direction from frontline stakeholders. To use an analogy, we thought it would be easier to balance a bicycle once it was already in motion. By combining some elbow grease with the vision of 350.org board members like Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben, we were able to garner support from some big-name public intellectuals, celebrity advocates, movement leaders, and scientists, like Maude Barlow, Wendell Berry, Tom Goldtooth, Danny Glover, James Hansen, George Poitras, David Suzuki, and Gus Speth, among others, which helped add public legitimacy to Tar Sands Action. Calls to action were one thing, but it took the rolling momentum of fourteen days of consecutive sit-ins, “pedalling our bicycle,” to build a level of mass engagement and media interest.
Though this sort of action was not original, we approached our organizing differently than we had in the past. Here, our goal was not to simply mobilize existing activists or action affinity groups, but rather to create a gateway into the movement for thousands of people who may never have participated in a protest before, let alone risked arrest in civil disobedience. Similar actions had happened regularly in preceding years, but without much recognition or support from larger, mainstream groups. Our hope was to demystify direct action for mainstream environmentalists, and invite influential groups (sometimes referred to as “grasstops”) to join in whatever way they were comfortable with. This approach was an effort to pierce some of the divisions that had hardened in the lead-up to the UN Copenhagen Ministerial, and shift mainstream groups a little bit to the left.
It worked. Over two weeks, 1,250 people—engaging a wide range of constituents, including farmers, faith leaders, ranchers, students, Indigenous elders and community members, students, scientists, grandparents, celebrities, and more—were arrested in front of the White House. They represented a committed core who inspired thousands of others to come off the sidelines. On the first day of sit-ins, there was little media interest, and we had to create our own. But each day saw more and more people coming to Washington. Skeptical groups that were on the fence joined in once they saw our credibility and others coming on board. By the end, the steady drumbeat yielded attention in nearly every major media outlet in the country, and a wide breadth of participating organizations. This affirmed our approach to navigating coalition politics: leading with action, rather than trying to get a wide variety of groups to agree on a unifying theory of change and a single strategy. Such a diversity of groups may not agree on everything, but they could at least recognize that this action was worthwhile. Almost overnight, people could feel a sense of being part of a nationwide campaign to stop the pipeline, propelled by a wide variety of autonomous, grassroots groups demanding action on climate change. The ability of multiple groups to maintain differing theories of change in the wake of the tar sands action was an affirmation that “movement moments” can open up space for a diversity of campaign approaches.
Lesson 2: Sometimes Making a Big “Ask” Is Vital to Getting People to Respond
Our recruitment strategy relied on making strong appeals to people and being open to their responses. One common message that we’ve heard consistently throughout our experience as organizers is to “meet folks where they are at.” This often means finding “soft” ways of bringing people into the fold. For instance, someone might initially sign your online petition; then they might attend a meeting or an event; then they might become regular members and facilitate meetings; and then they may join a protest, and then organize their own actions. This is what organizers call a “ladder of engagement.” We took a different tack—by finding ways to support people leapfrogging the ladder entirely.
One pitfall of using “soft” approaches, with more limited engagement from people, is that these can lead to the continuing use of tactics that are outdated, and might not match the severity of the problem you are trying to solve. Many of us can be overwhelmed by the scale and urgency of the climate crisis and the power of the industry propelling tar sands expansion. We are regularly confronted with doomsday climate scenarios, and people who are aware of the tar sands recognize their devastating health impacts. In the face of these problems, asking people to sign a petition or come to a rally is not likely to psychologically fit the scale of the crisis. People want to take action only when they believe it will have a meaningful impact. Thus, we wagered against a soft approach to engagement, with the assumption that more people would be mobilized by a big and bold ask, rather than a small and shallow one, and this seemed to work.
We also recognized that asking anyone to risk arrest for any reason is a big deal. For seasoned activists, the White House sit-ins seemed “low risk,” but for people who had no experience with direct action, such an ask can appear as a major life decision to risk one’s physical well-being and face possible legal consequences, as well as social stigma. We knew we had to be honest about these risks.
Lesson 3: Organize Openly and Transparently for Mass Actions
It may seem obvious that being transparent should be one of the first things we do as organizers. After all, “transparency is the first rule of accountability.”3 Often, however, transparency in public actions can be muddled by distrust, busy-ness, negligence, or “security culture” (that is, withholding information for fear of the police, industry, or opposition learning our plans). Intentionally or not, it is not always easy for organizers to share everything they are thinking with volunteers, or with prospective recruits. Sometimes it is necessary to be clandestine, especially with intentionally small or covert actions. But not in mass actions that are providing doorways. When working on Tar Sands Action, we realized that if our participants knew everything, we could make our movement more accessible. But transparency requires a lot of active work.
Our first step in making things transparent was explaining our process to potential action participants. We sent folks regular emails, mapping out every detail of the action we could communicate. As soon as someone signed up, they would receive a message confirming that they understood the action they had signed up for. We prided ourselves on a comprehensive Frequently Asked Questions backgrounder, and one-on-one communication with literally thousands of people. We had lawyers available to help offer guidance, and posted their legal assessment so that anyone who went to our website could see what the risks were. Some of us fielded emails full of questions for almost fifteen hours a day. We had regular public web video chats to give updates about how the action planning was coming along. We held public strategy sessions to get feedback from thousands of people and be guided by the work people were already doing in their own communities. We did our best to model the principle that organizers should take direction from the communities they serve.
Our hope was that given a sense of urgency, with all of the information on the table, and the media interest towards our spokespeople like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein, participants could be fully engaged and prepared for the action. They knew they may need an extra day off work, in case they were held overnight if they were arrested. They knew what they should wear, what they should bring, and what time to be at the trainings.
When organizing for such actions, we often assume that if people hear the worst-case scenario (the possible legal charges, days in jail, and so on), they will get too nervous, and take a step back. There were some who did; however, it was clear that many more people joined because we demystified this particular style of public nonviolent direct action (NVDA) and made it accessible. We knew that if we created an open framework for folks, they would be more willing to trust us.
The action framework we created for folks was a first step. It was a somewhat-controlled situation that had relatively low legal consequences, and allowed participants to access NVDA as a tactic. Like all messy, real-world organizing, the effort was not without its contradictions. “Big tents” can quickly fill up with groups whose structures are at odds with one another, and groups with power can cluelessly misuse it at the expense of those who don’t. Openly facing these challenges head-on is part of the task of building mass movements.
Some critics correctly pointed out that by negotiating with the police in advance, with a lot of directive handholding, we were sacrificing a degree of organic energy and spontaneity in service of a flashy media action. We did not encourage people to refuse fines and cite-and-release procedure to jam up the jail system until their trial. The sit-ins did not cause an economic disruption to our target, and we did not follow a common “affinity group” style, with the small collectives and personal relationships that are common in the environmental movement. Such criticisms, we replied, were missing the point in this circumstance. The participants who took their very first step wearing zip ties have put NVDA in their toolboxes as organizers. The doorway that this carefully designed action created had the effect of ushering in a much broader group of people, who then went and initiated their own actions across the country, and have been doing so consistently in the years since. One woman approached us upon her release from jail, saying, “I feel like this action was training wheels—and I needed that—but now I’m ready to ride a bike!”
Our entire model relied on trusting the ability of people to make use of a transformational flashpoint and go back home to organize in ways that serve their own communities’ needs, as well as link up in solidarity with those facing the worst impacts of the pipeline.
Suddenly, our Tar Sands Action organizing team was sprinting to catch up with and support the organic energy springing up against the Keystone XL pipeline around the country. Within weeks of the action, Obama could not make a fundraising or campaign stop without being confronted by protesters. Obama for America offices were regularly stormed by community activists around the nation. The first time Obama spoke directly about the pipeline was in response to pointed questions from Tom Poorbear, Oglala Sioux vice-president. In the months following the sit-ins, we sought to help highlight and connect all these efforts.
Lesson 4: Campaigns Are Complex and Involve a Variety of Styles of Action
… And actions that include influential voices and scripted elements need not be mutually exclusive from bottom-up grassroots initiatives. Sometimes the former can help open up space for the latter, and support spontaneity and long-term grassroots empowerment.
Our organizing model for the campaign following the sit-ins depended on organizers letting go of most of our control. Our movement has rightly inherited a lot of distrust. National organizations have a checkered history of supporting (and undermining) grassroots organizing, and the severity and seriousness of the issues often leave little room for compromise between conflicting strategies and theories of change. This can lead to paid “professional” organizers and campaigners micromanaging protests or community meetings. We thought we could help build trust between groups by modelling being trusting: pushing bigger organizations to get more comfortable not being in the driver’s seat. We highlighted a diversity of messages coming from communities, regardless of whether or not they were the perfectly polished talking points that make NGOs feel secure. Similarly, we worked with bigger organizations and trusted them to do what they were good at doing. For example, the Natural Resources Defense Council does not have the capacity or skill for direct action or community organizing, so it is not appropriate for them to have a community meeting in Nebraska, but we trusted their media savvy, technical analysis, insider perspective on Capitol Hill, and celebrity outreach. Each organization acted as its own piece of the puzzle, without attempting to do things they were not built to do.
Lesson 5: Know the Landscape of Your Organizational Partners— and the Difference between Your Target and Your Enemy
We sought to trust our partners in what they are good at doing, and draw clear boundaries so groups didn’t inadvertently step on each other’s toes. One way we tried to build alignment was by identifying a clear target. Most campaign strategy processes would have placed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the centre of the bull’s eye. She was in charge of the State Department, which was in charge of the review and approval process. We decided to roll the dice and go bigger. In theory, Barack Obama is in charge of most federal processes. In practice, decisions are made at a variety of levels, covered in red tape, and Obama’s office simply rubber-stamps decisions at the end of the line. Some of our allies said that choosing Obama was sloppy, since Clinton is the actual decision-maker. We hoped that if we hung the decision on Obama’s head and generated sufficient public controversy, it would force the decision into his court. This would be ideal, because it’s difficult to pressure Clinton outside of DC—but Obama has offices in every city, had to raise money around the country, and had a track record of nice words on climate change that we could confront him with.4 We often held signs with his own rhetoric that we must “be the generation that frees America from the tyranny of oil,”5 and that his presidency would see the time when the “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”6 We took a gamble by attempting to mobilize Obama’s own disaffected base to force him to live up to his rhetoric and promise. We trusted that people could handle complexity and understand that while Obama was our target, TransCanada was our enemy.
This choice included another risk: while we believe Obama was a proper target for this specific campaign, we did not want the larger movement to lose sight of its own power by simply trying to persuade decision-makers. Our movement goals are about exercising our own power directly, regardless of the political whims of elected officials. Our campaign choice to target Obama was taken within that larger context—and in our public training sessions and strategy conversations, we did our best to consistently emphasize that we were doing more than asking power holders for change; whether or not Obama approves the pipeline, we need to build the energy of the movement and escalate our demands and actions. We hoped we could foster a direct-action theory of change that built bottom-up power in the big picture, while still having space for specific campaigns that achieve policy gains. Despite our clarity on this in our trainings, and finding some success in shifting mainstream concepts of how change happens, our campaign choices still had the cost of this concept getting muddled and confused in the following years.
Members of the Indigenous Environmental Network at the front of a White House sit-in during the fourteen days of the Tar Sands Action, shortly before arrests, 2011.
Lesson 6: Create Your Own Battlefield
By hanging the decision on Obama’s head, we created our own battlefield. Had we focused on Clinton, our main opportunities for intervention would have been limited to State Department hearings and Clinton’s own statements. By reshaping our landscape, we were able to go on offence, and prevent our campaign from being caught in a cycle of simply reacting to our opposition’s timeline. We were successful in this for the first several months, and this streak culminated in our first partial “victory.” Obama sent Keystone XL back into another two-year review process. We were not as prepared for the next stage of the fight, however, when Republicans and oil-backed Democrats made several attempts to override the decision in Congress. Our playing field shifted. Suddenly we were faced with organizing where we did not have as much power—in the DC beltway. We engaged in mass petitions that got over 800,000 signatures with dramatic public deliveries, and media events that were meant to shame and stiffen the spines of wavering Democrats. The movement defeated their attempts to override the Congressional decision and helped broaden our base of support, but we were stuck putting one foot in front of the other, and needed multiple approaches to keep our opponents at bay. In response, we organized another major DC event in which ten thousand people surrounded the White House, acting as another tipping point and movement moment.
Lesson 7: Don’t Fetishize “Winning”; Do Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
Much of the following three years were like a roller-coaster ride, with short-term victories tempered by losses—which sometimes were big ones. One step forward; three steps back; two steps forward again. When Obama did a photo-op approving the southern leg of the pipeline, our hearts sank. One consequence of the DC-centric national narrative carried by louder groups around Keystone XL was a general lack of attention to communities in the South, for whom legislative goals had failed. While there were many factors leading up to this, we wondered if the tone set by our initial fourteen-day action had cluelessly planted a seed for this dynamic. Furthermore, it seemed inevitable that if the southern leg were approved, the northern leg would follow. Bolder, more confrontational direct action emerged. Alliances were forged between Texas landowners concerned with property rights and eminent domain (the seizure of land by the government) and radical tree sitters. Alongside a wide variety of community organizations, the direct action group Tar Sands Blockade took serious risks by physically blocking the construction of the pipeline, and had to face violent responses from the police in Texas (for more on this, see chapter 17).
For conditions in communities along the southern route of the pipeline, there was no “victory” with federal KXL campaigning to be had, regardless of the outcome for the northern leg. But there was still much to fight for in stopping the project writ large, and much that could be done to support groups diversifying their tactics in the South.
In this context, it was often difficult to know when to celebrate short-term victories, especially when the long-term fight sometimes seemed bleak. We knew that movements are fuelled by a sense of momentum and the hope that winning is possible, and that it is important to cherish every step forward, but with land being seized and people suffering because of the pipeline, it is difficult to celebrate. Often, celebrating small steps forward in the national arena can be a slap in the face for frontline communities dealing with ongoing local impacts and not experiencing improvement in their conditions. We learned that there are ways to talk about and celebrate victories that offer support and momentum to groups on the ground—and there are ways to talk about victory that undermine them. In the time since the Tar Sands Action, many national groups did not understand this difference, and this exacerbated movement fractures that continue to this day.
Nebraska ranchers with an organization known as Bold Nebraska organized along the Midwest; residents fought infrastructure across the Gulf Coast; Lakota tribal members blockaded megaload trucks going up north; and many, many more groups vigorously organized around North America. At the same time, the right wing hardened, which included Mitt Romney’s campaign ads for the 2012 presidential election stating that approving the Keystone XL pipeline would be his first act in office.7 Each time Keystone entered the media, there was an opportunity to get our message across—but also a lot of internal peril, since so many groups had different perspectives on what it all meant. Responding to the twists and turns of the political circumstances was easier said than done. It was often challenging to overcome distrust when some actors in the movement were celebrating any positive words that came out of Obama’s mouth, while others were decrying them as nefarious pandering.
Our opponents are not monolithic or static. They are re-strategizing with every step. It’s possible that even if we defeat the northern leg, they will find a way to transport tar sands bitumen across the US for refinement in the Gulf through the southern leg. Oil company plans for new pipelines and transporting crude by rail have sprung up in the campaigns’ wake. When we stop one part of their strategy, we need to remain vigilant enough to adapt to TransCanada’s plan B (and plans C, D, etc.).
Defining victory becomes even more complex when one considers the distinction between the impacts of climate change versus the impacts of fossil fuel extraction. If the northern leg is defeated, and that translates to a meaningful amount of carbon being left in the ground, it is a genuine “win” for the climate. And if that same “win” also carries with it the devastating impacts of fossil fuel extraction, transport, and refinement from the southern leg or crude-by-rail, it is a material “loss” for many communities. Sometimes the specific frontlines of extreme weather are the same specific frontlines as extraction; sometimes they are different. Often these efforts share the same targets, but disagreements proliferate depending on which lens people are using to measure victory, and climate justice movements have to grow to develop clarity about the difference. The intersections and the distinctions matter. Whether using a climate lens, an extraction lens, or both, another question is who “gets” to declare victory. In our experience, the most honest answer is that communities most affected are the ones best equipped to determine whether or not “big tent” efforts have been successful.
In some ways, any language about “winning” environmental fights inherently whitewashes complexity.8 We need a new language with which to celebrate steps forward that doesn’t default to the zero-sum thinking of winning and losing. We’re inheriting a broken world of increasing insecurity and crisis, and true solidarity means encouraging each other to be honest about our limitations while thinking optimistically about our future and prefiguring our vision of a just world, without rendering invisible the plight of those left out of particular “wins.” And yet, amid all this, we need to always keep our eyes on the prize of the real “win”—a new society driven by interdependence, locally controlled economies, self-determination, social justice, and ecological balance.
Conclusions
We should be clear that all environmental victories are temporary as long as the underlying system of exploitation of both people and the planet persists. If we defeat one project, like Keystone XL North, another company will try another one, as we can see with the various efforts to push tar sands pipelines east and west. It was humbling to learn that in the cases where some activists attempted to celebrate progress, those dealing with the worst impacts of the tar sands sometimes felt like their struggles were being made invisible. Navigating this complexity will be a constant feature of any movement struggle. We are not sure we always made the right decisions, but we are clear on our intention to keep momentum rising and apply our lessons. We see the creation of a “movement moment” around this fight as successful— though we have yet to see if the movement energy in its wake will ultimately be enough to beat the northern leg and translate to other victories. Our hope is that the focus on Keystone XL has grown the movement writ large, which can continue the fight against all tar sands extraction and pipeline projects.
We don’t know what the future holds for the northern leg of Keystone XL, but we do know that “win or lose,” this project is just one piece on a massive chessboard. If the project is defeated, we will still have an astronomical amount of work to do. The step forward for the movement, nevertheless, would be tremendously significant, both in reducing on-the-ground impacts of extraction and carbon emissions, and also as a symbol: it would be a declaration that people power is stronger than the people in power. Onward.