Natalie Eberts, a 20-year-old Western senior, is finally back to the west coast after four days of protesting in Washington, D.C., after she was arrested along with 1,251 other protesters.
Eberts and more than 2,000 others in Washington, D.C., sang songs of protest in front of the White House over a proposed 1,700-mile-long oil pipeline that would run from Hardisty, Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast refineries in Port Arthur, Texas.
Eberts said she was excited when she arrived off the Greyhound from North Dakota because the protest group seemed professional and welcoming.
“That night I helped a couple volunteers cook for about a hundred people,” she said. “People were travelling from really far away.”
She said there was a team of lawyers, volunteer cooks and group leaders all working together with the support of labor unions.
“(It was a) collaborative decision-making process to keep the momentum going,” Eberts said.
The group wore professional clothing and choreographed every detail of their protest, including which area to sit in – on the sidewalk in front of the White House. They waited in orderly lines before they were escorted to police vans, she said.
“I went there with the intention of being arrested,” Eberts said. “We wanted it to be more than just a rally.”
The largest environmental protest in decades was in part planned by famous author and environmentalist Bill McKibben, who was arrested the first day along with a Western student and friend of Eberts, Chelsea Thaw, motivating Eberts to join.
Eberts said the goal of their civil disobedience was to tell President Barack Obama that he should stick to what he said during the 2008 election and show more interest in protecting the environment by not signing the permit for the pipeline.
She helped make a banner for the protest to represent this that said, “This is not the Change we Hoped for.”
The State Department’s environmental impact statement supports the pipeline.
“Overall, the impact of construction to wildlife is expected to be minor and would be primarily temporary to short term,” according to the report. “The emissions from the proposed project would be consistent with state implementation plans for air quality issues.”
Eberts said she believes that these statements do not take into account the added carbon dioxide emission that come from using Canadian tar sands crude oil or the amount of damage mining it is having on the earth.
“If the tar sands are fully developed it would cause irreversible damage to the climate,” Eberts said.
Other political figures have spoken out on their opposition to the pipeline.
Al Gore and the Republican Governor of Nebraska, Dave Heineman, said he is concerned about the pipeline because it passes over the Ogallala water reservoir, an aquifer spanning 174,000 square miles from Texas to South Dakota.
According to The State Department report, they expect one to two leaks per year, but 12 have happened on the TransCanada Keystone system since May, 2010.
The permit for the pipeline is expected to be approved by Obama at the end of the year.
Keystone XL pipline:
Keystone XL Project is a 1700-mile crude oil pipeline.
Delivery from Alberta, Canada to Texas.
The proposed project could transport up to 830,000 barrels per day.
Estimated cost: $7 billion.
If permitted, it would begin operation in 2013, with the actual date dependent on the necessary permits, approvals, and authorizations.
Source: U.S. State Department
