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api - www.earthskyweb.com/sota.htm - Anpetu Iyamni - Oct. 3, 2018

“That was really pretty 

successful in thwarting a lot of our 

efforts to continue any activism after 

that,” McCray said.

Oka Lawa never drew the kind 

of participation and attention that 

made the Dakota Access Pipeline a 

national cause, and the Diamond 

Pipeline was completed quietly later 

that year.

McCray has since channeled 

her energy toward politics, running 

for a seat on the Oklahoma 

Corporation Commission, which 

regulates the energy industry. 

But even as a candidate, McCray 

says, she now watches her words 

and her Facebook posts, afraid of 

being implicated as a conspirator 

if someone were to violate the law, 

even if she doesn’t know the person. 

“I don’t feel safe, honestly,” she said.

Across the country, activists 

like McCray are feeling increasingly 

under assault as energy companies 

and their allies in government have 

tried to turn the law—and law 

enforcement—against them.

In Louisiana, which enacted 

a similar law in May, at least nine 

activists have been arrested under 

the new law since it went into effect 

on Aug. 1. In one incident, three 

people were pulled off a canoe 

and kayak after they maneuvered 

the boats on a bayou to protest 

construction of an oil pipeline. The 

arrests were conducted by off-duty 

officers with the state Department of 

Public Safety and Corrections who 

were armed and in uniform, but at 

the time were working for a private 

security firm hired by the pipeline 

developer.

Dozens of bills and executive 

orders have been introduced in at 

least 31 states since January 2017 

that aim to restrict high-profile 

protests that have ramped up as 

environmentalists focus on blocking 

fossil fuel projects.

In addition to Oklahoma’s 

infrastructure bill and similar 

legislation enacted in two other 

states, these bills would expand 

definitions of rioting and terrorism, 

and even increase penalties for 

blocking traffic. Twelve have 

been enacted, according to the 

International Center for Not-for-

Profit Law. The bills have all come 

since the election of President 

Donald Trump, who openly 

suggested violence as a way to 

handle protesters on the campaign 

trail, and once in office called the 

nation’s leading news organizations 

“the enemy of the American people.”

At the same time, law 

enforcement and private companies 

have conducted surveillance on 

campaigners, while some federal 

and state officials have suggested 

pipeline protesters who break 

laws be charged as terrorists. 

Corporations have hit landowners 

and environmental groups with 

restraining orders and hundred-

million-dollar lawsuits.

Some pipeline opponents 

have conducted dangerous and 

illegal stunts, cutting pipelines with 

oxyacetylene torches or closing 

valves. But most protests have been 

peaceful. If they’ve broken laws by 

trespassing, activists say, they’ve 

done so as part of a tradition of civil 

disobedience that stretches to the 

nation’s colonial roots.

“All of the social progress we’ve 

made has depended, over the entire 

history of this nation, from the very 

beginning, on that ability to speak 

out against things that are wrong, 

things that are legal but should not 

be,” said Carroll Muffett, president 

of the Center for International 

Environmental Law. “This country, 

for all its failing, has long respected 

the importance of that. These bills 

put that fundamental element of our 

democracy in jeopardy.”

In an Age of Terrorism

The modern environmental 

movement sprung out of mass 

protest, when millions took to the 

streets for the first Earth Day in 

1970. In the decade that followed, 

civil disobedience emerged as a core 

tactic as greens joined with anti-war 

protesters to launch anti-nuclear 

campaigns.

Laws against protesters

Continued from Page 5

The movement returned to 

those roots with its fight to stop 

the Keystone XL oil pipeline. 

Beginning in 2011, activists 

staged sit-ins ending in arrests that 

galvanized the movement and drew 

national attention to what had been 

the mundane work of building 

pipelines.

Across the country, people 

began physically obstructing fossil 

fuel infrastructure. Protesters 

blocked train tracks carrying coal 

and oil in Washington state, halted 

trucks at the gates of a gas storage 

facility in upstate New York and 

kayaked in front of an oil rig in 

Seattle. This was before hundreds 

were arrested at Standing Rock.

In the absence of a clear 

federal energy plan, fossil fuel 

projects effectively became the 

policy, locking in oil, gas and 

coal infrastructure—and their 

greenhouse gas emissions —for 

generations. They became the focus 

of environmental groups, who 

found common cause with tribes 

and landowners fighting to protect 

their land and water. The groups 

launched campaigns that delayed 

or blocked several major coal 

export facilities, pipelines and other 

projects, costing energy companies 

millions or even billions of dollars.

To push back, the industry 

turned to its supporters in 

government.

Soon after Oklahoma’s critical 

infrastructure bill passed last 

year, the conservative American 

Legislative Exchange Council 

(ALEC) used it to write model 

legislation for other states.

In at least six more states, 

lawmakers introduced similar bills 

that would impose steep penalties 

for trespassing on, or tampering 

with, pipeline property and other 

infrastructure. Two were enacted 

this year. Two others are pending.

In Wyoming, one bill was 

openly proposed on behalf of energy 

companies. In other states the ties 

are barely hidden.

Louisiana state Rep. Major 

Thibaut, a Democrat, introduced a 

bill that followed ALEC’s model by 

adding pipelines to a list of critical 

infrastructure facilities. When he 

presented it to a Senate committee 

in April, he brought Tyler Gray, 

a lobbyist for the Louisiana Mid-

Continent Oil and Gas Association. 

During the hearing, Gray answered 

most of the questions. At one 

point, he leaned over to Thibaut 

to recommend that he accept an 

amendment. Neither Thibaut nor 

Gray responded to requests for 

comment.

Gov. John Bel Edwards 

signed it into law in May, after an 

amendment removed the threat of 

conspiracy charges.

Iowa enacted a law that makes 

“critical infrastructure sabotage” a 

felony. Lawmakers in Wyoming and 

Minnesota also approved critical 

infrastructure bills this year, but 

the governors there vetoed the 

legislation. Similar bills are pending 

in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The bills may get their first test 

soon in Louisiana after the arrests 

of the three activitists on the bayou. 

Activists had been conducting tree-

sits and other actions for weeks and 

were careful to stay off the pipeline 

easements once the new law took 

effect, said Cherri Foytlin, an 

activist organizer in the state. The 

three who were taken from their 

boats, for example, claim to have 

been in navigable waters, which 

are supposed to be public. The 

definition of what’s navigable has 

been the subject of much debate 

and legal wrangling in the state, 

however, and the off-duty officers 

pulled the activists off their boats to 

arrest them.

“It was really scary,” said Cindy 

Spoon, one of the activists, in a 

video posted to Facebook. “They 

grabbed my wrist, grabbed my waist 

and they started to pull one of my 

arms behind my back and put me in 

a stress position.”

The local district attorney has 

not yet formally filed charges. If 

the case proceeds, the activists will 

challenge the law itself, said William 

Quigley, a professor at Loyola 

University College of Law in New 

Orleans who is representing them 

pro bono. They could face up to five 

years in prison if convicted.

Two more incidents occurred 

over the weekend involving activists 

who had erected a stand high in the 

trees to block construction. Quigley 

said the group had permission from 

property owners to be on the land. 

But deputies with the St. Martin 

Parish Sheriff’s Office arrested six 

people, including a journalist. The 

property is co-owned by hundreds 

of parties, and some of them have 

not signed easement agreements 

with Energy Transfer Partners, the 

primary owner of the pipeline.

The St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s 

Office did not return requests for 

comment on the weekend arrests.

“I think this shows how 

ridiculous this law is if this is 

the way it’s going to be applied,” 

Quigley said.

The legislation is not without 

precedent. Since 1990, nearly a 

dozen states have passed bills known 

as “ag-gag” laws that prohibit 

surreptitiously recording inside 

feedlots and breeding facilities. 

Many came after exposés of horrific 

conditions and animal abuse. Three 

of those laws were subsequently 

overturned by courts.

But environmentalists and free 

speech advocates say the new bills 

are part of a broader effort to recast 

environmental activists as criminals, 

even terrorists.

For example:

In May 2017, the American 

Fuel and Petrochemical 

Manufacturers published a 

blog post about activists who 

vandalized pipelines, under the 

headline: “Pipelines Are Critical 

Infrastructure—and Attacking 

Them Is Terrorism.”

Last year, Energy Transfer 

Partners filed a federal lawsuit 

against Greenpeace and other 

groups seeking hundreds of millions 

of dollars. The complaint accuses 

some of the nation’s leading 

environmental organizations 

of operating an “eco-terrorist” 

conspiracy at Standing Rock. (A 

judge dismissed the case against 

one of the defendants last month, 

but has yet to rule on a motion to 

dismiss the case against Greenpeace.)

Another industry group 

launched a database to track 

“criminal acts on critical energy 

infrastructure,” claiming eco-

terrorism incidents were on the rise.

In Congress, 84 members 

wrote a letter to Attorney General 

Jeff Sessions asking if protestors 

who tamper with pipelines could be 

prosecuted as domestic terrorists. 

Sponsors of the state pipeline bills 

have also invoked terrorism.

Supporters of the bills say they 

do not suppress lawful protests.

“There’s a legal process to 

stop something,” said Oklahoma 

state Rep. Mark McBride, who 

sponsored another bill that assigns 

civil liability to anyone who pays 

protesters to trespass. “But if you’re 

chaining yourself to a bulldozer 

or you’re standing in the way of a 

piece of equipment digging a ditch 

or whatever it might be, yes, you’re 

causing harm to the project and to 

the person that’s contracted to do 

that job.”

Advocacy groups say the bills 

are unnecessary—trespassing and 

vandalism are already unlawful, 

and protesters who have disrupted 

operations have largely been charged 

under existing statutes. They fear 

the legislation uses a handful of 

dangerous incidents as a pretext to 

intimidate mainstream advocates 

and target more widespread acts 

of peaceful civil disobedience, 

like temporarily blocking access 

to a construction site. Several 

environmental and civil liberties 

organizations are now in talks about 

how to respond to the industry’s 

actions.


“The clear attempt there 

is to bring environmental 

justice, environmental advocacy 

organizations into a realm of 

criminal liability,” said Pamela 

Spees, a senior staff attorney at 

the Center for Constitutional 

Rights, which represents activists in 

Louisiana. “They’re basically trying 

to silence and minimize the impact 

of environmental organizations.”

Afraid to Speak Up at the Pipeline 

Crossroads of the World

Ever since the state’s first 

gusher began spurting crude in 

1897, oil has dominated life in 

Oklahoma. Today, it is home 

to fracking pioneers, including 

Continental Resources. The town of 

Cushing, the self-dubbed “pipeline 

crossroads of the world,” is a critical 

oil trading hub. “Environmental 

activist” is not a badge many wear 

openly in Oklahoma.

Dakota Raynes spent the 

past few years at Oklahoma State 

University writing his dissertation 

about how people have responded 

to a fracking boom that’s literally 

shaken the state. As drillers began 

injecting more wastewater into wells 

from 2010-2015, the number of 

earthquakes jumped more than 20-

fold to 888.

Raynes interviewed dozens 

of activists, lawmakers, regulators 

and ordinary citizens. He found 

that almost everyone is reluctant to 

speak publicly against the industry. 

They fear neighbors or colleagues 

or parents of their children’s friends 

will catch wind and shun them. 

Raynes said he’s attended events 

with activists who have returned to 

their cars afterward to find screws 

driven into tires.

“Many people read Oklahoma 

as a hostile context in which 

to engage in any kind of pro-

environmental work,” he said. 

“And they all link that back to the 

phenomenal amount of power that 

the oil and gas industry has, both as 

a cultural force, as a legal force, as a 

political force.”

Standing Rock changed that 

deference, said Mekasi Camp 

Horinek, a member of the state’s 

Ponca tribe.

Horinek grew up on tribal land 

near an oil refinery and a factory 

that produces carbon black, a sooty 

petroleum product. He blames the 

facilities for contributing to disease 

and deaths in his community. When 

the call came to join the resistance at 

Standing Rock, he became a leading 

organizer. (The Ponca’s ancestral 

land in Nebraska lies in the path of 

the Keystone XL pipeline, another 

project he’s fought.)

“I think the state of Oklahoma 

felt threatened and was worried that 

people would rise up,” he said about 

the critical infrastructure bill. “And 

they should be.”

Horinek says he remains 

undaunted, but he said the new law 

had an immediate effect on others.

People were suddenly 

threatened with long prison terms if 

they crossed onto pipeline property. 

“That definitely weighs heavy on a 

person’s thoughts,” he said.

Oklahoma has 39 American 

Indian tribes, most forced to move 

there during the Trail of Tears in 

the 19th Century, and indigenous 

activists led the fight against the 

Diamond Pipeline. “They can’t 

risk a six-month sentence for 

trespassing. Who’s going to take care 

of their kids, their parents, their 

grandparents?” he said.

Biggs, the state representative 

who sponsored the bill, now 

works for the federal Department 

of Agriculture. He declined to 

comment for this article. The 

Oklahoma Oil and Gas Association 

also declined to make anyone 

available for an interview.



Activists say the bill was a clear 

assault.

The Sierra Club has a 

policy against engaging in civil 

disobedience. But the bill’s 

conspiracy element—which says a 

group can be charged with 10 times 

the fines given to a person who 

violates the provisions—worries the 

organization’s Oklahoma director, 

Johnson Grimm-Bridgwater. He was 

among those who spoke at the 2017 

press conference. While Grimm-

Bridgwater says participating in a 

press conference should qualify as 

constitutionally protected speech, 

there’s no telling how a prosecutor 

might apply the new statute.

“The law is punitive and is 

designed to create friction and 

divisions among groups who 

normally wouldn’t have a second 

thought at working together,” he 

said.

Brady Henderson, legal 



director for the Oklahoma chapter 

of the American Civil Liberties 

Union, said there’s widespread 

concern in both liberal and 

libertarian circles about the law, and 

he’s fielded questions from several 

nonprofits about the conspiracy 

clause.


The ACLU in Oklahoma is 

considering legal challenges, but 

may have to wait until a district 

attorney tries to use the new law. 

Still, Henderson said, the language 

is so broad that it can apply to 

almost anything.

“By equating those kinds of 

things together, essentially political 

speech on one end and on the other 

end outright terrorism,” he said, “the 

bill is a pretty gross instrument.”



Protesters Under Surveillance

As activists were fighting the 

Diamond Pipeline in Oklahoma, 

Energy Transfer Partners was 

planning another oil pipeline at the 

southern end of its network.

The Bayou Bridge pipeline is 

slated to run from Texas to St. James 

Parish, Louisiana, already home 

to many petrochemical facilities. 

Along the way, it crosses through 

the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation’s 

largest river swamp and a center of 

the state’s crawfish industry.

Environmentalists were 

alarmed by the risks the project 

posed to residents of St. James 

Parish and the swamp’s fragile 

ecosystem. And they quickly felt 

as if law enforcement agencies 

were working against them. For 

one thing, some officials openly 

supported the project. Joseph 

Lopinto, now Jefferson Parish 

sheriff, spoke at a hearing last year 

on behalf of the National Sheriffs’ 

Association and urged regulators to 

approve the pipeline.

Anne Rolfes, an organizer of 

the pipeline resistance and founder 

of the advocacy group Louisiana 

Bucket Brigade, said activists also 

suspected they were being watched.

During the protests at Standing 

Rock, a private security company 

hired by Energy Transfer Partners 

had compiled daily intelligence 

briefings and coordinated with local 

law enforcement, as detailed in 

reports by The Intercept.

Rolfes’ group this year also 

obtained a handful of documents 

through a public records request 

that indicate state officials were 

tracking their efforts.

One state police report from 

November said the agency sent 

an investigator from its criminal 

intelligence unit to a hearing where 

activists had allegedly planned a 

protest, and that a local sheriff’s 

office planned to send a plainclothes 

officer. Rolfes said no protest was 

planned; activists merely intended to 

speak at a public hearing.

In the following months, 

an intelligence officer with the 

Governor’s Office of Homeland 

Security and Emergency 

Preparedness sent two emails to 

colleagues describing environmental 

groups’ priorities, quoting Rolfes’ 

newsletter and an article about the 

groups and adding a photograph of 

her.

Louisiana State Police declined 



to comment. Mike Steele, a 

spokesman for the state Homeland 

Security Department, rejected the 

notion that his agency spies on 

activists. He said this type of open-

source tracking was similar to what 

they conduct ahead of football 

games or festivals. “We do that with 

any type of event, because safety is 

the number one concern,” he said.

Energy Transfer Partners 

spokeswoman Alexis Daniel issued 

a statement saying, “any claims 

that our company or our security 

contractors have inappropriately 

monitored protestors in false.” It’s 

unclear what surveillance, if any, 

the company or its contractors 

have deployed in Louisiana. Energy 

Transfer Partners has also been 

accused of spying by a family in 

Pennsylvania.

Rolfes said Louisiana officials 

are treating activists like criminals. 

“We’re going to be followed while 

we participate in the democratic 

process?” she said.

The arrests in August of the 

three protesters on boats who were 

detained by off-duty officers only 

deepened the activists’ feelings that 

the state and energy industry were 

working against them. While the 

arresting officers were working as 

contractors, they wore their state 

uniforms and badges and carried 

weapons.

Spees, with the Center for 

Constitutional Rights, said the 

incident represented a problematic 

melding of public and private 

authorities. After the industry-

supported bill was enacted by the 

state, she said, state employees acted 

on behalf of an energy company to 

detain activists under the new law.

“It’s as though they’ve 

become the hired hands for private 

oil companies and pipelines 

companies,” she said.

Activists in Virginia, where 

two gas pipelines are drawing 

protests, have also been tracked 

by that state’s Fusion Center—

which shares information across 

agencies to combat terrorism and 

crime—according to a report by the 

Richmond Times-Dispatch.

In Washington state, a local 

sheriff’s office has monitored 

activists opposed to a major pipeline 

project that connects with Canada’s 

tar sands, sharing information 

with that state’s Fusion Center, 

documents obtained by The 

Intercept show. Protest groups there 

already tried to block tanker traffic 

associated with the project, and local 

authorities have conducted trainings 

to prepare for mass protests.

The nation’s intelligence 

community has a dark history 

of tracking political movements, 

including the FBI’s COINTELPRO, 

which snooped on Martin Luther 

King, Jr., and others. Earlier this 

decade, FBI agents monitored 

opponents of the Keystone 

XL pipeline, according to The 

Guardian, and the bureau had at 

least one informant at Standing 

Rock.


Even if local law enforcement 

agencies today are doing little 

more than collecting news 

articles and other open source 

information, covert surveillance 

risks equating political protest 

with criminal activity, said Keith 

Mako Woodhouse, a historian 

at Northwestern University 

who wrote a book about radical 

environmentalists.

“It gives a sense that law 

enforcement is, if not on the side 

of, at least more sympathetic to 

the industries and practices that 

are being protested,” he said. 

“Presumably they’re not surveilling 

the energy companies.”

Pipeline companies have 

cultivated that relationship. 

They have reimbursed state law 

enforcement millions of dollars 

for providing security for their 

projects in North Dakota, Iowa 

and Massachusetts, for example. 

Most major pipeline companies 

also run charitable campaigns that 

have contributed millions of dollars 

to local emergency responders and 

other agencies and groups along 

their routes. The National Sheriff’s 

Association, in turn, supported the 

Bayou Bridge and Dakota Access 

pipelines while it called protesters 

“terrorists.”

A Worrying Trend

Over the past decade, the sense 

of urgency around climate change 

has intensified. Scientists say there 

is little time before the planet is 

committed to potentially devastating 

warming. The only practical way 

to avoid that is to largely eliminate 

fossil fuel use over the next several 

decades.


The government’s response has 

been minimal, “so the next step is 

civil disobedience,” said Woodhouse, 

the historian. “And if anything, it’s 

surprising that it hasn’t happened 

sooner and at a greater scale.”

Woodhouse said efforts to 

suppress environmental protest 

trace back to the rise of radical 

environmental groups in the 1980s 

and `90s, when public officials 

slapped names like “eco-terrorism” 

and “ecological terrorism” on 

activists who vandalized equipment 

or animal testing facilities.



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