Tar Sands Blockade Profile: Grassroots Network Of Resistance To Texas Fossil Fuel Industry

(American Prospect) Sarah Laskow reports ~ Slow and Steady Wins the Anti-Keystone XL Race

Grace Cagle knew what Keystone XL’s path through Texas meant for the state’s environment. The pipeline was going to run through the post-oak savannah, a type of forest that's drying out, desertifying. It’s one of the few places in the world where the ivory-billed woodpecker—one of the world's largest woodpeckers, a bird so endangered that for years no one had seen one alive—makes its home. Cagle graduated college at the end of 2012 and had planned to get a PhD.; she was studying ecology, biology, and chemistry. But she couldn’t just sit in a classroom while Texas was in danger.
So, she took a risk. She sat in a tree. She stayed there while construction crews hired by TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, came and took down the trees around her. In October, TransCanada sued the group she joined, the Tar Sands Blockade, along with other organizations employing direct action against the pipeline. As the company tried to stop the blockaders, Cagle found herself dodging private investigators and trying to hide her identity. The groups finally settled the suit the company had brought against them in January, and agreed they wouldn’t trespass on the ground reserved for Keystone XL. In exchange, the company wouldn’t pursue them for the $5 million in damages TransCanada said the activists had caused.
Now, Cagle is Houston, still working with the Tar Sands Blockade as an organizer and spokesperson. Along with other blockaders, she's doing environmental justice organizing in the city, where one fork of Keystone XL's southern segment will end. The group is working in the Manchester neighborhood, where nearby oil refineries spill pollution into the air and the families who live there have stories to tell about rare cancers, respiratory diseases, and children dying too young. “We built a grassroots network of resistance to the fossil fuel industry in Texas. Which is completely ground-breaking,” says Cagle. It’s useful for the future, too. “I live in an oil and gas state. There are other tar sands pipelines. We have a lot of fights to fights. There are a lot of fish to fry.”

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