But how many pipelines are there in the United States that go under river beds? Near water sources? Near lakes and streams? I can’t honestly say, but I know the number is a lot.
Consider how ludicrous it would be for a suburban kid from Seattle to try and block a pipeline in Louisiana because the water it was crossing is “sacred”. White people don’t get to call the Earth sacred, at least not without copying and plagiarizing Native Americans. Yes, I get the Eucharist may not be thrilling, but it is what we have. We have our country, and we have our ideals. We are admittedly a myth-challenged nation and we are the worse for it.
This whole protest is in no small measure a means for people who feel they lack a sense of connection to wonder, the universe, the Earth, and even to God, to get that feeling. The importance they are attaching to it is vastly out of proportion to its ACTUAL importance.
Again: nothing much was going to get done in the middle of a North Dakota winter anyway. Obama did the politically convenient thing, knowing if Trump won it would be reversed, so that even though the project started and blossomed under his Administration, even though it got within a mile or two, if memory serves, of its destination after a long building process, that he would not be blamed for it.
And I will note that the new water treatment plant was paid for out of the “Stimulus” money. It is economically useless, but it should have made these people shut up.
I really think David Archambeault–I think that is close to the correct name–or whatever the tribal leaders name is, should tell the protesters to leave.
I will add that there is this underlying sense of the sacred within much of the environmental movement. Now, I have nothing against clean air and water, and nothing to say in support of pollution and ecological poison. But it seems to me that as with this case, much, much too often feeling gets the upper hand over science, because people have this emotionally rooted need to believe. Global Warming is an excellent example. It is anti-scientific bullshit, but it meets both the emotional needs of people who need something to protect, and the political needs of those who never saw an expansion of government they didn’t like.