You’ve been hearing about it for weeks. Thousands are traveling to North Dakota to stand with Native American tribes against the building of a pipeline. But why? To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure either. I kept seeing hashtags like #NoDAPL and #StandWithStandingRock and felt like I should have been doing something. Here’s a millennial-friendly breakdown of exactly what DAPL is and why we need to stop it.
First of all, DAPL stands for the Dakota Access Pipeline. It’s an underground pipeline that is currently under construction in North Dakota.Its proposed path snakes 1,172 miles through parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois.The pipeline is intended to transport 470,000 to 570,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the rich oil fields in North Dakota to a storage facility in Patoka, Illinois. The pipeline would have a diameter of between 12 and 30 inches and would be buried underground for the vast majority of its path. The major point of the DAPL is to avoid using tanker trucks or trains which can be much less efficient and extremely volatile. But the problem is, regardless of how you transport the oil, there are tons of environmental risks in the event of a crash or leak.
The people most affected by this construction, and the majority of people on the front lines of the protest, are the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The tribe’s main sources of drinking water are located downstream of the current route of the pipeline, and the protesters fear that a spill on the pipeline could irrevocably contaminate their water supply. Now this is a logical fear because as I mentioned before, there is the risk of the pipeline leaking. The original route for the pipeline was altered because it went too close to North Dakota’s capital city, Bismarck, and they were afraid a spill would impact municipal water sources. Is this not the same fear? Do the natives of Standing Rock not deserve to have clean drinking water? And if you’re thinking. “Well there’s probably a slim chance of leak anyway,” you’re wrong. In 2010, a spill from an oil pipeline into the Kalamazoo river spewed 840,000 gallons of crude oil into the environment, leading to years of cleanup and recovery at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. That incident was the worst inland oil spill the United States, but far from the only pipeline-related oil spill. More than a million barrels of oil have leaked from pipelines in the last 20 years. This isn’t uncommon. People’s lives are at stake and not just in this generation but for generations to come.
Whether you want to admit it or not. the United States has a long history of putting Native Americans at risk-- does Columbus Day not sound familiar to anyone? And it’s about time we starting shedding light on these inequalities. These are the most native people we have. This is their land, who are we to tell them to get up and move so we can transport oil more efficiently? Thousands of protesters made up of Native Americans and environmental activists have been protesting the construction of the pipeline for months. If you can get to North Dakota and stand there with them, do it. If not, sign petitions, share information, let people know what is happening in our nation. The refusal to find alternatives for fossil fuels does nothing but hurt current and future generations. Stand with Standing Rock.
