“When we first entered into this, we understood the history, we knew the facts, we knew the laws. We still have to bring it all up. [...] Just because [the situation] is legally right, it’s morally and ethically wrong. What happened at Standing Rock is a movement, and you don’t see the benefits of a movement until way later.” ~David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, addressing court ruling
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The 91-page decision issued Wednesday by a federal court ruling against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for violating the law with an inadequate environmental review of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline garnered some long-delayed activist hurrahs this week. But it is a victory with caveats.
The pipeline—which runs 1,172 miles from the Bakken Formation of North Dakota (and Montana) through South Dakota and Iowa to refineries and other pipelines in southern Illinois—is designed to eventually carry 520,000 barrels a day of hydraulically fracked oil out of the Bakken shale. Most of that run is built on private land. But the pipeline also crosses Lake Oahe, a dammed portion of the Missouri River, and the only source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux.
Led by Native people, the activists in their thousands opposed the pipeline project with direct action from temporary camps set up on and near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, which straddles the border of North Dakota and South Dakota. Their actions led to more than 750 arrests and a number of clashes involving violence initiated by the local sheriff’s department and private security forces. It became the biggest and longest confrontation between Indians and government authorities since activists of the American Indian Movement occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota in 1973.
In his ruling D.C. Circuit Court Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, stated:
“Although the Corps substantially complied with NEPA in many areas, the Court agrees that it did not adequately consider the impacts of an oil spill on fishing rights, hunting rights, or environmental justice, or the degree to which the pipeline’s effects are likely to be highly controversial. To remedy those violations, the Corps will have to reconsider those sections of its environmental analysis upon remand by the Court. [...]
“Even though a spill is not certain to occur at Lake Oahe, the Corps still had to consider the impacts of such an event on the environment.”
In addition, the judge scolded the Army for giving the go-ahead because the pipeline does not cross reservation land. But it runs just over half a mile from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, and federal rules require that projects built near communities of color, poor communities, and Indian reservations have to be assessed on the basis of environmental justice. The Army shrugged off those rules.
