When We Fight: Keystone XL And Delegitimizing Fossil Fuels
By Scott Parkin for Counter Punch - Near the sprawling Dallas suburb of Garland, TX where I grew up are the east Texas piney woods that are now home to the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. In the blistering summer heat of 2012, I traveled there in support of the coalition of local Texas and Oklahoma landowners and radical environmentalists known as the Tar Sands Blockade that fought to stop the southern leg of the pipeline. A year before, Keystone XL had become a household name when over 1200 people participated in two weeks of sit-ins at the White House demanding that Barack Obama reject the pipeline. A few months after the White House sit-ins, Obama fast-tracked the permit for the southern leg with the stroke of a pen.