Nebraskans Well & Truly Pissed About Pipeline Plan - a.k.a. The Newest Environmental Protesters

[hatrack]

LINCOLN, Nebraska — Bruce Boettcher has no objection to fossil fuels — his trucks and tractors burn up plenty of the stuff every year. He doesn't spend a lot of time fretting about global greenhouse gas emissions, either, or pondering the fate of ducks that fly into the tailings ponds in Alberta's oilsands.

What Boettcher does care about is the water — so clean you can drink it straight from a flowing well — that saturates and courses under his land in Nebraska's remote Sand Hills.

Worry that an oilsands pipeline leak will contaminate the resource he depends on every day is what has turned this fourth-generation rancher into a fierce opponent of TransCanada Corp.'s Keystone XL project. Worry is what made Boettcher drive 4 1/2 hours to Nebraska's capital for a hearing to tell U.S. State Department officials to deny the company a permit to build the Canadian pipeline through the region. And worry is why he's driving 4 1/2 hours back home for a second public hearing on Thursday in the Sand Hills town of Atkinson.

"Alberta's gold is the black oil. But our gold is the water — and we're concerned about water," Boettcher says. "We are just stewards of our land." Boettcher and his brother, Scott, bring something of a unique perspective to the debate raging in Nebraska over whether the State Department should deny TransCanada a presidential permit to build its $7 billion pipeline. They are not pipeline workers bused in from out of state to argue in favour of Keystone XL at this week's hearings on the project, a final step before the Obama administration decides the pipeline's fate. Neither are they professional — or even amateur — environmental activists who are using the project as a proxy for all the bad things Alberta oilsands production represents to them.

They actually live over the Ogallala Aquifer, where near-the-surface groundwater fills fence post holes almost as soon as they are dug. They run cattle across a Sand Hills ecosystem so fragile that just one year of overgrazing can render the land useless for seven. Their lifetime of experience has made them highly skeptical of studies — by both TransCanada and the State Department — that conclude environmental damage from an oil spill would be limited and localized. The water is not static — it moves, Bruce says, and oil spilled into it will move, too.

EDIT

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Nebraskan%20pipeline%20opponents%20defy%20warrior%20stereotype/5472527/story.html

[Vincardog]

1. EVERYONE should stand up and refuse to allow this monstrosity (Can you hear me now BO?)