Last week Donald Trump told the US Army Corps of Engineers to stop their comprehensive environmental review of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It’s up to us to deny that request. Sorry, Donald.
Yesterday, things got worse. This review moved one step closer to being scrapped as the Acting Secretary of the Army Corps directed them to grant the final permit needed. It could happen any time now and construction could resume – unless we flood the Army Corps with comments telling them to continue their full environmental review of the pipeline.
If we succeed, DAPL will be forced through a multi-month review of its impact on drinking water, tribal rights and the climate. The only way to approve this pipeline without conducting the review would be to to disregard the hundreds of thousands of comments from people like you.
The Standing Rock Sioux tribe, whose drinking water and sacred sites have been desecrated by this pipeline, already announced plans to sue to stop any action to expedite DAPL. Every comment we send bolsters their legal case that the federal government would be abandoning their own rules and procedures by illegally forcing the project through.
Not only is Trump’s administration full of Big Oil cronies, he also owns stock in the company behind Dakota Access. Illegally forcing this project through is an obvious example of corruption — not to mention a gross violation of Indigenous rights and the science of climate action.
If the first 10 days of Trump’s administration have shown us anything, it’s that people are ready to resist in unheard of numbers.
To be honest, he’s holding a lot of the cards in this fight. But he’s also facing some of the most dedicated and most effective grassroots organizers in North America — the indigenous leaders who brought over 500 tribes together in this historic fight, the hundreds and thousands of people who stood out in the cold in North Dakota with them, not to mention the millions of people supporting this fight around the country, and the rest of the world — and I will never rule them out.