[LINK] "The untold story of Keystone"

[rfmcdonald]

Noel Maurer's link at The Power and the Money to Luisa Ch. Savage's MacLean's article is entitled "How deep red Nebraska (may have) killed the Keystone Pipeline".

It's a good title: Savage's article makes the argument that in Nebraska, concern over property rights and environmental damage--specifically, the fear that the Ogalalla aquifer underlying the Midwest might be damaged--helped catalyze even Republican-leaning Nebraskans against the pipeline. The Canadian planners of the pipeline simply didn't recognize these basic local concerns, and, in opting for what seems to be a shorter and more direct route, undid themselves.

Randy Thompson, a tall, reserved cattleman rarely seen without his 10-gallon hat, was not the first or only Nebraska landowner to raise his voice against the pipeline, but he would become the face of the fight. Thompson’s grandfather arrived in Kansas, near the Nebraska border, around 1880 as a young boy in a covered wagon with settlers from Tennessee. The shotgun that made that journey, “Old Zulo,” still hangs alongside a collection of vintage saddles and steer-themed belt buckles in Thompson’s home on a 23-acre homestead outside the state capital, Lincoln.

Thompson, 66, moved to Nebraska as a child, and grew up poor, without indoor plumbing or electricity; the family used kerosene lanterns and an outdoor privy that spooked him and his siblings at night. “You ran as fast as you could so the bogeyman didn’t get you,” recalls his sister, Joyce Petit. His parents had married during the Great Depression and eked out a living on rented land. “At some points they had nothing—just what they raised on their land to eat,” Petit said. Only late in life did they buy their own 400 acres in Merrick County: cornfields and cattle pasture—“a really big deal,” their daughter says.

[. . .]

His parents’ hard-won land happened to lie on the route where the Canadians planned to bury their 36-inch diameter pipeline on its way from Alberta to Texas. By the time the company came asking for an easement across an 80-acre parcel, Thompson’s father had died and his elderly mother, Frances, lived in a nursing home and rented out the land to pay for a portion of her expenses. The phone call came “out of the clear blue sky,” recalls Thompson. He and his brother and sister met with TransCanada’s land agent at their parents’ old homestead. The siblings said they were not interested and assumed that was the end of the matter. “We’re naïve enough to think this is a private company and this is a foreign company so there is no way in hell they’re going to be able to force us to give up our land,” says Thompson.

TransCanada would eventually make them a “final offer” of $17,861 for use of their land. The Thompsons had 30 days to accept or, the company said in a letter, “we will initiate the eminent domain process,” in which the government can force an owner to allow development on private property.

By raising the spectre of expropriating the land, TransCanada had hit on one of the holiest grails of conservatism and lifelong Republicans like Thompson: property rights. “You feel like you’ve been violated,” says Thompson. “I’ve never seen any asterisk in the Constitution that says this property is only yours until a big corporation wants it.”

He was offended by what he saw as a sense of entitlement to the modest property that had been the crowning achievement of his parents’ lives. “They didn’t earn this land,” he says of TransCanada. “They didn’t carry heavy milk buckets and walk through the snow and the slop like my Mom did.”

The whole thing is a long, but worthy, read.