Keystone XL Pipeline Protesters Stuck in Texas Jail

Protesters sitting in trees or blocking equipment used to build TransCanada’s Keystone XL oil pipeline are learning that environmental activism in East Texas sometimes has big consequences. Matthew Almonte, Glen Collins, and Isabel Brooks landed in jail in Tyler on Dec. 3, charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass, resisting arrest, and illegal dumping after they entered an unlaid pipe at a construction site near Winona, Tex., and tried to stop work on the $7.6 billion project. Once completed, the pipeline will bring products of the Alberta tar sands to Houston-area refineries.

The trio, who remain locked up, are among more than 30 arrested since October near Tyler and Nacogdoches for similar acts. “You have just about every mainstream NGO speaking about game-over for the planet if this pipeline is built,” says Ron Seifert, a spokesman for the protest group Tar Sands Blockade. “There is a disconnect between that rhetoric and the willingness to take aggressive action like the Tar Sands Blockade is doing.”