BY BRADFORD McKEE
Credit: Pax Ahimsa Gethen [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
From the upcoming January 2017 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine
You may safely expect that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers? halt on the Dakota Access pipeline will end after the close of the Obama administration. It shouldn?t. The halt should instead force a rethinking of the pipeline?s route through unceded Sioux lands near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and under the Missouri River, ?to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing,? as Jo-Ellen Darcy, the army?s assistant secretary for civil works, said in announcing the cease order in early December after months of protests.
The stop on the project should also compel a total reconsideration of certain perversities that pass as common practice by government and industry in the construction of oil and gas pipelines, which have been helpfully highlighted by the rising tension over Dakota Access in the past year. If the pipeline were halted and rerouted, it would mark a rare interruption in the standard protocol for forcing pipelines to go exactly where the fossil fuel industry, in this case Energy Transfer Partners, Inc., and its subsidiary, Dakota Access, wants them. There are an estimated 2.5 million miles of energy pipelines in the United States. The habit in building them, for the greatest convenience of the industry, is to ?ask? landowners for voluntary easements through their properties, which owners may decline on...