Enter: Ground zero of the Standing Rock protest, where a drama wages on that is all to familiar to anyone versed in the back-and-forth in Canada about pipelines. A battle between a small army of protestors, and a U.S. government and military ready to make the Dakota Access pipeline a reality, wages on.
At a camp the size of a small city, which consists of tents, lean-tos, and other assorted provisional shelters, what do you imagine abounds at the site of the protest, at the heart and command centre of those many environmental firebrands who’ve come from across the U.S. to the middle of flyover-country to fight for the environment?
If numerous sources that have been fastidiously and largely disregarded by many large media outlets up to this point have the right of it, one prominent feature of those camps is a profusion of garbage. About six month’s worth of waste, and enough to fill over 2,500 garbage trucks.
What we see with the truly fascinating behaviour of the Standing Rock protesters leaving their gargantuan mess in the middle of an area they’re putatively trying to protect from the very thing they continue to inflict upon it, is a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do.”
What’s worse is that those who have been appointed to clean up that mess have not been able to, on account of the presence of those protestors. Workers with Morton County have only been able to clean up a quarter of the garbage and waste there, so far. If things continue at that pace, they’re not going to be able to remove the tremendous mess on the flood plain that is the epicentre of the protests.
The total estimated cost of that increasingly hopeless endeavour is an excess of $33 million, on the backs of the Morton County taxpayers and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
Apparently, many of the conscientious objectors who, for the most part, live in other states, care enough about the environment to indulge in the mass virtue signalling that participating in a large, highly publicized environmental protest entails, but are a little slower to modify their own less than scrupulous habits, when it comes to respecting the environment themselves.
Some of the exceptionally warm thaw conditions we’ve seen up here in Saskatchewan are also occurring near the site of the protests, turning much of the land set aside for camps into a trash-strewn, fecal swamp, and it’s still February.
It’s astounding that those people can find it in themselves to protest the danger to the environment they believe the Dakota Access Pipeline to be, walking right past the small environmental disaster their presence and negligence have created.
The most fascinating part is that much of what they’re leaving there can’t be bundled into a garbage bag and thrown into a truck. That’s because many of the firebrands who crusaded out to the demonstration area near Lake Oahe have departed, themselves, but left a legacy: their abandoned cars. Vehicles that are full of that awful oil and gas they detest so much have been casually left in the middle of an area that is known to reliably flood every spring.
You’d think that they, of all people, would be conscientious of their own environmental footprint, but given that there are 200 of those abandoned vehicles, many sitting there for months, I guess the irony of that is lost on them.
I’m not going to comment either way on the pipeline itself. That’s another far more complicated matter that’s outside the scope of this piece, but if you’re going to claim the moral high ground, it helps not be standing in a pile of your own filth, in the middle of a thawing flood plain, the entire time.
The hundreds of passionate hypocrites at Standing Rock haven proved something, alright. They’ve proven that not only are they no better than the “bad guys” they’re shouting at to save the waterways. They’ve proven, through their own clueless apathy and proliferative, regular disrespect for those waterways, that they’re part of the problem.
