My home has come home again. Growing up on the prairie of western North Dakota, my childhood was shaped by muddy creeks, the might Missouri River, and the roiling grass of a vast and intimidating landscape. I spent time meandering and wandering among rolling hills and solitary buttes, gazing at the wide-open horizon of a western, arid landscape. Now, though, living in Ames, Iowa, several hundred miles away from the Bakken oil boom, my home has come home again.The Bakken pipeline, what the oil companies call the “Dakota Access Pipeline,” is the latest installation in a national conversation about supposed energy independence. Along with the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline and lesser-known Sandpiper pipeline–which will flow from northwest North Dakota to Lake Superior, shipping crude oil through the Great Lakes–the Bakken pipeline will cut diagonally from western North Dakota, through South Dakota, and across eighteen counties in Iowa, spanning eight major watersheds–including both the Missouri and Mississippi rivers–before snaking its way to Illinois. Think of this as Keystone XL Lite.
I grew up along the banks of the Missouri River, in coal country, in western North Dakota. The Missouri River shaped the contours of my imagination through stories–stories of Lewis and Clark, Sakakawea and her son, Pomp; the legendary George Armstrong Custer lived 30 miles south of my hometown before he was killed in the Battle of the Little Bighorn; Theodore Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch loomed large in my childhood mind. What I wasn’t told in childhood was that these men–because largely they all were white men–brought a new wave of imperialism across the continent. Prairie grasses were clearcut to make way for crops; Native Americans were relegated to reservations; bison were decimated–all to continue the American mindset of independence and progress.
Now, too, in my new home, another cadre of white men–because many of them are white men–are seeking to bring ruin across an already ravaged state–Iowa. In December, the Bakken Pipeline Resistance Coalition organized a gathering to discuss the intricacies of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Farmers, archaeologists, economists, lawyers, landowners, local and state-level elected representatives assembled to share their concerns about the pipeline. In total, 275 of us gathered to listen, reflect, and share our concern for what this new pipeline would mean for Iowa. For me, as a North Dakotan, this gave me hope.
Over the past year I have spent four months living in the Bakken oil boom, a place ravaged by supposed “progress,” a place that, for some, represents salvation in the growing concern over energy independence. Only the Bakken oil boom is a crude type of development, and it should be called so–2.6 million year-old buttes are leveled; saltwater spills sterilize cropland; natural gas is flared to save time in oil production; and local watersheds are under threat from leaky pipelines.
And now the boom has come to roost throughout Iowa. Iowans seem to be of a different mindset than North Dakotans. An agrarian state, Iowa is little thought of in the national discourse. But now, Iowa may very well take center stage in the national debate around pipelines. In December, a man, dressed in black, symbolizing oil said, “It is now time we use civil disobedience like we did in Vietnam.” Another man–a Republican farmer–spoke about how farmers all across Iowa need to gather to discuss how to stop the development of this pipeline across vital cropland. And an economist at Iowa State University proved how few jobs would be created in the overall construction of this pipeline.
Where my own home state has failed to stand-up to Big Oil, Iowans are rallying and preparing to halt the construction of a pipeline that would ensure the systematic ruin of not only cropland, but watersheds–including the two major water highways of the country, the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. It makes sense to me that Iowa’s state motto reads, “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.” It’s my hope that all Iowans continue to fight for our rights for healthy cropland, clean watersheds, and an end to dependency on crude development.
By Taylor Brorby