Environment in the News
An environmental issue that's been bothering me most recently is the North Dakota pipeline, because is disregards the people living on the land as well as their right to clean drinking water. An article from The Daily Caller mentioned how Energy Transfer, the group trying to make the pipeline happen, is appeasing protesters. However, many other reports, like the one from ABC News, mentioned that people trying to keep this work off their land have been attacked. Chris White, the Daily Caller's article writer, said that Energy Transfer was going to "extraordinary lengths to avoid trampling Native American ritual sites." However, early in the development, the pipelines construction ran through sacred burial sites of the tribes of American Indians who live on that land. The judge for this case didn't stand with the Standing Rock Sioux because they couldn't prove how the pipeline would harm the burial grounds. However, a good idea of this would be if the judge and the writer of this article considered if there was a pipe full of sludgy looking oil being pumped through a cemetery where they're family members were buried, and part of the area were dug up to make room for that pipeline. White also wrote that the tribe "haggled" with developers, trying to see if the National Historic Preservation Act would actually protect them, posing this group as trying to win something over on the developers. There's no haggling about this, the tribes in North Dakota are struggling to find ways that developers can't continue their work, even though there's clear proof of damage and danger from their project. White's main focus in this article is posing how much money would be lost from this project, which is only money the company has invested so it doesn't mean the country would be losing those funds. Additionally, White writes how this pipeline would be the first of its kind, trying to make it seems like a waste if we don't follow through.

However, White's background is most likely journalistic, so he doesn't realize that this will effect him, too. The pipeline is being built from the Bakken Shale formation, which also coincides with the spot for the North Dakota watershed. So, if the pipe they're building has a crack in it, which is will at some point, it could be leaking 309,000 barrels to 1 million barrels a day into the water millions of people use to drink. Which then goes into environmental issues of clean water and pollution, as well as economic issues of lost revenue and damage control. It also gets in to politics, as to who will respond and how to the disaster. And this issue is already environmental and political, since a group of people in America is under threat, since the developers didn't even notify the tribes that they were considering their land a site for construction. It's already environmental because the construction work has already contaminated the drinking water, and thus harmed the living organisms, people included, in that area. So I think different perspectives need to be put into play to write this issue correctly, not just looking at it from a financial point of view. Additionally, it's not a big deal if we can't transport oil, because it's a nonrenewable resource and will run out, so it'll be harmful on the economy when that happens. If this project ceases, maybe people will consider renewable energy more seriously, too. So we can consider the social repercussions to events like this as well.