Climate and Environment

Pipeline protesters seize Minnesota construction site in bid to stop $4 billion project

The protests have done little to impede the replacement of the decades-old pipeline, according to Enbridge, the Canadian company behind the project

By Joshua Partlow
June 7, 2021 at 4:56 p.m. EDT

MAHNOMEN, Minn. — The young climate activists met at the windmill shortly after sunrise. There were several missions underway on Monday morning but “marmalade” and “peanut butter” were particularly high risk. Protesters using those code names planned to descend on an undisclosed location along a pipeline route known as Line 3. They were ready for arrests.

Dozens of cars were soon caravanning down dusty dirt roads amid corn and soybean fields in the largest salvo yet in an ongoing civil disobedience campaign to try to stop a border-crossing oil pipeline running from Canada across the wetlands and forests of northern Minnesota.

By midmorning, hundreds of protesters, led by Native American women and joined by celebrities such as Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener, had marched into a construction site operated by Enbridge, the Canadian company behind the pipeline, and strapped themselves to bulldozers and other heavy machinery.

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By Josh Partlow
Joshua Partlow is a reporter on the The Washington Post’s national desk. He has served previously as the bureau chief in Mexico City, Kabul, Rio de Janeiro, and as a correspondent in Baghdad. Twitter https://twitter.com/partlowj