The protests started in the chill of winter and got bigger as the weather got warmer. At one gathering place outside rural Clearbrook, Minn., the demonstrators often outnumbered the town’s 500 or so residents, as activists, farmers, and citizens of nearby Native American reservations turned out to resist a catastrophe in the making.
The protesters were there to stop the building of Enbridge Energy Line 3, a 1,000-mile-plus oil pipeline that would connect the Alberta tar sands in Canada to refineries in the U.S. Its foes believed the pipeline, if breached, could foul rivers and aquifers that they counted on for their livelihoods; more broadly, the flow of hydrocarbons it enabled would aggravate the global climate crisis.
