by Naomi Klein
People gathered at Sacred Stone and in satellite camps to organize their protests but also to work, teach, and learn. For Indigenous youth, the gatherings were a way to connect more deeply with their own culture, to live on the land, to follow traditions and ceremonies. For non-Indigenous people, it was a chance to learn skills and knowledge they didn’t have.
Brave Bull Allard watched as her grandchildren taught non-Indigenous people how to chop wood. She taught hundreds of visitors what she considered basic survival skills, such as how to use sage as a natural disinfectant and how to stay warm and dry in North Dakota’s vicious storms. Everyone, she instructed, needed “at least six tarps.”
When I arrived at Standing Rock, Brave Bull Allard told me she had come to understand that, although stopping the pipeline was crucial, something greater was happening in the camps. People were learning to live in community with the land. Practical skills, such as cooking and serving meals to thousands of people, were inspiring, but participants were also being exposed to the traditions and ceremonies that her people had protected, despite hundreds of years of attacks on Indigenous People and cultures. Being in the camps meant bonding together in a shared purpose, and teaching and learning in new ways. From seminars on nonviolence to drumming around a sacred fire, much of this knowledge was shared with the world on the visitors’ social media feeds.
Resistance to the pipeline continued, even when security forces hired by the pipeline company set attack dogs loose on the water protectors. But in the fall of 2016 things got worse as soldiers and riot police forcibly cleared a camp that sat directly on the pipeline’s path. The assault on the protest did not end there. A month later, in freezing weather, police drenched protectors with water cannons. At the time it was the most violent use of state power against demonstrators in recent US history.
North Dakota’s governor then doubled down and issued orders to clear the camps entirely in early December. The movement was to be crushed, with force.
I and many other people went to North Dakota to stand with the water protectors. A convoy of about two thousand military veterans also joined the resistance. They said they had sworn to serve and protect the Constitution. After seeing video of peaceful Indigenous water protectors being brutally attacked, fired on with rubber bullets and pepper spray, and blasted with water cannons, these veterans had decided their duty now was to stand up to the very government that had sent them to war.
Despite being drenched by blasts from law enforcement’s water cannons, Standing Rock protesters held the line in freezing temperatures.
By the time I arrived, the network of camps had grown to about ten thousand people. Participants lived in tents, tepees, and yurts. The main camp was a hive of orderly activity. Volunteer cooks served meals. Groups gathered for political study. Drummers gathered around a sacred fire, tending to the flames so that they would never go out. Despite the threats, the protesters were not going anywhere.
On December 5, after months of resistance, the water protectors learned that the administration of President Barack Obama had refused to give Energy Transfer a permit that the company needed to drive the pipeline under the Missouri River at Lake Oahe—one of the last stretches yet to be built.
I will never forget the experience of being at the main camp when the news arrived. I happened to be standing with Tokata Iron Eyes, a thirteen-year-old from Standing Rock who had helped start the movement against the pipeline. I turned on my phone video and asked her how she felt about the breaking news. “Like I have my future back,” she said, and then she burst into tears. I did too.
The battle seemed to be won—but was it?
Obama would be president for just a few more weeks. Republican Donald Trump had already been elected as the next president. He was known to be a friend of the oil and gas industry, and the top executive of Energy Transfer had made a large donation to his campaign. Some protesters feared that their victory would be snatched away, so they remained in the camp.
They were right.
In January 2017, Trump reversed Obama’s decision. The pipeline would go ahead. At the end of February, soldiers and law enforcement removed the protesters who remained. The DAPL was completed. It went into operation in June. A report in early 2018 said that it had leaked at least five times during 2017.
The pipeline was built, but the Standing Rock Sioux continued to challenge it in the courts. In June 2020 a federal judge ruled that in permitting the pipeline, the US Army Corps of Engineers had violated the National Environmental Policy Act and had not properly reported the potential hazards of the project. The judge ordered the pipeline shut down until a full environmental analysis was complete—a process that could take several years. The ruling was a hard-fought victory for the Standing Rock Sioux and for all those who had joined the #NoDAPL campaign.
At the same time, pressure from the public had caused investors to divest—to pull about $80 million out of banks that had loaned money to the DAPL project. Protesters who urge banks and other lenders to divest from fossil-fuel projects do not always succeed in stopping those projects, but they discourage lenders from supporting future projects. Meanwhile, the Standing Rock Sioux have several projects underway to power their community with clean solar energy rather than use the fossil fuels that have threatened their water.
During those months at Standing Rock, the water protectors created a model of resistance that said both no and yes. No to a threat in the moment, but yes to building a world that we want and need.
“We are here to protect the Earth and the water,” LaDonna Brave Bull Allard said. “This is why we are still alive. To do this very thing we are doing. To help humanity answer its most pressing question: how do we live with the Earth again, not against it?”
A Long Run for the Future
When Alice Brown Otter stood in the spotlight at the Oscars ceremony in Hollywood, she was fourteen years old. Almost two years earlier, in August 2016, she had run 1,519 miles (2,445 km) from North Dakota to Washington, DC.
Brown Otter was one of about thirty young Indigenous People who had run to the nation’s capital with a petition signed by 140,000 people. It asked the Army Corps of Engineers to stop work on the Dakota Access Pipeline because a leak or spill from the pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation could contaminate the reservation’s only water source.
That long run was not the beginning of Brown Otter’s activism, and it wasn’t the end. She explained, “It’s normal for a human to stand up for the Earth that they live on. It’s actually a gift to be here. It’s just giving back.” She believes young people should have more of a voice in decision making. “We’re gonna be the next adults.”
In early 2018, a year after President Trump had allowed the pipeline to be completed, Brown Otter was one of ten activists invited to the annual Oscars ceremony in Hollywood. They took the stage with performers Common and Andra Day, who sang the song “Stand Up for Something” from the movie Marshall, the story of civil rights leader and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
“It was really nerve-wracking at first,” said Brown Otter, “but just having a lot of people up on stage with you fighting for different causes but who want the same thing: a different change in the world. It was just such an amazing experience.” Her experience shows that making a difference sometimes means simply putting one foot in front of the other, again and again—and shows that you may be surprised at where your path of protest takes you.
THE JULIANA CASE: KIDS TAKE IT TO COURT
Can kids sue the United States government for failing to act against climate change? Twenty-one young people asked that question when they launched the climate lawsuit Juliana v. United States in 2015.
Young people from ten states filed the suit against the government in the US District Court in Oregon, home of eleven of the plaintiffs—the people filing the lawsuit. The case takes its name from one of them, Kelsey Juliana. Their legal services were provided by a law group that supports conservation,
climate justice, and the right of young people to have a voice in the issues that will shape their futures.
The lawsuit claimed that the government had known for decades that carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuels was causing “catastrophic climate change.” Yet the government continued to make climate change worse. It aided and encouraged more fossil-fuel extraction, including on lands owned by the public and managed by government agencies.
The government’s actions were a violation of rights guaranteed by the US Constitution, said the lawsuit. Those actions interfered with the young people’s “fundamental right of citizens to be free from government actions that harm life, liberty, and property.” They also argued that the government had violated its duty as a steward of public lands.
The lawsuit listed the damages and losses each of the young people was experiencing because of climate change. It gave evidence for human-caused climate change and for the government’s knowledge of that evidence. One of the plaintiffs is the granddaughter of James Hansen, the famous climate scientist you read about in chapter 5. He testified in the case.
What did the kids want? They asked the court to do three main things. First, order the government to stop violating the Constitution. Second, declare that plans for a fossil-fuel development called Jordan Cove on the Oregon coast were unconstitutional and must stop. Third, order the government to prepare a plan for lowering fossil-fuel emissions.
The lawsuit was filed in August 2015. Then came a long, complicated series of legal moves and countermoves. Along the way, the administrations of two presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, tried repeatedly to get the case thrown out of court.
They did not succeed. After several delays, the trial was finally set to take place in October 2018. The Trump administration applied to the United States Supreme Court to halt the case or postpone it again, but the court ruled that the case would proceed. (It would take place in a lower federal court, as planned, and not before the Supreme Court.) Vic Barrett from New York, one of the twenty-one young people who had filed the lawsuit, said, “The constitutional rights of my fellow plaintiffs and I are at stake in this case, and I am glad that the Supreme Court of the United States agrees that those rights should be evaluated at trial. This lawsuit becomes more urgent every day as climate change increasingly harms us.”
The government did not stop. Once again, the case was delayed. This time, lawyers for the Trump administration shifted their request for a halt or delay to a lower court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This court issued an order called a “stay.” The trial was put on hold while three judges of the Ninth Circuit heard arguments about whether or not the lawsuit should go ahead.
Legal back-and-forth ate up all of 2019. But the youth-led climate group Zero Hour lost no time. It started a campaign asking thousands of young people from across the country to add their names to a “friend of the court” document in support of the Juliana youths. Other organizations and activist communities did the same. The court received fifteen such documents.
In January 2020 the three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals gave its ruling on whether the case could go ahead. The panel agreed with the young Juliana plaintiffs that climate change is real. However, two of the three judges ruled that it was beyond the power of a federal court to give them the remedies they sought for the losses and harms they have suffered from climate change. Their written opinion said, “The panel reluctantly concluded that the plaintiffs’ case must be made to the political branches or to the electorate at large.”
In other words, these two judges told the kids to take it to Congress, the president, or the voters.
The third judge did not agree. She wrote in her dissenting opinion, “It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses. Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the nation.” But her view was in the minority, and the case was dismissed.
By that time, Kelsey Juliana was twenty-three. She and the other plaintiffs had spent more than four years pushing the Juliana case forward. She said, “I am disappointed that these judges would find that federal courts can’t protect America’s youth, even when a constitutional right has been violated.” But even though it had taken a long time to get this no, the young people and their lawyers did not give up.
“The Juliana case is far from over,” said one of the lead attorneys. “The Youth Plaintiffs will be asking the full court of the Ninth Circuit to review this decision and its catastrophic implications for our constitutional democracy.”
The young people of the Juliana case have learned that seeking justice in the courts can be a long and winding path, but it is one they and their legal team plan to follow to the very end.
Many legal experts think that more climate lawsuits are likely, especially if the president and Congress continue to do nothing about climate change. A Yale professor of environmental history said, “The courts are still coming around to the necessary role that they may have to play.” Just because one court refused to try a case, he added, does not mean that other courts will always do the same.
CLIMATE JUSTICE IN THE WORLD’S COURTROOM
Like the plaintiffs in the Juliana case, in May 2019 a group of Torres Strait Islanders made history. They filed the first-ever legal complaint about climate justice with the United Nations. Climate change is destroying their homeland, which is part of Australia, and the islanders claim that the Australian government has not done enough to protect them or the land.
The Torres Strait Islanders are Indigenous People. This means that their ancestors were the earliest known human populations in their part of the world, like the First Nations and Native Peoples of the Americas. The majority of Torres Strait Islanders now live in mainland Australia, but more than four thousand of them still live on their traditional islands.
Those islands lie in a strip of sea called the Torres Strait, between the northern tip of Australia and another large island, Papua New Guinea. More than two hundred fifty islands dot the strait. About fourteen of them are inhabited.
Some of the islands are the rocky tops of underwater mountains. Others, including some inhabited islands, are low-lying, made of coral sand. A number of them rise no more than 3.3 feet (1 meter) above sea level. These islands have already suffered the effects of climate change that you read about in chapter 2. The tropical storms that batter them are becoming more severe. Rising seas slowly creep up their low shorelines, covering or eroding the land. Salt water is contaminating the drinking water. But the damage is not only to the land and water.
“When erosion happens, and the lands get taken away by the seas, it’s like a piece of us that gets taken with it—a piece of our heart, a piece of our body. That’s why it has an effect on us. Not only the islands but us, as people,” says Kabay Tamu, one of the islanders who filed the UN complaint. He is the sixth generation of his family to live on Warraber Island. “We have a sacred site here, which we are connected to spiritually. And disconnecting people from the land, and from the spirits of the land, is devastating.”
The future is at risk, Tamu says. “It’s devastating to even imagine my grandchildren or my great-grandchildren being forced to leave because of the effects that are out of our hands. We’re currently seeing the effects of climate change on our islands daily, with rising seas, tidal surges, coastal erosion and [flooding] of our communities.” Torres Strait Islanders fear that, if they are forced to move away from their islands, then their history, culture, and even their language will be lost.
The Torres Strait Islanders are represented in their legal action by a nonprofit group called ClientEarth, which focuses on environmental law. The complaint the group filed with the United Nations Human Rights Committee says that by failing to lower greenhouse gas emissions and take proper measures to protect the islands, the government of Australia has violated the islanders’ rights to life, culture, and
freedom from interference. ClientEarth said, “Australia is failing its legal human rights obligations to Torres Strait people.”
The legal filing also asked the UN committee to tell Australia to drastically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and phase out its use of coal. Australia gets about 79 percent of its energy from fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas. The country is a major producer and exporter of coal, which emits higher amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than other fuels, and which drives climate change.
It will likely take time for the UN committee to answer the Torres Strait Islanders’ complaint. As in the case of the complaint brought by Greta Thunberg and other young activists against five countries for their greenhouse gas emissions, the United Nations cannot make Australia do anything, even if the committee rules in favor of the islanders. Member nations must only “consider” what UN committees decide or recommend.
Yet the legal actions at the UN, first by the Torres Strait Islanders and then by Greta Thunberg and other young people, have put climate change—and climate justice—on the world stage. And these legal steps are tools for movements and sympathetic politicians to use in order to demand meaningful action.
No matter how these cases are decided, they are a sign of the changing times. They show that people, including kids, will not sit by while their homelands erode and their futures are darkened to feed the world’s addiction to fossil fuels. People have stood up and spoken out to energy companies, governments, courts, and the nations of the world, demanding change. Others will surely follow them. The call for change will become louder as more voices join in, until the resistance is so great that it can no longer be ignored.