The company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline resumed digging trenches and laying pipe again in North Dakota on Tuesday, triggering a new phase in the fight to stop the pipeline project from going forward.
Energy Transfer Partners started working again just days after a federal appeals court ruling on Sunday allowed construction to resume within 20 miles of Lake Oahe on the Missouri River.
The pipeline has been criticized for its proposed route underneath the Missouri River in part because the Missouri River provides drinking water for 18 million people, and in part because of the climate impacts of the pipeline project.
But beyond that, this project threatens a number of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's sacred sites, and Energy Transfer Partners has already callously destroyed a sacred tribal burial ground.
What's worse?
The company destroyed the sacred burial ground
JUST ONE DAY after the tribe had filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order to prevent the destruction of sacred sites.
For months - Energy Transfer Partners and the Standing Rock Sioux tribe have been locked in a legal fight over one section of the National Historic Preservation Act.
But while the lawsuit proceeds, Energy Transfer Partners has shown that they will use any trick in the book to get this pipeline built, no matter what sacred lands are destroyed in the process.
Chip Colwell at the
Guardian raises an interesting question though: "What if nature, like corporations, had the rights of a person?"
I wrote in my book Unequal Protection about the history of the 14th amendment and how the courts have twisted the amendment's words to recognize corporations like Hobby Lobby, Chik-Fil-A, Enron, and yes, Energy Transfer Partners, as "legal persons" protected under the U.S. Constitution.
So if we're fine with saying that Hobby Lobby can be a "Christian person" - even if they aren't a human and can't be baptized - why aren't natural monuments and nature itself protected as persons under the US Constitution?
It sounds radical, but we wouldn't be the first country to do so.
In 2014 the government of New Zealand set a stunning legal precedent when it passed the "Te Urewera Act," which grants the legal protections of a person to 821-square miles of forest that the Tuhoe people consider sacred.
