Victory in the pipeline.

• Author: Mark, Jason
• Position: Keystone XL pipeline in Nebraska

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In Nebraska, college football is something of a civic religion. The University of Nebraska Cornhuskers have had a sellout crowd for every home game since 1962, and when Memorial Stadium fills on Saturdays, its 86,000 fans make it the third-largest city in the state. So it made perfect sense for the Calgary-based energy services company TransCanada to use the venue to promote its plans to build a massive oil pipeline across part of Nebraska. Last fall, at the start of the 2011 football season, the company started running a one-minute spot that featured highlights from the Cornhuskers' 1978 conference championship team and opened and closed with the TransCanada logo and the not-so-subtle tag: "Husker Pipeline."

But when the ad showed during the third home game of the season, people in the stands started to jeer. Soon, thousands of fans were booing the TransCanada ad. Four days later, the university announced it was pulling the pipeline video as part of its policy that prohibits ads for alcohol, tobacco, gambling, or "divisive" political issues.

"The Husker ad was clearly a turning point," says Jane Kleeb, founder and director of Bold Nebraska, a grassroots group that organized opposition to TransCanada's proposed 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, which is supposed to move tar sands oil from the far reaches of Canada's boreal forest to the Gulf of Mexico. "That's when I knew we had kicked their butt."

Kleeb also cites participation at State Department-sponsored hearings in Nebraska.

"Essentially every single Nebraskan who went up to speak was in opposition to the pipeline," she says. "And the people who were opposing the pipeline weren't environmentalists or even progressives. They were farmers and ranchers."

The Nebraska fight was just one front of a much larger battle to stop the project. Last August, more than 1,200 people were arrested at the White House gates as they called on President Obama to reject the pipeline; the two-week protest marked the largest display of civil disobedience on an environmental issue since the anti-nuclear protests thirty years ago. Throughout September and October, pipeline opponents rallied outside of Obama speeches--in Raleigh, North Carolina, in Pittsburgh, and in St. Petersburg, Florida. People who had supported the President in the 2008 election went to Obama for America offices and told campaign staffers they would not volunteer for the reelection effort unless the President denied the pipeline permit. At private fundraising dinners, major donors to the Democratic Party began to raise the issue with the President.

Then, on November 6, exactly a year before the Presidential election, more than 12,000 people opposed to the pipeline converged on the White House and encircled the building. Many of the people in the crowd carried signs reminding Obama of something he had said during the...