New Hampshire activists to travel to Minnesota to join pipeline fight

New Hampshire activists are traveling to Minnesota next week, to take part in a direct action against the Line 3 Pipeline.

Chris Balch of Wilton and Kai Parlett of Manchester are among New Hampshire residents who are making the trip to Northern Minnestota on the weekend of June 5 to participate in the ongoing protests against the construction of the pipeline.

“This is the next Standing Rock,” Balch said, referring to a long-standing protest by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Balch also traveled to North Dakota to participate in those protests in 2016. He said many of the issues with the Line 3 pipeline strike the same chord.

Like the Dakota Access Pipeline, Tribal nations have alleged that the construction of the pipeline would violate treaties with the Ojibwe tribe that establish their rights to hunt, fish and gather along the proposed route.

While protesters on the ground have been participating in action against the pipeline for seven years now throughout the approval process. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency issued water crossing permits for the project in November, and shortly thereafter, it also received its permits from the Army Corps of Engineers.

Parlett, 19, said she’s participated in some smaller protests in New Hampshire, as part of No Coal, No Gas, an activist organization aiming to end the use of fracked gas and coal in the state. She said other members of the organization have already made trips to the Line 3 site, and inspired her to do the same.

“This is a very important moment in the climate movement,” Parlett said. “I want to stand in solidarity with indigenous communities. Their livelihood and communities depend on halting construction. And, I think it’s all connected. Climate crisis as a whole isn’t a single coal plant in New Hampshire or a single pipeline in Minnesota.”

One of the aims of the protests is to gather enough public support to catch the attention of the current presidential administration.

“The fossil fuel industry operating in a ‘status quo’ fashion and continuing their path of destruction is propped up by public consent,” Parlett said. “When we withdraw our consent from the system – when masses of people withdraw their consent – is when real change happens. The fossil fuel industry cannot continue to burn our future if we refuse to let it, if we put our bodies in the way and actively work to change the status quo.”

Balch said he expects the weekend of June 5-8, when 750 or more protesters expect to travel to Minnesota to aid the ongoing protests to be a weekend of direct action against the construction of the pipeline.

“I expect to be on the front line,” Balch said. “We’ll be going toe-to-toe with pipeline workers and police, probably linking arms and physically blocking progress on the pipeline.”

Balch said organizers have provided nonviolent protest trainings, and from his perspective, there is more organization of this protest weekend than the one he participated in while protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline.

For more information about the Line 3 protests, visit stopline3.org/take-action.

•••

Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172, ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.

These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative as part of our race and equity project. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.