Australia has its own Dakota pipeline story, and it’s happening right now.

This is a 622km high-pressure underground
 pipeline that will connect gas fields
 in the Northern Territory with customer
 in the Eastern Gas Market.

The world has been following the protests at Standing Rock for the last few months, watching as a social media trend has been kicked-up by our keyboard-grazing era offering solidarity with protestors on the ground. Whilst some might say this demonstrates a modern-day delusion that clicking a button makes a difference, I believe that displaying solidarity through a tool readily available to us, at least, starts the conversation that leads to action.

Over the past months, hundreds of indigenous persons and their allies have gathered near the crossing of the Missouri and Cannon Ball River in the ancestral territories of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. Their goal is to stop the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which would connect production fields in North Dakota to refineries in Illinois. The main concern is that an oil leak would threaten water quality for many members of the tribal community.

Oil pipes burst, a lot. Since 1995 there have been more than 2,000 significant accidents involving oil and petroleum, and between 2013-2015 an average of 121 accidents happened every year.

Read The One Million Women story – “Australia has its own Dakota pipeline story, and it’s happening right now.”