A New Era for Environmentalists?

The Keystone pipeline protests reveal the shifting fault lines and changing culture of protest movements.

The Keystone XL pipeline protests in Washington, which concluded on Sept. 3, were about more than the fight over the tar sands – they were proxy arguments for many things. For climate-change activists, preventing the pipeline is a method of holding U.S. President Barack Obama accountable to his pledges. For others, it is a symbolic struggle against oligarchy. Still others view it as a spiritual movement to fix humanity's extractive relationship with the Earth.

Yet, more than any particular aspiration, the two-week exercise in civil disobedience that led to 1,200 peaceful arrests was a referendum on the capacity to build, and sustain, a political movement.

Movements are defined, and remembered, as much by their conflicts as by their conquests. These conflicts are fodder for political writers, whose editors feed on antagonism.

Every evening between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., those who planned to be arrested the following day met for a working dinner and training. During the first night's training at Saint Stephen Episcopal Church – after the opening talk by prominent environmental writer Bill McKibben, but before the rice and beans – there emerged a recognizable, if subtle and brief, dispute over the following question: Should we sing while being arrested?

In a defiant act of civil disobedience, protestors stage a sit-in at the White House to implore Obama to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. Read more on the efforts here.

The question posed, an advocate of song initiated a round of “America the Beautiful.” The response was un-spirited, the singing dull. Directly, there were objections from two groups: Canadians (why sing “America the Beautiful”?), and others whose reasons went unstated. A vote was quickly taken, and the results tallied: There would be no singing.

Non-violent civil disobedience in front of the White House is a methodical piece of performance art. So long as nobody taunts the Park Police, the routine is the same day after day after day. Protesters march across Pennsylvania Avenue, turn their backs to the president's office, and wait. Police clear and cordon off the area, give three warnings, and then start escorting people into vans.

For observers milling about Lafayette Park, there is not much to do. A bit of buzz about the media (which reporters are here today?), questions about the count (how many people have been arrested today compared to yesterday?), some tweeting, chatting, and smoking.

For or against it, singing is inevitable.

Only a few minutes passed on the first day before voices were raised, issuing the kind of call-and-response chants that dominate colour wars at summer camp. "I say, 'Tar sands,' you say 'No.' Tar sands … No! Tar sands … No!"

In the weeks leading up to the protests, McKibben stressed the virtue of solemnity, encouraging people to dress like adult taxpayers, and to showcase dignity and seriousness rather than rage against the man and his machines. The effect of the chants, however, was jarring, atonal, and strangely out of rhythm with the mood. Even the police volunteered opinions. One officer told an organizer: "It sounds like people are shouting Tarzan."

Do Canada's new oil sands regulations go far enough? The Pembina Institute weighs in here.

It is said, perhaps apocryphally, that when the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel marched alongside Martin Luther King, he always hummed Hasidic spirituals. Heschel was heir to one of the great Eastern European Hasidic families. These dynasties produced good theology and mysticism, but, above all, were prodigious makers of music. The civil rights movement, with its influence from enthusiastic liturgical traditions of southern black churches, was an oddly natural fit for someone like Heschel.

But this practice of integrating political rallies, marches, and singing – spiritual or otherwise – vanished after 1968, when more violent means of expressing outrage led to the Weather-Men's "Days of Rage" in 1969. Try to name a popular protest song written after 1971. There’s a very good chance that you cannot. (It's not as if people today go around singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” while protesting.)