EDITORIAL: North Dakota pipeline protesters leave behind an ecological disaster

For the better part of last year, protesters poured into North Dakota to agitate against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Despite the fact that the company behind the project planned to use only private land and had secured all the necessary permits, the pipeline became a left-wing cause of the day — in part because members of the Standing Rock tribe argued the plan posed a threat to ancient burial grounds and the area’s water supply.

Turns out, however, the biggest environmental threat to the area was the protesters themselves, who turned their camp into a massive, filthy trash heap that now threatens the very drinking water they claimed they wanted to protect.

The protests began early last year over the pipeline, slated to run from western North Dakota to southern Illinois. The project would cross underneath both the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, as well as under a section of Lake Oahe, a half mile upstream from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

Eventually, thousands of outsiders converged on Standing Rock, determined to block pipeline construction. An increasing amount of publicity-seeking celebrities took up the cause, as well — in person, online or both. Late last year, the Obama administration caved and pulled back an easement for the project — an order that Donald Trump reversed last month.

In the meantime, the number of protesters had dwindled by late December thanks to the winter weather and efforts by the local authorities to break up the gathering.

But as Forbes reported last week, the thousands of “environmentally minded” protesters moving in and out of the site over the past few months have left behind an estimated 200-plus large truckloads of garbage, an enormous amount of human waste, and dozens of abandoned cars, buses, trucks and other vehicles that had either broken down or run out of gas.

According to recent piece in the Washington Times, the Standing Rock Sioux, private sanitation companies and other volunteers involved in the cleanup estimate that it could take weeks to clear all the abandoned tents, camping gear, supplies and trash now littering the camp.

The looming winter thaw threatens to make the area even more of ecological mess. “Without proper remediation, debris, trash, and untreated waste will wash into the Cannonball River and Lake Oahe,” the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in a statement.

Not surprisingly, protest groups — and the many celebrities who joined them — have been conspicuously absent from the clean-up effort and appear unconcerned about the disarray they left in their wake. But then again, what’s the big deal with a few tons of garbage, human waste and other debris if this feel-good environmental social event allowed preening progressives to showcase their virtue?