Sally writes

I was arrested on Friday, 2 September, and it was deeply meaningful – and I hope, will contribute to the defeat of this monument to fossil-fuel addiction. The charge was “failure to obey a legal order”, and it is an infraction, not even a misdemeanor. Basically, the equivalent of a traffic ticket, as the trainers [seasoned activists who prepared protesters for getting arrested] explained it. The service at All Souls [Unitarian Church] may have been cancelled, but there were protests every day at the White House. There may not have been arrests, as diverting park police from hurricane-related duties would not have been a good idea for many reasons, but nobody [none of the protesters] took the day off.

A question: was 15 people really the largest delegation from any single denomination? That seems surprising to me, even as it seems a pretty poor showing for a religious group [Unitarian] that prides itself on its history of social action and commitment to social justice. I challenge us to do better in the 2.5 months that we have remaining in which to influence the president: for the pipeline to be built, he must sign a permit declaring that [the pipeline] is in the national interest. That would mean approving a pipeline to the Gulf of Mexico [where the oil would be refined and then sold to the highest bidder, domestic or foreign]. [On its way it would cross] the Ogallala aquifer, which provides drinking water for millions of people and irrigation for most of our agriculture; [it] would be fed by a technology that removes 2 tons of soil and uses 4-5 barrels of water for every barrel of oil [produced], and [the pipeline would produce] only 3 times the amount of energy expended. By comparison, conventional oil produces 100 times the energy [invested to produce it]. I cannot see how this can be in the interest of anything but profit [to the producers at the expense of extensive exploitation of and damage to natural resources].

[signed] Sally Jane Gellert