Portside

“[These companies are] here in our communities, extracting from the land, extracting from our women and just leaving us to deal with the aftermath, and they’re screaming about us.”

In the past year, the Austin Heights congregation has found itself in the thick of the intense fight over the Keystone XL pipeline, specifically the southern leg of it—running from Cushing, Oklahoma, through East Texas (within twenty miles of Nacogdoches) to Gulf Coast refineries in Port Arthur and Houston—which was fast-tracked by President Obama in March 2012 and is now nearing completion, according to TransCanada, the Canadian corporation building it.