Anti-pipeline activist a Nebraskan warrior
Jane Kleeb is a force to be reckoned with
If you believe in the power of the individual, believe in Jane Kleeb. The diminutive, eternally cheerful community organizer and activist is the towering force in the battle against TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline.
While other states quickly lined up to support the project that will transport 830,000 barrels of oil a day — much of it diluted oilsands bitumen — to Gulf coast refineries, adding billions of dollars to Canada’s treasuries, Kleeb’s work has so far stopped the project in its tracks.
Her strategy of marshalling Nebraska farmers and ranchers has alarmed Canadian oil interests and sent a flood of worried Canadian political leaders to Washington to battle the Nebraskan warrior on the world’s biggest political stage.
Resentful of a Canadian company using their ancestral lands and worried that an oil spill could destroy their dwindling water resources, many landowners have rallied to Kleeb’s cause. Her success has astonished some, but angered others.
U.S. President Barack Obama refused to approve the pipeline last year, pending a rerouting and further environmental studies. Public hearings into the environmental aspects of the project open here Thursday at the local fair grounds.
Whatever the outcome, Kleeb and her Nebraska landowners say they’re ready for civil disobedience. Who is Jane Kleeb? “I’m a mom of three little girls,” she said. “When I was a little kid I was raised an activist. My mom was a pro-life activist. I grew up literally at my mom’s side. I’ve never known any other way to tackle problems other than being an activist. You organize other people and tell them stories and hold rallies.”
Kleeb is 40 in May. She’s slim, wears stylish ranch clothes and cowboy boots, sports a flare of short, dyed auburn hair and a smile that would melt cheese. She’s the wife of Scott Kleeb who ran in Nebraska’s congressional race in 2006 as a Democrat and lost. He also lost a bid for the U.S. Senate in 2008.
When she was president of the Young Democrats of America, an organizer sent her Scott’s picture, proposing him as a speaker at the 2001 Democratic youth convention in Arizona. “I fell in love with his picture,” she said. “It became my screen saver.”
That would eventually be her connection to the Keystone. Scott Kleeb’s family owns a ranch in the sand hills, an ecologically unique region of grass-covered sand dunes and shallow valleys that sits over a section of the Ogallala aquifer near the South Dakota border.
After they were married in 2007, she and her husband lived with his family for six months. She said she fell in love with the sand hills and although they later moved to Hastings in southern Nebraska, that passion never disappeared. When sand hill ranchers began to complain that the Keystone XL would go right through their land, Kleeb began to organize.
She had just started in March 2010 an advocacy group called Bold Nebraska. She said she hoped to change the Republican landscape of the state. She started by raising support for Obama’s public health-care policy. Two months later, she began working on the Keystone.
“The sand hills was my first interaction with Nebraska,” she said. “It’s where I fell in love with my husband. So they are special. I know those people and I could not imagine not standing side by side with them to defend that land.”
Before that she had never heard of the oilsands. She had to Google it. Nor was she an environmentalist, although, she said, she soon became one after seeing a video of the oilsands, which she calls the “tarsands.”
There are about 500 landowners over whose property Nebraska’s 491-kilometre Keystone XL section will travel.
The Nebraska Union of Farmers says about 60 per cent of those landowners have already signed agreements with TransCanada allowing the pipeline on their property. Kleeb has been rallying the remaining 40 per cent, constantly meeting with farmers, driving to the sand hills three times a week.
These farmers say they fear the pipeline will leak through the sands and into the aquifer, contaminating their water supply and jeopardizing the future of farms already at risk in an arid climate. “We’re taking all the risk and we don’t get any benefit,” rancher Nancy Allpress said.
“The landowners are the power behind this,” Kleeb said. “It’s our internal staff (at Bold Nebraska) that keeps the train moving. I try to be the glue that keeps it altogether.”
Bold Nebraska operates on a budget of about $250,000 a year and is financed by donations, mostly from Nebraskans. She said Dick Holland, an Omaha philanthropist and investor with Warren Buffett, has given the organization up to $50,000 a year. A Vermont donor sent $5,000 and a New Yorker sent $10,000.
Her life, however, has not been a steady upward curve. She grew up in Plantation, Fla., and for seven years struggled with anorexia.
“I was a fat kid and I got teased a lot,” she recalled. When her heart stopped, she ended up in an intensive care unit. She said when she finally recovered she developed a program for using activism as a tool for recovery.
“It’s a way to show your strength,” she said. She also became the director of her eating disorder unit’s foundation.
Leading the charge against such powerful political and economic interests both in the United States and Canada, occasionally has made her fearful. “It does terrify me a little bit some times,” she said.
“I’ve seen the movies where they knock off the activists. I don’t think that would happen. If they did they would have a lot of angry ranchers at their door. But that does cross my mind every once in a while.”