Activist causes grief for pipeline planners
‘ Nebraskan warrior’ Jane Kleeb ready for civil disobedience during public hearings
GRAND ISLAND, Neb. — 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 last year refused to approve the pipeline, 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 battle. Scott Kleeb’s family owns a ranch in the sand hills, an ecologically unique region of grasscovered 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.
In March 2010, she started 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 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.”