Talking to the Host of Drilled about the Legal Battles around Standing Rock

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

Protests around the construction of the now complete Dakota Access Pipeline brought national attention to Energy Transfer, the company that built and owns the pipeline and funded private security against the protestors. Energy Transfer sued the nonprofit Greenpeace for hundreds of millions of dollars. The company claimed that the Standing Rock movement was not Indigenous-led environmental activism but a conspiratorial effort by Greenpeace. Reporter Alleen Brown is spending this season of her podcast, Drilled, looking into the lawsuit and the message that legal actions like this send to activists. Recommended reading: Listen to Drilled Read Alleen Brown’s newsletter E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman. Our show is edited by Alex Sugiura with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:42.0	For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman. In 2016, a group of activists who called themselves water protectors, led by members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, set up camp on the windswept plains of North Dakota.
1:05.8	Their protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline quickly grew into one of the largest indigenous-led
1:11.1	movements in recent U.S. history. At the protest height, more than 10,000 people gathered
1:16.6	to stand in defense of water, land, and tribal sovereignty. The response? Militarized police,
1:23.9	surveillance drones, and a private security firm with war zone experience, and eventually
1:29.8	a sprawling lawsuit that arguably aimed to rewrite the history of Standing Rock. My guest
1:36.0	today is Aline Brown. She's a freelance journalist and a senior editor at Drilled, a self-described
1:41.8	true crime podcast about climate change. The latest season of Drilled,
1:46.4	which premiered on June 3rd, digs into the shocking legal battle the pipelines builder,
1:51.0	energy transfer, launched against Greenpeace. Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today.
1:57.1	Yeah, thank you for having me. So for folks who don't remember or maybe weren't paying as much attention as they should have, remind us what the Dakota Access Pipeline is.
2:06.6	Yeah, so the Dakota Access Pipeline is an oil pipeline that travels from kind of the western part of North Dakota to Illinois.
2:17.2	And in 2016 and 2017, it was being completed and
2:23.1	sort of inspired a big indigenous led movement of people who were attempting to stop it.
2:28.9	Yeah. And what were their motivations for stopping the pipeline? There were a few motivations.
	...

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