Farms across the Great Plains are in the path of a monster: the Keystone XL pipeline. Photo: David Clow The other morning I took a call, like so many other calls I've taken over the last four years, from another Dakota farmer wondering how his land may be affected by the Keystone XL pipeline. He had a notice of condemnation and interrogatories from TransCanada in hand, and I wish I'd had better news for him. He's in the path of a monster. Keystone XL will be a 36-inch-diameter pipeline, carrying nine times the volume of the Silvertip line that just …

It’s time for the climate lobby to listen to rural grassroots groups.I don't spend much time "inside the Beltway," so I've reserved judgment in recent years on the Beltway-centric strategy to advance climate policy. I'm willing to grant that all those Congress-focused lobbywonks are rational. As a seventh-generation Montanan who's physiologically dependent on wide open spaces, I wouldn't want to stay in D.C. long enough to find out. The place creeps me out. But in the aftermath of the climate-legislation train wreck, I'm starting to wonder. Here's the view from the cheap seats. My organization works in states that will …

 From his rolling green soybean fields above a slow river in eastern Iowa, Don Shatzer looks out over the farm where he was raised, across land he and his neighbors have farmed all their lives. Below him are the garden beds where his wife Linda grows organic vegetables to safeguard the family's health, and the farm pond and beach he built for the grandkids. A few miles to the west lies the city of Waterloo, with a population of about 66,000. The sky is clear and the southwest wind sweet on a humid summer day. Shatzer's land is some of …