(Federalist) After half a year, hundreds of arrests, and thousands of headlines, the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline has drawn to an end at the Standing Rock site. On February 22, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum forced an evacuation of the protestors' camps. The government needed time to clean the environmental mess the environmentalists left behind.

That paradoxical reality underscores many of the problems with efforts that claim to solve potential problems. In the end, this lengthy "protest" accomplished none of its stated goals, cost millions to those on both sides, and left the area in crisis thanks to the very sorts who claimed to be there as a form of protection.

Instigated by resistance and lawsuits brought forth by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, protesters descended on the flats of the Cannonball River plain and encamped to resist the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The tribe has been in court battling the Army Corps of Engineers over the pipeline. Tribal elders resisted despite the dubious merit of complaints this construction would violate sacred tribal lands and threaten their water supply, even though numerous other pipelines already run through these lands.

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