By Alleen Brown, The Intercept

The early morning sun was still low on a dirt road in northern Minnesota this March as a small crowd faced Aitkin County sheriff’s deputies. The crowd drummed and chanted messages of support for the seven people on the other side of the police line, who sat linked together from one side of the road to the other, locked to concrete-filled barrels. The chained demonstrators were stopping construction personnel from entering a pump station for Enbridge’s Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline that has become the latest flashpoint in the fight to halt the expansion of the fossil fuel industry as the climate crisis deepens.