It’s the largest gathering of Native American tribes in a century. Each day, a large group of protesters, composed of leaders and representatives of dozens of tribes, march a mile from their camp to the construction site of a hyper-controversial pipeline, where they chain themselves to construction equipment, pleading with company officials to halt their project. Perhaps some would see these actions as drastic, but to them, it is a fight for sacred land and clean water. Those are things worth fighting for, and the fight is escalating.

What is the project? It’s been called the “black snake,” the “Bakken blunder,” but it is officially named the “Dakota Access Pipeline.” The pipe is being constructed to expedite the flow of crude oil extracted from the northern soils of North Dakota.

Some 470,000 barrels of crude oil would flow through the line daily, cutting through South Dakota and Iowa to southern Illinois and ultimately ending in refineries and markets in the Midwest, East Coast, and Gulf Coast.

According to Energy Transfer Crude Oil Co., the business behind the pipeline, the project “is a $3.7 billion investment in the United States directly affecting the local and national labor force by creating 8,000 to 12,000 [temporary] construction jobs and up to 40 permanent operating jobs.”

Apparently this monetary investment, which predominately benefits the company building the pipeline above all others, validates the private use of the already controversial government practice of eminent domain.

This culminated in an Iowan farmer-led lawsuit against the company in May, which, according to the Des Moines Register, “the litigation could have far-reaching implications, because there 1,295 properties along the 346-mile pipeline route in Iowa, and voluntary easements still haven’t been obtained on about 168 Iowa land parcels.”

Unfortunately, the lawsuit was tossed out. The Sioux City Journal reported “District Judge Nancy Whittenburg ruled that the landowners who filed the lawsuits do not have the right to challenge Dakota Access’ exercise of eminent domain and instead must seek a legal challenge to the Iowa Utility Board’s final order to grant the company a permit to build the pipeline.”

The abuse of eminent domain is alarming enough, but the potential for ecological disaster associated with the pipeline has environmentalists livid. The pipe would run directly beneath the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, among others, raising fear of water contamination for the millions who rely on those sources of water.

These fears are well-founded. To put it simply, as oil production increases, so do oil spills. According to the Chicago Tribune, “Since 2009, the annual number of significant accidents on oil and petroleum pipelines has shot up by almost 60 percent, roughly matching the rise in U.S. crude-oil production,” with the majority of these accidents “linked to corrosion or material, welding and equipment failures, problems often associated with older pipelines, although they also can occur in newer ones, too.”

It is a simple fact: Infrastructure degrades. If a section of this pipeline were to leak into the Missouri River, a plausible situation, the repercussions would leave the entire Sioux Nation currently protesting its construction without clean water and would inevitably affect millions of other water-drinking Americans.

With fracking being used for this oil, the use of eminent domain to secure the land on which the pipeline will be built and the environmental stakes set by movement of this crude oil, it seems there’s not a single facet of this project that is not rooted in controversy.  The one community seemingly most negatively affected by this pipeline is a community that has been consistently plundered in American history. How this will conclude is still unknown, but the Daily Iowan Editorial Board gives the Standing Rock protesters its support: Kill the black snake.