(NEW YORK) — In the fall of 2016, under the cover of darkness, Jessica Reznicek had a singular focus: to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. At valve sites across America’s heartland, she snuck through security fences, set fire to equipment, and used chemicals to burn holes in the pipeline itself.

To Reznicek, a veteran climate activist, the damage was justified: a nonviolent act of civil disobedience in pursuit of saving the planet. The Justice Department saw it differently. After Reznicek publicly acknowledged her crimes and entered a guilty plea, federal prosecutors subsequently persuaded a judge to apply a sentencing increase known as the “terrorism enhancement” against her, putting her behind bars for eight years.

The enhancement was applied “even though no person was ever hurt, no person was intended to be hurt, she wasn’t charged with terrorism, and she didn’t plead guilty to terrorism,” said Bill Quigley, Reznicek’s attorney and a professor emeritus at the Loyola University New Orleans Law School. “The terrorism enhancement doubled her amount of time in prison, which is troubling.”

Next month, when a panel of 8th Circuit Court of Appeals judges hears Reznicek’s appeal, the terrorism enhancement will take center stage. Her case has emerged as a potential watershed moment in the eco-extremism movement, galvanizing free-speech advocates and renewing calls for reform. And the outcome could reverberate down through future American protest movements.

Most frequently used against violent extremists or those with ties to foreign terrorist organizations, the terrorism enhancement is praised by national security officials and prosecutors as an effective tool of deterrence — a stiff penalty meant to discourage others from engaging in similar behavior. But critics say the use of the enhancement against Reznicek reflects a broader push from the powerful oil industry to level harsh penalties against activists who target energy infrastructure.

At a time when domestic violent extremism is on the rise, experts say Reznicek’s appeal presents a fresh opportunity to reexamine how terrorism cases are prosecuted — and who deserves to be labeled a terrorist.

Iowa homecoming

Long before Reznicek committed herself to a life of environmental activism, the Iowa native felt a deep connection to nature. In an interview with ABC News’ Iowa affiliate, WOI-TV, shortly after her sentencing, Reznicek described a childhood spent swimming in a local river, which she called her sanctuary.

“I’ve carried that love with me all my life,” she said. “And I’ve also witnessed that desecration and the pollution that has occurred during my lifetime.”

She described a spiritual calling that eventually led her to fight the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, an oil conduit that would eventually run more than 1,000 miles from North Dakota to Illinois. Beginning in April 2016, thousands of Native American and environmental activists gathered to protest the project. Over time, Reznicek’s actions grew increasingly dangerous.

“I entered the valve sites multiple times in multiple locations on multiple days,” Reznicek told WOI. “Each time, there was a process of preparation for that, knowing full well what the legal consequences were.”

In public and in court, Reznicek admitted to her actions — which included setting fire to multiple construction vehicles — and encouraged others to follow suit. She never hurt another person and said she never targeted human life. But her actions led to a delay in the pipeline’s construction and more than $3 million in damages.

“Everybody’s afraid of these environmental groups and fear that it might look bad if you fight back with these people,” said Kelcy Warren, CEO OF Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, during a cable news appearance in August 2017. “But what they did to us is wrong, and they are going to pay for it.”

In February 2021, prosecutors secured a guilty plea from Reznicek on one felony count of conspiracy to damage an energy facility. Reznicek said she was prepared to serve time in prison, but she and her legal team expected “somewhere in the neighborhood of three or four years,” according to Quigley.

Reznicek’s aggressive brand of protest proved legally perilous: in June 2021, a federal judge handed her a hefty prison sentence and a damning new label: domestic terrorist.

Section 3A 1.4: The terrorism enhancement

In the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Congress enacted tougher penalties to intentionally deter acts of “intimidation or coercion” aimed at the government or civilian population. In the 1990s and early 2000s, multiple individuals associated with groups like the Earth Liberation Front faced terrorism-related sentences in connection with a string of arsons, including one that burned down a planned ski resort in Vail, Colorado.

“When an individual or group of individuals use an explosive device and incendiary device, engage in tight acts of targeted violence, they have crossed the line,” said John Cohen, an ABC News contributor and former senior official in the Department of Homeland Security, describing the intention of the harsher penalties.

“They should expect — regardless of how noble their cause — that they will be investigated, arrested, prosecuted, and, if convicted, incarcerated as terrorists,” Cohen said.

But critics complain that the law is too broad and too inconsistently applied. Terrorism sentences have historically been used against defendants with ties to ISIS or al-Qaida, or to violent domestic extremists like Cesar Sayoc, who was convicted in 2018 for mailing pipe bombs to members of Congress.

Notably, prosecutors did not seek terrorism enhancements in several other high-profile cases. Neither Dylann Roof, who pled guilty to massacring nine people at a Charleston bible study, nor James Fields, who was convicted of killing a Charlottesville demonstrator with his car, were sentenced with the terrorism enhancement.

“While [prosecutors] try to be consistent, they’ll try to be fair, obviously, there’s going to be different jurisdictions, different groups,” DOJ federal prosecutor Joe Moreno told ABC News. “And ultimately, you’re never going to get a system where it’s uniformly applied everywhere.”

More recently, of the 140 defendants sentenced to date in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, none have faced terrorism charges or sentences.

“In the court of common sense, individuals who went into the Capitol to engage in destructive behavior for the purposes of impeding congressional action and certifying the vote are, by its very definition, engaged in terrorism,” Cohen said. “Unfortunately, under our current legal environment, it may not meet the elements of a terrorism offense.”

Civil rights groups say prosecutors and judges have increasingly branded eco-saboteurs as terrorists, even as some resist applying that label in other more violent cases.

“I believe 100% that this is an overreach of power,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. “And it is absolutely imperative that we put guidelines in place.”

Spotlight on Big Oil

Markey and other climate supporters say the oil and gas industry has spent years trying to silence opposition, lobbying state and federal lawmakers to enact tougher rules for protesters and increasing penalties for trespassing, damage and destruction at critical infrastructure sites.

“What the oil and gas industry wants is for these protesters to be charged as eco-terrorists, so that they are sentenced to longer time in prison as a deterrent against legitimate civil disobedience,” Markey said. “And that’s wrong.”

In the last five years, 17 states have adopted so-called critical infrastructure protection laws that do just that — and 40 additional bills are pending across the country, including a federal one.

“These laws introduced extraordinary penalties,” said Elly Page, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. “Protesters who even momentarily cross onto property that contains a pipeline … can now face multiple years in prison.”

“They’re discouraging people from turning out and have making their voices heard about what’s really the crisis of our time — the climate crisis,” Page said.

In 2017, 80 Republican and four Democratic members of Congress — who over the course of their careers received a combined $36 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry — pressed the Justice Department to treat all eco-saboteurs as domestic terrorists.

The Department of Homeland Security later grouped some environmental activists — the so-called pipeline “valve turners” — with mass killers and white supremacists in a description of domestic threats, according to internal documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the nonprofit group Property of the People.

Meanwhile, Reznicek is in her first year behind bars as she prepares for her upcoming appeal of her sentence’s terrorism enhancement. The Justice Department has argued that Reznicek’s full sentence should remain in place, and that the evidence shows her conduct was targeting the government.

Supporters hope that a favorable outcome could set a new precedent for how activists are treated under the law. Quigley said that Reznicek’s case will be watched closely by those involved in other American protest movements.

“Nuclear, civil rights, Black Lives Matter and others … see this as a really hyper criminalization of consequences for people who protest,” he said.

Moreno agreed that there’s a lot on the line beyond Reznicek’s prison term.

“It’s going to be a difficult uphill battle for her” to get the sentencing enhancement removed, Moreno said. “But if she is able to make that distinction, it would be a very significant one in how these cases are approached.”

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(NEW YORK) — When the oil tanker Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, hundreds of thousands of acres of water were threatened.

The 1989 spill, considered one of the most devastating environmental disasters in U.S. history, destroyed the livelihood of local Indigenous fishermen, local food sources, as well as the natural habitats of local fish, whale and bird species.

“The thing about the oil spill that a lot of people don’t realize is that was like climate change happening to us overnight,” said Dune Lankard, the founder of the Native Conservancy. The organization was born out of the devastation that the spill caused to the local economy and ecosystem.

The group was created by Lankard to protect the region from further devastation by corporate development. He’s just one of the many environmentalists who argue that Indigenous traditions and tools can turn the tide on climate injustice through the Land Back movement.

Indigenous people make up less than 5% of the world population, however, they have protected 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity for centuries, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

However, climate change and environmental injustices continue to threaten vulnerable populations, including Indigenous tribes. To combat this looming threat, Lankard and his team have cultivated rich kelp mariculture farms, which Lankard calls the “waterkeepers” of the ocean.

He says kelp farming not only supplies a valuable food source and business opportunities for tribes, but it has the ability to pull in and remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.

According to a panel by the science research nonprofit Energy Futures Initiative, kelp farms can sequester up to nine billion metric tons of carbon per year, essentially reversing the effects of climate change.

It’s become an exciting tool for climate activists and scientists alike in taking the fight against environmental destruction back into their own hands.

The more land and water Indigenous people can conserve and repair, the more they can implement climate-saving strategies such as kelp farming.

“What people have to do is: they have to organize, we have to direct their energy, their time, money or love in whatever direction they may need to, in order to save the last of the wild places that are not only dear to them, but they need in order to survive,” Lankard said.

What is the Land Back Movement?

The Land Back movement is a widespread, Indigenous-led effort to return land to Indigenous tribes to conserve, restore and revitalize important landscapes and biodiversity.

“We are calling for the return of land and putting it into indigenous land management or governance, so that we can really have indigenous-led conservation,” Jade Begay, the climate justice campaign director at the Indigenous activist group NDN Collective, said.

Ninety-nine percent of Indigenous lands have been taken from tribes over the development of modern-day America, according to 2021 findings in the Science Journal.

The research also found that the lands Indigenous people have been forcibly moved to are more likely to be at high risk to the ongoing effects of climate change.

The decentralized movement demands that tribes be able to manage environmental efforts on ancestral lands, efforts that can halt or reverse negative climate impacts.

Land Back has already begun to be successful. The government has begun to return and repatriate Native and Indigenous land to tribes.

The Rappahannock Tribe recently reacquired roughly 465 acres at Fones Cliffs in Virginia.

Fones Cliffs is not only the ancestral land of the tribe, but also an important region for resident and migratory bald eagles and other birds. It’s home to one of the largest nesting populations of bald eagles on the Atlantic coast.

Now that the land has been reacquired, they hope to create trails and a replica 16th-century village to educate visitors about Rappahannock history and conservation efforts, as well as train tribal youth in traditional river knowledge.

“We look at the Mother Earth as our mother, and what would you do to harm your mother?” said Chief Anne Richardson of the Rappahannock Tribe.

“The work that I’ve done to get land back on the Rappahannock River is to teach the public how to think the way we think, how to utilize the incredible value systems that have kept our people sustaining on this land for 11,000 years,” she said.

The work of the Eyak people, the Rappahannock Tribe and more Indigenous groups seek to align with the goals of climate scientists as they continue the dire fight against a changing climate.

Climate fears grow

The most recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that global emissions will need to peak by 2025 at the latest, and steeply reduce thereafter, to prevent worsening impacts on the climate.

Right now, countries are not on track to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the conservative figure established by the Paris Agreement.

The report named a wide range of solutions to reduce global emissions, including reducing fossil fuel use; large-scale renewable energy resourcing; improving energy efficiency; and reducing methane and carbon emissions drastically.

“If we wanted to really expedite and be efficient about decarbonization, honoring indigenous rights, honoring, calls to action for Land Back will really push us to meet those climate targets to meet that target of keeping temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees,” Begay said.

Some of the efforts of the Land Back movement, which include water filtration, carbon sequestering and wildfire management can tap into the IPCC’s recommendations.

“I love it when tribal values and traditions validate what the professional scientists have found,” Richardson said. “It’s important for the tribes to be in the care of and to be able to train and teach the public on how to really care for the land and all of our natural resources.”

Much like the Eyak and Rappahannock Tribes, Indigenous groups across the country have already begun to do the work on the ground to save the planet — one river, cliff, or forest at a time.

Land Back as a climate justice solution

The impacts of the oil spill into the Copper River have yet to be completely resolved more than 30 years later.

Lankard called the $2 billion cleanup effort by Exxon after the oil spill “a dog and pony show.”

“Once the oil spill — any oil spill — hits the water, the war is over. You’ve lost. There’s no way you can clean it up,” said Lankard.

“The best thing you could possibly do is get environmental laws in place and preventive measures that will actually protect the environment,” he said.

He says efforts like the Land Back movement can prevent such disasters. Following the spill, Alaskan Natives were able to take control of and preserve more than a million acres of wild salmon habitat along the Gulf of Alaska coastline.

In the meantime, kelp farming has helped bolster the local economy thwarted by the oil spill, as well as provided an environmental element.

Kelp farming is just one of many traditional practices used in environmental justice efforts, joining methods like oyster cultivation for natural water filtration or fire management methods of burning land to reduce grass fuel and limit wildfires.

“We want to figure out how we can be a part of this new emerging regenerative industry and we don’t get owned by the corporations in this next 150 years,” Lankard said.

“They’re going to use all the fun words like conservation and restoration and mitigation and say that they’re the ones that are helping save the ocean when they’re the ones who got us into this mess in the first place,” Lankard said.

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