In the lead up to the 2011 official U.S. State Department decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline--running from the Alberta, Canada Tar Sands to the Gulf of Mexico--the Department held nine public meetings in Fall 2011 in the six U.S. states through which the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project would pass (the Department rejected the proposal; however, a new proposal is under consideration as of this writing). The transcripts of these public meetings are publicly accessible. Understanding the pipeline as a project of trans-national trade and the global circulation of petrochemicals--including global emissions of carbon dioxide--this paper hones in on one region within one U.S. state: the Nebraskan Sandhills, a cattle ranching region of grass-stabilized sand dunes and inter-dunal valleys stretching 20,000-square miles across the north-central part of the state, under which rests a vast hydrological network, including the largest freshwater aquifer in the world - the Ogallala Aquifer. This essay argues that we can read the Public Comments as a form of poetic expression, paying attention to the ways the State Department transcription process formatted the oral testimonies into an "official" and sanctioned public document -- instituting line-breaks and other syntactical procedures. Using the tools of literary-critical analysis, this paper makes a case that we can read the Comments as a form of documentary poetry - in the tradition of such American modernist poets as Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, and George Oppen - that explore ecological questions while experimenting with lyric structures. The Comments reveal competing environmental stakeholders' stances - on such topics as Prairie systems ecology and the neoliberal economics of private-public capital markets. In doing so, they subsequently express citizens' various understandings of themselves in relation to landscape, ecology, technology, and geo-politics.

TransCanada Corporation has proposed the Keystone XL pipeline project to transfer crude bitumen from the oil sand fields in northern Alberta, Canada, to oil refineries located in the southern part of the United States. This project has created controversy at the national level in the US and Canada and at the international level. The existence of various stakeholders with differing wants and needs has embroiled the Keystone XL in a complicated strategic dispute. This dispute was initially ignited by the potential project’s negative environmental impacts. However, economic and political issues have also played a critical role in further complicating the decision process. The objective of this study is to design a strategic decision-making system for use in assessing the Keystone XL conflict with standard and perceptual graph model methods. Standard graph model analysis consists of various steps. After identifying the decision makers (DMs) subjectively, their options and preferences are determined. Then, possible scenarios or combinations of options for these DMs are evaluated. In the next step, based on rules called solution concepts, a standard stability analysis is conducted. The perceptual graph model technique, on the other hand, considers the emotions and perceptions of DMs in a conflict to assess the existing dynamics among them. Although this technique takes its basic structure from the standard graph model technique, it presents unique insights into each DM’s perspectives toward the conflict and other DMs. This technique has been used in this study to understand how the awareness of one DM regarding other DMs’ perceptions can change reactions and strategies under different conditions regarding the Keystone XL conflict.