About Randy
Do you stand with randy?
Randy Thompson is a landowner from Merrick County who has put up with TransCanada’s bullying for the last three years, and now he’s asking you to lend a hand protecting our land and water.
Until TransCanada approached Randy about running a risky tarsands pipeline through his family's land, he wasn’t really involved in politics. He didn't write letters to the editor or ask for meetings with Senators. But when his land, family and legacy were threatened, he put his boot down.
Randy is a farmer and stockman who’s always got the right story to keep the pipeline fight in perspective. He cracks jokes about the politicians who have sold out to a foreign company (“you can put seeds on a pile of manure and call it a flower bed, but it is what it is”). Randy speaks with a sense of honesty and integrity that’s rare nowadays. He’s held his ground every time TransCanada comes tromping around or when certain politicians try and wriggle out of his critical eye.
Randy cannot fight the pipeline alone. He needs you and we need each other. In solidarity, we will show we each have the power to Stop the Pipeline. While you may not be a landowner, we are all Randy. We all want to protect our land and water. We all want America to be energy independent. We all stand with Randy.
We all have shared concerns that a pipeline of this magnitude and inherent risks could endanger our livelihoods and way of life. Most all of these family operations have been built through decades of hard work and love for the land on which we live. Our families have invested too much blood, sweat, and tears to simply sit back and let a foreign corporation take a portion of our hard earned land for their private use and gain.
When a company like TransCanada comes along and tries to bully and intimidate us into signing unwanted easement agreements it only serves to make us more determined, and we plant our feet a little firmer in the sand.
I do not consider myself to be an environmentalist in the true sense of the word, instead, as with most Nebraska farmers and ranchers I consider myself to be a conservationist. We need to be conservationist and stewards of the land because if we’re not, the land won’t return to us what we need to survive. The government has recognized a need to conserve our water, our soils, and other natural resources, and it has spent billions of dollars sponsoring various conservation programs in order to achieve that goal.
Submerging a giant risky oil pipeline into our land and water resources certainly seems contrary to those goals. The damage to the fragile Nebraska Sandhills during the construction phase of this pipeline could literally undo decades of conservation work, ranchers in that area of Nebraska have tried many different methods over the years to keep their sandy soils from blowing away, the pipeline represents a devastating set back to those efforts.
We Nebraskans may be a little independent and hardheaded but we’re not uninformed. We have witnessed the results of other pipeline spills and associated problems throughout this country, and that’s why we are wary of this proposed project.