Photo: Dead marine life has been washing up on South Australia’s shores since a toxic algal bloom began to spread in May. Photo by Sia Duff.

The start of South Australia’s toxic algal bloom began like a horror film. It was a sparkling morning when Dr Mike Bossley, two other marine scientists and Pam Bennett approached the cliff overlooking their marine sanctuary. Half a decade ago they had established it next to land that Bennett’s family owned. It was intended as a refuge for marine life to escape fishing and other human activity, and to educate the public about local marine ecology and the Great Southern Reef. An overlooked temperate cousin to the famed Great Barrier Reef, the ecological wonder stretches along the southern coast of the Australian continent from Kalbarri in the west to the Solitary Islands on the east coast.

A small bay tucked into the bottom of Yorke Peninsula, Treasure Cove is made up of multiple habitats in a small area, with high biodiversity concentration. It had all been going “really well, really beautifully” in recent years, Bossley says, which is what made reports of a spreading sickness in the ocean all the more concerning. There had been whispers of something stirring in the water as far back as early February, when fishers working down south around Robe reported patches of dead sea, a funny smell and foam to their reps at the Marine Fishers Association, who in turn attempted to notify authorities. At the time, no one gave it much thought. Sometimes, the sea does strange things.

No one currently knows exactly where the bloom began, but based on anecdotal reports it started north of Robe before making its way to Middleton. From there it wrapped around Kangaroo Island, then hit the bottom of the York Peninsula. At that point the bloom split into two, one arm staying put, the other reaching its way up St Vincent Gulf. The second arm circled the gulf before coming back down along the metropolitan Adelaide Beaches

A group of surfers first raised the alarm in March; Anthony Rowland had gone down to Waitpinga Point on the southern Fleurieu with two friends to catch the swell. It was a 40C day, and on the way into the water he felt like he was getting a flu – a scratch in his throat and an odd taste in his mouth. On their way back, he and his two friends were coughing. Looking around the carpark, he noticed the two dozen people there coughing, too. That was the moment he understood something was deeply wrong.

Later that night, he went back to get samples. The next morning he returned again but this time found foam on the waves and death on the shore. On Monday, he returned again to find it even worse. “There was so much death,” he says. Fearing something had spilled or someone had dumped something into the waves, he reported what he had seen to the Environmental Protection Authority, but the authorities didn’t seem alarmed. When he followed up his initial contact with more information on Wednesday, the person responding told Rowland that it was all in hand.

“I did not think this would keep people out of the water on such a nice day,” they wrote.

Stories of mass death followed – a friend of Bossley’s had been finding unusual numbers of cuttlefish bones on the beach and people reported marine life washing ashore in numbers: fish, sea horses, rays and sharks. What washes ashore represents a fraction of what is taking place in the water, Bossley knew, and he was keen to learn how the sanctuary was faring. The remote location on the Eyre Peninsula, however, made logistics tough and by the time he and two fellow marine scientists made the drive from Adelaide – a little over three hours without stopping – it was early May.

The first sign of trouble didn’t seem like trouble at all. From the top of the cliff, the group looked down into the water and noticed three large short-tailed sting rays cruising in the shallow water. The gentle giants of the ocean, also known as “smooth rays”, can grow to around 1.5 metres (5ft) wide. It was unusual to see three rays clustered together in a small area, Bossley says, but it wasn’t alarming.

When the group made their way down the track to the rocky beach, they began to find dead rays and fish washed up with the tide. Not knowing what to expect, they prepared to conduct their survey. They had met the night before to plan their work: Bossley would enter the water with Pam, and the other two would go their own way. It was only when the team entered that the full scale of what was taking place came into focus. The water was thick and oily, Bossley recalls. Visibility was down to two metres at best. As soon as he put his face in the water, Bossley says, a dead ray floated past his mask

“To me it was a feeling of ‘the ocean’s fucked’. Everything’s dead and dying,” he says. “It felt like you were entering a dead zone.”

As they entered, the rays circled. Normally shy, pensive creatures that elegantly move through the water, under ordinary circumstances they would rather run from a diver than fight. This time was different. Bennett had been in the water a matter of minutes when it happened. She didn’t see the ray coming and before she understood what was happening a 16cm (6inch) serrated barb shot through her arm. As Bossley rose from the water and looked around, he could see Bennett holding her wound and the blood trickling down her arm. She was remarkably calm, he recalls. A nurse for 45 years, she was more concerned for the rays than she was with herself.
“I was thinking: I guess that’s the end of my dive then,” she says. “You know, I’ve seen big smooth rays all my adult life and I’ve never seen them act like this before. They look so graceful and beautiful in the water, they never come toward you, not in my experience.”

“Humans, when they don’t have enough oxygen to their brain or when they’re impacted by something and are in the throes of dying, they do crazy things they wouldn’t normally do. Why wouldn’t a sea creature?

“These rays were sick. They were scared. They were stressed and they were dying. What it highlighted to me was the impact this was all having on the creatures.”

Faith Coleman says it took authorities longer than it should have to investigate what was happening with the bloom. Coleman, an estuarine ecologist and daughter of respected South Australian scientist, Peri Coleman, says these events are not without precedent. In 2013, another bloom started in the same area before moving north, causing fish kills along the way. There was also another, long-forgotten, episode in 1982. This, she says, gave advanced warning of what was possible.

The big mystery at the start of the algal bloom was which species had come to dominate, a process Coleman described as “a game of Russian Roulette”. There were a number of suspects, most of them closely related. The prime suspect in this bloom, however, was 

, a species responsible for fish kills in waters as far afield as Japan, Norway, Ireland and New Zealand. Confirmation, however, took time. Due to a lack of local lab capability, authorities first sent samples to a group in Melbourne. When they couldn’t confirm which species with certainty, samples were sent to a lab in Sydney.

Nine days after the Environmental Protection Authorities sent off its first samples, the Colemans grew tired of waiting. With help from Rowlands as middleman, a sample found their way to the Colemans and the private lab Peri Coleman maintains at her home. Within 20 minutes, they had identified the presence of 

. To human health it was low risk, but for marine life, it was a disaster. On the possible spectrum of threat, Coleman says it could always have been worse, with species like

, a neurotoxin shellfish poison that is deadly to marine life but has so far only been found in the northern hemisphere and is usually picked up in water monitoring before an event. In May, however, authorities confirmed that, for the first time, brevetoxin had been detected in South Australian waters at three sites affected by the bloom; by August this list had grown to ten. A spokesperson for the Department of Primary Industries and Regions South Australia (PIRSA) said 

 had not been detected, but the toxin’s presence was “evidence that other algae species are likely involved”. In other words, in some places the bloom was more like a cocktail than a spirit, with 

All the necessary ingredients, brought to you by climate change

From there the state’s scientific community began to reverse engineer what had happened. Three ingredients are required for an algal bloom to get going – temperature, the right conditions and food. In the preceding months, South Australia had all the preconditions necessary, Coleman says, thanks to climate change.

“To really tie this to climate change we need to look broader,” Coleman says. “The really interesting thing about this bloom is that it’s occurring all the way along the coast from Ningaloo to New Zealand. In each spot where this hits the coast, we see some sort of heat related distress.”

Zooming out she says what is happening in South Australia should be understood in the context of fish kills and smaller algal blooms along the coasts of Victoria and Tasmania. The starting point for what happened in South Australia, however, was the marine heatwave that formed off the northern Western Australian coast in September 2024. At that time, the oceans surrounding Australia had begun to broil. The world’s oceans absorb a third of all carbon and capture 90% of the excess heat generated by burning fossil fuel. A century of burning oil, gas and coal has transferred energy once locked beneath the earth and pushed it into the atmosphere where it is now being absorbed by the ocean. This process is now at the point where change has become noticeable with ocean temperatures rising hotter than average as the seasons change.

In Coleman’s telling, the hot water off the Kimberley coast of far north Western Australia was eventually dragged south by the Leeuwin Current, triggering coral bleaching events in spectacular reef systems such as 

 and Scott Reefs. Usually the Leeuwin Current loses steam at Albany, but because the ocean has become more energetic with the excess heat it has absorbed, this water kept going. From there, it continued to flow east across the southern coast and the Nullarbor plain into South Australia, knocking out the normal currents and flushing mechanisms that occur through autumn. Ocean currents and strong winds blowing from the south normally bring cold water from the deep ocean and the Antarctic in an effect known as the Bonney Upwelling. Between December 2024 and February 2025, Coleman says the marine heatwave interrupted this process. Long stretches of smooth, clam, sunny days under infinite blue skies made great weather for beach goers and algae alike. With no cool water to dilute the warm, temperatures began to rise and all that was left to get things going was fuel.

The specific source of this nutrient load is currently debated. Some point to floodwaters moving down from the northern states after the floods in 2023 as the cause. Having washed through the landscape, collecting decomposing leaf litter, debris, fertilizers, runoff and other organic matter, the thinking goes that this soup flushed into the Coorong where it sat for two years. Others point to the nutrients brought up to the surface from an “unprecedented” cold water Bonney Upwelling over the 2023-2024 period. A few storms that swept through during autumn and winter that many hoped might break up the bloom only acted as spreading events, pushing the cloud further out.

Coleman says these explanations are too easy. Algal blooms are triggered by events a few weeks, or sometimes even a few days prior. Coleman says the trigger point in this case was “a really interesting complex array of climate change-related variables” that began when rising water temperatures killed kelp, seaweed and macro algae that preferred cooler waters. The effect was to mulch the sea floor with organic matter that Coleman says was heaven for 

, a family of single celled algae that includes 

 Under normal circumstances, these organisms provide a waste disposal function within the ocean but with an overabundance of food, they began to feast.

“As the kelp and seaweed died, they released a whole heap of organic matter into the water which is perfect for dinoflagellates,” she says. “In addition, of course, we have increased CO2 in the water. And we have an increased amount of carbonate in the water that helps in their growth.”

The result was the bloom: a spreading, imperialistic, green-tinged cloud that began to sweep through the ocean. By July the bloom stretched across 4,400km2 and reached depths of 30 metres. Marine species that were quick and mobile had a better chance to swim to safety. Those that had evolved to be habitat-dependent, those too slow and those which took a wrong turn were trapped. Fish, crabs, lobsters, sponges, sea cucumbers, leafy sea dragons, dolphins, sharks, sea lions, cuttlefish, worms, entire microbial networks – anything that could not escape, succumbed. Based on the best understanding available as of August, in fish and other marine life, the bloom acted like a flu. The algae clogged gills, releasing a chemical that prompted them to produce mucus as an immune response in an attempt to clear it. This continued until the fish suffocated. In mammals such as dolphins and sea lions, death took a few extra steps. As the animals swam through the cloud, it irritated their eyes, ears, lungs and skin. Blinded and, increasingly disorientated, they could not recognise the danger.

By August, the citizen-scientist project iNaturalist had 

identified 19,820 animals from 446 species

 – but these are just those that washed ashore. It is anticipated that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lifeforms, have gradually been swallowed by the cloud – and the more lifeforms killed, the more the bloom can feed.

“It’s now self-feeding,” Coleman says. “We’re not getting the current through the Gulf to clean it out. We’ve got bacterial and organic slurry that is just not being pushed out.”

“The damage is extensive. In the worst-affected areas, we’re dealing with a habitat underwater that has been completely annihilated, like a really severe bushfire has gone through.”

Some within the South Australian government would prefer not to compare the bloom to a bushfire. A better comparison, as Premier Peter Malinauskas told reporters in July when a joint federal-state financial assistance package was announced, was a drought. South Australians understood drought; water security was a long-running issue in the state and drought-like conditions had 

. The bloom, Malinauskas added, was “more confronting” than drought “simply because we haven’t seen anything like it before.”

“It is severe and confronting by virtue of the fact that it is tragic in that it is new, and even more tragic in the knowledge that, in part, this is a consequence of human induced climate change,” Malinauskas said. “Now I don't say that to sound like an ideologue. I'm saying that because that's what the science tells us so we are confronted by what we are seeing here is a new reality.”

The politics of the moment were perhaps uncomfortable territory for the leader of the centre-left Labor government ahead of a March 2026 election. Australia is currently lobbying to host COP31 with the South Australian capital, Adelaide, 

 owing to the state’s role in leading the energy transition. Since 

 – the state, home to 1.8m people, has received global recognition for its rapid embrace of renewable energy. At least two fifths of South Australia’s electricity is drawn from renewables, with a growing 

number of periods where wind and solar provides all the state’s power

On the other hand, the Malinauskas government has maintained an uncomfortably close relationship to the oil and gas industry over its term in government. Santos, one of Australia’s biggest domestic oil and gas producers, is headquartered in Adelaide, a presence that affords considered influence in a state that has grappled with 

, accelerated by the end of domestic car manufacturing in 2016. In a small city, some crossover in decision making roles is always inevitable but the direct connection between the company and the government is uncanny. Malinauskas’ brother previously served as head of external relations for Santos, and his sister worked with the oil company as a lawyer. When the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (today known as Australian Energy Producers) held its 2023 national conference in Adelaide, Minister for Energy and Mining Tom Koutsantonis opened the conference by telling his audience of fossil fuel company executives that the state government was “

”. Days later, in response to protests by Extinction Rebellion that attempted to disrupt the conference and shame Santos as a fossil fuel producer contributing to climate change, the Malinauskas Labor government 

rushed through some of the strictest new anti-protest laws

When it comes to the algal bloom, activist groups including Extinction Rebellion and Rising Tide have already been working to make the link with climate change and fossil fuel production explicit. In late July 

 outside Santos headquarters holding signs with photos of dead and dying marine life, and captions that read, “MAKE SANTOS PAY”. The group had attempted to deliver a box of letters addressed to the company’s CEO, Kevin Gallagher, but security took the box and turned the group away.

So far the state government has sought to thread a needle with its public communications about the bloom and its impacts. A taskforce has been set up to provide weekly updates, and both the Premier and Deputy Premier, Susan Close, have been explicit about the role of climate change, but others are more cautious in how they talk about the crisis to avoid saying anything that might undermine tourism and aquacultural businesses that have so far been unaffected. Staffers and communications officers privately brief that three in four of the state’s beaches remain clear. The majority, some 90% of shell fish producers, remain open and operational, they say. The message is that if South Australian seafood is commercially available, it is safe to eat – a takeaway fish and chip owners were keen to reinforce 

Raising some alarm, however, has been necessary. In late June, after some delay, a joint $28m (USD $18.3m) support package was announced with the South Australian government providing $14m (USD$9.2m) and the remainder provided by the federal government. This package included money for monitoring and scientific research, and $10,000 grants for small businesses affected by the bloom, financial counselling and mental health support – assistance that Pat Tripodi from the Marine Fishers Association says is badly needed. Uncertainty has taken a toll, he adds. In many cases his members have been on the water for most of their lives, with multiple generations of some families working the ocean. Now they are being confronted with the end of everything they have known and no one can tell them how long it will last, or how far it will go.

“The people experiencing it were quite shocked and emotional,” Tripodi says. “We’re seeing grown men brought to tears over this because of the uncertainty over their future.”

“The impact’s been crippling. They’ve got no ability to earn an income. Where the algal bloom is, there is literally nothing to be caught. They’ve lost their ability to make an income. That’s really disheartening for them – and then comes all the uncertainty that goes with it.”

A traumatizing spectacle of destruction and doom

Marine ecologist Scott Bennett says the psychological blow is hard to articulate. Now the bloom is underway, there is nothing that can be done to stop it. What was once considered a distant or theoretical impact of climate change is real and being felt. Early on in the bloom, Bennett, co-founder of the Great Southern Reef Foundation and no relation to Pam Bennett, participated in marine surveys in an attempt to quantify the scale of what was taking place. Even he, who was aware of the science, was shocked.

“It is hard to overstate the catastrophe, the ecological disaster that is unfolding in South Australia right now,” Bennett says. “As a scientist and a researcher, I travel around the country conducting biodiversity surveys and assessing the health of reefs. They’re normally things that you really look forward to, because there are just amazing things we see on these trips.”

“To go on this trip and face the spectre that everything you love might be gone – and you really just don’t know how bad it is. The whole spectacle of death and destruction and doom is hugely emotionally taxing – I really felt it, even as an outsider.”

The experience, he says, left him shaken. Ecologically the Great Southern Reef functions as a highway linking east with west. Species that diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago and are normally separated by geography, or their evolutionary ancestors, can still be found together on the reef. Among them are endangered species like the giant kelp that plays host to whole communities, the endangered Australian sea lion and the vulnerable white shark. Bennett says the reef is so understudied there are many species that have yet to be identified or properly researched. How much will be left remains to be determined.

“When this is your backyard and the places and creatures you have grown up with, and you love, and that form an intimate part of your life and existence –when that’s suddenly taken away from you, and lost at scale, that is devastating,” he says. “The trauma South Australians are experiencing right now cannot be understated and it is so indicative, so symbolic of climate change more broadly. It is a visceral and devastating thing when it happens to you.”

Others in the state’s scientific community fear the bloom offers a terrifying glimpse into the future. Wayne Boardman, a veterinary scientist and associate professor at University of Adelaide says it may represent that “initial phase of the breakdown of nature and climate change” and a vision of the future.

“It’s like a trigger: it kills off all the fish and so we lose a lot of biodiversity. So the next year, what happens? And the year after that, what happens?” Boardman says. “We might go into remission at some point, but it’s likely, unless we do something different, it’s going to be one of those inexorable problems that are going to get worse. And it’s going to decimate.”

“It might be the start of permanency.”

In July the Biodiversity Council described the bloom as “a devastating example of how climate change has supercharged the potential for marine catastrophes.” Its ten-page report 

outlined what was required to respond to the crisis

. At the top of the list was a phaseout of oil, gas and coal, the end of fossil fuel subsidies and exports, greater efforts to control nutrient run-off from land into the ocean and a program to restore shellfish reefs, sea grass meadows, kelp forests and mangroves along the coast that help to filter and absorb excess nutrients. Coleman, who has proposed a similar program of work, says a response on this scale is necessary to help ecosystems recover, even if it would require “one of the greatest marine restoration attempts the world has ever seen.”

“No one wants it to be climate change because you can’t do anything about it locally. They’d like it to be an act of God or someone else’s problem. And to me that is very shallow thinking,” Coleman says. “The truth is that we’re pushing ecological systems to their edge and most extractive systems require our ecological systems to be stable.

“What we can do is engage transparently. We can reinstate the oyster. We can reinstate the sea grass. We can reinstate all these other habitats to some degree. That will make us more resilient the next time this happens again and we can sequester more carbon – but there is only one thing that will actually stop this and that’s no more fossil fuels.”

“There Was So Much Death.” A Toxic Algal Bloom Is Ravaging Australia’s Southern Coast—Warming Waters Are to Blame.

By the final day of testimony in the Energy Transfer vs Greenpeace trial, it's March 13 and an 

 has melted the snow.  Kelcy Warren is called as a witness. He's Energy Transfer's board chair and largest shareholder — and he was CEO when the Dakota Access Pipeline was being built.

Energy Transfer has spent a whole a lot of time trying to keep Kelcy Warren's testimony out of the courtroom. Their lawyers tried to claim that Kelcy didn't have any useful information about his own company's famously controversial pipeline.

In interviews Kelcy's made it clear he has strong feelings about the Standing Rock movement. Here he is on CNBC right after the original Greenpeace lawsuit was filed in 2017.

 What happened to us was tragic. I mean, uh, that lies were being told, tens of millions of dollars were being raised by Greenpeace and others based on these lies

In addition to his island in Honduras and his collection of exotic animals, he also owns a record label and writes his own tender songs on the guitar. Jackson Browne is his idol

Kelcy has a reputation for using the legal system to lash out when he feels his company is unfairly being attacked. Which is exactly what he thought was happening with the Standing Rock movement. It couldn't have helped that his hero Jackson Browne publicly denounced Kelcy's company's pipeline. Jackson even gave a benefit concert in honor of the water protectors.

 We've got to do something. It's, it's, it's, everybody's afraid of these environmental groups and the fear that it may look wrong if you, if you fight back with these people.

But what they did to us is wrong and they're going to pay for it.

 At the Morton County Courthouse, Kelcy's face appears on the flatscreen tvs around the courtroom. It's a pre-recorded video deposition. He has a shock of white hair and his eyebrows are furrowed, like he's concerned.

The lawyer goes over how Donald Trump's executive order in 2017 told the Army Corps to approve the Dakota Access Pipeline's easement. And about midway through his testimony Kelcy drops his first surprise.

That executive order that allowed Energy Transfer to start drilling: Energy Transfer actually drafted it.

Energy Transfer's lawyers turn back to the question at the heart of the case.

“Do you have any personal knowledge about anything Greenpeace did at all in relation to the protests?” a lawyer asks from off-camera.

But then the lawyer asks about a different nonprofit called EarthJustice. It's the public interest law organization that represented the Standing Rock tribe in the early days of its legal fight to stop the pipeline. At the name EarthJustice, Kelcy perks up... and I can start to see why Energy Transfer might not have wanted him to testify.

“They're scumbags,” Kelcy says of Earthjustice. To be clear, Earthjustice is not Greenpeace. It's NOT the organization this suit is against.

“Why do you say that, sir?” the lawyer replies.

By way of explanation, Kelcy begins to describe a meeting he had in December 2016, with the Standing Rock Sioux Chairman  Dave Archambault [Ar SHAM bow].

“I went there with the intention of working out a financial transaction with the chairman,” he says .

Kelcy starts talking about how he tried to make a deal with the Standing Rock Sioux chairman to end the protests— as if the tribe, not Greenpeace, was the one leading the protests.

Kelcy goes on: “I said, ‘David, I'm here to make a deal with you. Do you want cash? What do you want?’ I said, ‘We own this land up there,’ Kelcy says he offered the chairman the ranch that the pipeline company bought, the one that held the sacred sites and the drill pad. “We could build you a whole new school on your reservation. Let's make a deal,’” he says.

“He made it very clear," Kelcy says of the chairman,"that he could not accept any offer from me that involved them backing down.”

Again  Kelcy is implying that it was the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe – not Greenpeace – that had the power to end the uprising.

And he has a surprising theory about why Chairman Dave Archambault refused. “It was clear to me that he had struck a deal with the devil,” Kelcy says.

“And devil being Earthjustice?” the lawyer replies.

Kelcy Warren apparently believes that the thing that stopped Standing Rock's chairman Dave Archambault from accepting Energy Transfer’s deal must have been another, competing, deal. With EarthJustice. “I read between the lines, and I believe that they made aI deal, and Archambault couldn't make a deal with me,” he says.

I asked Dave Archambault about this. He told me he did meet to discuss safety with Kelcy Warren, but he said he was not there to negotiate ending the protests.

Back in court, the lawyer asks,“Nothing was said about Greenpeace during that meeting, was it?”

We're at the finale of the trial, and Energy Transfer's board chair has just given us a whole new theory of the case, which completely contradicts his company's lawsuit.

After three and half weeks of testimony, and months of my own reporting, this case is full of holes. To summarize, we've seen that Greenpeace donations and fundraising at Standing Rock only amounted to  a small fraction of the millions in donations that poured into the movement from around the world.

Only six employees from Greenpeace Inc visited Standing Rock out of well over ten thousand people who showed up -- and no one from Greenpeace International or Greenpeace Fund ever went.

The whole time this was all going on, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other Indigenous nations were very publicly fighting the pipeline in court. The pipeline company had no ability to drill under the river during the protests, because they had NO permission from the US Army Corps of Engineers to do that.

Meanwhile, Greenpeace's allegedly defamatory statements -- including that police used violence against nonviolent demonstrators, that the pipeline passes through tribal land, and that Energy Transfer deliberately destroyed sacred sites -- are assertions that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and many others stand by to this day.

Now, today, on the last day of testimony, Energy Transfer's own board chair has a whole other story of the movement.

This season of Drilled we bring you SLAPP’d. The story of an Indigenous nation fighting for its water, an environmental nonprofit facing extinction, and an energy giant using the courts to punish protestors. I'm Alleen Brown.

The Monday after Kelcy Warren's testimony, Energy Transfer's lawyer Trey Cox steps in front of the jury for his closing statement.

Trey tells the jurors that Greenpeace employees are "master manipulators" and "deceptive to the core." The volume on the courtroom drama has been turned way up.

"Think about the Mafia," he suggests. "I got to see a guy about a thing -- did you get the package? Sleeps with the fishes. These are the type of words that people in conspiracies use as code words to communicate other things."

He says that Greenpeace relies on similar code words to trick people. Like

Campfire. Nonviolent. Art tent. Solidarity--.

"Now, solidarity and indigenous leadership, these are some of the most deceptive words that they use. And when they stand up here and they try to use those words, I want you to call them out as code words."

Trey starts to get into the damages -- what Energy Transfer wants Greenpeace to pay them. And he reveals that Energy Transfer isn't JUST looking for the over $266 million the company claims they spent on countering the protests. They want triple that total, including massive "exemplary damages" -- extra money meant to make an example out of Greenpeace.

He tells the jury that ruling in Energy Transfer's favor is about more than just this case.

"It needs to be done for Morton County. It needs to be done for Morton County's law enforcement. And more importantly, [00:09:00] it needs to be done for the next community where Greenpeace exploits an opportunity to push its agenda at any cost. And I don't know whether that's going to be in Louisiana or Texas or Oklahoma or Ohio, but you have the responsibility of protecting those others."

The Greenpeace organizations present their closing statements -- a detailed outline of all the inconsistencies and holes in Energy Transfer's lawsuit. And Judge Gion sends the jury to begin their deliberations.

And now, all there is to do, is wait. A decision could come in a few hours or even a few weeks.

Even at this point, I was not really sure what was going to happen. But I figured the best way to get a sense of how this might go was to talk to some people who are from here.  After all, this case was in the hands of Morton County community members.

As I was driving into Mandan awhile back, I had noticed a digital sign advertising community events. "Testicle Festival,"  at the Moose Lodge, it flashed in neon red. I knew what I had to do.

 These are, uh, uh, Rocky Mountain oysters. Mm-hmm. Do I need to tell herJim, what they're actually made out of? Yeah. Do. Mm-hmm. Well, I already know, but tell me anyway.

Okay. Well, they, they're, they're, uh, uh, mature bulls. Mm-hmm. You know, herford, Angus, whatever you want to call it. And they're big nuts.

 he just made the, uh, shape like bigger than his head.

 Well, not quite that big, but anyways, then they slice 'em all right in a little, alright, I need some sauce.

 Mandan's Moose Lodge is packed. The space is half dive bar, half events hall. And tonight, there's a line of people waiting to order bison burgers and Rocky Mountain oysters. A bunch of tables and chairs are set up for people to eat.

Dale, who doesn't want to use his last name, is a retired rancher. Alongside oil and gas, cattle ranching is one of Morton County's biggest industries. And the testicle festival takes place every year during calving season. After the bull calves are castrated, their balls are breaded and deep fried. These ones come from adult bulls, so they're not traditional.

I mean, it's not terrible. It tastes like, um, like a fried thing, you know?

 I want to know what people here thought about the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. So I'm working my way around the room. I start chatting with Helena Riehl and Betty Thompson. Both of them grew up on farms.

 I got my first bite of a rocky Mountain oyster.

Uh, I'm from the Twin Cities originally. I grew up in St. Paul and now I'm, I'm based in Brooklyn, 

 Mandan’s good. Mandans a small community that, um, sticks up for it's fellow man. I mean, that's what we do, right?

  what was it like when those protests were going on for this community?

 All the protesting and then, then they closed the roads. You couldn't go anywhere. Then they come to Manan, they're marching down Main Street with dead pigs. Really? Who does that?

 I'm wondering what Betty and Helena think about Greenpeace's argument that people from here are too biased to be neutral jurors.

 Part of the reason I want to talk to people in Mandan is because one of the things they're trying to argue is that the trial should not be held here because there, it's, it would be impossible to find someone who's totally unbiased on the subject I agree with.

 Helena says there's another guy I should talk to. She introduces me to a rancher named Jim, who also doesn't want to use his last name. His family has a ranch, not far from where the anti-pipeline camps were located. And he says he and his neighbors felt unsafe.

 I was repeatedly, I. Threatened, chased up and down the highway. They'd follow me from our ranch, 30 miles south all the way to town, follow me around town until I would stop to confront 'em.

Then they'd take off. They would, I was spied on, threatened in the middle of the night, they'd be in our yard..and I'd catch 'em

 Jim says he's convinced that what he experienced didn't come from people from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

 When they say it was outsiders, stirring things up, that was our view of it, because there was never, we never had issues with anybody that we knew locally when you had issues.

And when I got, you know, you'd catch people in my yard sneaking in there, it was always people from Where are you from? Oh, I come up from Nebraska. Or I, you know, it was never local people.

 Dale is listening in. He shares who he thinks those 

 They, Greenpeace was behind it. You know, they always take that anonymous thing, you know, right across the world. Right. Jim? They take that anonymous, they always stand in the backgrounds and they, and they agitate is what they do.

 What, I mean, what did you, what makes you think that?

 Well, because they, their name came up many times during the protest. Greenpeace did. It came up right? Oh yeah. Yeah. That's why I believe they were behind it, but they were behind a lot of protests.

I ask Dale and his friend what they think of the damage claims.

 They're trying to get Greenpeace to pay for everything, and

 they should to the point where they're broke.

 The people I'm talking to are convinced that outsiders drove these protests, but it's also clear that what happened continues to impact relationships among people who are from here. For example, Dale says he doesn't go to Standing Rock's Prairie Knights Casino anymore.

That tension is still there, eight years later — especially between white and Native people, according to Dale.

 It's just right under the surface right now, you know?

 Our conversation meanders. And we start talking about what Morton County is like. I ask Dale about the oil boom that began in the mid 2000s.

Oh man, it was crazy. I mean, they came from all over. I mean, I'd never seen hookers walking on the street before. 

Transcription

The verdict comes through, more than doubling the damages, at a time when repression of protest is accelerating in the U.S., but somehow Energy Transfer's lawyers claim it is a victory for free speech. As the trial and our season wrap up, we take a look at what this verdict means for Indigenous rights, climate activists, and the decline of individual free speech rights in the U.S. as corporate free speech rights expand. 

SLAPP’d Episode 6 | The SLAPP Heard ‘Round the World

SLAPP’d

Carbon Bros

Information Pollution

The Real Free Speech Threat

This is part one of a seven-part series produced in partnership with 

as a companion to the SLAPP’d season of the Drilled podcast. You can see all seven pieces together in a beautiful layout over 

, where you’ll also find other great climate stories. 

In March 2025, a jury ordered the environmental giant Greenpeace to pay $666 million to the companies behind the Dakota Access pipeline.

The companies argued that Greenpeace was responsible for protests near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation nearly a decade ago that drew thousands.

But Indigenous leaders, water protectors, activists, and court records agree: Greenpeace played a bit part in the Standing Rock movement, at best.

“They're trying to point the finger at Greenpeace," said Honorata Defender, a Standing Rock Sioux tribal member who helped start the movement. "Because God forbid some Indians think for themselves and make a decision to stand up for themselves and their water and their land.”

They called themselves “water protectors” and 

 on the side of a highway near where construction was approaching the river. Most were Oceti Sakowin — Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples. It was the early days of the #NoDAPL movement, in August 2016, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had just granted 

 for the Dakota Access pipeline to go under the Missouri River.

The company behind the pipeline, Energy Transfer, had 

 building it upstream of the twin cities of Bismarck and Mandan in North Dakota, which are mostly populated by white people. But the Army Corps of Engineers rejected that route, in part because it had the 

potential to harm the cities' drinking water

 supply. Instead, the pipeline was re-routed to cross the river just north of the Standing Rock reservation’s own drinking water intake.

To Dave Archambault, then-chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, this was a case of 

. He and other tribal leaders were worried, too, that culturally important sites located along the pipeline route could be destroyed.

It was also a matter of sovereignty. Two days after the Army Corps issued that key permit to Energy Transfer for the new route, the tribe sued. They argued that the Army Corps should not allow construction to continue without a deeper review of the route and substantial consultation — 

 that recognizes the nation-to-nation relationship between tribal governments and the United States.

When small protests began, the corps had still not issued an easement, a legal right that would allow Energy Transfer to build under the river on land that belonged to the U.S. government. However, there was nothing stopping Energy Transfer from building on private land. That’s when the trouble started.

Chairman Archambault was one of more than a dozen people 

 for attempting to block Dakota Access pipeline construction, but there was little attention paid by journalists. Online, however, in Indigenous digital spaces, protests were becoming very visible, very quickly. Facebook Live had launched that spring, and water protectors were broadcasting their actions on social media in real time for the world to see and 

 from around the country to stand with Standing Rock.

As more and more water protectors made their way to North Dakota, Achambault realized he would need help. He put out a 

, asking people to stand with Standing Rock. He also called Nick Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota organizer who had helped found a collective called the Indigenous Peoples Power Project, or IP3, which offered nonviolent, direct-action trainings to Indigenous peoples working to protect their communities, including from unwanted industrial development.

“The training that we're talking about is not some crazy training,” said Tilsen, who saw the protests as an extension of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. “Some people think that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks just one day sat on a bus and launched a movement. But the reality is, they went through training. And that training helped them be disciplined and helped them be effective and helped them change the course of history.”

With protests underway, Tilsen worked with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to develop a set of principles for nonviolent direct action — protest actions and 

 meant to disrupt activities. At times, nonviolent direct action involves trespassing or disregarding police orders. The principles were hand-painted on a sign that hung prominently in the growing camp. Among them: “We are nonviolent,” and “Property damage does not get us closer to our goals.”

Tilsen was close with a Greenpeace employee named Cy Wagoner who is Diné and also a member of IP3, and Tilsen said he invited Wagoner to bring Greenpeace to Standing Rock. “We asked them to help train people,” Tilsen recalled. Around the same time, Tom Goldtooth, who is Diné and Dakota, was also urging Greenpeace to come. The executive director of the nonprofit Indigenous Environmental Network, Goldtooth was watching as tensions between police, private security, and water protectors intensified throughout the month. “I’m afraid of escalation,” recalled Goldtooth. “They’re waiting for someone, you know, to wink.”

Like Tilsen, Goldtooth hoped that Greenpeace would reinforce trainings already in progress, and send support for water protectors, such as a solar trailer that could power laptops and cell phones so that broadcasts could continue across social media.

Wagoner put together a proposal and a budget request for Greenpeace, which was approved: About $15,000 would pay for five people from IP3 to go to Standing Rock for two to three weeks. Greenpeace agreed to pay the cohort $125 a day, plus expenses, to conduct trainings, while Wagoner went on his usual Greenpeace salary. They began arriving around the beginning of September.

Meanwhile, the week before Labor Day, Tim Mentz — Standing Rock’s former 

 and one of the people responsible for reviewing federal projects that may impact historic areas, burial sites, and religious places — began a survey of an area Energy Transfer planned to bulldoze. He was looking to see if there were culturally important sites along the pipeline path.

Mentz is a highly respected elder, and the first tribal historic preservation officer in the U.S. thanks to his tireless work to amend the 

 that created the role — one that is now used by over 

As part of Standing Rock’s lawsuit against the Army Corps filed in July, Mentz had already submitted a statement to the court saying that “destruction of these sites will eventually destroy generations of family connections to these areas of spiritual power.” He added that protecting those sites wasn’t just about the past: It was about the future of the Oceti Sakowin.

“Steps taken to preserve sites like this are important to the survival and recovery of our spiritual traditions," he wrote. "These sites still retain the ability to mend our people.”

On a hot, bright day, with permission from the landowner, Mentz and his team drove onto the privately-owned buffalo ranch that included access to the area where Energy Transfer wanted to drill under the river, and Mentz got to work. Over the course of a few days, they documented 27 burial sites and 82 stone features — arranged in circles and other patterns for ceremonial purposes — all along a 2-mile corridor that Energy Transfer planned to dig up.

On the Friday before Labor Day, he wrote up what he found, including a cluster of stones shaped like the Big Dipper, with a grave site attached to the cup, indicating an important leader. “This is one of the most significant archaeological finds in North Dakota in many years,” he wrote. The tribe’s attorney, who worked for a nonprofit public interest law organization called Earthjustice, filed the coordinates Mentz identified with a North Dakota Court.

The next morning, the Saturday before Labor Day, bulldozers were spotted at the sites Mentz had identified and that the tribe had filed in court. Water protectors rushed to stop them but private security guards stood waiting, and 

Despite their attempts, Energy Transfer graded the 2-mile corridor Mentz surveyed, digging a foot deep into the earth. “A significant portion of the site we’d surveyed had been cleared,” Mentz wrote in another declaration to court. “I do not believe that the timing of this construction was an accident or coincidence.”

A judge ruled soon after that he didn’t have the power to stop the company from continuing to build on private land.

 transformed the movement. Recorded by nonprofit news organization Democracy Now!, the 

. People poured in, mushrooming new resistance camps across the prairie and filling them with Indigenous peoples, longtime environmental organizers, and everyday activists moved by the social feeds coming out of Standing Rock. Church members, community groups, and individuals donated money and supplies to keep the camps afloat. 

“There Was So Much Death.” A Toxic Algal Bloom Is Ravaging Australia’s Southern Coast—Warming Waters Are to Blame.

The Kill Step, Part One: “They’re Waiting for Someone to Wink”

The Kill Step, Part Two: “What the hell is this bullshit?

The Kill Step, Part Three: “You’re Going to Fight This.”

The Kill Step, Part Four: “How many of you feel the same way?”

SLAPP’d

Carbon Bros

Information Pollution

The Real Free Speech Threat

SLAPP’d Episode 6 | The SLAPP Heard ‘Round the World

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

“There Was So Much Death.” A Toxic Algal Bloom Is Ravaging Australia’s Southern Coast—Warming Waters Are to Blame.

The Kill Step, Part One: “They’re Waiting for Someone to Wink”

The Kill Step, Part Two: “What the hell is this bullshit?

The Kill Step, Part Three: “You’re Going to Fight This.”

The Kill Step, Part Four: “How many of you feel the same way?”

SLAPP’d

Carbon Bros

Information Pollution

The Real Free Speech Threat

Support our reporting,subscribe today!

SLAPP’d Episode 6 | The SLAPP Heard ‘Round the World

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

Support our reporting,
subscribe today!