Daryl Hannah leaves an arrest footprint at the White House

Darryl Hannah, the actress best known for hits such as Blade Runner, Splash and Roxanne --- not to mention being a longtime girlfriend of the late John Kennedy Jr. --- is, of late, adding arrests to her resume, as she was arrested during a protest outside the White House.

However, Darryl Hannah's fans can rest easy. Her arrests are for worthy causes. It's just that in attempting to reduce the U.S carbon footprint, she created her own arrest footprint.

Darryl Hannah, who in addition to being an actress is also an activist, particularly an environmental one, was taken into custody on Tuesday while participating in a sit-in to protest the expansion of a pipeline running from Canada's controversial Keystone XL tar sands to Oklahoma. If approved by the U.S. State Department, the pipeline would be extended to the Gulf Coast. The proposed pipeline would stretch 1700 miles.

"We stand here today to just say no to slavery, to just say no to tar sands, oil and no to the Keystone pipeline," Hannah was reported to have said at the protest. Over 500 people have been arrested since protests first began on August 20, according to the group Tar Sands Action, which has been organizing the protests. An estimated 100 people were part of the sit-in that occurred today on the sidewalk in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Darryl Hannah, 50, is becoming a veteran of arrests for environmental causes. She was previously arrested in 2006 after chaining herself to a walnut tree for three weeks to protest the destruction of the country's largest urban farm in South Central Los Angeles. She was arrested again 2009 during a sit-in to protest mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia.

Tar sands are becoming the focus of increasing media and scientific attention as a remedy – albeit a flawed one – to our dependence on oil from the Middle East, and as an additional source of petroleum in an industry with declining oil field discoveries. The sands contain naturally occurring mixtures of sand, clay, water, and a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum technically referred to as bitumen (or colloquially "tar" due to its similar appearance, odor, and color). There is a vast reserve of tar sands in Canada's Alberta province.

Tar sand reserves have only recently been considered to be part of the world's oil reserves, as higher oil prices and new technology enable them to be profitably extracted and upgraded to usable products. Making liquid fuels from tar sands requires energy for steam injection and refining. This process generates two to four times the amount of greenhouse gases per barrel of final product as the production of conventional oil. All current forms of extraction are extremely environment-destructive, removing in the process vast stretches of viable ecosystems and leaving a virtually sterile wasteland.

Sources:

http://blogshots.org/www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/daryl-hannah-arrested-white-house-229420
http://blogshots.org/www.businessinsider.com/actress-daryl-hannah-arrested-during-protest-at-white-house-2011-8

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons