For nearly 10 months, thousands of protesters camped out near Standing Rock, North Dakota to fight the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The fear was that any breach in the pipeline would contaminate the Cannonball River which flows into the Missouri River. Such a contamination would destroy the only source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux.

Protesters flooded in from around the country, and were forced to endure everything from attack dogs, to tear gas, to water hoses in sub-freezing temperatures, as well as several blizzards. Their cause was a good one and one that I fully supported.

At the end of 2016, President Obama put a halt to the pipeline in order to give the designers time to find another route, according to the Wall Street Journal. President Trump has since signed an executive order overturning the halt with a promise that only U.S. steel would be used, thus creating jobs, according to CNBC. So the pipeline moves forward, and the protesters have all been evacuated from the site. They were given three weeks to leave. They are all gone now, and the amount of garbage they left behind is mind-boggling.

So far more than 24,000 tons of garbage have been removed, according to Waste 360. The Army Corp of Engineers and the local Sioux tribes asked some of the protesters to stay behind and help with cleanup. It appears that few people stayed. Instead, they set fire to nylon tents piles of garbage, many of which contained plastic and other materials that give off toxic fumes when burned, including teepees.

The Sioux tribes are left with a huge and difficult mess. Most of the garbage is still frozen to the ground, making it difficult to remove. The biggest worry is that the very likely scenario of a flood during the spring melt will wash much of that garbage into the Cannonball River, the very same river the protesters were trying to protect.

I have been to my fair share of environmental protests. I was one of the guys who chained himself to a redwood tree at the Headwaters protest in the late nineties in northern California to help fight against the clear cutting of old growth redwood trees. At every one of those protests, we cleaned up after ourselves. We left no mark that we had even been there. That was the whole point. We were trying to protect the Earth, not help destroy it.

At Standing Rock, the protesters should have been doing the same. How do they expect their message to protect the rivers in that area to hold any weight when they trashed the land and left the clean up to the Sioux?

All people who protested the pipeline will be remembered from this massive effort is the massive piles of garbage they left behind. This is not how a protest should be done. The message is now lost.

I have heard some conspiracy stories that the amount of garbage has been exaggerated, or that the government put the trash there themselves. I don’t buy any of it. After cross referencing this story from many different sources, I am completely convinced that the people who showed up to this protest, thousands strong, had little to no respect for the Earth. They had plenty of time and opportunities to clean up after themselves. This is inexcusable.