Bags. Bags of all shapes and sizes and degrees of reusability are on display, fittingly, in the Fashion District’s hub. There’s a Hollister bag on the smallish end of the spectrum, but it is the most ornately decorated: brownish paper with a green and blue tropical scene. One man wraps a Timbuktu messenger bag around his legs as if it’s the handlebar on a rather tame roller coaster. He’s talking about health care reform with a woman resting a lime green three-gallon purse on her lap. They’re sitting next to the Asian woman with the Hollister bag, which sits on the floor holding a white plastic bag of its own and a Poland Spring water bottle – no clothes to be seen. She has two more bags in her lap, both purses, both different shades of brown. Outsizing them all is a white plastic bag resting at the feet of a Chinese man. It’s reinforced twice, and holds at least three identical bags stuffed inside.

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Worry is what made him drive 4½ hours to Nebraska’s capital for a hearing to urge U. S. State Department officials to deny the company a permit to build the Canadian pipeline through the region. But our gold is the water – and we’re concerned about water,” he says. Boettcher and his brother, Scott, bring something of a unique perspective to the debate raging in Nebraska over whether the State Department should deny TransCanada a presidential permit to build its $7-billion pipeline. Worry that an oil-sands pipeline leak would contaminate the resource he depends on every day is what has turned this fourth-generation rancher into a fierce opponent of TransCanada Corp. Boettcher does care about is the water – so clean you can drink it straight from a flowing well – that saturates and courses under his land in Nebraska’s remote Sand Hills. And worry is why he’s driving 4½ hours back home for a second public hearing on Thursday in the Sand Hills town of Atkinson. “Alberta’s gold is the black oil.

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