Daryl Hannah Arrested at White House, Protesting Obama's 'Short-Sighted' Oil Pipeline Decision

Actress Daryl Hannah was arrested at the White House on Tuesday while participating in a sit-in protesting the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, a planned oil pipeline that will stretch from the U.S. Gulf Coast to Canada, The Washington Post has reported.

Hannah, who is deeply committed to freeing the U.S. from dependence on fossil fuels, was arrested after she refused to comply with orders from the U.S. Park Police to move away from the front of the White House, where the demonstration took place.

This is not Hannah's first activism-related arrest.

In 2006, Hannah was among several protestors who had to be forcibly removed from a tree by law enforcement. The demonstrators arrested were resisting the construction of a warehouse in a community garden in Los Angeles.

I'm very confident this is the morally right thing to do, to take a principled stand in solidarity with the farmers, Hannah told The Associated Press by cell phone before a fire truck raised officers into the tree to evict her. Hannah was released after spending a few hours at the Century Regional Detention Center.

Hanna was arrested again in 2009, during a demonstration protesting mountaintop removal in West Virginia. She and the others arrested were charged with misdemeanor offenses of obstruction and impeding traffic, Huffington Post reported.

Tuesday's arrest was an expected par for the course for Hannah, who co-wrote a HuffPost blog piece with Philip Radford on Aug. 29 explaining the urgency of the pipeline protest:

This week, President Obama will find hundreds more people in front of the White House -- us included -- willing to go to jail for peacefully protesting the President's short-sighted decision to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. President Obama's decision on this enormous fossil fuel project will not be a quiet deal with oil industry lobbyists; it will be witnessed by millions of voters who had hoped that President Obama would have the vision to get America off of oil with a moonshot program for oil-free cars by the next decade. Instead, oil profits have been pitted against the world that our children will live in, hooking America to some of the highest polluting oil without moving America quickly to a foreign oil-free future.

For many Americans, Obama's promise to begin to move the United States away from its growing dependence on fossil fuels and address global warming was foremost among his promise of change. For many more, it was Obama's assurance that his presidency would change a political system dominated by lobbyists and their narrow interests, instead of the public interest. President Obama's commitment on both of these promises -- to the volunteers who knocked on doors, the young voters who elected him, and the country he leads -- will be tested by his decision on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Hannah rose to A-list stardom as a misplaced Mermaid opposite Tom Hanks in the 1984 film Splash, after a memorable but slightly lower profile role in Blade Runner two years prior. She enjoyed a resurgence of popularity after Quentin Tarantino cast her as a one-eyed assasin in Kill Bill.

Hannah has been a dedicated activist and environmentalist throughout her film career. She never married, but had long term relationships with the late John F. Kennedy, Jr. and the singer Jackson Browne, who was rumored to have physically abused her. Hannah never pressed charges, and Browne has persistently denied the allegations.