Huge acts of technological hubris have often spelled huge disaster. Recent incidents such as the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill or the possibly dam-assisted Sichuan Earthquake are good examples of how attempts to push the engineering envelope can leave us vulnerable to disasters of correspondingly outrageous scale.

Then we should rejoice about a successful push to reroute a mammoth pipeline planned to intersect an important aquifer, right? Perhaps, but only briefly.

Environmentalists and landowners are celebrating news that the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline—originally slated to stretch from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Texas—will be altered to avoid Nebraska’s Ogallala Aquifer and the wetlands of the Sand Hills. Equally heartening (albeit politically motivated) is the U.S. State Department’s intention to delay permitting for the project until 2013 so that environmental and health concerns can be further examined, according to the New York Times.

Pipeline opponents see the recent events as the beginning of the end.

“It’s important to understand how unlikely this victory is. Six months ago, almost no one outside the pipeline route even knew about Keystone XL,” writes Bill McKibben on the climate activism site 350.org. “As late as last week the CBC reported that [pipeline proposer] TransCanada was moving huge quantities of pipe across the border and seizing land by eminent domain, certain that its permit would be granted. A done deal has come spectacularly undone.”

Others say not so fast. TransCanada is now working with the Nebraska legislature to determine new routes the pipeline might take through the state and a poll of “energy insiders” by the National Journal indicated a majority thought the project would eventually move forward.

If that majority is correct, the Ogallala Aquifer may be safe, but something somewhere else is going to be at risk. It’s not possible to move up to 830,000 barrels per day of corrosive tar sand through six states and two provinces without threatening some crucial piece of the environment—particularly water.

“Any new route for Keystone XL would inevitably cross hundreds of rivers, large and small, between the tar sands in Alberta and the U.S. Gulf Coast,” writes Sandra Postel in National Geographic. “Among them would be the Missouri, the nation’s longest river, and almost certainly Nebraska’s Platte.”

Postel goes on to detail University of Nebraska water engineering professor John S. Stansbury’s analysis of worst-case spill scenarios for the pipeline, which could include benzene contamination as far south as Kansas City, Missouri, and more than 91 spills in 50 years—significantly more than TransCanada’s estimate of 11 during the same period.

Environmentalists have also cited concerns about the tar sands' contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and the fact that a “pipeline of this size and scope is simply too risky to operate,” according to a New York Times fact sheet.

While the Ogallala reprieve and subsequent review of the pipeline represent plodding progress in warding off some catastrophes, the simple fact that a behemoth like Keystone XL is being considered demonstrates a failure to learn the lessons of the past.

Loyola University New Orleans Professor Anthony Ladd uses the term "energy-driven disasters" to describe this blind spot in an American Behavioral Scientist article. The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill points toward a trend of increasing technological disasters attributable to an “era of corporate hubris; congressional timidity; and the power that the fossil-fuel industry exercises over our economy, culture, and energy policy,” he writes. “I raise questions regarding whether a sustainable energy policy can ever be implemented in a society characterized by disaster amnesia and placated by notions of ‘acceptable risk’ and ‘normal accidents.’”

Indeed, the future of Keystone XL might just be the answer to that question.