The Line 5 Disaster is Now
Much of the debate over the fate of Enbridge’s Line 5 beneath the Straits of Mackinac has taken the form of speculative fiction: frightening imaginative projections of a not-so-distant future. Opponents and proponents of Line 5 alike each cast their gaze forward and offer competing semi-apocalyptic narratives of what they foresee. Those calling for the shut down of Line 5 imagine a catastrophic rupture, in which thousands of gallons of oil spill into the Straits, get swept away by powerful currents, and despoil hundreds of miles of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron shoreline, poisoning the water and killing fish and wildlife. On the other side, Enbridge and its supporters conjure a dangerous future that features a nation in thrall to foreign sources of energy, rising gasoline prices, grandmothers freezing in UP winters, and convoys of exploding tanker trucks rumbling across the Mackinac Bridge.
Crews in 1953 prepare to pull steel pipe across the Straits of Mackinac
Two sides of the same coin, these doomsday narratives echo the nightmare visions of post-apocalyptic fictions: nuclear winter, zombies, or the mass floods and burned-out landscapes of “cli-fi” (fiction about climate change)– books and movies that simply duplicate the terrifying projections of climate scientists. Just read the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, or a nonfiction best-seller like David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth. The power and appeal of this dystopic, future-oriented narrative form resides in its potential to rouse people from apathetic slumber, its ability to inspire action-before-it’s-too-late. After all, we should be worried and scared. Therefore, visions of a frightful future might well prove rhetorically, and perhaps even politically, effective.
But lately, I’ve become increasingly concerned with what I think are some of the limitations of this concern for the future, this preventative attitude that, strangely, unites people on both sides of the Line 5 question. For one thing, I’m increasingly worried that imagining catastrophe as belonging to some imagined, avertable future allows us to pretend that things are okay right now. More and more, I wonder whether we focus on future possibilities, good and bad, as a way of avoiding present realities.
The latest news from Enbridge has prompted these reflections. Just last week, they announced that they’ve secured contractors to build their tunnel (itself, as I’ve argued before, an implausible speculative fiction). I was particularly struck by the comments of Enbridge’s Vice President of U.S. Operations Brad Shamla, who, according to the Detroit News insisted that Line 5 is “essential to the state’s energy future.” Shamla then repeats the standard Enbridge boilerplate about the “critical fuel” Enbridge Line 5 provides and touts “the thousands of products Line 5 helps make possible.”
Shamla’s claim about “critical fuel” succinctly evokes the Enbridge dystopic narrative about freezing UP residents and national energy (in)security. But what about the “thousands of products Line 5 makes possible”? What does that phrase evoke? It’s a fairly new line of argument for Enbridge, one that didn’t feature prominently in Enbridge’s PR two or three years ago, when all the talk was about propane and gasoline. Deliberately nonspecific, this new talking point is meant to remind us that the oil Line 5 transports isn’t just used as fuel to heat our homes and power our cars, but is used in the production of a myriad of everyday products. At the same time, Enbridge is careful not to push the point too hard, careful not to specify precisely what those “thousands of products” might actually be.
Imperial Oil web copy
Which brings me to the catastrophe of the present. What Enbridge doesn’t say about the products Line 5 makes possible is that nearly all of them have one thing in common: plastic. I’ve written about the early history of Line 5 elsewhere; it’s worth remembering that the pipeline wasn’t built to deliver propane to heat Michigan homes; it was built to feed the rapidly expanding oil and gas refineries in Sarnia, Ontario, the manufacturing hub now known as “Chemical Valley.” To this day, the vast majority of oil Line 5 transports is exported to Sarnia, where refiners like Imperial Oil (a subsidiary of ExxonMobil) transform it into petrochemical feedstock like polyethylene and vinyl intermediates, materials that are used to manufacture everything from shopping bags to plastic bottles and kayaks—literally “1,000s of products,” as Imperial also boasts.
The problem with this boast is that plastic pollution, as we’ve discussed on this blog before, is choking the planet, inundating the oceans, killing wildlife, penetrating the earth’s soil, and infiltrating our drinking water. A recent article in Rolling Stone magazine tells the story in grisly detail. Buy you’ve likely already seen the appalling images: the great Pacific garbage patch, sharks entangled in plastic nets, pounds of plastic found in the stomachs of dead whales, cattle grazing on pastures of plastic.
Photo credit: Zikri Maulana/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
Less visible and less extensively studied, the Great Lakes are likewise awash in plastic. These days, a casual stroll of any Lake Michigan shoreline will yield you far more plastic debris than it will Petoskey stones. Experts estimate that more than 20 million pounds of plastic winds up in the Great Lakes each year. Researchers have also discovered that tiny microplastic particles are ubiquitous in the Great Lakes, where they are ingested by fish, then by the birds (and humans) that feed on those fish. Microplastics pervade our drinking water and even, according to a recent study, our craft beer. The health effects of ingesting all this plastic, full of toxins, are still unknown.
Lake Michigan shoreline, Glen Arbor
All of which is to say that Line 5 is not just a disaster waiting to happen; Line 5 doesn’t just threaten to pollute the Great Lakes and to poison wildlife and humans alike. Line 5 has already polluted the Great Lakes. Line 5 has already poisoned wildlife and humans. Line 5 has already helped produce a disaster.
A tunnel to house Line 5 beneath the Great Lakes simply guarantees a continuation—an intensification—of this ongoing planetary calamity at a moment when everybody knows that what we desperately need is to find a way to reverse course, to figure out how to kick our plastic habit. And make no mistake about it: Enbridge understands this. Their recent rhetoric touting “the thousands of products Line 5 makes possible” is part of an industry-wide effort to increase petrochemical production as demand for fossil fuels decreases due to the climate crisis. Fossil fuel companies seem to figure that if they can’t set the planet on fire, they can nevertheless bury it in plastic.
Obviously, Enbridge’s Line 5 isn’t the sole source of petrochemical feedstock. Nor will shutting down Line 5 solve the problem of plastic pollution. But sooner or later– probably sooner– the dismantling of the fossil fuel infrastructure that is destroying species and the planet has to commence. Michigan has an opportunity to lead the world in the process of undoing an unsustainable system and building a new, better one.
For that reason, maybe it’s time those of us who want to see the permanent decommissioning of Line 5 to stop talking about prevention, to stop imagining disaster as looming in the future, to stop telling stories about what might happen . Maybe instead we should be telling stories about the damage, visible and invisible, that is all around us here in the present. After all, the catastrophic future is now.