Introduction

If you’ve stopped by the blog in the past few weeks, you have probably seen The Line 5 Syllabus I created. As I explain there, it’s an expanded version of a syllabus I prepared for the summer M.A. course I’m currently teaching on “Literature and Social Engagement.” I’m fortunate to have six amazing, smart students in the course. As part of their semester’s work, I’ve asked them each to write guest blog posts. It is my great pleasure to introduce those short essays now.

Both the course and the collection of essays seek to situate Line 5 in a number of broad cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts. The essays are especially interested in telling stories about Line 5 that don’t always get told (or don’t get told enough). What does it mean to think about Line 5 beyond the fear of an imminent spill? What gets obscured when the conversation is framed only by questions of safety or jobs or gas prices? How might we re-frame the discussion of Line 5 to highlight questions and problems that don’t lend themselves easily to slogans or radio commercials? What might we gain by looking away briefly from the Great Lakes and toward the termination points of the line, like Sarnia and Detroit?

We might describe this work of re-framing as a shift from what we know about Line 5 to how we know about Line 5. By making this an epistemological question, I am following the lead of the petro-critic and cultural theorist Imre Szeman in his essay “How to Know About Oil: Energy Epistemologies and Political Futures.” Szeman begins with the premise that while we already know about the planetary and social harms wrought by our oil dependence, we nevertheless seem unable to rectify these harms because “we are people who live in societies so saturated with the substance that we cannot imagine doing without it.” Thus, he asks, “what could we possibly learn by thinking about how we know oil, as opposed to thinking about the ways in which we have lived with it and what we need to do to live without it?

This is a question equally applicable to the debate over the future of Line 5. What can we learn by thinking critically about how we know Line 5, rather than just thinking about the ways in which we have lived with it and what we need to do to live without it? 

The six essays that comprise this series each take up this question in different ways. Shannon Waite and Lourd Razooq wrestle with both the urgencies and the difficulties Line 5 presents to us conceptually and culturally. Focusing on the climate crisis, Waite invites us to imagine a world where we are unburdened from the pressures and anxieties of the status quo, which Enbridge desperately wants to maintain. Razooq, in turn, identifies that status quo with even more specificity; her essay highlights the way Line 5 emblematizes a key feature of the culture of oil: that we are, as she puts it, “shaped by the very thing that damages our environment.” A key challenge both essays identify, then, is how we extricate ourselves from what Waite describes as “life as we live it now.”

In a second set of essays, Sydney Wendling and Paige Therrian consider more specific contexts for Line 5. Wendling provides a helpful primer on the 1977 Pipeline Transit Treaty between the U.S. and Canada, which the Canadian government formally invoked in 2021 to protect Enbridge’s interests. But as Wendling notes, both the history of that treaty and its legal particularities have received little detailed public attention to date. Wendling also observes, pointedly, that this emergent geopolitics of Line 5 excludes from consideration other treaties between sovereign nations; namely, those between the U.S. and Native American tribes. Therrian’s essay, in turn, examines the foundations and the importance of those treaties from the point of view of indigenous peoples, for whom “water is life.” In elaborating upon that maxim, Therrian emphasizes key differences in indigenous and settler epistemologies.

The final two essays in this series take us “downstream” to the termination points of Line 5 and in doing so, emphasize environmental injustice. Ava Gardiner focuses on pollution in Detroit, especially near the Marathon refinery that receives feedstock from Line 5. Gardiner reminds us that Line 5 threatens more than just tourism and the freshwater of the Great Lakes; it’s part of a larger interconnected system that has long contributed to other very real harms. Those harms reach across the border, as Alma Dukovic shows in her consideration of Sarnia’s “Chemical Valley,” which surrounds the Aamjiwnaang First Nation. But more than just a recounting of toxic devastation, Dukovic tells a fascinating story about the origins of Line 5, a story that is as much about resistance as it is about injustice, with powerful resonances for the Line 5 battle today.

As I’ve said many times before, Line 5 is about more than just a single pipeline or even the Great Lakes. It encompasses and crystallizes so many of the most urgent social, political, and ecological questions of our time. The bright, passionate student-scholars who have written these essays have a real stake in those questions; their work helps elucidate and bring them into focus. As the essays appear here over the next few weeks, I hope you will read and engage them.

Contents

1. Life as We Live it Now is the Problem, by Shannon Waite
2. Aesthetics and the Dark Gratifications of Petroculture, by Lourd Razooq
3. What is the 1977 Transit Pipelines Treaty? by Sydney Wendling
4. Chemical Valley and the Origins of Indigenous Resistance to Line 5 by Alma Dukovic
5. Building Solidarity Along the Entirety of Line 5 by Ava Gardiner
6. The Great Lakes and the Rights of Water by Paige Therrian