MPSC Line 5 Post-Mortem, pt. 3

MPSC Line 5 Post-Mortem, pt. 3

Part 3: The Commission Speaks

Last week, in part 2 of my new series on the MPSC’s Line 5 decision, I wrote about relations. Or rather, I wrote about how the rules of the MPSC proceedings are designed to sever relations, to deny relations, to ignore relations, to pretend like things that are inextricably connected are somehow not connected at all. This kind of partitioning, I argued, effectively doomed the proceedings from the start, since that narrow way of thinking about the matter is exactly how Enbridge wanted the Commission to look at the matter. Even worse is the fact that Enbridge didn’t really need to persuade the MPSC to adopt their narrow view; the MPSC also prefers to look at things narrowly. It helps them evade accountability.

In this the third installment of my series on the MPSC decision, I planned to take up another dimension of that narrow view. But then on Friday, as if on cue, one of the Commissioners, Dan Scripps, illustrated the point of my previous blog post perfectly. So I’m afraid this series just got a little longer; the discussion of harm and violence I promised will have to wait until later in the week. You see, we have to talk about Dan Scripps.

If you missed it, Scripps appeared on WDET radio’s Detroit Today with Stephen Henderson to discuss the Commission’s decision. To his credit, Scripps appears to recognize that Line 5 poses a serious risk to the Great Lakes. And in justifying the Commission’s decision to approve Enbridge’s application, Scripps leaned heavily on the idea that the tunnel “virtually eliminates the risk of an anchor strike and is a much safer option and more protective of the Great Lakes than what exists today.”

I’m sure that sounds like a quite reasonable view to a lot of people. The problem is that it’s a view that, among other things, is astonishingly short-sighted. Scripps talks about the tunnel as if it’s simply going to materialize overnight, like slipping one’s arm into the sleeve of a new shirt. But the reality is that this “safer option” is at least ten years away from getting built, probably more. Enbridge’s estimates on how long tunnel construction might take certainly can’t be trusted. And ten years from now, at the current rate of global greenhouse emissions, we will have reached the dangerous global warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures. The visible and inescapable effects of reaching that limit will make a billion-dollar investment in fossil fuel infrastructure look even more reckless and foolhardy than it does now.

But that explanation for the MPSC decision was hardly the most striking thing about the interview. In fact, one statement Scripps made nearly caused me to crash my car. Here’s what he said:

We [the MPSC] didn’t get a say in whether or not the tunnel gets built.

It’s hard to know if Scripps believes what he’s saying here. But regardless, his remark displays how absurd it is to try and separate that things that can’t possibly be separated. “Who has what responsibility in this process?” he went on to ask, in what seemed like an attempt to distance the MPSC from its decision. He explained that the agencies responsible for approving the tunnel are the Michigan Straits Corridor Authority and the Department of Energy, Great Lakes, and the Environment. The MPSC, he continued, was only tasked with the question of whether to approve the relocation of Line 5 inside that tunnel. “The actual question of building the tunnel wasn’t for us,” Scripps demurred, “That’s the Straits Corridor Authority.”

Now, in the strictest, most technical sense, what Scripps said on the radio is true. The MSCA and EGLE are the agencies charged with approval and oversight of the tunnel. And as per the ruling of the Administrative Law Judge in the MPSC case, the Commission was charged only with approval of the re-route of the portion of Line 5 inside the tunnel, not with approving tunnel construction itself. So sure, on a purely formal level—that is, in terms of which agency issues which permit—the MPSC didn’t get a say in whether or not the tunnel gets built.

But that technical, formal distinction is completely nonsensical. It is nonsensical because the re-route and the tunnel are inextricable; they’re a package deal. After all, it’s not as though Enbridge would construct a tunnel without permission to put a pipeline inside of it. The re-route, in other words—the specific decision before the MPSC—was the precondition for tunnel construction. No re-route, no tunnel. Which means that despite Scripps’s attempt to pretend otherwise by relying on an absurd technicality, “the actual question of building the tunnel” was absolutely the question before the MPSC. The MPSC had all the say as to whether the tunnel gets built.

But Scripps wasn’t done. He then went on to explain that the MPSC is guided by a Michigan law, Act 16 from 1929. Under that Act, Scripps said, the Commission had to consider three questions: is there a need for the line? Is the route reasonable? And does it meet or exceed safety standards? According to Scripps, the answer to all three of these questions in the eyes of the MPSC is: yes.[i]

There’s just one problem here: there is nothing in Act 16—nothing whatsoever—that confines the MPSC to those three questions. In fact, those three questions, questions treated as utterly binding by the Administrative Law Judge who oversaw the case, by the MPSC Staff, and by Dan Scripps and his fellow Commissioners, don’t appear anywhere at all in Act 16. Nowhere. Yet strict adherence to those three questions is the source of all those exclusions I wrote about last week, exclusions that precluded the intervenors in the case from introducing their most powerful and important arguments into the record.

So what does Act 16 say, you might be wondering? Well, to put it in layman’s language, basically it says the MPSC can consider whatever the hell it wants. It gives the Commission very broad authority to establish its own rules and regulations. In fact, the language of the law itself is exactly the opposite of the narrow view taken by the very Commission to which the law grants authority. Here, for example, is Section 8 of Act 16:

The commission is hereby authorized and empowered to make all rules, regulations, and orders, necessary to give effect to and enforce the provisions of this act.

That’s it. No explicit restrictions on the scope of review of an application. Not a bunch of limitations on what the Commission can and cannot consider. Nothing about any three-part test. And the worst part of all of this? That narrow framework, stated so clearly by Dan Scripps last week as the sole criteria by which the MPSC is to be guided in its decision-making: it is almost entirely an Enbridge invention. I recounted that history right here on this blog a full decade ago.

But nobody, it seems, is reading Act 16; they’re only reading Enbridge’s self-serving interpretation of it. Which is a shame because if you were to read all of Act 16, you might come across something else it says, like this in section 2b:

A pipeline company shall make a good-faith effort to minimize the physical impact and economic damage that result from the construction and repair of a pipeline.

If you’re like me, the phrase that stands out here is “good-faith effort.” Enbridge has exerted a great deal of effort on a great many things here in Michigan over the past decade. But very few of them have been undertaken in good faith. Just spend some time in the archives of this blog; it’s ten years of carefully documented examples of Enbride’s bad-faith efforts.

Which, to return to the thesis of this series, is yet another problem with the system: it appears to include no mechanism which can account for and contend with bad-faith actors. It presumes, rather than interrogates, the good faith of applicants like Enbridge. Intervenors can’t simply claim—or even show—that Enbridge has a long history of being full of shit, of lying to regulatory agencies of various kinds. That sort of intervention, too, according to the MPSC’s current procedures, would be “beyond the scope of review.”

[i] I want to note that the intervenors in the case produced many excellent arguments demonstrating how Enbridge’s plan does not satisfy these three criteria.

 

MPSC Line 5, Post-Mortem, pt. 2

MPSC Line 5, Post-Mortem, pt. 2

Part 2: Relations

This week I started a new series of posts in response to last Friday’s MPSC decision approving Enbridge’s application to relocate a portion of Line 5 inside a tunnel beneath the bedrock in the Straits of Mackinac. The decision has produced in me a feeling of déjà vu, hearkening back to the MPSC decision a decade ago that approved Enbridge’s “replacement” of Line 6B. It echoes, too, as a friend reminded me this week, the more recent but equally short-sighted decision by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission approving Enbridge’s re-route of its Line 3.

The hard truth is that in all three cases, the opposition never really stood a chance. And that’s not because opponents aren’t on the side of what is right, what is just, and what in the long term is best for human and more-than-human life. It’s because, as I stated in my first post, the system is built in such a way as to set aside, to bracket, what is right and just in favor of what is most expedient—by which I mean what is best for commerce. These public commissions might pay some lip service to what is right and just—in the form, say of “tribal consultation” or basic compliance with some fairly weak environmental protections (if they exist)—but those things are at best secondary, subordinate, minor checks on the economic imperatives that are the primary concern of the proceedings.

This is not a bug in the system, as they say; this is a feature.

In my last post, I emphasized two other features of the system. I highlighted the way that it is unjust because it is exclusionary both in form—limiting, in practice, who gets to participate—and in content—limiting the kinds of things that are permissible as matters of consideration. Here I want to elaborate on the latter of these two points, especially on the way the proceedings’ emphasis on process, on establishing and adhering to certain rules that define the field of play, encourages, even requires, what I called “conceptual partitioning or discreteness.”

Of course, the Commission simply calls this establishing the scope of review, which of course is necessary. Yet there’s no question that the inclination of the Commission, and certainly of the Commission Staff, is for a narrower, rather than more expansive scope. Recall the Staff’s remark that “without reasonable and legally sound limitations,” the intervenors’ “anything-goes-approach would expand and weigh down the evidentiary record until it buckles.” Staff seems to want to treat this as a practical and therefore neutral observation about process; no proceeding, after all, can take up everything. But the remark is disingenuous on its face; the intervenors weren’t arguing that “anything goes;” they were simply asking that a specific set of questions be allowed to go. But what’s even more astonishing is just how little consideration Staff’s process-oriented thinking gives to whether and how a narrow review might advantage one side and disadvantage the other.

And there was never any question as to which side would benefit by this narrower scope. As I mentioned in my last post, Enbridge argued for exclusions at every turn. Here’s just a brief list of things Enbridge sought to have excluded from consideration:

  • The need for Line 5
  • Construction of the tunnel
  • The current operational safety of Line 5
  • Climate change
  • The environmental effects of the extraction, refinement, or consumption of the oil transported by Line 5
  • Tribal treaty rights
  • Examination of terrestrial archaeological sites in the Straits
  • The 2010 Line 6B spill

Enbridge got its way with almost all of this. In fact, even in those instances where some allowances were made—for consideration of greenhouse gas emissions, for example—those allowances came with absurd restrictions: only greenhouse gas emissions related specifically to the activity of re-routing Line 5 into the tunnel could be considered.

These restrictive rules about what was and was not permissible in the proceedings required everyone to act like the tunnel plan exists in a vacuum—as if the 4-mile stretch of pipeline in the Straits is connected to nothing, as if the oil the pipeline transports comes from nowhere and has no destination, as if global warming is a localized phenomenon, as if the pipeline has no past and no history, as if causes have no effects, as if time doesn’t exist, as if pipelines have no social consequences. All that’s left, after one has adopted such a myopic and morally bankrupt view, are narrow, mystifying technocratic matters: welding procedures, construction specifications, leak detection systems.

And this, in turn, dictates not just what kinds of arguments intervenors can not make; it dictates, too, the kinds of arguments they have to make if they want to be a part of the proceedings. But this is like requiring an NBA basketball team to compete in the NHL finals. Because they’re talented and tenacious the ballplayers will compete, but ultimately they don’t stand a chance because it’s not their game. The same goes for the National Wildlife Federation, FLOW, the Bay Mills Indian Community, and the rest. Techno-engineering, the maintenance of extractive capitalism for short-term economic interests: that’s just not their game. Instead, they have urgent and vital ethical, political, and social arguments to make. Their primary concerns, their commitments and convictions and claims, involve the public trust, thriving ecosystems, the preservation of lifeways, cultural and spiritual practices, treaty rights, sovereignty, justice, a habitable future for all lifeforms.

But the kind of thinking required to safeguard all that stuff is the very opposite of partitioning and segmenting and separating and bracketing and excluding. It’s about relations. The problem with the system—as these proceedings and their inevitable outcome painfully demonstrated—is that it is insufficiently mindful of relations.

Coming soon, Part 3: Harm and Violence

 

 

Enbridge-MPSC Post-Mortem Series (2023 edition)

Enbridge-MPSC Post-Mortem Series (2023 edition)

Ten years ago in 2013—I really can’t believe it’s been a full decade—I wrote a series of posts in response to a Michigan Public Service Commission case involving Enbridge. At issue then was the “replacement” of Line 6B across the state and at the time, I’m sure I never imagined I’d be writing a similar series again. But here I am.

Welcome to the Enbridge-MPSC Post-Mortem Series, 2023 edition.

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard: on Friday, the Michigan Public Service Commission approved Enbridge’s application to re-route a portion of Line 5 beneath the Straits of Mackinac inside a concrete tunnel. I know this sounds preposterous, what with a planet on fire and the urgent need to decarbonize as rapidly as possible. But it’s true.

A decade ago, in response to the similarly disappointing outcome, I called the MPSC “a terribly weak-kneed, embarrassingly toothless regulatory body,” “an agency with very little power (and perhaps even less will).” Sadly, not much has changed over the past decade.

But let’s start with the brutal reality: the MPSC was never going to deny Enbridge’s Line 5 application.

I don’t mean to suggest that the Commissioners are somehow corrupt or that they are bought and paid for by Enbridge. This is a completely different trio of Commissioner’s than last time. And anyway, it’s not as simple as corruption. In fact, it would have taken genuine courage to deny Enbridge’s application. And despite what I said about the Commission’s lack of will a decade ago, I honestly hoped these Commissioners might possess some courage. They don’t. But that’s also not really the reason why approval was basically inevitable either. It’s more complicated than that, too.

The problem is the system.

For one thing, the system is fundamentally unjust, structured in such a way as to advantage large corporations like Enbridge, which possess unlimited resources to spend on armies of attorneys to represent them in the proceedings. Meanwhile, others who wish to formally intervene—ordinary individuals, cash-strapped non-profit organizations, or Native American tribes—either have to search desperately for legal funds (and therefore constantly worried those sources will dry up), convince civic-minded attorneys to take on their cause pro bono, or simply remain on the periphery of the process. This “pay to play” system, as the scholar Kathleen Bosemer has called it, is an example of “procedural energy injustice.” And while the MPSC pays lip service to those features of the system that do not require legal fees, like public comments and so-called “tribal consultation,” such opportunities “do not form part of the [formal] record of proceedings.” What’s more, since “they are filtered through staff reports and are not subject to cross examination… their influence on decision making is limited.”[i]

Nor is access the only basic problem with the system. Just as the form of the proceedings is exclusionary; so too is the content of the proceedings extremely limited.

Specifically, the MPSC doesn’t exist to decide what is good or right or just. It’s not designed to take up messy ethical or historical questions. For that reason, it’s not really equipped to scrutinize, to question, to be skeptical. Instead, its purview is commerce and its job is to enable, to facilitate, to permit—but to do so within certain limits. But importantly, those limits are also not ethical or historical, not matters of what is good or right or just. Those limits, instead, are almost entirely processual. What matters to institutions like the MPSC, in other words, is process, ensuring that i’s are dotted, that t’s are crossed. Such dottings and crossing will then, in turn, somehow yield the appropriate outcome. This is why, for example, in her remarks at the MPSC meeting on Friday, Commissioner Katherine Peretick invited the outspoken opponents of Enbridge’s application to take (cold?) comfort in the process, despite its outcome. “I know that many of you will be disappointed by the decision,” Peretick said. “But I can genuinely say that your comments, whether in writing, verbal, here in person or over the phone or (webinars), did make this process better.” Process absolves.

Let me put this another way. The MPSC exists to follow and enforce rules, not to make judgments. This is why the rules matter so much. Enbridge’s army of lawyers certainly understands this, which is why they worked so hard in these proceedings, just as they did a decade ago, to make sure the scope of what could be considered in the hearings was as narrow as possible. Tunnel construction? Out of bounds! Climate change? Out of bounds! The entirety of Line 5? Out of bounds! The past? Out of bounds! The future? Out of bounds! And so on and so on.

Now, in some instances, the MPSC did allow very limited consideration of some of these matters—to the extent that they could yoke them specifically to a rule, like the Michigan Environmental Protection Act. But those allowances themselves were severely restricted, requiring the acceptance of a conceptual partitioning or discreteness—a way of thinking that willfully forgets that the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone—that is almost comical. (I’ll have much more to say about this in another post in this series.)

But beyond these minor allowances, Enbridge once again had its way in defining the field of play, in establishing the rules of the game, in reducing the question before the Commission to an extremely narrow “three-part test.” Honestly, I’ve been hollering about that so-called test since 2013, so I’m not going to rehearse it again. But I will just say once more that I predicted this a decade ago, long before anyone ever dreamed up a ridiculous tunnel.

The more important point, however, is that Enbridge’s success in narrowing the scope of the proceedings isn’t because they are somehow smarter or better or more persuasive than the lawyers for FLOW or the National Wildlife Federation or the Environmental Law & Policy Center or the Bay Mills Indian Community or any of the other intervenors. Rather, their success is explained by the fact that they speak the same narrow procedural language as the Commission itself. By the fact that the MPSC also prefers a narrow scope of review. The rule-and-process- minded MPSC staff, for example, is entirely amenable to rulemaking of the kind that makes what otherwise might be difficult questions—by which I mean complex, messy, multifaceted, ethically-involved—simple and straightforward, their answers determined not by the hard, careful thought of individuals, but by the disembodied rules themselves. The MPSC all but admitted as much in one of its filings in the case: “without reasonable and legally sound limitations,” they wrote in March 2021, “the Joint Appellants’ anything-goes-approach would expand and weigh down the evidentiary record until it buckles.”

In other words, for the MPSC some contexts count and other contexts don’t. And this fact– this erasure– makes all the difference.

[i] This is a textbook example of the difference between equality and equity. While theoretically anyone can intervene in the proceedings (equality), the vast difference in financial resources available to potential intervenors advantages some and disadvantages others (equity).

 

Enbridge Re-re-writes Michigan Law

Enbridge Re-re-writes Michigan Law

Today, in an inexplicable and astonishingly short-sighted decision, the Michigan Public Service Commission approved Enbridge’s Line 5 tunnel scheme. I’m still digesting and thinking and reading about the decision, so more after I’ve had some time. In the meantime, I will refer back to what still to this day remains the most important thing I’ve ever written on this blog. This is from 10 full years ago:

You Can’t Believe Anything Enbridge Says, Part– well, I’ve lost count

You Can’t Believe Anything Enbridge Says, Part– well, I’ve lost count

The thing about spending more than a decade documenting Enbridge’s endless parade of fabrications, falsehoods, fibs, prevarications, dissemblings, distortions, deceptions, casuistries, inaccuracies, misinformationings, truth-stretchings, misleadingnesses, and ass-coverings is that there’s always another one.

Here’s the latest, courtesy of the National Wildlife Federation. 

Feel free to peruse the archives here for countless more examples, like this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one and so many more…

 

The Great Lakes and the Rights of Water

The Great Lakes and the Rights of Water

[Note: this essay is part of a series of six essays on How to Know about Line 5. You can read the series introduction and find links to the other essays as they are posted here.]

The inevitable environmental catastrophe Line 5 poses forces us to imagine a world tainted by the irrevocable damage of oil spillage, a world where the water is no longer beautiful and blue. It is void where once flourished immense and intricate ecosystems. It once supported our own lifeways, providing clean drinking water, fishing, recreation, travel, and tourism. If the waves of the Great Lakes were to crash black with oil against the Michigan shoreline, how would we survive?

In Michigan, we are lucky to be surrounded by 20% of Earth’s surface freshwater supply. Beneath the Straits of Mackinac, Enbridge proposes to reroute Line 5, a deteriorated 70-year-old pipeline that could quite easily and swiftly pollute the entire Great Lakes region with the millions of gallons of oil it transports per day. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before: in 2010, Enbridge was responsible for one of the largest inland oil spills in U.S. history, a ruptured pipeline leaking 1.1 million gallons of diluted bitumen over a span of 17 hours into the Talmadge Creek and Kalamazoo River, which empties into Lake Michigan.

If the waves of the Great Lakes were to crash black with oil against the Michigan shoreline, how would we survive?

The heart of the matter is that there is no way to safely operate oil pipelines and protect sources of water from the ever-looming threat of a pipeline rupture. Not just at the Straits of Mackinac, but at any other point along the miles of pipeline that run near the Great Lakes. Indigenous communities, above all others, understand most what this threat could mean for their communities as well as for the world. The maxim “Water is life”, from the Lakota “Mní wičhóni,” shapes Native relations to the natural world by acknowledging that water has an existence beyond sustaining our own. In the wake of the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, “Water is Life” has endured as an emblem of pipeline protest, spurring conversations about the rights of nature.

Faced with all we stand to lose, we turn to ways that preserve the water that provides life and livelihood. The aesthetic values and economic boons of the Great Lakes are often the focus of our conversations about water protection. For example, the Public Trust Doctrine posits that the public has a right to water as a resource, and thus it must be protected from pollution or destruction. This is the basis for the state’s revocation of Enbridge’s 1953 easement, as the operation of Line 5 violates the safety of the Great Lakes, and thus the safety of those living in the region. While this doctrine is a powerful tool to protect the health of our waterways, it nevertheless outlines a human-centric relationship with water, predicated on use and consumption, reducing water to a public good.

But if water didn’t serve our whims and sustain our survival, would we bother protecting it at all? What if instead we considered water worthy of protection not just for our sake, but for its own? If humans can’t protect water, what if it could protect itself?

If humans can’t protect water, what if it could protect itself?

In other words, we often discuss our rights to water and all that it provides; but it is not often that we discuss the rights of water. For instance, we commonly refer to lakes as “bodies” of water, and in doing so, our language explicitly applies personhood to water. But that way of thinking rarely extends beyond a turn of phrase; certainly it is not a dominant viewpoint in a society fixed in the mindset of colonial extractivism that fuels petroculture. Zoe Todd, Métis anthropologist and Indigenous scholar, remarks, “This is the thing about colonization: it tries to erase the relationships and reciprocal duties we share across boundaries, across stories, across species, across space, and it inserts new logics, new principles, and new ideologies in their place.”

As Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte describes it in “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now,” water is a spiritual and sacred entity; it is alive, not inanimate. It is not insular or isolated, but interconnected with all parts of the natural world. It has the same rights as any human, whether those rights are legally recognized or not. Similarly, Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians Chairman Mark Wiggins describes the “spirit transfer” between the Great Lakes and the Bad River and other connected waterways, explaining, “That’s the actual scientific truth. And the rest is how we as human beings fragment, compartmentalize, put things in the science catalogs, and then retrain our minds and hearts to think of things differently. But the absolute natural law is that that hydrology is very direct and very connected.”

While Indigenous communities have for centuries lived by the belief that nature has rights, non-Native legal systems are beginning to recognize that this premise might just hold water. In 1972, the Supreme Court case Sierra Club v. Morton  marked a bellwether moment that brought nature’s rights to the forefront of legal thought. After The Walt Disney Company proposed to build a ski resort within Sequoia National Park that would severely disrupt the landscape, the Sierra Club attempted to block the project by suing on behalf of the forest. In the end, the Court decided that the Sierra Club did not have legal standing because it was not directly injured by the corporation. While the ruling ultimately denied the rights of nature, Justice Douglas’ dissent of the decision made clear that there are those at the jurisprudential level who recognize the sentience of the environment: “Those who have that intimate relation with the inanimate object about to be injured, polluted, or otherwise despoiled are its legitimate spokesmen,” Justice Douglas wrote. “The voice of the inanimate object, therefore, should not be stilled.”

Douglas’s perspective directly opposes the colonial view of natural entities as property and “resources” and disrupts the capitalist framework that upholds it (which likely explains why his view did not prevail). “Stillness” is the operative word in Douglas’s statement; water is viewed as inert, inanimate— and its Indigenous stewards are rendered invisible. But resistance to this way of thinking is evident in the recent movements of environmental personhood and water sovereignty, movements predominantly propelled by the activism of Indigenous communities.

Environmental personhood refers to the legal granting of personhood, and all concomitant rights, to natural forms, such as forests or rivers. For instance, in New Zealand, the Whanganui River became the first river in the world to be recognized as a legal person. The Maori people view the Whanganui as an ancestral entity, one that is as much a part of the people as the environment. As of 2017, New Zealand law states that the river is owned by itself, and two members of the Maori tribe are appointed to speak on its behalf.

The precedent has been set elsewhere as well for the execution of environmental personhood. From the Vilcabamba River of Ecuador, to the Ganges of India, to Bolivia’s Law of Mother Earth that protects Pachamama, the earth deity, natural forms all over the world are being recognized as living and autonomous. Not just globally, but also domestically: in the United States, there are several recent instances of nature granted personhood, such as the Yukon Tribe of California’s recognition of the Klamath River as a rights-bearing entity.

More locally, the White Earth Band of Objiwe in Minnesota has been seeking justice for Manoomin, a wild rice species that is vital to the lifeways of the Anishinaabe peoples. As a plant that grows in shallow waters, Manoomin’s prosperity is inextricable from the life of waterways. In 2021, Enbridge requested a permit to divert 5 billion gallons of water during construction of its Line 3 tar sands pipeline. Filing on behalf of Manoomin, the White Earth Band served as plaintiff in a suit challenging the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources for issuing the permit. This was the first enforcement of the rights of nature to be filed in tribal court—an action taken because Enbridge’s Line 3 oil pipeline crosses through the very waterways inhabited by Manoomin, thereby violating its rights to environmental health.

In many ways, Line 3 reflects the dire threat Line 5 poses to the Great Lakes. What if, like Manoomin and other natural forms around the globe, the Great Lakes were recognized as legally living? What if they could protect themselves from the destruction imposed by pipeline construction? What if the voice of the Great Lakes were not stilled? We seem to be part of the way there: as of 2019, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights allows citizens to sue on behalf of the lake for pollution or contamination. The fate of the rest of Great Lakes seems to be even more precarious, with the threat of an oil spill seeping closer and closer.

What if the voice of the Great Lakes were not stilled?

Often obscured by the extractive enterprises that oppose them, Indigenous communities are the backbone of environmental activism; the case of Line 5 is no exception. In 2016, the United Tribes of Michigan passed a resolution stating their strong opposition to the continued operation of pipelines that traverse Indigenous lands, especially projects like Line 5 that would jeopardize the Straits of Mackinac and the Great Lakes at large. Indigenous activists have engaged in other forms of resistance and action as well, such as the The Mother Earth Water Walk, an Anishinaabe led initiative aimed at reframing our relationship to nibi (water) and advocating for the urgent need to protect it. All in addition to organizing rallies and protests, writing letters to President Biden and other political officials, and forging coalitions and alliances with environmental groups to seek justice for the Great Lakes.

Despite these signs of progress in our legal system’s recognition of water sovereignty, significant impediments remain. Our system has no capacity for interpreting or comprehending the spiritual nature of water. The view of water as abstract and spiritual directly counters the law’s proclivity for the concrete and evidentiary. As Whitney Gravelle, President of the Bay Mills Indian Community, puts it, “An environmental review is vital as the Straits of Mackinac are a treaty-protected spiritual and sacred space that provides income, and food resources for Native and non-Native communities alike. Every community requires clean water, air, and soil as well as healthy fish, game, and plant populations to survive. Our ancestors understood this common human need when they negotiated the Treaty of March 28, 1836, with the United States.”

Whereas settler legal systems have taken steps towards granting status and rights to water because it ultimately benefits humans, from a range of Indigenous nations have come powerful arguments about how those rights are inherent to a spirit that is not human, but just as important and sentient. And whereas non-Native (white settler) communities too infrequently concern themselves with the plights of the marginalized, Native activists and scholars have brought into focus how there is a common human need to protect our water. It may be scientifically true to say that we all need water to survive (and we would all be affected in some way were there to be an environmental catastrophe like a pipeline rupture in the Great Lakes), but to say that we would all be affected equally would be a blatantly false statement.

As President Gravelle testifies, “All it takes is one time and one spill to destroy my people and destroy all that we hold dear.” There is an urgency and a gravity to this situation that non-Natives will never understand. Native cultures possess ways of being and knowing that inform relations held with earth and water that have been practiced for millennia. They certainly predate the time a white Supreme Court Justice acknowledged that maybe the environment is not an object to be pillaged by colonialist extractive enterprises. From 50 years ago to today, environmental personhood has been gaining traction as a means of protecting nature. A belief held forever by Indigenous communities is finally becoming legible by those noticing the insidious petroculture that threatens everything. If water is life, pipelines like Line 5 are death. Standing up for our waterways means standing behind the Indigenous leaders that are most intimately involved with the life of water. Perhaps it is time we learned to listen to them. The fate of the Great Lakes depends on it.

 

Building Solidarity Along the Entirety of Line 5

Building Solidarity Along the Entirety of Line 5

[Note: this essay is part of a series of six essays on How to Know about Line 5. You can read the series introduction and find links to the other essays as they are posted here.]

As someone who has just newly enlisted in the movement to help save the environment and people around me, I had trouble deciding how I wanted to best utilize my skills to make a difference. Thanks to the organization Oil & Water Don’t Mix, as well as the prompt emails of Bill Latka and Sean McBrearty, I learned that the Michigan Public Service Commission scheduled a meeting earlier this month, to discuss Enbridge’s proposed Line 5 tunnel. I attended the meeting and was made aware that the MPSC Staff recommended approval of Enbridge’s scheme. 

Yes, that is correct. The MPSC Staff has endorsed the tunnel, notwithstanding the facts and studies that indicate continuing to keep a pipeline in the straits of the Great Lakes magnifies the risk of polluting 20% of the entire world’s freshwater supply, threatening the health and safety of humans and non-humans alike. Furthermore, constructing this tunnel will force continuing use of the pipeline for oil and gas transport and consumption for decades to come, despite the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels in order to curb global warming. The US Army Corps of Engineers has not yet released its study of the potential environmental impacts the construction of the tunnel will cause, but spoiler alert: the cement industry generates 8 percent of global carbon emissions (triple that of the entire aviation industry!). In addition, the construction process will cause massive disturbance to the lakebed and is sure to produce mishaps. Enbridge’s horizontal drilling in Minnesota, for example, caused 28 drilling fluid spills in one summer. And if all that isn’t bad enough, continuing operation of Line 5 also violates treaties with indigenous peoples. Yet despite all these factors, Enbridge and MPSC staff are still advocating for the tunnel.

I am angry, and I am fearful. Life, human and nonhuman alike, should not be commodified. Yet the fossil fuel industry, and the petroculture that Enbridge seeks to perpetuate, treats lives as nothing more than resources to be used to gain profit. But at what cost?

Line 5 threatens more than just the Great Lakes

In making their determination in favor of the tunnel, the MPSC Staff treats Line 5 as a closed system, observing the proposition through the narrowest lens. Talks of risk to the Straits of Mackinac are rejected out of hand because the pipeline operates under the maximum pressure, yet nearly every other factor that is relevant (such as how old Line 5 is) is not examined sufficiently. It is easy to dismiss a (mostly unseen) pipeline, especially one that is remotely located under two of the Great Lakes. However, this pipeline is part of a complex and interconnected system, and the various areas it traverses and affects should no longer be ignored. The fact is, Line 5 threatens more than just the Great Lakes; it harms communities at the other end of the line as well. Consider, for example, the Black community in Detroit.

How is Detroit, of all cities, connected in any way to Line 5 and the Straits of Mackinac? The answer is simple. Enbridge pipelines provide feedstock to the Marathon Petroleum Company refineries in Detroit. Most of the product Marathon receives comes from the infamous pipeline Line 6B, now known as Line 78, which spilled into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. However, a portion of Marathon’s feedstock is diverted from Line 5 at Marysville, just before the pipeline crosses the St. Clair River into Canada, and is carried by the Sunoco pipeline to Detroit. So Enbridge supplies the product that leads to what is often called Michigan’s most polluted zip code, as two of Marathon’s three processing facilities are located specifically in the zip code of 48217. This zip code is important; despite only encompassing a two mile area, it includes communities such as Oakwood Heights and Boynton, and houses over 8,000 residents. Its inhabitants have expressed frustration with the actions exhibited by the industrial sector, “consider[ing] themselves a sacrifice zone, because many of the people that live [there] are Black low-income folk.” 

In fact, these residents are victims of longstanding and ongoing environmental injustice in Detroit. But that injustice is part of a larger and longer history of racial discrimination in the US that contributes to residents’ living conditions. The demographics of 48217 are the result of racial discrimination through districting, an early twentieth-century practice known as redlining. Redlining, to be concise, was a tool that enabled the federal government to evaluate the riskiness of mortgages in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The government overwhelmingly rated neighborhoods where Black residents lived poorly, effecting a refusal to insure mortgages. This practice pushed many African Americans out of the suburbs and into urban housing projects. Redlining occurred in Detroit on June 1st, 1939. 

While the official practice of redlining ended with the Fair Housing Act of 1968, other forms of housing discrimination persist. Marathon’s actions over the past two decades have extended the history of environmental injustice in Detroit. Back in 2008, when the company sought to expand, they started by buying up homes in Oakwood Heights to create a 100-acre green buffer zone. Oakwood Heights is 90% white (and Hispanic), while only 10% Black. Boynton, an adjacent neighborhood, is at least 71% Black, and only 10 homes from this area were purchased. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development considers Boynton a community without reinvestment potential, owing to the unusually elevated rates of and deaths from cancer. It is unclear whether or not anyone at Marathon knows that a correlation exists between proximity of air/soil/water pollution and cancer rates. At the very least, creating a buffer zone for Boynton would probably allow for reinvestment potential in the future, as well as ensure the safety of the current residents through healthier air, water, and soil. As it stands, the estimated value for most houses in Boynton is less than $15,000 and dropping steadily. Because the Black community that resides in Detroit are disproportionately the victims of these practices, they inordinately take the brunt of the ills produced by the activities of companies like Enbridge and Marathon. 

There is no respite from constant reminders of this situation, either. Quotidian life for the residents of Detroit is dominated by sights and smells and sounds from Marathon. Theresa Landrum, a resident, spokesperson, and advocate for the people of Detroit, specifically takes issue with the encroachment of the refineries around residential areas, noting how “you could walk right from your house– front porch or back porch and walk right onto industries’ property.” The menacing presence of industry physically and mentally affects those who live there. The Kemeny rec center, for instance, is shadowed by the looming figure of the Marathon refinery, an inescapable and unwanted pillar of the Detroit community. And as if these towering giants weren’t bad enough, there have been many incidents throughout the years that explicitly threaten the safety of the citizens, from the explosion at the Marathon refinery in 2013, to the mountains of carbon-sulfur-selenium-vanadium chunks (otherwise known as pet coke) stored near the banks of the Detroit river, to the issues with flares compounded by the polar vortex in 2019. 

The outdated racial districting processes that formed present day-Detroit have had long-term consequences that are compounded by companies cutting corners to increase profit margins, directly contributing to injuries to the Black community. In 2017, the NAACP discovered that 2,402 Black children have asthma attacks due to natural gas pollution, and miss 1,751 days of school as a result. Marathon, in punishment for their frequent and flagrant violations of regulations, installed an air system at a single school in Detroit. Every little bit helps, of course, except when you consider that these 185 students may be breathing in clean air for less than a quarter of their lives. Or when you consider that there are over 53,000 students attending public schools in Detroit that are breathing unclean air every second. As for adults, it doesn’t get easier for them to breathe; statistics indicate that, as of 2019, the rate of hospitalizations for Black residents in Detroit was more than three times that of white people. I mean, let the facts speak for themselves: nearly 80% of the population in Detroit is Black, and the asthma levels in Detroit were 46% higher than the entire state of Michigan!

Asthma is not the only source of fear for the people of Detroit. Lead studies conducted by the state of Michigan also reveal that the highest proportion of children with elevated levels of lead in their blood all originated from Detroit’s Wayne County. These levels as declared by the state of Michigan are so high, they warrant immediate action, according to the scale developed by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Further testing conducted in the soil around schools and parks have also revealed dangerous levels of lead and arsenic. Just as Line 5 is par of a complex and interconnected system, so too is health and biological safety influenced by many factors; the high concentration of heavy metals in turn combine to have a more toxic cumulative effect that hastens the deterioration of vital systems of the body.

There is no reason anyone should be subjected to these living conditions.

Other chemicals also pervade Detroit, like sewer gas, which is a mix of chemicals such as hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen cyanide, a byproduct of processing crude oil and a component of vehicle exhaust, can also be found in large amounts. Exposure to the chemical can cause headaches, nausea, issues with breathing, and chest pain. PFAS, chemicals that come from plastics and much more, has been found overflowing from a manhole next to Schaefer Highway, which leads to the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) Wastewater Treatment Plant. After investigation, Marathon was identified as a source of PFAS contamination. Additionally, PFAS has also been discovered in the soil and groundwater where the Gordie Howe Bridge is being built

There is no reason anyone should be subjected to these living conditions. And while Enbridge is not solely responsible or producing those conditions, its Line 5 exists within a larger set of structures that need to be dismantled or overhauled to properly rectify the larger injustices that are presently occurring. By shutting down Line 5, we can begin to safeguard the health of our communities and take steps to address the inequities and inequalities that afflict Detroit.

We must look towards solutions that are founded upon embracing a community and forging new relationships based on trust. The general public needs to be united to effect such large change. Building solidarity along the entirety of Line 5, linking those seeking to protect the Great Lakes to those dedicated to resolving urban pollution and environmental injustice, is a surefire way to ascertain everyone’s needs are met. This work is already beginning to take place; Oil and Water Don’t Mix hosted a solidarity tour community pop-up open mic night in Detroit on June 13th of this year (special shoutout to Detroit coordinator of Oil & Water Don’t Mix Hadassah GreenSky and the other attendees of the event). Everyone has stories and thoughts to share; we just need to listen. After all, don’t we all just want to make the world a better place?

 

(Shameless) Summer Reading Suggestion

(Shameless) Summer Reading Suggestion

I don’t ordinarily do this sort of thing here at the blog, so I’ll beg forgiveness for a little self-promotion. But if you’re looking for a good beach read for the summer, might I recommend Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick? I’ve just edited a brand new edition and it’s out now from W.W. Norton.

What, you might ask, does Moby-Dick have to do with the matters we usually discuss around here? Well, for one thing, I’d argue it’s the greatest environmental novel ever written. For another, it’s a book that speaks powerfully to the climate crisis: extractive capitalism? check! resource exhaustion? check! species extinction? check! the folly of human domination over the nonhuman world? check! colonialism, imperialism, ecological devastation? check! check! check!

Oh, and it’s also a novel about the shift from one source of energy to another. Here’s a little bit from my introduction:

Moby-Dick is therefore attuned to what today we call energy transition. The novel might help us think through the imperative implied by the idea of transition, which typically imagines, potentially at least, a smooth shift from one (dirty) energy source to another (clean) one with a minimum of disturbance to existing social arrangements. Yet the novel questions both the historical reality of and the logic behind fantasies of transition.

And if all that’s not enough, it also just so happens to feature what I believe to be the first-ever oil spill in all of American literature (see Ch. 109).

Oh, and it’s the most boisterously hilarious novel you will ever read. Give it a shot. I’d love to hear what you think!

 

On Wildfires, Enbridge, and Line 5

On Wildfires, Enbridge, and Line 5

The next essay in our ongoing series How to Know About Line 5 will drop soon (I hope you’ve read the first four!). In the meantime, as I look out at the haze and smoke and read the news that the Michigan air quality today is probably the worst it’s been since the Canadian fires began, I’ve been having a few thoughts about Enbridge and Line 5. Believe it or not, these things not unrelated.

As readers of this blog know, this is not the first time an ecological disturbance way up in Alberta has had a dramatic effect upon Michigan. The last time was in 2010. But rather than wildfires, it was tar sands oil extracted in Alberta, and transported via pipeline through Michigan. Enbridge’s Line 6B ruptured and spilled over a million gallons of the stuff into the Kalamazoo River. By now, we all know most of this story by heart.

But it wasn’t just the river that was spoiled. Air quality was pretty bad then too. In fact, benzene concentration levels were high enough to require evacuation near the spill site. And we still don’t know what else was released into the air and breathed in by nearby residents. To this day, there have been no human health studies on the effects of those airborne toxins.

But there’s more. Back in those days, Enbridge was running around talking about its “Tree for a Tree, Acre for An Acre” program. It was supposed to be a way to neutralize the company’s planetary footprint. From 2009 to 2013, for example, they claimed to have planted some 800,000 saplings (that’s less than the number of gallons of oil they spilled into the river btw!).

Where did they plant all those saplings? They sure as hell didn’t plant them in my backyard, where they cut down over 100 trees. So it’s hard to say for sure. But it appears that a lot of those trees were planted in… Alberta! https://createyourforest.ca/partner/enbridge-pipelines-inc

You see, that’s where a lot of trees get planted—in large “tree plantations” created as part of those “carbon offset” schemes that oil and gas companies love so much. They get to pretend like it somehow gets them off the hook. Here’s a great, informative twitter thread on the role of tree plantations in the current wildfires.

Enbridge stopped talking about the “Tree for a Tree” program about a decade ago. It’s not entirely clear why, but my hunch is that it’s because the program was always designed as greenwashing p.r. for their ill-fated Northern Gateway project. When that project died, or so it appears, so too did their tree program.

But they still love talking about “net zero” and about planting trees. In fact, not so long ago they were planting trees over in Lambton county—which just happens to be where Line 5 ends.As far as I know, those tree plantations aren’t currently ablaze. But the air there is still pretty bad

But then again, for some populations, the air there has been very bad for a very long time, not because of forest fires, but because of the refineries Line 5 feeds that emit toxic pollutants (into the water and soil as well as the air).

All of which is to say that while Enbridge isn’t directly responsible for the Canadian wildfires, they are a major player in a system that inevitably produces those fires, a system they work hard to sustain and perpetuate. And a system, more importantly, that also produces lots of other harms, including global warming, that are often less visible and less dramatic but in many ways far more devastating even than the current fires.

Chemical Valley and the Origins of Indigenous Resistance to Line 5

Chemical Valley and the Origins of Indigenous Resistance to Line 5

[Note: this essay is part of a series of six essays on How to Know about Line 5. You can read the series introduction and find links to the other essays as they are posted here.]

In 1952, Sarnia, Ontario began to undergo what a Detroit Free Press staff writer, James Pooler, dubbed a “Blue Water Boom”: an $80,000,000 expansion of Sarnia’s petrochemical industry (known as “Chemical Valley”), born out of the area’s production of synthetic rubber during World War II. Imperial Oil, a refining company historically and presently reliant on Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline, shared in $15,000,000 worth of this expansion. Dr. J. L. Huggett, the superintendent of Imperial Oil at the time, boasted that oil would produce 752 different products.

News reports of the petrochemical industry expansion also promoted a narrative about “prospering Indians” who sold parts of their reservation near Sarnia to the expanding petrochemical industry. In fact, Pooler concludes one of his reports on Sarnia’s Chemical Valley with: “Today the Indian is being chased right off the reservation by expanding industry. And you should be chased off your land by that kind of money!”

Accounts like these attempt to situate the Indigenous community as fortunate to have the petrochemical industry’s expansion near and into their territory. But the overt reality is that the refinery expansions dispossessed the “prospering Indians” near Sarnia — the Aamjiwnaang First Nation — of their land. It was ongoing colonialism. This dispossession can be seen, in part, in the First Nation’s resistance to the 1953 construction of Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline, which terminates in Sarnia’s Chemical Valley.

In July of 1953, Canada’s ministry approved a right-of-way over the Aamjiwnaang First Nation’s reserve near Sarnia. In the order, the ministry required that the Interprovincial Pipe Line Company (the precursor to Enbridge) compensate the First Nation, since Line 5 crosses their territory. Just months prior, Interprovincial had received pushback from the Aamjiwnaang community, who refused to let the pipeline cross the proposed section of their land and suggested that the company construct the line along an alternative route. The First Nation’s primary objection to the pipeline’s construction through their reserve was that the area requested was “the most valuable they have left.” The Star’s Sarnia Bureau claimed that the First Nation’s Council “foresaw the day when the reserve might become simply a network of pipe lines buried four feet under the sod and useless on the surface.”

After the reserve was pressed to accept some form of compensation, the First Nation suggested that the company rent that section of their territory annually, rather than obtain an easement. Interprovincial ultimately rejected Aamjiwnaang’s proposal, but did consider and adopt a new route. The original proposal would have had the pipeline nearly cut through the center of the First Nation’s reserve. The new route no longer cut through the reserve’s center, but still crossed LaSalle and Churchill roads, which the Aamjiwnaang community claimed as part of their reserve. In the order, Canada’s Minister of Transport acknowledged that the Aamjiwnaang’s Chief and Council were opposed to the government’s granting of the right-of-way through their territory. The government acknowledged the First Nation’s ownership over at least a section of LaSalle street.

The First Nation responded to the order by continuing to resist Line 5’s encroachment. They cited Treaty 29 (1827) to assert that their reserve is not a part of Canada; hence, they argued, the Canadian federal government did not have the right to grant the right-of-way decision, as the pipeline would trespass their territory. They even threatened to take the issue up to the United Nations.

At the time, Interprovincial began laying the pipeline in the areas permitted by the order.  As a result of the forced easement, the First Nation eventually appealed to the county court for compensation. Judge E. A. Shaunessy — the judge who oversaw the case — demanded that the Aamjiwnaang community provide proof of ownership over all or a part of LaSalle street. This demand was given despite the fact that the Canadian federal government had already acknowledged this ownership when the ministry provided Interprovincial with the right-of-way order. Interprovincial then provided the court with documentation that indicated the area was located outside of the reserve; in turn, Shaunessy didn’t hold the company accountable for any compensation to the First Nation, as was initially required by the federal government’s right-of-way order.

But what if Shaunessy was given proof that the Aamjiwnaang First Nation owned that section of LaSalle street? Would the outcome have been any different? The current dispute over Enbridge’s Line 5 trespass across the Bad River Band’s territory seems to provide an answer to that question. Despite concluding that Line 5 has been trespassing on the tribe’s territory since 2013, U.S. District Judge William M. Conley has not met the Band’s demand for the pipeline’s immediate shutdown. Conley recently issued an order for Enbridge to compensate the tribe with roughly $5.15 million (a shamefully paltry sum), and to either shut down or reroute that section of the pipeline by 2026. Enbridge is already planning to appeal the ruling, arguing that the company is not trespassing on tribal territory and that the order does not provide enough time for a reroute. More importantly, the Bad River Band had already stated that they have no interest in being compensated in place of Line 5’s immediate shutdown, or in its reroute. A spill along the pipeline’s current and alternative routes poses a threat to their cultural practices and ways of life — rights they have guaranteed to them by Treaties from 1837 and 1842. Conley’s decision parallels the Canadian federal government’s initial approach to the 1953 dispute over LaSalle street; both assumed authority over Indigenous land even when territorial boundaries are (or seem) clearly defined.

And here’s what that makes clear: decisions made by legal systems and federal governments with regard to pipeline operators, like Enbridge, seem to supersede the authority of Indigenous groups over their own territories. If the territory in question is found to be outside of an Indigenous reserve, then this fact can be used to allow pipeline operators to continue their construction and/or operation of a pipeline. If a pipeline is found to trespass Indigenous territory, then the pipeline operator will merely have to negotiate terms with the impacted tribe; terms which ultimately allow, in the given moment, the ongoing operation of Line 5.

how will the U.S. and Canada ever begin to repair their long histories of dispossession and injustice?

I don’t mean to ignore the difficult position that Conley has been placed in, notably given the Canadian federal government’s invocation of the 1977 Pipeline Transit Treaty with the United States. But if a clear, distinct trespass of the pipeline on Indigenous territory is not enough precedent to force the immediate shutdown of Line 5, then how will the U.S. and Canadian governments and their legal systems ever come to adequately consider the human and ecological consequences of constructing and operating many of these pipelines in the first place? Moreover, how will the U.S. and Canada ever begin to repair their long histories of dispossession and injustice?

What has, for instance, become of Sarnia’s Chemical Valley, that was so heavily boasted of by some in the mid-twentieth century? For the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, Chemical Valley dangerously exposes their 900 community members to toxic pollutants. Average benzene levels near the reserve reached 32 micrograms per cubic meter in March of 2023, while Ontario’s Ambient Air Quality Criteria (AAQC) sets its maximum at 2.3 micrograms per cubic meter over a 24-hour period of exposure and 0.45 annually. In the same month, sulphur dioxide reached an average of 147 parts per billion within one hour near their reserve, while Ontario’s AAQC sets its maximum at 40 parts per billion within one hour of exposure. This criteria is set by the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks; and while it’s not used to regulate chemical emissions in Canada, it provides guidelines for the maximum rates of various contaminants that humans can be exposed to before the contaminants have an impact on human health. Moreover, these measurements do not consider the impact of exposure to several of these contaminants at the same time. The Aamjiwnaang First Nation cites a large number of health complications among their members, including increased rates of asthma, skin rashes, headaches, and cancer. In the early 2000’s, the First Nation also had their fears confirmed regarding a continual decline in their community’s overall rate of male births, which had dwindled down to a one to two ratio of male to female births.

While it’s crucial to recognize the demarcations of Indigenous territories when considering the shutdown of Line 5, pollution is not contained outside of their boundaries — and this is perhaps most evidently seen in the Aamjiwnaang reserve near Sarnia. The Red River Métis/Michif scholar Dr. Max Liboiron goes as far as to say that pollution itself is colonialism because colonialism is first and foremost about accessing Indigenous land, not just its settlement: “[Colonialism] can mean using Land as a Resource, a practice that may generate pollution through pipelines, landfills, and recycling plants, or as a sink to store or process waste” (10). Even assimilative capacity — the scientific theory adopted by state and federal environmental regulations to establish thresholds for pollution — assumes an entitlement to Indigenous land by enabling pollution that their bodies and territories have to absorb. Pollution entails land transformation and dispossession. It often produces the end results of settler colonialism, albeit through a different colonial form.

While covering the 1953 dispute between the Aamjiwnaang First Nation and Interprovincial, The Star’s Sarnia Bureau’s Charlie Whipp chillingly captures the relationship between Sarnia’s expanding petrochemical industry and colonialism: “It may well be that the 4,000 acres nestling right in Sarnia is under the same ownership it had when Christopher Columbus landed . . .  So right here in this city we may have the last remaining unconquered Indians. At that time, their reserve comprised some 10,280 acres. Today there are about 4,000 left.” In the twenty-first century, Aamjiwnaang’s reserve measures at roughly 3,100 acres; and its 3,100 acres are surrounded and polluted by Sarnia’s Chemical Valley. The Aamjiwnaang First Nation continues to resist toxic pollution to their land, air, water, and on-reserve members today.

At the 2023 Michigan Climate Summit held earlier this month at Oakland University, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed argued that the face of the climate crisis should not be the threat it poses to polar bears or other charismatic megafauna, but the threat polluting industries pose to human lives. He pointed to the fact that children in Detroit breathe toxic air daily because of the lack of industry regulations and ongoing environmental racism. We might think about Detroit’s Marathon Oil refinery and the Detroit communities forced to deal with its pollution. We should also think about Sarnia’s Chemical Valley and the Aamjiwnaang First Nation.

When Governor Gretchen Whitmer revoked Enbridge’s Line 5 easement in 2020, the Michigan government acknowledged Indigenous treaty rights for the first time in Line 5’s history. If we look at the Line 5 battle as a microcosm of the climate crisis, then the Straits of Mackinac and the broader span of the Great Lakes are — and have been for a long time — the movement’s “polar bears.”