What is the 1977 Transit Pipelines Treaty?

What is the 1977 Transit Pipelines Treaty?

by | Jun 19, 2023 | 6 comments

[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.]

Since 2021, articles and discussions of Line 5 have begun to reference an obscure treaty between the United States and Canada from 1977, which the Canadian government formally invoked to prevent a shutdown of the pipeline. Yet despite the frequent mentions of this treaty—especially recently, as the United States and Canada enter their third round of negotiations for it—news reports have had little to say about its background beyond: 1) that it was formed in 1977; 2) that it was designed to keep hydrocarbons moving through pipelines like Line 5; and 3) that it supposedly supersedes the state lawsuits facing Enbridge. In other words, detailed information in public forums about this treaty is sparse. Because of its apparent importance in the Shut Down Line 5 battle, knowing the history of the treaty and why it is being invoked—wrongly, I’d argue—will be helpful in understanding the future legal and political moves the US and Canada make as they address Line 5.

The goal of this post is to address the following questions: What is the 1977 Transit Pipelines Treaty and why was it formed? Why is it relevant to Line 5? What does it say and what are its implications? And perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to invoke a fifty year old treaty that was created to facilitate the flow of hydrocarbons when we are now in the midst of a climate emergency that calls for rapid decarbonization? Or put more simply, what is at stake?

The History of the 1977 Transit Pipelines Treaty

The not-so-well-documented history of the treaty begins with the 1973 Arab oil embargo, in which “Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an embargo against the United States in retaliation for the U.S. decision to re-supply the Israeli military.” Naturally, given the United States’s dependence on foreign oil, the embargo caused a period of energy instability in the US, sending oil prices skyrocketing per barrel and shrinking the United States’s domestic reserves. This ironically caused the US to double down on their dependence on imported oil, scrambling to negotiate with OPEC leaders to end the embargo as soon as possible. During this time, the Nixon administration also organized “Project Independence,” an initiative that aimed for the US to become self-sufficient in terms of energy while also “engag[ing] in intensive diplomatic efforts among its allies, promoting a consumers’ union that would provide strategic depth and a consumers’ cartel to control oil pricing.”

Such energy-based diplomatic efforts would come to fruition with a change in administration. On March 30th, 1977, President Jimmy Carter sent a message to the Senate detailing an agreement made between the US and Canadian governments, led then by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, that would pave the way for a natural gas pipeline to cross between the US and Canadian borders: “The Agreement negotiated … provides reciprocal protection against interruption in the flow of hydrocarbons in transit, and against discriminatory taxation,” President Carter wrote, “The Agreement is applicable both to existing and future pipelines transiting the United States and to future pipelines transiting Canada.” As President Carter’s message indicates, the big picture of the Transit Pipelines Treaty is that no public official from either country “shall institute any measures … which are intended to, or which would have the effect of, impeding, diverting, redirecting or interfering with” the flow of hydrocarbons between the countries, with such behavior resulting in arbitration.

For almost fifty years since the treaty’s creation, it has not entered the limelight—except for a brief stint in 2009—until the legal battles between Michigan and Enbridge started to become more intense. Seeing a serious possibility of Michigan gaining ground in their suit, the current Trudeau administration submitted an amicus curiae brief into the The State of Michigan v, Enbridge Energy case, mentioning the treaty’s purpose and their intention to invoke it if need be. In October of 2021, Trudeau formally invoked the treaty, allowing Canada to deal directly with the federal government, thus bypassing Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel’s lawsuits against Enbridge. Specifically, Canada referenced Article IX of the treaty, which states that “Any dispute between the Parties regarding the interpretation, application, or operation of the Agreement shall, so far as possible, be settled by negotiation between them,” or by arbitration if negotiations do not settle the dispute.

Notable Articles in the Treaty and the Role in the Line 5 Debate

Though Article IX was referenced by Canada for taking the dispute to the federal level, other parts of the treaty are worth looking at as well. For example, I quoted from Article II above when discussing the main point of the treaty: “No public authority in the territory of either Party shall institute any measures, other than those provided for in Article V, which are intended to, or which would have the effect of, impeding, diverting, redirecting or interfering with in any way the transmission of hydrocarbons in transit.” Notable here is the fact that “no public authority” may interfere with the flow of hydrocarbons. In their amicus brief, Canada explicitly cites Governor Whitmer and the court involved in the Michigan v. Enbridge suit who would enforce her shutdown of Line 5 as those public authorities. However, the exception to Article II lies in Article V of the treaty, which stipulates that “in the event of an actual or threatened natural disaster, an operating emergency, or other demonstrable need temporarily to reduce or stop for safety or technical reasons “the pipeline’s flow of hydrocarbons “may be temporarily reduced or stopped in the interest of sound pipeline management and operational efficiency.”

Whitmer’s revocation of the 1953 easement is based on Enbridge violating its terms, for example by ignoring structural issues in the pipeline. Those terms are also relevant to Article V, which states that the flow of hydrocarbons may be halted “in the interest of sound pipeline management” by regulatory authorities in the territory that a “disaster, emergency, or other demonstrable need occurs.” On the other hand, provision 3 of Article V says that the party halting the flow of hydrocarbons “shall not unnecessarily delay or cause delay in the expeditious restoration of normal pipeline operations,” which Canada argues Michigan is doing.

Opponents of Line 5 have also pointed to Article IV of the treaty, which says “the transmission of hydrocarbons… shall be subject to regulations by the appropriate governmental authorities.” This provision clearly acknowledges that the treaty does not exempt cross-border pipelines from complying with local, state, and federal regulations and explicitly recognizes the authority of states (like Michigan).

while the best time to act on Line 5 may have been ten years ago, the second best time is now

The final article of the treaty notably details that it “shall remain in force for an initial period of thirty-five years,” but that after those thirty-five years, either nation can dissolve the treaty as long as they give ten years notice to the other party. If this doesn’t happen, the treaty will remain until a side does provide notice. This built-in expiration date indicates that those who organized the treaty recognized even then that the conditions surrounding the agreement might eventually change—it was plainly not meant to be fixed and permanent in its original form. And in fact, conditions have changed. At this point in time the Line 5 movement is over ten years old. Perhaps if the federal government had taken the threat of Line 5 seriously—especially after Enbridge’s disastrous Line 6B spill into the Kalamazoo River—the US could have given ten years notice to opt out of the treaty, and we could have avoided the geopolitical and legal battles we are in now. But while the best time to act on Line 5 may have been ten years ago, the second best time is now. The United States has the power to move against this treaty. It’s tempting to say the US could even just violate it; it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done so.

Areas of Contention Related to the Treaty

As we’ve begun to see, there are many debates involving the Transit Pipelines Treaty. The first is the aforementioned issues with Articles IV and V of the treaty—Michigan believes they are within their right in terms of ending Enbridge’s easement and Article V’s stoppage clause, but Canada argues that Michigan is unnecessarily delaying the flow of hydrocarbons, and that Enbridge has solved Michigan’s complaints about the damages to the pipeline. Governor Whitmer and protestors have argued that since Michigan is acting in line with the treaty, the invocation of it is a “delaying tactic.”

Other debates arise from whom the treaty does and does not include. Several Tribes and First Nations have spoken out against Line 5, including the Bay Mills Indian Community, who permanently banished Enbridge and Line 5 from their lands; the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians; the Bad River Band, who are in ongoing legal proceedings with Enbridge; the Anishinabek Nation; and ten other federally recognized Nations in Michigan; among others. Members of these Tribal and First Nations have argued that both Line 5 and the Transit Pipelines Treaty explicitly violates their treaty rights: the US is violating the 1836 Treaty of Washington and Canada is violating An Act Respecting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Justin (left) and Pierre Trudeau

As sovereign nations, these Tribes and First Nations argue that they are excluded from the 1977 Treaty and should be included in diplomatic negotiations, since Line 5 trespasses on their lands and threatens their waterways; they have taken their appeal to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Of course, despite lip-service both the US and Canada to acknowledge their histories of settler-colonialism, indigenous groups are still being disadvantaged by settler-colonial epistemologies favoring the economy over sovereignty when it comes to Line 5. In Canada’s case in particular, on one hand Prime Minister Trudeau funds Indigenous-led conservation initiatives, but on the other hand he continues to uphold the legislative decisions his father’s administration made almost fifty years ago—a treaty that specifically violates indigenous treaty rights and has very publicly been rebuked by Tribal and First Nations of the Great Lakes region. As we have seen time and time again, North American settlers just cannot shake their habit of committing settler-colonial violence in pursuit of capital gain and maintaining their “status quo.”

If the Treaty is Upheld—What’s at Risk

As this point about ongoing settler-colonial dispossession suggests, if the 1977 Transit Pipelines Treaty is upheld, it can have horrible implications not only for indigenous sovereignty, but also for the possibility of shuttering transnational pipelines. As cultural critic Imre Szeman explains, pipelines do not function as a form of “statecraft”—that is, energy transport is not something that the US government operates only within the US with its own resources. Instead, pipelines are a form of “extrastatecraft,” with the US supporting private companies and other countries to fuel its energy needs—in this case, using Enbridge pipelines to get their oil. Szeman discusses how the “power of extrastatecraft” lies in its normalcy in our culture. According to this view, the fact that we’re putting all of our trust in Enbridge doesn’t matter, because Enrbidge is just solving our problem of energy transport. Thus, this form of extrastatecraft is “seen as [a] neutral, rational, and technical [solution] to modern problems, and so are seen, too, as devoid of political interest or impact.”

However, time and time again Enbridge and Line 5 have proven they need supervision and to be held accountable. Over its lifespan, the pipeline has leaked over 33 times, accumulating more and more damage over time, with little to no action from Enbridge. We can no longer let Enbridge and pipelines projects in general operate as extrastatecraft, allowing them to lay low despite disaster after disaster and ongoing threats to indigenous lands and waterways. If the 1977 Transit Pipelines Treaty is honored by the Biden administration, we will have no choice but to maintain the status quo of leaks and ruin, and Line 5—among other transnational pipelines—will not be stopped until a rupture occurs.

Why are we holding onto the pipelines and politics of nearly 50 years ago?

Is it worth it? Why are we holding onto the pipelines and politics of nearly 50 years ago when our social, cultural, technological, and obviously environmental climates have progressed past the need for these measures? While Enbridge and oil barons might be trying to convince us that we’re in the same age of energy insecurity as the ‘70s, we should know better by now that we need to move away from oil dependence and move towards cleaner and greener energy and different ways of being.

It’s hard to say what the next steps are at this point, but now that the treaty has been invoked, the most important steps seem to lie with the federal government. The Biden administration has yet to step in on the Line 5 controversy, though recently they faced off with the oil industry in a similar case in Colorado. Supporters of shutting down Line 5 hope that due to the similarities between the cases, President Biden may move in favor of revoking the presidential permit for Line 5, but this is still up in the air. Either way, our best point of leverage is at the federal government level. If we can urge the Biden administration to act on Line 5, we might see serious progress in the dismantling of petroculture, the preservation of the Great Lakes and other areas impacted by Line 5, and the acknowledgement of indigenous sovereignty and treaty rights. The United States has the power to start this shift away from oil dependence by putting their policy where their mouth is and starting the process of moving against—and giving notice to pull out of—this outdated treaty.

 

Aesthetics and the Dark Gratifications of Petroculture

Aesthetics and the Dark Gratifications of Petroculture

by | Jun 14, 2023 | 6 comments

[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.]

Lying beneath the surface of our wondrous Great Lakes is a pipeline that extends for 645 miles across Wisconsin and Michigan, transporting thousands of barrels of oil and gas every day. The pipeline threatens to cause tremendous damage to our Great Lakes. This danger exists, and can cease to exist, because of our choices. Us. But the question that we have to confront is this:

Why are we only interested in the things that benefit us and overlooking the negative consequences that come with them?

How is it that we find pleasure in the things that blind us from reality? The comfortable parts of our lives that remove us from our immediate environment, like driving to another state, pumping gas after an exhausting day at work, or buying that expensive makeup palette one has been fervently awaiting to purchase, only glorifying the beautiful exterior and aestheticizing our experiences? These are the kind of questions that we rarely ask ourselves because well, let’s face it…why even burden ourselves with such inconvenient thoughts? But, that is the problem. In order to understand the matters that sustain our existence, we must also pore over those concealed issues that play a part in the downfall of our planet, and eventually our same existence.

The problem in our vicinity, in our wake, is what scholars call petroculture. It is a term that describes the global culture that has emerged from the dependence on and consumption of fossil fuels, specifically oil. It is through the extraction and circulation of petroleum that humans gain access to daily essentials that include modern transportation, feminine cosmetics, cleaning products, medicine, clothing— in a word: everything. Yet, we are so entangled in all these materials, we cannot even comprehend their destruction on the world around us. We are too caught up in their aesthetic, their appeasements.

We are bound to the aesthetics of petroculture—an aesthetic that tugs on human fantasy and desire. Aesthetics in this sense is not a representation, but an experience that produces the surrounding conditions of our everyday lives, like our sense of speed and progress. Aesthetics is about how our mind and body become conditioned to what it means to be modern. We become more in tune with sensorial experiences–how clean a road looks, how fast an ordered package arrives in the mail, and how soft and cozy a sweater feels when touching it. These experiences become a language of understanding for us.

We are bound to the aesthetics of petroculture

The infrastructure of fossil fuels promotes petrocultural aesthetics. Infrastructure not only enables the movement of goods and people but also bridges the gap between time and space and reshapes the meaning of autonomy and freedom. As a result, citizens become not only materially dependent on fossil fuels but also find them infused into their norms and values to the point where they becomes their only source of emotional response and ways of understanding. So how can we break away from the one thing that has come to define our ideologies and conduct? What is at issue as a result of those attachments? Well, literally everything that we know.

Enbridge has continually defended the operation of Line 5 by calling it a piece of “critical infrastructure.” But critical for whom? For Indigenous people whose land has been invaded by an existential threat and their natural resources of sustainability jeopardized? Or for the rest of us? Those of us who have been conditioned to believe that our needs supersede everyone else’s? That oil has to exist if we want to maintain a life of comfort and convenience? Whether it is us or Indigenous peoples, we are all expendable in the eyes of Enbridge, mere targets they can toy with as long as their pockets are filled and their intentions fulfilled.

As the expansion of oil and gas networks continues to dominate our everyday lives, they also operate as forms of settler colonialism, facilitating colonial principles of settler domination over Native lands. As the Tlingit scholar Anne Spice has argued, the railroads that enabled westward expansion onto Indigenous lands in the nineteenth-century were colonial projects that not only transported capital and settlers to the West, they also replaced pre-existing Indigenous infrastructures and further concealed the historical and cultural presence of Indigenous peoples. Spice shows how the concept of modernity and “modern” infrastructure has not only come to refer to the “brand-new” and the contemporary but also to the removal of the “non modern,” or more appropriately, the removal and negating of Indigenous “critical infrastructure” in their own historical spaces. By referring to Line 5 as “critical infrastructure,”—that is, critical for settlers– Enbridge is erasing Indigenous narratives of critical infrastructure; theirs is the clean drinking water while Enbridge’s is the pipeline that is infecting their waters.

Thus, like other modern infrastructures, pipelines represent the disruption of Indigenous sovereignty and naturalize the domination of petroculture; pipelines are a link between the dispossession of Native territory and the omnipresence of the oil industry. In the words of anthropologist Kregg Hetherington: “To behold something as infrastructure is to suspend that thing’s present as the future’s necessary past, the tense we call the “Future Perfect” (5). In this kind of linear thinking, Indigenous peoples are removed from the emerging future and, in turn, a way is paved for different kinds of subjects who are more acquiescent to the investments made by their society and who wish to be included in the future promised by infrastructure. With Line 5, we are seeing that scenario play out in real life. Indigenous people are stripped of their resources and homeland and forced to live in constant disturbance by intrusions beyond their control. Last month, for example, an emergency filing was made by the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa in Wisconsin in an attempt to shut down Line 5 due to ongoing flooding and erosion near the pipeline.

We learn of all these troubling matters regarding the world of petroculture and its colonial and technological invasion and, yet we struggle to find the willpower to find a solution that unshackles us from the bounds of extractive capitalism. That’s because we are shaped by the very thing that damages our environment. It is difficult to extract ourselves from the evolutionary thinking of modern infrastructure because its promises are what attracts us. Infrastructures harness a kind of power so compelling that it obscures reality and leaves us in a circle of doom: infrastructures create change, and through change, they produce historical and cultural advancements, and through those advancements, we gain autonomy, and repeat. They offer a feeling of hope and a sense of grounding in that one feels control over one’s own movements.

we are shaped by the very thing that damages our environment

We view pipelines in the same way. If pipelines can produce a fruitful economy and allow for the movement of exchange, why should we put a stop to that? Despite being material things, oil and oil pipelines vivify abstractions like freedom, accessibility, autonomy, and pleasure. Commodities and objects are encoded with certain qualities that come to oversee one’s emotional responses and senses of pride, anger, frustration, and pleasure. According to theorist Brian Larkin, such experiences “come to represent the possibility of being modern, of having a future, or the foreclosing of that possibility and a resulting experience of abjection” (333). It is like a game of inculcation that preys on people’s desires and imagination.

But while we have been conditioned to think that our investments and dependence upon oil and oil infrastructure have made our lives easier, the question is, at the expense of whom? At the expense of those whose history has been replaced and removed by petroculture, and, realistically, by us.

As our economy continues to steep itself in the casks of oil culture, it has become harder and harder to imagine a world beyond the nets of capitalism. It seems impossible to extricate ourselves from petroculture and the notion that ‘it is making my life easier, so why should I try to complicate it by involving myself in things that are beyond my control?’ We are victims of a culture that promised to nurture our needs and supposedly gave us “autonomy” in choosing what is best for us. But that autonomy is illusory. We have become so accustomed to the ease of petroculture that we cannot bear to see the blazing inferno below the sheets. It is like we know of the monster that exists in the closet; we just don’t want to open that door and face its rebuke.

This is why Line 5 continues to be an issue. How can we separate ourselves from the monster that has made our life easier?

But ask yourself this: where are the pleasures and fantasies of petroculture leading us? Are we—are all of us– really living as comfortably as we like to believe? Although we cannot dwell on the past or change its results, we can do better for the future. Today’s present regards Line 5. That present now has to be challenged in order to become “the future’s necessary past,” as Hetherington puts it. We can challenge infrastrucure’s “future perfect” tense by reclaiming what was ours and connecting with our past and present to protect our water and our future.

If you think about it, we are an indispensable part of Enbridge’s continued enterprise; they need us to keep buying into their ventures and to perpetuate the capitalist system that underpins petroculture. They like to make us think that we are disposable so they can keep us under their thumb, but we possess much larger power than they would like to think.

Watching the world burn before your eyes because you were simply unaware of the consequences is understandable but choosing to be oblivious is jus self-destructive.

So please do your part because our critical infrastructure depends on you.

 

 

Life as We Live it Now is the Problem

Life as We Live it Now is the Problem

by | Jun 9, 2023 | 6 comments

[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.]

Three feet of water might reach just your knees, but three feet of water can kill you. Flooding, especially more frequent flooding, can do worse. Dying from drowning is one of those things you probably don’t think will ever happen to you, but it happens to someone, and the climate crisis is kind of the same, except it’s happening to everyone. Right now. I’m not trying to scare you or shame you, but I do want to think about this movement with you. Okay?

How do you feel about the climate crisis? About Line 5? I’m wondering if it makes a difference if I tell you that they are intertwined. Line 5 is a 645-mile oil pipeline in the Enbridge Lakehead System, a long, underwater snake transporting up to 540,000 barrels of oil (light crude oil, light synthetic crude, and natural gas liquids which get refined into propane) every day. It does this through a steel pipe running through water, including the Great Lakes. Steel might make it sound safe, but Enbridge has a history of oil spills, including one in Michigan. In 2010, Enbridge’s Line 6B pipe ruptured and pushed over 800,000 gallons of thick, dangerous oil into the Kalamazoo River where it floated and sank for over 17 hours before anyone even knew what was going on. The people working at Enbridge let it sit there for almost a day. This meant that because of outdated pipelines and a lack of concern from Enbridge, an entire community was damaged. People nauseously smelt the oil, unsure of what was happening, finally finding out they were living next to this horrifying mess. Hundreds of homes and businesses had to be evacuated for safety purposes, and hydrocarbons poisoned the air.

Enbridge wants to maintain the status quo.

To try and rectify instances of their pipes splitting open, Enbridge wants to slide a new pipeline through a concrete tunnel, built below the lakebed in the Straits of Mackinac. The fish and other animals that call the freshwater home will pass the construction as it’s going on, pass the tunnel once it’s built, and have to accept this as their new normal in their own lives. Enbridge says this will allow us to maintain our oil use while better protecting our land. It can’t though. Protect anything. With 36% of global energy being devoted to buildings and 8% of global emissions alone going to cement creation, simply building it directly impacts the climate, increasing dangerous greenhouse gas numbers. To do as Enbridge proposes, the construction and operation of the proposed pipeline would lead to an annual increase of about 27 million metric tons CO2e in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Enbridge wants to maintain the status quo though. What I mean by this is that giving up the pipeline isn’t on the table for them. They want to keep an oil pipeline, use construction to create more damage that they claim provides safety and protection, all to secure life as we live it now. They say, “Life takes energy.” They say Line 5 “powers… the cars buses, boats, and trucks that keep Michiganders on the go.” But maybe we don’t have to always be “on the go.” Enbridge does not even consider that creating a new way of living, without this pipeline and oil all together, could be an even better approach.

Life as we live it now is the problem. By producing extensive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions that blanket the Earth, we are trapping heat, raising the global temperature, and messing with other factors that impact Earth’s environment as we know it. One alteration being  increased, extreme floods. Fort Lauderdale, Florida recently had a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event that left it in an emergency, drowning in the rainiest day of its history. Sydney, Australia residents also recently evacuated as they faced their worst round of floods in less than a year and a half. Detroit and other cities (like Fishtown, for example) have too been damaged by increased flooding over the last decade. These floods, and so many others around the world like them, damage crops and public health. They have also triggered the failure of existing structures like damns in Midland, Michigan.

“Drought”, original by arbyreed, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Floods have become more common as sea levels have risen. It’s especially bad in areas that are pumping oil, gas, and drinking water where these extractions collapse the land – the land is shrinking. In 2021, University of Michigan experienced a massive flood, ruining several buildings. Their fieldhouse’s hardwood floor was completely destroyed. The university saw three 100-year storms over eight years so the campus rebuilt their fieldhouse once more with added flood barriers to accommodate expected future flooding.

Other areas of the world are having the opposite problem, facing extreme droughts. When groundwater gets used up and when snow melts too early, water moves too quickly which means the ground dries and becomes thirsty. All of this impacts land that is now nearly uninhabitable.

So what does this mean? It means we’re seeing traumatic environmental changes. These changes are because of carbon released in the atmosphere, trapped and increasing. It means that anything we do to add to that number is a big deal. Line 5, in addition to threatening the Great Lakes with impending spills, will also continue to contribute to the climate crisisour Earth and each of our individual worlds are suffering from in other ways.

It seems like you might have some concern about a world like this, an environment that feels apocalyptic. Images of destruction. Was there a time in your life where you felt differently? Like the world wasn’t burning or drowning around you? I’d love to hear about it. Why didn’t it feel like a problem then?

“CA-Wildfire-15”, original by Jeff Head, licensed under CC BY 2.0

“Flood damage – Houghton, MI – 2018”, original by Chris857, licensed under CC BY 2.0

For me, I think about a time when I was maybe six. We were a little past winter in Michigan here but not yet summer and the daffodils had just bloomed. Yellow sprouts infused my family’s flower box, morning shade cast across our yard, and I rode my tiny bicycle up and down the street with the wind leaning into me. All promises. I didn’t care about anything. I will say that time has caught up to me: I care about paying my bills on time, calling my grandmother on the way home from work, and taking the trash that’s overflowing with banana peels, some of my husband’s tissues, and the tortilla chip bag out. Things are different from that spring in the 90s. I’m able to recognize the significance of ‘now’ though and the precious role I have in this moment’s history, so even though my responsibilities are different, when I reflect on it all, I think about how caring about nothing might not be as important.

Surprisingly, the time that I don’t feel so hopeless about the world is now. I’m with you; I can see the water spinning along the roads, the leaves and tree branches floating down the stream, the people sweaty and red from worry about their soaking basements. I can see the dusty ground, dry bark, and a heat unbearable. But when I close my eyes, I can see a clear space: unfreckled skies, rinsed waves, and communities of people we’ve chosen to live near, to support one another. To rebuild our lives. Can you see it?

One strategy for tackling climate change is carbon neutrality, which means equalizing greenhouse gas emissions through equal absorption. By taking steps to enforce activities that are carbon neutral, all of this extra fuel that’s creating the climate crisis might be lowered. Some institutions that are taking steps toward carbon neutrality include the American Institute of Architects (AIA) which has called for companies to embody the AIA 2030 Commitment which offers standards and steps to reach net zero emissions in the built environment. The University of Michigan and many other schools at both K-12 and the university level have also laid out carbon neutrality goals that will impact climate action. This includes deadlines to accomplish things like reducing greenhouse gas emissions from their purchased electricity, eliminating campus emissions, and fostering a just, university-wide culture of sustainability. Even further, the state of Michigan has stepped up to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across its economy in spaces like energy, transportation, buildings, and housing, with the plan to make these areas of the state carbon neutral by 2025! These changes look like eliminating coal plants and carbon grids, new housing appliances becoming completely electric, transportation made up of vehicles with low or zero emission, and endorsing electric buses and expanding public transportation.

I’m thinking about how steps like these will create an impact, but are they enough? Let’s push our thinking and imagine further. I want you to picture with me a world where you and I are comfortable in the quiet and slowness. Hear that? A few chirps. Feel the sun-skin. A soft breeze. There isn’t much to do by way of going or using. This might not be something we’d enjoy now, but growth comes with practice, right? I mean, think about yourself before you started playing basketball, or cooking meals, or drawing. Before you understood mathematical equations, gardening techniques, or fixing cars. Before you started communicating with people: the power of language is mind-blowing! And you can do that! Right now is just the time period before you start reconnecting with the Earth.

“Hands of a Man and Woman Reaching Toward Each Other”, original by Tony Frost, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Imagine a world where we don’t need to power all of these machines, but we’re strong and capable of working with our environments to support ourselves and the people around us. It seems wild – a life completely different from the one you might live now, but that’s the point. Years ago, scenes of floods and wildfires and thirsty, dried soil among disappearing land and suffering people also may have seemed completely different from the life you live now, but that’s our reality. Why can’t we change it ourselves, into something better?

Line 5 is the status quo – but the status quo isn’t working for us anymore. It can’t. Line 5 is one of many parts of a problem that hurts us, the nature that surrounds us, and the future. It’s emblematic of our clinging to a way of life that is destructive. This clinging to the way things are now though means hanging onto anxiety, hanging onto harm. We don’t have to continue living with this type of worry.

I asked you earlier how you felt about the climate crisis and about Line 5, and then I asked you to rate these feelings on a scale of 1 to 10, and why that number you assigned to your feelings felt right. I’m going to ask you one more time now:

How do you feel about the world’s climate crisis? About Line 5?

 

New Series: How to Know About Line 5

New Series: How to Know About Line 5

by | May 7, 2023 | 2 comments

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? 

What can we learn by thinking critically about how we know Line 5?

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

 

Join Us at the Michigan Climate Summit, June 2!

Join Us at the Michigan Climate Summit, June 2!

by | May 2, 2023 | 0 comments

You may have seen that last week I unveiled the Line 5 Syllabus— a resource for anyone who wants to understand the matter in its most complex and historical dimensions. Thanks to everyone who took a look.

I mention this because you can bet that Line 5 will be a topic of conversation one month from today when people from around the state convene for the annual Michigan Climate Action Network’s Climate Summit. I’m especially excited that this year’s summit will be hosted by my very own Oakland University. I can tell you with certainty it’s going to be fun and exciting– much more that dry policy discussions.

The theme for this year’s Summit “Climate S.O.S”.: an opportunity for “Sharing Our Stories” amid Michigan’s moment for the movement. So in addition to the science and policy panels, the summit promises more intimate interactions, featuring the arts, culture, and healing. The idea is to build camaraderie and catalyze the emotional engagement needed to spark social action toward solutions to today’s crisis.

In fact, here’s a little sneak preview: if you attend this year’s summit, along with lots of other arts, you can see the sixteen-foot whale my students made in our “Literature and Environment” course this semester. His name is Ishwhale and he is currently on display in the Kresge Library. But he’ll migrate over to the Oakland Center for the summit.

And if that’s not enough, to kick things off we’re holding a cool storytelling event the night before at the Crowfoot Ballroom in Pontiac. It should be fun as well!

 

I hope you’ll join us; I’d love to meet some new folks in person. You can register here. Please do! 

 

The Line 5 Syllabus

The Line 5 Syllabus

by | Apr 28, 2023 | 2 comments

This public syllabus started out modestly, as a short syllabus for the Summer course I’m teaching on Literature and Social Engagement. I wanted to teach a course that was rooted in local and regional social concerns and chose to focus, which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, on the Line 5 movement. But as I began to pull together that syllabus (which you can see here), it just kept growing and became far too extensive for a short 7 week course.

But I couldn’t let it go. So I took inspiration from the amazing Standing Rock Syllabus, assembled some years ago by a collective of indigenous scholars, and decided to make a public version, which I’m calling “The Line 5 Syllabus.” But it should really be called a Line 5 syllabus, since it is hardly, nor is meant to be, either definitive or exhaustive. In fact, the version here (believe it or not) is itself pared down. Perhaps I’ll yet let it grow and develop. If you have comments or suggestions, I’m happy to receive them.

At any rate, the basic premise here is that it’s one thing to know the facts of the Line 5 matter, but it’s quite another thing to understand its deeper origins and more profound implications. These readings therefore aim to situate Line 5 in a handful of much larger contexts, contexts that often don’t get as much attention as they might (or should) in public debates. Or, to the extent that they do get some attention, they are not always (perhaps of necessity, given the forums in which such debates ordinarily play out) as historically informed or theoretically nuanced as they might otherwise be. I’ve also obviously emphasized a set of questions that I think are especially important. Which is not to say that those issues that do tend to dominate the Line 5 debate– jobs, “energy security,” gas prices and tourism, pipeline safety, engineering standards, and state vs. federal authority, for example– aren’t important. But it is to say that those matters can’t be– our ought not to be– divorced from broader ethico-historical questions involving climate change, indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, and forms of resistance. I’ve sought to highlight and illuminate those latter questions here, aiming to provoke by drawing upon the insights of scholars from across disciplines (literary studies, history, anthropology, geography, sociology, for instance) as well as from literary artists and others. I think they have much to teach.

But having said that, I should also add that over the past decade or so that I’ve been thinking and writing and reading about and working against that rickety pipeline in the Straits, I’ve learned from many teachers myself: journalists, lawyers, advocates, activists, water protectors, ordinary citizens, and many others, I hope this syllabus, whether you read any of it or not, will be taken as a gesture of solidarity.

A final point: I can imagine some readers who might wonder where the Enbridge perspective is in this syllabus. To that I would only reply that the Enbridge perspective is the very air we breath– both literally and figuratively. For more on this point, see the “Petroculture” section.

Note: this is still a bit of a work in progress. I have linked to as many files as possible. In the coming weeks I’ll try to link to the rest. (If you encounter difficulties, please let me know.)

I. Background: The Great Lakes, the Kalamazoo River, & the Straits

II. The Big Picture: Climate Change, Climate Justice, Settler Colonialism, & Indigenous Sovereignty

Climate Change

Indigenous Sovereignty

III. Petroculture

IV. Crossings: the Border & Infrastructure

V. The Other End of the Line: Sarnia, Detroit, Plastic, Pollution, & Environmental Justice

Sarnia

Detroit

VI. Resistance

Additional Resources:

Enbridge Fined Again, Again.

Enbridge Fined Again, Again.

by | Oct 17, 2022 | 0 comments

Look, I’ve written this same post I don’t know how many times, so I won’t belabor it. But what’s the point of a system that pretends to hold corporations accountable without ever holding them accountable. I mean, I appreciate that the DNR Commissioner wants to pretend like this is some hard-ass action, but let’s get real. I don’t even have the patience to link to all the times I’ve linked to similar situations. It’s all in these archives and it’s a joke. Sigh.

Here’s the story: https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/enbridge-to-pay-millions-in-fines-for-line-3-water-quality-violations-aquifer-breaches/

 

Enbridge Does Not Learn from Its Mistakes

Enbridge Does Not Learn from Its Mistakes

by | Sep 19, 2022 | 2 comments

Do you get déjà vu?

Among the very first assignments I gave myself when I started this blog more than ten years ago was to read and draw some lessons from the comprehensive report released in July 2012 by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) after its investigation into the causes of the 2010 Enbridge oil spill in Marshall, Michigan. (You can read the three-part series here.) At the time, the report made a lot of headlines, not least because of the scathing comments of then-NTSB chairwoman Debbie Hersman, who likened Enbridge’s handling of the spill to the “Keystone Kops.”

Last month, almost exactly ten years after the Marshall report, the NTSB issued another one: the results of their investigation into the horrific 2019 Enbridge gas pipeline explosion in Danville, Ky. The rupture of the 30-inch Line 15 pipeline killed one person, injured 6 others, and caused property damage and the evacuation of people from nearby homes.

The new report is very important, not least because of matters here in Michigan, where Enbridge is trying to convince the Public Service Commission that they can be trusted to build a billion dollar tunnel to house a new Line 5), but also because of matters in Wisconsin, where the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians is trying, with only partial success, to stop Enbridge from trespassing on tribal land, and matters in Minnesota, where the effects of Enbridge’s recklessness while constructing Line 3 are still not entirely known.

But the report is also important because of what it makes stunningly, if unsurprisingly, clear about Enbridge: that they have hardly changed at all since the last NTSB report. In what follows, I’ll provide some details about the new report, which I’ve read carefully in full. But if you just want the the tl;dr version, it basically amounts to this: “oops, we did it again.”

What makes this especially appalling is the fact that Enbridge has essentially been on a decades long campaign to convince us all that the Marshall spill was a come-to-Jesus moment for the company, that following that calamity, they came to see the light, underwent an almost religious conversion emblematized by the creepy iconography they expect their employees to wear as a reminder of their sinful past.

Their public displays of repentance began almost immediately after the 2012 report, as I pointed out at the time. They’ve continued ever since. Here, for example, is Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy two years ago in a report occasioned by the ten-year anniversary of the Marshall spill:

The result of the spill in Marshall is a company with increased awareness of safety and focused attention on proactive measures to maintain safe operation. Enbridge transformed itself to prevent a similar incident from happening in the future.

But the new NTSB report reveals these pious displays as a hollow sham, a kind of corporate televenagelism designed to dupe the credulous. It’s a lot like the link on the Enbridge website about “What’s Changed Since Marshall”: a road to nowhere.

for anyone familiar with the report on the Marshall spill, the Kentucky findings will be disturbingly familiar

All of which is to say that for anyone familiar with the report on the Marshall spill, the Kentucky findings will be disturbingly familiar. In both cases, Enbridge knew about defects in their pipeline years earlier but failed to take mitigating action. Also in both cases, Enbridge had in place procedures and protocols in place to help them respond in a timely way to a rupture, but they failed to follow those procedures. It’s the same old situation.

As a result, the new report at times seems practically to be copy-and-pasted from the 2012 one.  In the older report, NTSB takes Enbridge to task for “deficiencies” in its integrity management program (the company’s procedures and practices for ensuring the safety and integrity of the pipeline), describing the “inadequacy” of Enbridge’s program to “accurately assess and remediate” known defects in Line 6B. The new report finds that a contributing factor to the Kentucky rupture was, that’s right, “Enbridge’s integrity management program, which did not accurately assess the integrity of” Line 15.

More specifically, the new report shows, Enbridge failed to “estimate the risk from interacting threats” just as, in 2010, they failed to account “for uncertainties associated with the data, tool, or interactions between cracks and corrosion.” In both cases, Enbridge generated interpretations of data gained from its in-line inspections that permitted them to keep operating pipelines with known problems. “After the Marshall accident,” the 2012 report says, “Enbridge’s inspection contractors reexamined [previous] in-line inspection data and determined that the features were misclassified.” Similarly, in the new report the NTSB determines that “insufficient data were available to support Enbridge’s classification of the threat” of defects in Line 15 as low. In other words, Enbridge “underestimated the risks” of the defects in Line 15 before 2019, just as a decade earlier they “chose a less-than-conservative approach” to the risks posed by the known defects in Line 6B.

Equally troubling, if not more so, are the operational failures outlined by the two reports.

Equally troubling, if not more so, are the operational failures outlined by the two reports. As I mentioned above, the 2012 report describes in ugly detail Enbridge’s “tolerance for procedural deviance,” Enbridge’s disregard for its own safety protocols and procedures. “Inadequate training of control center personnel,” the 2012 report found, “allowed the rupture to remain undetected for 17 hours and through two startups of the pipeline.

The new report details a similar pattern. For example, just a few months before the terrible Kentucky explosion, one of its local operators—the same operator on duty the day of the rupture– didn’t know what actions to take in the event of a shut-down emergency. And yet, the report reveals, Enbridge took no steps to teach or retrain the employee. Thus, the NTSB concludes, “had Enbridge Inc. disqualified, requalified, or provided remedial training to the Danville compressor station operator after he displayed a fundamental lack of knowledge during the May 8, 2019, emergency shutdown, the operator’s closure of [a valve] during the August 1, 2019, rupture may not have been delayed, potentially reducing the volume of gas released.”

So way back in that series of posts from 2012, I asked: does Enbridge learn from its mistakes? At that time, I was skeptical but willing to give them a chance. But now, after ten full years spent exhaustively detailing example after example of the same mistakes, misrepresentations, and shenanigans, and after reading yet another scathing NTSB report, I know the answer all too well.

The far more urgent questions now are whether the judges in the pending Line 5 cases know it, whether the Army Corps of Engineers knows it, whether the Michigan Public Service Commissioners know it. And if they do, how are they going to act on that knowledge?

 

Enbridge Trespassing, Rules Federal Judge

Enbridge Trespassing, Rules Federal Judge

by | Sep 8, 2022 | 1 comment

I’m on vacation this week, enjoying the Lake Michigan paradise so many of us are working to protect. For that reason, I don’t have time to provide any real analysis here. But I do want to note that major news has come from federal court in Wisconsin: a judge has rule that Enbridge has indeed been trespassing on land of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians.

This is a very important decision, not least for its recognition of tribal sovereignty. The judge did not go so far as to order the immediate shut down of the line (as, in my opinion, he should have). But he did grant the Band’s claims of unjust enrichment– meaning Enbridge will have to pay for their trespass.

This is big, big news and, I think, of no small significance to the State of Michigan’s case against Enbridge and Line 5. I’ll try to expand on that next week if time allows. But the important thing is that this ruling, finally, shows proper respect to the authority and sovereignty of the Bad River Band.

News here. And here is the full text of the ruling. 

The New Worst Thing Enbridge Has Ever Done

The New Worst Thing Enbridge Has Ever Done

by | Sep 1, 2022 | 3 comments

Shameful. Reprehensible. Disgusting. Settler colonialism in action, 2022-style.

A year or so ago, I wrote about Enbridge’s cheap pr stunt aimed at sowing division among tribal members. At the time, I said it was probably the worst thing they’d ever done. But this week, they called in their pals from the Canadian government who said, “hold my beer!” 

What did they do? Well, in a flagrant attempt to disregard– no, it’s worse than that, to legally destroy– the sovereign authority of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians, Canada has tried to invoke that 1977 pipeline treaty in the Bad River Band case. For years now, you will recall, Enbridge has been operating Line 5 illegally on the Band’s reservation in defiance of an expired easement and the Band’s order to leave their land. It’s a clear and indisputable violation, one that the courts have already allowed to continue for far too long.

But apparently just thumbing their noses at the Bad River Band’s legal rights and sovereignty isn’t enough. Now Enbridge is colluding with a federal government not only to override that authority but to set a precedent that could have far-reaching ramifications for indigenous sovereignty elsewhere and into the future. It’s a maneuver that should once and for all expose as a complete sham the hollow rhetoric of Enbridge that it cares about tribal rights as well as the Canadian government’s attempts to have you believe they respect or recognize the authority of First Nations.

Enbridge continues to say that they would like to settle the matter “amicably.” But it’s clear that only means settling it in a way that is suited to their own corporate interests, interests that the Canadian government apparently has decided are far more important than tribal rights or, say, justice. If the Biden administration has any courage or moral compass they will step in here and make it very clear that they denounce Canada’s action and that they won’t be party to upholding a recent Treaty between settler nations over and above the Treaty and sovereign rights of indigenous peoples that both precede and supersede any such agreement.

Folks, it just doesn’t get any worse than this.