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