(Originally Published in the New York Times by Louise Erdrich, December 28th 2020)

Not Just Another Pipeline

The expansion of Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline is a breathtaking

betrayal of Minnesota’s Indigenous communities — and the

environment.

By Louise Erdrich

Ms. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is a novelist and

poet based in Minnesota. Her most recent book is “The Night Watchman.”

Dec. 28, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET

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A young Line 3 protester in Palisade, Minn., near a construction site this month. Alex

Kormann/Star Tribune, via Associated Press

PALISADE, Minn. — My daughter and I are walking along the

fast-flowing stream of pure darkness that is the young Mississippi

River. We are two hours north of Minneapolis, in Palisade, Minn.,

where people are gathering to oppose the Line 3 pipeline. Patches

of snow crunch on pads of russet leaves as we near the

zhaabondawaan, a sacred lodge along the river’s banks. It is here

that Enbridge is due to horizontally drill a new pipeline crossing

beneath the river. We enter the lodge. The peace, the sweetness,

the clarity of the water is hard to bear. The brush and trees hardly

muffle the roar of earth-moving and tree-felling equipment across

the road. The pipeline is almost at the river.

Last month, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s administration signed off

on final water permits for Enbridge to complete an expansion of its

Line 3 pipeline. After the final section is built in Minnesota, the

pipeline will pump oil sands and other forms of crude oil from

Hardisty, Alberta, to Superior, Wis., cutting through Indigenous

treaty lands along the way. Lawsuits — including one by the White

Earth and Red Lake nations and several environmental

organizations, and another by the Mille Lacs Nation — are

pending. But construction has already started.

This has been a brutal year for Indigenous people, who have

suffered nearly double the Covid-19 mortality rate of white

Americans. We have lost many of our elders, our language keepers.

Covid has also struck an inordinate number of our vibrant young.

Nevertheless, tribal people worked hard on the elections. The

Native vote became a force that helped carry several key areas of

the country and our state. On the heels of those victories, the

granting of final permits to construct Enbridge’s Line 3, which will

cross Anishinaabe treaty lands, was a breathtaking betrayal. The

Land of 10,000 Lakes is already suffering from climate change. Yet

Minnesota’s pollution control and public utility agencies refused to

take the future of our lakes into account, or to consider treaty

rights, in granting permits.

This is not just another pipeline. It is a tar sands climate bomb; if

completed, it will facilitate the production of crude oil for decades

to come. Tar sands are among the most carbon-intensive fuels on

the planet. The state’s environmental impact assessment of the

project found the pipeline’s carbon output could be 193 million tons

per year. That’s the equivalent of 50 coal-fired power plants or 38

million vehicles on our roads, according to Jim Doyle, a physicist at

Macalester College who helped write a report from the climate

action organization MN350 about the pipeline. He observed that

the pipeline’s greenhouse gas emissions are greater than the

yearly output of the entire state. If the pipeline is built,

Minnesotans could turn off everything in the state, stop traveling

and still not come close to meeting the state’s emission reduction

goals. The impact assessment also states that the potential social

cost of this pipeline is $287 billion over 30 years.

Carbon footprint aside, the extraction process for oil sands is

deeply destructive. Mining the sands often requires scraping off

the life-giving boreal forest growing over Alberta’s oil fields.

Photographs of Alberta’s oil sands sites show a vast moonscape

impossible to reclaim. The water used in processing is left in toxic

holding ponds that cumulatively could fill 500,000 Olympic

swimming pools, as one National Geographic article puts it.

And if the pipelines were to leak, the sludgy mixture is almost

impossible to clean up. The state’s environmental impact statement

notes that the pipeline will run through two watersheds that drain

into Lake Superior. Any spill in the vicinity of the Great Lakes,

which contain 84 percent of North America’s available freshwater,

is an existential threat to our water supply. The climate action

group 350Kishwaukee compiled data from Enbridge websites and

found at least 1,000 spills by Enbridge pipelines between 1996 and

2014, including a disastrous spill into the Kalamazoo River, which

flows into Lake Michigan. The Environmental Protection Agency

estimated in 2013 that in spite of an extensive effort, just over

160,000 gallons of oil would remain in the river.

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“There is nowhere worse on earth to have an oil sands pipeline

system than the Great Lakes region,” says Rachel Havrelock, the

founder of the University of Illinois Freshwater Lab. “It is,

everything else aside, the world’s worst planning.”

The thing is, there was no plan. There is no plan. It’s clear to me

that with the Keystone XL Pipeline on hold and Line 5 challenged

in Michigan, Enbridge is building as fast as it can to lock in pipeline

infrastructure before regulatory agencies and governments

institute rules on climate change. Global financial institutions have

been realizing the environmental cost of the fossil fuel industry.

Last year, Moody’s downgraded Alberta’s creditworthiness to its

lowest level in 20 years, citing (among other issues) the province’s

reliance on oil sands. Black Rock, HSBC, Deutsche Bank and many

other global financial institutions have taken steps to divest from

fossil fuels.

But instead of pulling back their production levels, many oil sands

companies, with the support of Canadian banks, doubled down,

producing a surplus. These Canada-based corporations are

perpetrating a vast ecological crime, and Minnesota is their

accomplice. But we could cross over to something better. Tar sands

do not have to flow through this pipeline. The rivers can heal, the

great scars gouged into the wetlands regenerate.

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Many tribal traditions recognize women as keepers of water. It is a

spiritual as well as practical responsibility, and therefore especially

meaningful that Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo, has

been chosen as our next interior secretary. Peggy Flanagan,

Minnesota’s lieutenant governor and a White Earth tribal member,

has taken a firm stand against Line 3. Organizations led by

Anishinaabe women have taken every available legal path to

protect our waters, but are now engaged in an on-the-ground battle

for the future, which brings us back to the lodge by the river. We

are here on earth, omaa akiing, and the waters are alive with

energy.

One protester named Liam, who grew up in northern Minnesota

and near Lake Superior in Wisconsin, spent 12 days camped in a

tree directly in the path of Enbridge equipment and was finally

arrested by an officer in a cherry picker. Liam tells me, “This is my

home. I love the river like a friend and the lake like my mother.”

Young people here are chaining themselves beneath pipeline

trucks, clamping themselves to bulldozers, facing down semi

trucks. It is unbearable. They know exactly what’s at stake.

The Mississippi widens and becomes mighty as it flows south.

Holding my daughter’s graceful hand in my own, listening to her

sing an ancient song to the four directions, I can feel her strength

and her fragility. In the protest camp, people are talking around the

fires about First Nations resistance and Standing Rock — they held

off a pipeline; so can we. Every morning at 10, people gather to

pray. Every day there are more people in the circle.

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the author, most

recently, of the novel “The Night Watchman.”

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