Why are we still building pipelines?

It’s a smoggy afternoon, and I’m listening to the wind as it blows softly through the willows and oaks that populate the forests of northern Minnesota. The noontime sun above me is blotted out by thick smoke, a symptom of the devastating wildfires raging here and across Turtle Island, more commonly known as North America. For the majority of the summer, I have been living at a pipeline resistance camp in rural Minnesota, one of many camps established by Indigenous matriarchs in response to the construction of Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline. The reality of this resistance camp, similar to the countless other blockades across Turtle Island, is that it exists in pursuit of an often impossible-feeling goal: to stop a pipeline through direct action, fighting for Indigenous sovereignty in the face of overwhelming corporate greed. Resistance camps and blockades have always existed in one form or another, and they will continue to exist for as long as extractive industries seek to extract. The pervasiveness of resistance camps speaks to the power of Indigenous peoples and their connection to the land—a connection that Western society must rediscover if it wants to  stand a chance of survival amidst a global climate disaster.

Before the impact of the fight against Line 3 can be fully understood, the adversary must be addressed: Line 3’s parent company, Enbridge Inc. Founded in 1949 as the Interprovincial Pipe Line Company, Enbridge is a Canada-based, multinational pipeline corporation. They specialize in the transportation of toxic crude oil and natural gas across North America through a network of pipelines spanning over 5,000 kilometres. The company already has a tarnished history; it was responsible for the largest inland oil spill in the United States, spilling 1.7 million gallons of oil into a Mississippi River tributary in Minnesota in 1991, as well as over 800 other documented spills from their pipelines between 1999 and 2010. As environmentalists and Indigenous peoples alike have been saying for decades: all pipelines spill. Line 3 is actually both an expansion and replacement of a pre-existing pipeline: Enbridge’s leaky and decaying Line 4. The proposed route for Line 3 adds more than 300 miles of new pipeline, illegally crossing through Anishinaabe, Ojibwe, Lakota, and Dakota treaty territories in the process.

Along with Enbridge being a Canadian corporation, Canada as a nation is inextricably and fundamentally tied to the fossil fuel industry. The economies of the Canadian Prairies (Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba) are heavily reliant on the vast oil fields lying underfoot. Many Canadian politicians, Liberal and Conservative alike, argue that extracting these resources is necessary to maintain the economic endurance of these oil-dependent provinces. But when all the oil has been extracted, and all the tar sands pits run dry, and the criss-crossed network of pipelines inevitably leak into communities’ water supply, what will the politicians who are supposed to represent the working-class settlers of the Prairies say then? Will they be thankful for the brief economic prosperity that drilling, fracking, and transporting petroleum and its byproducts brought them? Or will they look at their murky tap water and fracking sinkholes and wish they had taken action sooner?

It may seem impossible to envision a time where much of the world doesn’t rely heavily on fossil fuels and their derivatives. But attempting to address this issue of environmental degradation as a whole—and with a scope so broad that its individual parts are barely discernible—sometimes does more harm than good. This disconnect in ideologies is where the critical concepts of decolonization and sovereign Indigenous governance come in. Many Indigenous populations have operated in harmony with their natural surroundings for thousands of years under what is known as a watershed resource management philosophy. A watershed approach promotes the idea of resource management and governance as having an inherent sense of responsibility and accountability to the land, water, and surrounding living things. This small-scale, Indigenous-centered approach to natural resource management is integral to the concept of decolonization. In reclaiming their historical connections to land and water through sovereign resource governance, Indigenous peoples continuously demonstrate their abilities to restore watersheds to their former, pre-colonial abundance.

Adopting a decolonial ideology allows us to look away from the large and incomprehensible threat of climate change and focus our scope around the actions we ourselves have the power to perform. It teaches us to look at the ecosystems around us—both their human and nonhuman components—and imagine how they might have looked before settler colonization. The next step is to try to envision a future that looks similar to that vision, and identify what actions we can take to achieve it. Are there climate action groups we could donate to or become active participants in? Is there a nearby blockade we could go to and put our bodies on the line for the land and its inhabitants? As individual, autonomous beings, we have infinitely more power than we were taught in institutional settings. This includes, though is in no way limited to, using our physical bodies as tools in direct action to fight the state repression of Indigenous peoples and their treaty rights.

Sitting under a wilting birch tree and breathing the fire-tinged air, I think about this land—land originally occupied by the Indigenous peoples who have loved it, nourished it,

and treated it with respect for thousands of years. I also see the fractured reality of

where I have chosen to live: a biome being crushed by capitalist greed, and the people pushing

back with all their might to protect it. I whisper a plea into the wind that others will join the fight. I imagine this wish dipping through lakes and wetlands, forests and prairies, into the gleaming windows of those making the decisions we are forced to rebel against. They may try to plug their ears and go about their lives in denial of the destruction they are causing. But they will see, soon enough, the impacts of their short-sightedness. I now leave you with this piercing 1972 quote from Alanis Obomsawin, Abenaki activist and filmmaker: “Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake… When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted… you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.”

To learn more about the Line 3 fight and how you can get involved, visit www.stopline3.org​​.