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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Pipeline fight a case of thinking globally, acting locally

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We reported last week on a lawsuit surrounding Calgary-based Enbridge Energy’s effort to get around environmental review laws in order to ramp up shipments of tar sands bitumen from Canada through its Alberta Clipper pipeline, which connects from the tar sands region to refineries in Superior.

The suit itself is over alleged violations of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, the mere mention of which normally causes most Americans’ eyes, mine included, to glaze over.

What I found fascinating, however, was that a global phenomenon that I had recently been reading about in Naomi Klein’s excellent new book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” had suddenly arrived very close to our doorstep. Anyone who has followed environmental issues in recent years has noticed the growing importance of native peoples in fighting a cultural phenomenon they call “extractivism.” It’s shorthand for the enormous increase in extractive industrial development, from mining to oil and gas fracking, to tar sands, that is occurring all across the globe, and very prominently right now in North America, most of it to feed the tremendous industrial growth in China. In many cases, such projects are being opposed by indigenous groups who stand to see little economic benefit as their resources are stripped away, and are, at the same time, forced to assume huge risks through the potential environmental impacts to lands they’ve depended on in some cases for millennia.

Enbridge Energy’s plan to boost its ability to transport tar sands bitumen from the current 450,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 880,000 bpd is all part of the extractivist mindset. Environmentalists and Canadian First Nations have focused much attention on tar sands development not only out of concern for the massive carbon footprint this development entails (a barrel of bitumen takes about three times as much energy to produce as a barrel of standard light crude), but also for the incredible destruction of vast swaths of boreal forest and wetlands that is inevitable when giant machines scrape away thousands of square miles of the Earth’s surface.

They know that since the tar sands oil is mostly produced for export, if they can block transportation outlets, most prominently the Keystone XL pipeline, Alberta’s bitumen becomes increasingly uneconomical. They also know that if the pipelines are built, a vast region of northern Alberta, nearly the size of Florida, will be sacrificed for a carbon-intensive energy source that most climate scientists agree has to stay in the ground if we’re to have any hope of forestalling drastic climate change.

Closer to home, tribes in northern Minnesota, including White Earth, Leech Lake, and Fond du Lac, are now actively engaged in this same fight, with both global and local concerns at the forefront. The local concerns focus on Enbridge’s pipeline safety record, which includes hundreds of pipeline ruptures, explosions, and other accidents, many of which have occurred in northern Minnesota.

While any oil spill is significant, the tar-like bitumen produced in Alberta is particularly hazardous. That’s because in order to force it through a pipeline, the bitumen must be under higher pressure and must first be thinned with a variety of volatile chemicals to reduce its viscosity. In the event of a spill, those volatile chemicals off-gas pretty quickly, leaving the sticky bitumen behind. Bitumen also sinks in water (regular oil floats) which means it ends up coating the sediments in wetlands, rivers, or anywhere else it spills, making clean-up extremely difficult. The clean-up cost for Enbridge’s million-gallon spill of bitumen into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in 2010 has already topped $1 billion, for example.

Pumping 880,000 bpd of this nasty product across wetland-rich northern Minnesota presents a virtual guarantee of local environmental damage. Add to this, Minnesota’s sensitivity to climate change and our region faces a potential double whammy from Enbridge’s plan. Actually, it’s potentially a triple-whammy, since the industry has also pushed to construct a giant oil-loading dock at the port of Superior, so the companies involved in the tar sands development can begin shipping their product overseas through the Great Lakes. Superior could be become the next Valdez, Alaska, serving as a loading point for hundreds of oil tankers per year, threatening the water quality on Lake Superior and other Great Lakes in the event of a major spill. These are the risks that our region is being asked to assume in order to facilitate the profits of the oil industry. The handful of jobs in the region associated with such development would seem hardly to justify these kinds of risks.

While native groups are focused on the tar sands, they have also begun to voice increasing opposition in our region to other extractive development, such as copper-nickel mining. The Fond du Lac and Grand Portage Bands have been most outspoken on that front, and should expect to hear more from them in the future.

It’s all part of an increasing movement globally to oppose the culture of extractivism and unbridled corporate capitalism that a growing number of people around the world see as an increasing threat to sustaining a livable planet. We caught a glimpse of the global nature of this movement in our reporting on the canoe expedition by Dave Freeman and Paul Schurke on Brazil’s Rio Roosevelt. Their trip plans had to be adjusted when it turned out hundreds of thousands of Amazonian tribes were, literally, up in arms over the increasing encroachment on their lands by wildcat miners. While many of these groups have chosen to maintain traditional lifestyles, they are also increasingly connected with the outside world through the Internet and have become much more attuned to the global nature of their struggle.

They, of course, are going up against forces that are monumentally well-funded, and that make no bones about using their vast financial resources to tip the political process in their favor. Around the world, and even right here at home, many people understand that the political process is increasingly rigged in favor of a corporate elite that enacts laws to further their interests, usually at the expense of the rest of us. That’s why the growing legions of activists are increasingly turning towards, mostly, non-violent direct action. They realize the ballot box is a far less effective means of bringing positive change than it used to be.

The threats posed by extractivism, both locally and globally, are finally capturing the attention of the growing number of people desperate for saner alternatives. They understand that the current political process is failing them, which is why we are likely to see much more direct action in the near future. Most people, inherently, have a desire to protect their home. We saw that instinct 30 years ago right here, in northern St. Louis County, when folks, led by the late Ernie Lund, engaged in direct action to halt plans to inject hazardous waste into bedrock near Ash Lake.

These days, our concept of home has taken on a broader context, as the threats have become increasingly global in nature. It is the viability of our home planet that is increasingly at risk.

It is this battle for the future of our world that is now being waged across northern Minnesota. What more dramatic story could there possibly be?