Let's Be Builders, Not Destroyers

Shit is bad, you guys, let’s just be honest. You probably heard the news recently: the United States Army Corps of Engineers might fast-track Enbridge’s permit to construct their ridiculous Line 5 tunnel beneath the Straits. The potential move is part of the even more ridiculous “national energy emergency” cooked up by the rapacious sociopaths who manipulate the narcissistic man-child we’ve elected President, like he’s some dime-store marionette. The administration has already placed a wolf in charge of every regulatory henhouse: a shill for the natural gas industry is the director of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration, a fossil fuel executive runs the EPA, and an oil industry toady is the new Energy Secretary. Meanwhile, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have been decimated. That means efforts to control invasive species in the Great Lakes will be severely curtailed. This means fewer scientists and specialists to work on crucial public and environmental health issues, like clean drinking water and algal blooms.

Then, in more bad news, we also learned last week that the Michigan Court of Appeals rejected the challenge brought by Michigan tribes and others to the short-sighted Michigan Public Service Commission’s approval of the Line 5 tunnel permit.

Of course, the tunnel decisions—and perhaps even the broader assault on regulatory protections—shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The fact that anyone, much less people in positions of authority, takes the tunnel scheme seriously in the first place boggles the mind. Frankly, I’m weary of writing about it. After all, everyone, Enbridge included, knows it’s a bad idea and a menace to the Straits. Everyone knows it’s mainly a delay tactic designed to keep Line 5 running for as long as possible. Everyone knows it’s yet a desperate attempt to shackle us to the twentieth-century fossil economy for another hundred years, climate-change be damned. Everyone knows it has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with corporate profit.

So why do so many people—and here I’m talking about people who aren’t, like Enbridge executives and members of the current Presidential administration, just cartoon villains— treat the tunnel plan as if it’s a thing to be taken seriously? I think there are two main reasons to explain this and naming them, I think, can help us see more clearly what we’re up against and how we might proceed.

The first is just process. We have systems and agencies that have been created and designed to facilitate and permit—by which I mean, to allow, not just to give authorization for— projects like the tunnel. Sure, these agencies have some latitude to impose some mild conditions and constraints, but PHMSA and the US Army Corps and the MPSC don’t exist to question the wisdom and logic and underlying assumptions of the projects they’re asked to review. They exist to help see them through, while at the same time ensuring that they cause minimal harm—according to very narrow conceptions of “harm.”

A good example of this came during the public comments period of last Friday’s Mackinac Straits Corridor Authority hearings. That body, too, exists to see that the tunnel gets built, not to stop it. As a result, all the sharp, persuasive, inspiring appeals from the public commenters felt a bit like asking a ball not to bounce. Still, I was especially struck by the remarks of Nichole Keway Biber of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians, who decried what she called “the limits on what’s being considered” in all of these reviews of the tunnel. The MPSC, the Army Corps, EGLE, the MSCA-- all of them have accepted or adopted such a narrow scope of review that their final decisions are practically a foregone conclusion. Take the MPSC’s “three-part test,” for example, or the Army Corps’ refusal to consider the entirety of Line 5. Because of these limits, as Biber put it, “full consideration never takes place”

February 28 meeting of the Mackinac Straits Corridor Authority

The second reason people take the tunnel seriously is even more fundamental: it’s something more like a failure of the imagination, a stubborn inability (or unwillingness) to imagine a world that is arranged differently than it is now. That is, if you just accept that because Line 5 exists now it must always exist, if you think that because we have relied on hydrocarbon energy in the past we must continue to rely on it in the future, if you believe that the drive for endless growth and accumulation is an immutable feature of human existence, and if you believe that the nonhuman world exists only for human use so we can forever do with it what we will without consequence… if you accept all of that, then of course boring a tunnel deep into the bedrock of the Straits of Mackinac to transport oil for another century is going to seem perfectly plausible. After all, that’s just how the world works.

Except that world—that contingent world—does not and has not worked for everyone. Denise Petoskey, another LTBB member, stated this succinctly in her comments to the MSCA on Friday. “It’s hard to get justice in the colonizer’s court,” she said.

All of this does not mean we give up the fight in these flawed forums; we should continue to pressure regulatory agencies and elected officials in the hopes that they can yet be persuaded, even within their constricted domains. But it also means that our task is bigger than that. We’re going to need to reform and reinvent some of our institutions, setting them on new foundations and raising them up from new principles. Let’s be builders, not destroyers.

Let’s build the world we want to see.