What It Feels Like to Have a Pipeline Cut Through Your Town
“I have nothing against the pipeline; they’ve always been
good to the community,” bartender Mary Hesse said, voice rising. “My take is
these protesters aren’t from here. They can go back to where they came from, and
that includes Jane Fonda!” I’d come to the D&K Corner Bar in Plummer, Minnesota
(pop. 289), to understand how neighbors of the new Line 3 oil pipeline felt watching
Canadian energy company Enbridge carve a deep trench all the way across their
state this summer. It wasn’t the first time a pipeline had crossed Plummer—the
original Line 3 went in 50 years ago. But this new “replacement” project is bigger.
It will transport tar sands crude, which is particularly
hard
to clean up when it spills. And construction this summer coincided with the
worst drought in Minnesota since the Dustbowl and a cloak of wildfire smoke
from Canada, conditions exacerbated by humans burning fossil fuels in the first
place. Mary had been counting out pull tabs—little cards that look
like lottery tickets but operate like mini paper slot machines—for her
customers when I arrived. Arlys and Roger Konickson, who were coming up on
their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, and their friend John Zimpel, who had
committed 35 years of his life to the Plummer Fire Department, would
occasionally slap down a matching card. They told me they didn’t mind losing a
little money because the proceeds went to the local Lions Club, which donated
heating oil to the town’s churches. After Mary’s muscular defense of Line 3, John leaned in on
his barstool. “When they had a leak, they took care of it,” he said. “They
evacuated the whole town and put ’em up in hotels.”“There was a leak here?” I hadn’t known. “Yeah, 20 years ago. A guy hit the line with a backhoe,”
John said. “The smell was all over the town, you didn’t know what it
was,” said Arlys. “Oil,” John said. “It just smelled like oil.” “Are you concerned about another leak?” I asked, mentally tabulating
the
potential health effects. “Life’s a risk,” said Arlys. “You drive to Thief River Falls,
you could get hit on the way. You can’t worry about everything, or you’d go
crazy.” I sat with dozens of people this summer as they watched
segments of pipe trucked in and buried in their backyards. Since then, Arlys’s words and similar sentiments I heard have haunted me: You can’t think too
much about this stuff, or you’ll lose your mind. Mary Hesse stands in front of the D&K Corner Bar in Plummer, Minnesota.Audrey GrayThey articulate a common predicament: How are we to stay
sanguine and functional day to day as we witness increasingly severe weather
and worsening air quality battering the places and people we love? How much
responsibility for deathly global systems are we able to shoulder before we’re
hijacked by fear that we lack agency in our own time? How do we stay alert, sensitive, and responsive to our environment when our sensors keep getting overloaded by
messages of shame and doom?But I also met Minnesotans who were approaching the issue from
another angle: Would acknowledging fear about this new pipeline’s impact really
break our brains? Would it kill us? Or would ignoring the risk present the
greater threat?Traveling the 340-mile Minnesota portion of the pipeline, I
found clues about what (and who) caused some folks to numb their worries over
Line 3 and accept it, while others fought to stop construction. I also noticed
that every Minnesotan I spoke with, regardless of coping style or political
leanings, was dealing with a sense of loss.“You know what? Climate change killed my dog,” said Herb
Johnson, a bearded 72-year-old who lives alone in a farmhouse his grandfather
built by the Red River, the spot where Line 3 enters Minnesota from North
Dakota. Just two weeks before I knocked on his door, his dog had stumbled back
into the house during a heatwave and suffered a stroke. Johnson reads a lot; he
knows what’s causing the heat spikes. “I told the Enbridge guys, we have to get off oil,” he said.
“But it’s like smoking, it’s a nasty habit, and I can’t quite get behind an electric
car here in the winter.”Johnson feels guilty for being a typical American energy
consumer. He’s not alone. That “personal responsibility” line of reasoning—you
are the emitter, and you deserve more fossil fuel infrastructure because you
want a warm house and full tank—has been carefully
engineered by fossil fuel companies over decades. Enbridge has been no
different. It didn’t sneak this project into communities; it built
relationships with Minnesotans, asked for their concerns, and spoke with people
about the ongoing need for oil in modern lifestyles, all while sponsoring local
charities and Fourth of
July celebrations. Johnson and his neighbor Tanner Samuelson, who sit on the
South Red River Township Board, told me that Enbridge was in near-constant
communication with the board. The company sent them thick briefing books full
of engineering details about how construction would commence just 300 yards
from the house where Samuelson lives with his wife and four children.“When they mobilized, it was incredible, the amount of
traffic through here,” Samuelson said. “But Enbridge is extremely
accommodating. They want to make sure the town board is pleased, and they
voluntarily paid for dust control.” Enbridge also took out frequent half- and
full-page ads in local papers listing reasons why Line 3 benefits the local
community. Visiting work crews, its messaging promised, would boost local economies. The
company also told the town board that affected farmland (this is sugar beet
country) would be buffered from any danger. It held informational Zoom
sessions in some communities to answer specific questions about safety
protocols. “They’re doing a good job with this pipeline,” said Johnson.
But even bombarded with reassurances, he hasn’t fully bought the company’s messaging:
“How necessary it is? That’s up for discussion.” People in Thief River Falls, Bemidji, and Park Rapids told me
they’d asked similar questions at town meetings: With the oil industry starting
to tank, is there a significant market demand for Alberta’s hard-to-refine tar
sands oil? Will Minnesotans see any economic lift after the visiting
construction crews have gone? And why are Americans stuck with a pipeline that
profits a Canadian company? “Would you
let somebody hold your mom down and cut her arms and drain the blood out of
her? That’s how I look at it.”Enbridge spokespeople attended the meetings too, and they
leaned on the notion of necessity for now—modern lifestyles and strong
economies require this oil until the energy industry transitions
to cleaner options; it’s just a matter of how to deliver it best. The (false)
choice many Minnesotans felt was on the table was either accepting the new
pipeline or having crude oil cross their state on trucks and trains,
which Enbridge said was more carbon-emitting and less safe (a logic along the
lines of, How do you prefer to be penetrated, by the best hunting knife we
can engineer or by crossbow?).Justin Keezer, a Native American retired firefighter who
lives close to the Mississippi Headwaters near Bemidji, wasn’t buying any of
those arguments. He’s been a vocal opponent of the new Line 3 all along, even
speaking out on local radio. Keezer’s home is a mile away from the original pipeline, which leaked so much, it was designated a national crude oil spill research site. He feels gutted and disgusted by this new project. “Would you
let somebody hold your mom down and cut her arms and drain the blood out of
her? That’s how I look at it,” he said. Keezer, who just turned 45, is Anishinaabe (also known as
Ojibwe), a nation of people who never left the region because they signed
treaties with the U.S. government in the mid-1800s that made allowances for
land sharing—white settlers could come in as long as the Anishinaabe retained
their rights to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice in these wetlands, as they had
for centuries. So Keezer has never considered himself a “protester” but, rather,
a defender
of treaty law and the last nonpolluted rivers, lakes, and streams in the
state. He’s part of a Water Protector movement led by Native women, including
his cousin Dawn
Goodwin, who invited people from all over the world to come to Minnesota
for rallies, marches, and direct actions to stop Line 3. More than 800 people
have been arrested so far, and videos of those actions
document the powerful emotions motivating Water Protectors to risk bodily harm.
“If humans go extinct, at least we went out fighting, but
it’s not too late, I think,” said Keezer, as we sat on the railing of a Route 2
bridge watching Enbridge workers pump water out of the Mississippi River to
power a drill. “These battles here are the ones we have to win.” Justin Keezer watches a pump installed by Enbridge use water to power a drill.Audrey GrayI kept moving south and then east along the line, watching
Enbridge teams working their way through vacation lake towns and state forests.
It was amazing to contemplate, the company’s feat of securing state and federal
permits for more than 200 freshwater crossings. About two-thirds of the way across the state, I stopped at a
woodsy campsite for activists called the Welcome Water Protectors Center.
Shanai Matteson is a sixth-generation Minnesotan whose Eastern European
ancestors immigrated to work in area iron mines. Ember Rose Phoenix (a
ceremonial name, she said), is a herbalist with family in Duluth, where her
ancestors settled after escaping enslavement. Both women arrived at the
camp to help oppose the pipeline. But they now say they will stay even after
construction is over to help model greener ways of living to Minnesotans. I asked them what it was like to watch neighbors greenlight a
pipeline Matteson and Phoenix adamantly opposed—Matteson’s cousin had even sold
part of their family land to Enbridge. The two women told me they were trying
to understand root causes. Minnesotans felt chained to “a culture of extraction,”
they said, because historically, it had been a tough landscape to farm. They
also said they think Americans struggle with fear and guilt about how much land
and water has been polluted already. “Shame about what’s happened immobilizes people, especially
white people,” said Phoenix. “What we need to say to each other instead is, ‘We
all fucked up, it’s not working, and we needed to figure out something else.’” The activists invited me to wade with them up the Willow
River to the site where Enbridge was drilling a pipeline tunnel that day—the
river is public land; so as long as we stayed in the water, we weren’t
trespassing. We fumigated ourselves head to toe with Deep Woods Off and
began a slow, quarter-mile slog through the water, trying not to think about
Minnesota’s prolific leech population.“You can pull ’em right off,” Matteson said. Pipeline workers in bright neon vests stood along both sides
of the river, watching us approach. Phoenix, in a one-piece bathing suit,
forged ahead and found a shallow spot where she could sit down in the water. I
marveled at how at ease she looked in the midst of that construction
scene—grinning, letting her arms float on the river’s surface, chin raised to
tree branches arching over her from the riverbanks. I asked her later what
she’d been thinking at that moment, and she said, “I acknowledge what you are
doing here on this site, I see you, and I can be present with the beauty
of what’s around me.”Phoenix had found a way to feel it all and protect her
equanimity, pacing herself for a long fight. She was arrested at a direct
action two weeks later.Ember Phoenix, who opposes Line 3, intends to stay at the Welcome Water Protectors Center even after construction on the pipeline is finished.Audrey GrayAs I tracked the final miles of gashed land to the
Minnesota-Wisconsin border, I pulled over near Scott’s Corner to watch crews
lower a segment of pipe into the earth. The pipe was aboveground one minute and deep in Minnesota soil the next. Not an inevitable action. Instead, one of
countless little junctures of cause and effect that might have been interrupted
had more people—and not just Minnesotans—allowed themselves to feel troubled
enough to prioritize an alternative to a Canadian oil transport company
expanding its short-term earnings potential in 2021. Enbridge is currently finishing up
construction and
has said in filings it could begin pushing crude oil through Line 3 any
day. In mid-September, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources fined
Enbridge $3.3 million for piercing an off-limits underground aquifer during
construction and failing to follow the environmental safeguards in its permits.
Minnesotans are now stuck with scarred lands hosting a new
pipeline that’s already damaging their wetlands. And when the oil begins
flowing, all of us will be stuck with the eventual carbon emissions of more
than 750,000 barrels a day, the equivalent of
firing up 50 new coal plants. This in a year in which climate scientists
are begging
humans to ease up on the throttle. The same year wildfires endangered air
quality from Oregon to Pennsylvania, heat waves killed
hundreds across the Pacific Northwest, Gulf waters strengthened
a hurricane too quickly for humans to evacuate, crops from wheat
to tomatoes
dwindled in drought, and New Yorkers drowned
in their basements.Notice whether you’re overwhelmed by all of this—tempted to
numb out. No one I spoke with this summer was truly apathetic: Frustration or
grief could be suppressed by a sense of inevitability but not erased. We’re all together at this emotional edge, including
President Biden, who can stop Line 3 right now with a single executive order revoking
its permit. He’s had that power since Inauguration Day. Would that be
“crazy”? Feeling so worried about humanity on this fast-heating planet that you
shut down a multibillion-dollar fossil fuel project nearing completion? Or
would it be the most galvanizing, wildly sane thing a person in power could do?
What I observed in Minnesota is that feelings
of loss and violation are not the end of us, they’re the depths, often
unearthing the courage needed to protect all that’s left.
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