Young Climate Activists Lead Minnesota Pipeline Battle

The proposed pipeline would carry 760,000 barrels of tar sands per day through lakes, wild rice beds, and important Native treaty lands in northern Minnesota.

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Sixteen-year-old Rose Whipple doesn’t have much experience canoeing. Yet this week she is joining more than a dozen other young water protectors from around the country—all of them either indigenous or people of color—paddling 250 miles across Northern Minnesota to resist a proposed tar sands pipeline.

The new pipeline would carry 760,000 barrels of tar sands per day through lakes, wild rice beds, and important Native treaty lands in northern Minnesota.

“Young people are going to be here way longer than the people creating the pipeline. We will live to see all effects,” says Whipple, who lives in St. Paul and is of the Santee Dakota and Ho-Chunk nations.

Through the journey, called Paddle to Protect, the paddlers hope to raise awareness about the costs and negative impacts of the pipeline. They will stop in towns along the route for actions and to speak with residents about the pipeline’s impacts.

“People deserve to know that one of the biggest oil companies is building a pipeline through their backyards,” Whipple says,

Enbridge Energy, a Canadian company, calls the pipeline a replacement, but it would in fact create an almost new corridor for the existing “Line 3.” The new Line 3 pipeline would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to Superior, Wisconsin.

The current Line 3 pipeline, built in 1961, has ruptured numerous times and has been working at only fifty-one percent capacity. The new Line 3 would be Enbridge’s largest project to date, and one of the largest crude oil pipelines in North America.

According to Andy Pearson, Midwest tar sands coordinator for the environmental advocacy group MN350, the pipeline’s negative impacts could include polluting the Mississippi River, which 18 million people across the country rely on for drinking water, along with harming many northern Minnesota lakes critical to the state’s $11.9 billion tourism industry.

“It’s not just an ecological issue,” Pearson says. “There is an economic and tourism standpoint as well.”

The proposed pipeline also raises concerns about sex trafficking , especially sexual abuse of indigenous girls and women. Camps that house male workers near oil fields have been linked to incidents of domestic violence and sexual assault against local women.

“Lots of indigenous girls get raped in these ‘man camps,’ and many Ojibwe girls are scared of that,” Whipple says.

The tar sands oil that the pipeline would carry is the world’s dirtiest oil. A leak or rupture could contaminate drinking water for many surrounding communities. And, according to a draft environmental impact statement created by the Minnesota Department of Commerce in May 2017, a leak or rupture over time is statistically likely to occur.

“If my generation wants a chance at a liveable future, 760,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest tar sands oil on earth through northern Minnesota is morally and economically absurd,” says Akilah Sanders-Reed, a 22-year-old climate activist from Minneapolis.

Enbridge pipelines have a long history of disastrous oil spills. In 1991, a rupture in the current Line 3 pipeline near Grand Rapids, Minnesota, resulted in the country’s largest inland oil spill, involving more than 1.7 million gallons. In 2010, more than 1 million gallons of tar sands oil spilled from an Enbridge pipeline in Michigan, contaminating the Kalamazoo River and Talmadge Creek. The cleanup cost the company $1.2 billion dollars.

The new Line 3 route also crosses through 1855 Ojibwe treaty territory. Winona LaDuke, executive director of Honor the Earth, an indigenous environmental, has argued that the pipeline, by running under land important to native peoples, including wild rice beds and areas used for traditional hunting and medicine, would violate these treaty rights.

Opponents have an example of past success to build on. Enbridge’s proposed Sandpiper pipeline, which would have cut through many lakes and wild rice beds in Minnesota, was dropped in September 2016 following strong resistance from native tribes and environmental organizations.

But Enbridge has remained an aggressive player. In February, the company acquired a nearly 30 percent ownership share of the Bakken pipeline system, which includes the Dakota Access Pipeline, the subject of prolonged protests at Standing Rock, North Dakota.

For Whipple and others, the most important risk from the pipeline is to future generations.

“I want there to be clean water and air for my grandchildren,” Whipple says. “I don’t want as much pollution as there is now, and I want to protect my grandchildren from that.”

Whipple and the other paddlers will canoe from August 12 to September 2, beginning at the Mississippi Headwaters, which the pipeline would cross, to Big Sandy Lake, where in 1850 the U.S. government killed hundreds of Ojibwe.

“I want there to be clean water and air for my grandchildren. I don’t want as much pollution as there is now, and I want to protect my grandchildren from that,” - Rose Whipple

In addition to her work with Paddle to Protect, Whipple is also part of the Youth Climate Intervenors, a group of thirteen activists under the age of 25 which recently gained legal status as an official stakeholder in the contested court case for the permitting of Line 3. Group members, representing themselves, intend to argue in court that the proposed pipeline will cause them direct injury or harm, ranging from mental health impacts to concerns about food resources and electric bills.

On July 25, the Youth Climate Intervenors met with Minnesota governor Mark Dayton’s senior policy advisor to share their concerns. The group also delivered over 4,000 petitions from Minnesotans asking that Governor Dayton publicly oppose Line 3.

“We are leaders of today because we have to be, the world has given us no other option,” says Sanders-Breen, one of the Intervenors. “We are choosing to stand up and engage and say our lives are important and our futures are important.”

Other parties in the case against the project include five Ojibwe tribes (White Earth, Fond du Lac, Mille Lacs, Leech Lake, and Red Lake), Lake Superior Chippewa, Sierra Club, Honor the Earth, Friends of the Headwaters, and two landowners. During the contested case hearing, which will take place November 6-10, an administrative law judge will hear arguments both for and against the project, then recommend to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission whether the project should move forward.

Sanders-Reed is hopeful. “This is just the wrong move for Minnesota,” she says. “We need to build a movement.”