The Kalamazoo River Spill: Pipelines, Politics, and Economies of Knowledge
By:
Sonia Grant
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master’s of Arts Department of Geography & Program in Planning University of Toronto
© Copyright by Sonia Grant 2014 The Kalamazoo River Spill: Pipelines, Politics, and Economies of Knowledge
Sonia Grant
Masters of Arts
Department of Geography & Program in Planning University of Toronto
2014
Abstract
In July 2010, an oil pipeline ruptured in southwest Michigan, spilling approximately one million gallons of diluted bitumen (dilbit) from the Alberta tar sands into the Kalamazoo
River. As the first major pipeline release of dilbit, the story of the Kalamazoo River spill is often cited in growing debates about dilbit pipeline projects in North America. This thesis provides an ethnographic account of the aftermath of the spill. Drawing on research conducted in Michigan in 2013, I examine how knowledge claims about the spill have been produced and mobilized in Michigan, focusing in particular on impacted residents’ responses to the disaster. Informed by my involvement with environmental justice groups in Toronto, the thesis also explores how the story of the spill has been brought to bear on debates about a proposed pipeline project in Eastern Canada.
Together, the chapters engage themes of risk, uncertainty, comparison, and knowledge production in environmental politics.
ii Acknowledgments
I have incurred many debts throughout the research and writing process for this thesis. First, I want to thank all those in Ontario, Michigan, and other parts of the US who participated in interviews. This document would not be possible without you. I owe special thanks to Craig Ritter and Michelle BarlondSmith, from whom I learned more than I can express here, and whose friendship has come to matter a great deal. Carolyn and Jim Timmons provided much support and encouragement, and fostered exciting collaborations. Elizabeth Friedman’s dedication and sense of humor inspired me to keep going when I might not have otherwise. I thank Todd Heywood for telling it like it is, since 2010 (and way before that). I am thankful to Riki Ott and Lisa Marie Jacobs for their 25+ years of advocacy and for enrolling me in the networks that have spun out from their work. I am thankful to the MICATS for fighting the fight. Rising Tide Toronto and the environmental justice crews in Ontario provided a fun and challenging space from which to organize and grow. Vanessa and Lindsay Gray’s work in Aaamjiwnaang First Nation first taught me about the many ways in which Line 9 matters. I am thankful for all that they do, and know that many others are too.
In Ann Arbor, I owe huge thanks to Arun Agrawal at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment for making possible my time in Michigan. Joan Wolf provided invaluable institutional support, a warm welcome that made a big difference, and was the best office-mate I could have ever wished for. Thank you to Ryan for making Ann Arbor such a lovely place to walk and talk, and for everything else.
I was fortunate to have had many wonderful teachers and colleagues at the University of Toronto (U of T). In particular, I received tremendous support at the Department of Geography and the Women & Gender Studies Institute, and am thankful to Jessica Finlayson and Marian Reed for helping me through the ins and outs of both departments. I am grateful to my MA cohort – especially Connor, Gwen, and Hillary – for being such fantastic people to think and learn with. Thanks to the Nobjects, the graduate student reading group that assembled around the Technoscience Salon at U of T, and many thanks to the organizers of the Salon.
I am extremely thankful to the members of my MA thesis committee, Deborah Cowen and Raj Narayanareddy, and my supervisor, Emily Gilbert, all of whom engaged generously with my work, posed challenging questions that I’ll be mulling over for years to come, and encouraged me to be more explicit about what I really mean to say. In my first year at U of T, Deb taught me how cool geography can be, and encouraged me to think both experimentally and with care. Raj challenged me to follow the threads of my arguments all the way, including their knots.
I want to extend my warmest thanks to Emily Gilbert, whose mentorship and steadfast support throughout my MA made a world of difference. Emily’s generosity with her time, insights, and edits has made me a stronger and more curious student. The example that Emily set is in no small part what motivated me to pursue academic work beyond the MA: the passion and care that she brings to her teaching, and her commitment to
iii politically grounded and theoretically rich scholarship are nothing short of goals to strive towards.
This research benefited immensely from the financial support of the University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science, the School of Graduate Studies, the Department of Geography & Program in Planning, and the Canadian Studies Graduate Student Network. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship provided generous external funding.
Finally, I thank my family for their support before and during this process. Cath made the big city a lot less scary and a lot more fun in my first year. Joe provided a lovingly assembled toolkit. I am grateful to my parents for listening to my rants, for their insightful interventions, and for making fun of me just the right amount. I often struggled with wanting to tell this story all at once, kind of like a chemical odor can hit you all at once. Needless to say I benefited tremendously from Mom and Dad’s careful, kind, and always encouraging reminders to take things one step, and one day, at a time.
iv Table of Contents
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………...ii Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………...... iii Table of Contents...... v Acronyms……………………………………………………………….……...... vii List of figures……………………………………………………………...... viii A note on names…………………………………………………………………...... viii
Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 The spill ...... 8 Cutting together causes…………………………………………………………………..10 Expansion/replacement…………………………………………………………………..11 On methods, enunciatory communities, and ethnographic folds………………………...12 The chapters ...... 14
Chapter 2: Anticipating the Line 9 Reversal ...... 18 Biopolitics, security, and circulation…………………………………………………….20 The circulation of Canadian tar sands……………………………………………………22 Precaution, preemption, resilience……………………………………………………….26 Environmentalism’s ‘biopolitical topologies’……………………………………………28 Anticipating otherwise3 ...... 34
Chapter 3: Un/knowing the spill………………………………………………………………. 38 On the edge of an explanation…………………………………………………………...38 The “tar sands name game” and missing MSDS………………………………………...44 How many gallons?...... 50 Like a python swallowing an elephant…………………………………………………..55 NRDA……………………………………………………………………………………60 Show me the data………………………………………………………………………..62 Evacuation……………………………………………………………………………….66 Community health studies……………………………………………………………….69 Unknowing………………………………………………………………………………75
Chapter 4: Toxic Rocks……………………………………………………………………….78 The results are in……………………………………………………………………….78 Planes of in/commensurability…………………………………………………………79 It was almost like a slurping sound…………………………………………………….82 Something Gulf-like……………………………………………………………………83 Backyard experiments………………………………………………………………….89 Morel mushrooms………………………………………………………………………91 Canary in the coal mine……………………………………………………………...…92 Do you smell fire?.……………………………………………………………………..97 Anniversary..………………………………………………………………………….101 Fingerprint match and TICs…………………………………………………………..103 The most visible reminder [not mere metaphor]..…………………………………….106 Black out..……………………………………………………………………………..109
v Chapter 5: ‘Remembering the Kalamazoo’……………………………………………….114 PetKoch……………………………………………………………………………...116 Buckets………………………………………………………………………………123 “Toxic” tour?.………………………………………………………………………..125 15 Detroiters, and I don’t have the luxury.…………………………………………..128 Drawing relations.…………………………...……………………………………….130
Works cited……………………………………………………………………………147
vi Acronyms
ATSDR: Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry
CAPP: Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers
CCPHD: Calhoun County Public Health Department
DCATS: Detroit Coalition Against Tar Sands
ENGO: Environmental Non-Governmental Organization
EPA: United States Environmental Protection Agency
GCM: Global Community Monitor
MDCH: Michigan Department of Community Health
MDEQ: Michigan Department of Environmental Quality
MDNR: Michigan Department of Natural Resources
MICATS: Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands
MPSC: Michigan Public Service Commission
NEB: Canadian National Energy Board
NOAA: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
NRDA: Natural Resource Damage Assessment
NTSB: National Transportation Safety Board
PAH: Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon
PHMSA: Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration
PST: Pipeline Safety Trust
RTT: Rising Tide Toronto
UIC: Unified Incident Command
VCVAOD: Victims of Chemical Valley for Asbestos and Occupational Disease
VOC: Volatile Organic Compound
vii List of figures
1.1 – Map of existing crude oil pipelines and refineries in Canada and the US 1.2 – Map of Line 6B 1.3 – Map of Line 9
3.1 – Table of US Census data for Battle Creek, Marshall, and the State of Michigan
4.1 – Photo of Craig holding two of his rocks form the Kalamazoo River 4.2 – Photo of unusual foam observed floating on the Kalamazoo River 4.3 – Photo of another unusual foamy substance observed on the Kalamazoo River 4.4 – Photo of Craig’s backyard experiment 4.5 – Photo of one of Craig’s rock formations under ultra-violet light 4.6 – CAT scan of one of Craig’s rock formations 4.7 – Photo of cleanup worker spraying unknown liquid into the Kalamazoo River 4.8 – Online meme of Chris Whamoff holding a rock from the Kalamazoo River
5.1 – Photo of petcoke piles in Detroit 5.2 – Photo of the Marathon refinery in Detroit 5.3 – Photo of protesters blocking a petcoke truck in Detroit 5.4 – Map of Enbridge’s Line 79 5.5 – Photo of one of the sign’s on the Taylor’s lawn 5.6 – Photo of Ada Lockridge demonstrating how to use a bucket sampler kit 5.7 – Photo of the Victims of Chemical Valley Memorial in Sarnia, Ontario
A note on names
This thesis would not have been possible without the many people who shared their stories, experiences, photographs, documents, and time with me, both on and off the record. In this document I use the real names of those who gave me explicit permission to do so. I also use the real names of ‘public figures’, who in this case are prominent activists whose names are already in the public sphere, political figures, or employees of agencies tasked with responding to the Kalamazoo River spill and who have become known in riverside communities by virtue of their work and extensive media coverage. All others are given pseudonyms.
viii Chapter 1 Introduction
The staff at the FedEx store in Ann Arbor seemed perplexed when Craig and I stumbled in on a hot afternoon in late July, 2013, wanting to express-ship several boxes of icepacks and mason jars filled with rocks and murky water to Mobile, Alabama. We had just come from a day trip to the Kalamazoo River, where we had carefully followed the instructions provided to us by the chemist to whom we were shipping samples. We nervously packed up the jars with layer upon layer of bubble wrap and sent the packages off, feeling ambivalent about whether or not we hoped the chemical analyses would confirm our suspicions. Over the course of our work together, up until this moment and in the months that followed, Craig told me many times that he wished he could just let it go. Forget about the oil spill. Move on with his life. Spend more time outdoors doing what he loves – fishing, hunting, being with his family and friends – rather than trudging around in that dirty river. But he couldn’t turn away, and he knew it. Nor could I turn away from people like him not turning away, and soon enough, I couldn’t turn away from the spill either.
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A year prior to this I had begun organizing with environmental justice groups in Toronto against a pipeline project in Eastern Canada. At the time I did not expect that this work would bring me to wade either literally or figuratively knee-deep in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. But as I joined with others in opposing a project proposed by Enbridge, a Canadian energy giant, to reverse the flow of its “Line 9” pipeline, I could not avoid for long attending to a major oil spill that occurred across the border in 2010, when another Enbridge pipeline called “Line 6B” ruptured and spilled approximately one million gallons of diluted bitumen (dilbit) into the Kalamazoo River. As the first major
1 dilbit spill in North America and the largest inland oil spill in US history, the rupture of Line 6B became an important point of reference in current debates about other pipelines that, like Line 9, are set to transport dilbit from the controversial Alberta tar sands deposits. My MA research was compelled by this frequent comparison between Line 9 and Line 6B, a comparison in which I have participated and about which I have come to feel torn. Comparison was a methodological point of departure for this research and quickly became itself an object of inquiry. On the one hand, oil spills are incidents to take very seriously and work towards avoiding. The story of the Kalamazoo River spill is worth retelling in part because it presents important pragmatic lessons that pipeline companies, engineers, regulators, cleanup crews, and public health officials could learn from in averting and responding to dilbit spills. On the other hand, the comparison between a past disaster (the Kalamazoo River spill) and a potential disaster to come (such as a rupture in Line 9) carves out a constrained political present, in which debates about whether to build pipelines often become debates about the conditions under which pipelines can be safely operated, where safety means the prevention of spills. In this space, other questions that could - and as I suggest, questions that should - also animate public discussions about pipelines fade into the background: for instance, questions about the social and environmental impacts of the extraction, production, and consumption of dilbit and other fossil fuels transported in pipelines, or questions of free, prior, and informed consent from Indigenous groups in both Canada and the US through whose territories this infrastructure is built.1 I haven’t sought to reconcile the tension that arose for me through the comparison between Line 9 and the Kalamazoo River spill. Instead I have tried to attend to what this comparison does and does not register. As Tim Choy (2011) remarks, knowledge practices in environmental arenas often rely on comparisons “to call relations of interdependence, connection, and disjunction into being” (12), and in so doing also rely upon and produce scales of comparative analysis. My own journey from Line 9 to Line 6B and back is but one instantiation of the productive capacities of comparison. Meanwhile, the chapters in this thesis differentially illustrate what the use of the spectacle of the Kalamazoo River spill, as an object of comparison, may elide - both in Eastern
2 Canada and in Michigan. As I hope to show throughout this thesis, there is a politics to these elisions. The comparison to the spill, perhaps useful at times, entails taking responsibility for what it passes over. The comparison to the spill as a spectacular event involves one in the spectacle’s dramatic spatiotemporality. Thinking speeds up, flying past much of what is at stake in the Line 9 reversal project as well as in the unfolding impacts of the Kalamazoo River spill. Vision focuses in on a segment of water in Michigan and segments of pipeline through Ontario and Quebec. In this thesis I have tried to slow down my thinking in order to disrupt the sense of urgency that the comparison draws me into, which is not to deny the urgency of intervening in the construction of unsafe infrastructural projects, but rather to ask what exceeds this urgency.2 The spill’s spatial and temporal reach, I learned, extends indeterminately. Throughout this thesis my line of inquiry circles back again and again to what is present and absent, included and excluded in various iterations of the Kalamazoo River spill. The thesis examines how knowledge claims about the Kalamazoo River spill have been produced and mobilized in comparison to Line 9, and more centrally, how economies of knowledge about the spill circulate in Michigan.
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I first began to inquire into the Line 9 reversal during my involvement between 2012-2014 with Rising Tide Toronto (RTT), an environmental justice collective that was part of the opposition to Enbridge’s pipeline project. RTT is a Toronto-based chapter of the international grassroots organization Rising Tide. In recent years, many Rising Tide chapters and allied environmental justice groups throughout Canada and the US have engaged in anti-tar sands work, especially through resistance to the growing number of proposed and existing dilbit pipelines (see figure 1.1). As I will explore further in Chapter 2, there is a strong push from both industry and the Canadian government to facilitate the transportation of currently ‘landlocked’ dilbit, and pipelines are the most efficient way to do so.3
3 ENBRIDGE NW
Upgraders Syncrude (Fort McMurray) ...... 465 Suncor (Fort McMurray)...... 438 RAINBOW Shell (Scotford)...... 240 CNRL Horizon...... 135 OPTI/Nexen Long Lake...... 72 Vancouver to: Prince George 2013 Canadian Crude Oil Production Japan - 4,300 miles Husky...... 12 000 m3/d 000 b/d Taiwan - 5,600 miles S.Korea - 4,600 miles British Columbia 6 40 China - 5,100 miles Alberta 421 2,651 Edmonton Saskatchewan 77 487 For Information Contact: (403) 267-1141 / www.capp.ca San Francisco - 800 miles Imperial...... 187 Manitoba 8 51 Los Angeles - 1,100 miles Suncor ...... 142 Shell...... 100 Northwest Territories 2 11 Lloydminster Newfoundland Husky...... 29 & Labrador HUSK Western Canada 515 3,241 North Atlantic...... 115 Vancouver Husky Upgrader...... 82 Y Eastern Canada 37 232 Chevron ...... 55 Total Canada 552 3,473 Regina Co-op Refnery/ Upgrader...... 135 KE Come by Chance
YS Moose Jaw
T Moose Jaw...... 19 Puget Sound ONE BP (Cherry Pt)...... 234 Hibernia White Rose Phillips 66 (Ferndale) 100 Hebron Shell (Anacortes)...... 150 WA Terra Nova Tesoro (Anacortes) ...120 US Oil (Tacoma)...... 39 Pipeline Tolls for Light Oil (US$ per barrel) Great Falls Edmonton to Calumet MT Rfg...... 10 Saint John Burnaby (Trans Mountain) 2.55 Irving...... 320 Anacortes (Trans Mountain/Puget) 2.80 Billings OR CHS (Laurel)...... 57 MT Montréal/Québec Saint John Sarnia (Enbridge) 4.00 Phillips 66...... 58 Suncor ...... 137 KE Superior Chicago (Enbridge) 3.60 Sarnia Valero...... 265 ID ExxonMobil...... 60 YS Calumet...... 45 Wood River (Enbridge/Mustang/Capwood) 5.00 ND T Imperial...... 121 ONE Montréal ME USGC (Enbridge/Spearhead/Seaway) 7.65* Nova...... 80 MONTREAL MN Shell...... 77 TTREAEAL Hardisty to Mandan Suncor...... 85 Tesoro...... 71 Guernsey (Express/Platte ) 1.60* San Francisco Wyoming Nanticoke VT Chevron ...... 257 Little America (Casper) ...... 20 SD Imperial...... 112 Wood River (Express/Platte) 1.95* Phillips 66...... 120 Sinclair Oil (Sinclair)...... 80 St. Paul Wood River (Keystone) 4.70** Shell...... 160 NH Wyoming (Newcastle)...... 14 WY Flint Hills...... 339 Chicago ENBRIDGE LINE 9 USGC (Keystone/TC Gulf Coast) 7.00** Tesoro...... 166 HollyFrontier (Cheyenne) ...... 52 Northern Tier...... 82 BP ...... 413 Westover Valero...... 170 WI ExxonMobil...... 250 NY MA PDV ...... 180 USEC to Montréal (Portland/Montréal) 1.50 CA NV Salt Lake City CT RI Big West ...... 35 NE Kansas MI St. James to Wood River (Capline/Capwood) 1.25 Chevron ...... 45 Pennsylvania SHELL NCRA (McPherson)...... 85 PA HollyFrontier.....31 ood River) IA Monroe Energy...... 185 HollyFrontier (El Dorado)..135 IL Detroit Warren CHEVRON Tesoro...... 58 Phil. Energy Solutions...... 330 Pipeline Tolls for Heavy Oil (US$ per barrel) CO Cofeyville Res(Cofeyville) 115 Marathon...... 120 United ...... 70
OCH (W Flanagan Hardisty to: Denver/Commerce City K ID Philadelphia NJ Chicago (Enbridge) 4.05 UT Suncor...... 98 New Jersey MD Cushing (Enbridge/Spearhead) 5.20 DE Phillips 66 (Bayway).....285 Oklahoma OH WV PBF (Paulsboro)...... 180 Cushing (Keystone) 6.15** PA Phillips 66 (Ponca City)...... 187 VA Axeon SP (Paulsboro).... 70 Bakersfeld Cushing (Keystone) 6.50* CIFIC HollyFrontier (Tulsa) ...... 125 Delaware ONMOBIL Kern Oil...... 26 X Cofeyville Res. (Wynnewood)...... 70 KS PBF (Delaware City) .....190 Wood River (Enbridge/Mustang/Capwood) 5.85 EX San Joaquin...... 15 Ohio Valero (Ardmore) ...... 90 Wood River (Keystone) 5.35** SPEARHEAD BP-Husky (Toledo)...... 160 NM SOUTH KY Wood River PBF (Toledo) ...... 170 Wood River (Express/Platte) 2.40* MO WRB ...... 314 Marathon (Canton) ...... 80 USGC (Enbridge/Spearhead/Seaway) 8.65* Los Angeles Borger/McKee Robinson Husky (Lima)...... 160 Alon USA ...... 94 USGC (Keystone/TC Gulf Coast) 7.95** WRB ...... 146 OK Marathon...... 206 Marathon (Catlettsburg)...... 240 Tesoro (Carson) ...... 266 Valero...... 170 TN Mt Vernon Chevron ...... 290 Countrymark...... 27 Notes 1) Assumed exchange rate = 0.92 US$ / 1C$ (May 2014 average) PEGASUS 2) Tolls rounded to nearest 5 cents ExxonMobil...... 155 CENTURION NC Phillips 66...... 139 Memphis 3) Tolls in efect July 1, 2014 Tesoro (Wilmington)...... 97 Valero...... 195 * 10-year committed toll Valero ...... 135 AR El Dorado Delek...... 80 **20-year committed toll Artesia Slaughter MS Big Spring SC AL GA New Mexico/W. Texas Mississippi Savannah EXXONMOBIL EX Western Refning (El Paso)...... 128 XONMOBIL Chevron (Pascagoula)...... 330 HollyFrontier (Artesia) ...... 100 Tyler Alabama Alon (Big Spring)...... 70 Delek...... 60 LA Hunt (Tuscaloosa) ...... 72 Area Refneries - Capacities as at Jun 1 , 2014 Shell (Saraland) ...... 85 Mississippi River (in ‘000s barrels per day) KO ExxonMobil (Baton Rouge)..... 503 CH Lake Charles TX Chalmette...... 192 Port Arthur/ Marathon (Garyville) ...... 522 Petroleum Administration for Motiva (Convent)...... 235 Houston/Texas City Beaumont FL Defense District PRSI (Pasadena) ...... 117 Motiva (Norco)...... 220 Three Rivers Valero (Norco)...... 270 Valero...... 100 Marathon (Galveston)451 Port Arthur/Beaumont Lake Charles Valero (Meraux)...... 135 Corpus Christi Shell (Deer Park)...... 340 ExxonMobil...... 365 CITGO...... 425 Phillips 66 (Belle Chasse) ...... 247 Major Existing Crude Oil Pipelines carrying CITGO...... 165 Sweeny ExxonMobil...... 584 Motiva...... 600 Phillips 66...... 239 Alon (Krotz Springs)...... 83 Flint...... 300 Phillips 66...... 247 Houston Refning ...... 268 Canadian crude oil Valero...... 310 Calcasieu...... 75 Shell (St. Rose) *idled* ...... 55 Valero...... 325 Marathon ...... 80 Valero (2)...... 160+245 Total...... 174 Placid (Port Allen)...... 60 Selected Other Crude Oil Pipelines
Figure 1.1 - Map of existing Canadian and US pipelines and refineries. The red lines transport products from the Alberta tar sands. Source: CAPP (2014)
For groups like RTT, opposing the Line 9 reversal is a way to engage in local mobilization against the development of the Alberta tar sands, in solidarity with communities living on the frontlines of industry. My research about Line 9 thus began through my work with RTT and an interest in the geopolitics of dilbit pipelines. This part of my project included a series of 19 formal interviews conducted in and around the city of Sarnia, Ontario, known as Canada’s Chemical Valley, and the adjacent Aamjiwnaang First Nation, where Line 6B and Line 9 converge (see figures 1.2 and 1.3).4 Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline, which extends 830 kilometers from Sarnia, Ontario, to Montreal, Quebec, first came into operation in 1976. It initially ran west-to-east, but was reversed in 1999 due to changing oil prices. Since then, Line 9 had carried imported conventional oil westwards from the east coast of the United States. However, beginning in August 2011, Enbridge filed a series of applications with the Canadian National Energy Board (NEB) to re-reverse the flow of Line 9, increase its overall capacity from 240,000 to 300,000 of oil barrels per day, and to use the pipeline to transport diluted
4 bitumen (dilbit) from the Alberta tar sands eastwards. The NEB ultimately authorized the reversal in early 2014.5 Bitumen is a semi-solid hydrocarbon that can be turned into synthetic crude oil. At 10° C it’s as hard as a hockey puck. When extracted from the ground, it’s about the consistency of peanut butter. In Canada, bitumen is found in naturally occurring tar sands deposits that sit underneath about 140,000 square kilometers of boreal forest in northern Alberta. 6 Methods for extracting tar sands vary depending on how deep underground the sands are buried. Some tar sands can be mined from the surface, but about 80% are buried over 200 feet below ground and are extracted through energy-intensive drilling processes that involve injecting steam into the earth in order to separate the bitumen from the sand and pump it to the surface. Because of its exceptionally high viscosity, bitumen requires extra processing before it can be shipped through pipelines. The majority of bitumen retrieved through drilling methods is diluted with lighter oils, solvents, and natural gas condensate for pipeline transportation. The exact composition of the diluent is proprietary information – a trade secret. It is this diluted bitumen, or dilbit, that Enbridge’s Line 6B carried at the time of the Kalamazoo River spill, and that Line 9 will soon begin transporting (cf. CAPP, 2012; NRC, 2013; McGowan et al, 2012).
Figure 1.2 - Map of Line 6B. The replaced pipeline is within 25 feet of the old pipeline, so this map gives a good picture of Line 6B at the time of the spill. The rupture occurred near Talmadge Creek in Marshall, and the dilbit flowed from the creek into the Kalamazoo River, through Battle Creek to Kalamazoo, and the towns in between. When the pipeline crosses the Michigan border into Ontario, it connects to terminals in Sarnia. Source: InsideClimate News, (Hasemeyer, 2012).
5 As I will explore in Chapter 2, the Line 9 reversal proposal sparked much debate in Ontario and Quebec, drawing in a wide array of governments, environmentalists, farmers, oil companies, Indigenous communities, and a host of other actors who articulated a stake in the pipeline project. Although the parties who expressed concerns about the Line 9 reversal had diverse reasons for doing so, a common thread that crossed through their arguments was a recurrent reference to the Kalamazoo River spill as a scenario that must be avoided in Eastern Canada. The Michigan incident was regularly invoked in media reports about the Line 9 debate, and provided fodder for critics of tar sands production and Enbridge alike.
Figure 1.3 - Map of Enbridge's Line 9. Source: Enbridge (2012).
In addition to concerns about the risks of dilbit transportation and spills, the comparison between Line 9 and Line 6B turned in part around the structural similarity of both pipelines, which are of a similar age and identical make.7 One last element that entered into frequent comparison between Line 6B and Line 9 was the degree to which Enbridge could care for its infrastructure and respond appropriately in the case of an incident. Captivated by this comparison, I thought that in order to better understand all that was at stake in the debate about the Line 9 reversal, I needed to acquire a greater understanding of the Kalamazoo River spill. And in the process, the spill captivated me in
6 turn. Between May and August 2013, I spent a little over three months living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while based at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources & Environment. I travelled frequently to many parts of the state to interview people who were impacted in some way by the spill, including but not limited to residents along the river, members of agencies called in to respond to the disaster, government officials, environmental activists, industry representatives, scientists charged with investigating the spill’s effects, doctors, and lawyers. I conducted a total of 75 formal research interviews with people impacted in some way by the Kalamazoo River spill. I most often found myself in Battle Creek, Marshall, Ceresco, and Kalamazoo, but also at times in Detroit, Jackson, Lansing, and in rural areas along the Line 6B replacement route. I also attended several relevant events, and participated in meetings and actions with the Michigan
Coalition Against Tar Sands (MICATS). After my time in Michigan I continued to work on projects with a handful of residents for several months from afar.8
Enbridge
What, or who, is Enbridge? Along the Kalamazoo River, this is a complicated question. Enbridge is the polluter, the spiller, the owner and operator of Line 6B. Enbridge is Big Oil. Enbridge is those men in white trucks that drive through Marshall and back and forth along the I-94 highway. Enbridge is those thousands of contracted and sub-contracted cleanup workers and their respective companies. Enbridge is the public relations spin-doctors. Enbridge is now the owner of most riverside properties between Marshall and Kalamazoo. Enbridge is taking a long time to clean up its mess, but has made several generous donations to community groups in Michigan in the interim. Enbridge is all of this and much more.
Enbridge’s headquarters are in Calgary, Alberta. Its subsidiaries (Enbridge US, Enbridge Energy Partners, or Enbridge Gas Distribution, to name just a few) are scattered across many corners of North America, but the Enbridge executives in Calgary ultimately call the final shots.9 The multi-billion dollar company specializes in energy transportation, distribution, and generation in North America. In 2013 its net earnings were $446 million (Enbridge, 2014d).
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In recent years, two major projects have dominated public pipeline debates and the campaigns of big ENGOs: Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project and TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, which will
7 carry 525,000 and 830,000 barrels per day of dilbit from the Alberta tar sands respectively. The proposed Northern Gateway project consists of a pipeline through Alberta and British Columbia that will meet tankers on the west coast of Canada for dilbit export, whereas the Keystone XL will, if approved, bring dilbit from Alberta to Texas.
While most eyes have been fixed on the Northern Gateway and Keystone XL, both Enbridge and TransCanada have continued to develop other projects.10 Enbridge has been especially successful in moving several projects through advanced stages of regulatory application processes in the United States. The company intends to build a 5,000-mile network of new and expanded pipelines that would transport upwards of the Keystone XL’s proposed capacity of dilbit to refineries in the Midwest and the US Gulf Coast. (cf. Song, 2013c; Horn, 2014b).11
The expanded Line 6B and Line 9 straddle the border between Enbridge’s American and Canadian Mainlines - principle networks of pipelines in both countries - and are relatively small but important conduits in these systems.
Enbridge is hard to get a grasp of, but following its pipelines is one way to start.
The spill In the late evening of July 25th, 2010, the emergency dispatcher in Calhoun County, Michigan, began receiving 9/11 calls from residents reporting noxious odors. Local fire fighters responded, but could not identify the origin of the smell. Had they known that Enbridge’s Line 6B ran underground through the county, things might have turned out differently. By the next morning, the strong odors could no longer be dismissed. Another call to the emergency dispatch center from the town of Marshall reported: “the entire downtown smells like natural gas” (HRCTI 2010: 5). Local officials soon discovered that Talmadge Creek, near Marshall, was full of crude oil. By 1:30pm, Enbridge reported to the National Response Centre (NRC) that its Line 6B pipeline had ruptured. The oil had travelled down Talmadge Creek and into Kalamazoo River. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) later estimated that approximately 1.14 million gallons of dilbit were spilled.12 Upon Enbridge’s reporting of the spill, the NRC notified relevant agencies. The EPA assumed the role of On-scene Coordinator and established a Unified Incident
8 Command (UIC) structure made up of local, state, and federal agencies.13 This structure is part of the federal Incident Command System, a standardized management system used to respond to crises of all sorts, with the goal of efficiently coordinating work among the various agencies involved.14 Over the following weeks the UIC outgrew the first two command bases it had established in Marshall, needing to move again and again to larger buildings. Members of the UIC worked long 12-hour days for months on end, often without days off. The thousands of responders who were called in were finally able to contain the spill at Morrow Dam, about 35 miles downstream from the rupture point, which was crucial in order to prevent the oil from reaching an EPA Superfund site where an old paper mill had left PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl) contamination, or from eventually reaching Lake Michigan.15 Southwest Michigan had received a large amount of rain, which meant that the water levels in the Kalamazoo River were higher than usual at the time of the spill. The oil thus inundated banks along the river. While the sheer volume of spilled oil was a major challenge for cleanup workers, the material composition of the oil that spilled is what rendered the cleanup most difficult. Response agencies initially believed dilbit would behave like conventional oil. “We all had this naïve assumption that this oil was going to float”, described a member of the UIC in an interview. At the time of the spill, Line 6B was carrying dilbit composed of 70% bitumen, and 30% condensate (NOAA, 2010). Whereas the condensate evaporated into the air and dissolved into the water, the bitumen sank to the bottom of the river and mixed with sediment. Parties involved in the cleanup process had to develop new techniques and tools to collect the oil, which rendered the process all the more costly – over $1 billion, and counting (Linnit, 2013). By November 2010, the EPA announced that Enbridge had completed all major work of removing submerged oil (Killian, 2010). Residents thought things would go back to normal. But when the ice thawed in 2011, cleanup crews were back on the river. And then back again in 2012.16 Rumors circulated that there had been a cover-up. One whistleblower in particular, who had worked for a cleanup company contracted by Enbridge, circulated videos documenting oil that remained in areas that had been cleared by Enbridge and the EPA.17 The EPA and Enbridge denied these allegations. 18
9 When I was in Michigan in the summer of 2013, right around the third year anniversary of the spill, Enbridge was preparing to begin yet another phase of the cleanup. The EPA had ordered Enbridge to dredge parts of the river where there remained significant amounts of submerged oil. Enbridge was expected to recover between 12,000 and 18,000 gallons of oil through dredging – work that the company will continue over the summer of 2014. The EPA estimates that once the dredging process is complete, there will remain approximately 162,000-168,000 gallons of oil in the river. The EPA has deemed this remaining oil to be “unrecoverable” through dredging or other immediate removal practices. Instead, it would be collected over a period of many years through the use of sediment traps (EPA, 2013).
Cutting together causes19
In June 2012, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) published the results of its investigation into the spill. The report condemned the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA), the federal pipeline regulator, for its failure to ensure that Enbridge adequately maintained Line 6B. Its comments about Enbridge were even more damming. Deborah Hersman, the Chair of the NTSB, likened Enbridge’s spill response to the ‘Keystone Cops’, fictional incompetent policemen that starred in silent films in the early 20th century (Krugel, 2012). Nearly two years after the spill, the NTSB’s findings reinvigorated local, and indeed international, criticism of Enbridge’s handling of the disaster. The NTSB found that the rupture in Line 6B occurred at 5:58pm on July 25th, 2010, during one of Enbridge’s scheduled shutdowns of the pipeline. Despite multiple alarms about abnormal pressure in the pipe triggered in Enbridge’s control center in Edmonton, Enbridge employees did not discover or report the spill for another 17 hours, during which they attempted to restart Line 6B twice. The NTSB found that 81% of the dilbit released was spilled during these two attempts to restart the flow of the pipeline (NTSB, 2012). The NTSB concluded that in addition to weak regulatory enforcement at PHMSA, “pervasive organizational failures” at Enbridge made possible the rupture of Line 6B.
10 Hundreds of defects had been detected in pipeline as early as 2004, but remained unaddressed. The pipeline burst in July 2010 due to “corrosion fatigue cracks that grew and coalesced from multiple stress corrosion cracks, which had initiated in areas of external corrosion beneath the disbonded polyethylene tape coating” (NTSB, 2012: 121).
Release waivers
About 6 miles from the point of rupture, or about 13.5 miles if you canoe down the Kalamazoo River. Rows of homes, named after letters of the alphabet. The Kalamazoo River weaves around three edges of the Baker Estates trailer park, on the outskirts of Battle Creek. In July 2010, about 80 of the 120 homes in the park were occupied, some of them sitting almost directly on the river. Only a handful of these families remain in the park today.
---
A few days after the spill, Enbridge employees walk through the park, knocking on doors. They are here to offer a free air purifier and, in some cases, a check for a few hundred dollars.20 All they need in exchange is a signature on a form. Several people sign, not knowing that in so doing they waived their right to take any legal action against Enbridge. Still others sign waivers releasing their entire medical histories to the company.
Local congressman Mark Schauer and his staff find out about these practices. He and James Oberstar, then Chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, issue a letter to Enbridge on September 1, 2010, ordering the company to cease and desist.21
Expansion/replacement
In late September 2010, about two months after the spill, Enbridge was authorized to restart the repaired Line 6B (PHMSA, 2010). Beginning in 2011, Enbridge began seeking approval to replace Line 6B entirely, and expand the pipeline’s capacity from 240,000 to 500,000 barrels of oil per day.22 The Michigan Public Service Commission approved the final portion of this application in January 2013 (MPSC 2012 & 2013).23 The approval of the Line 6B replacement meant that Enbridge could expand its easement along the old pipeline route by about 85 feet24 in order to make room for the new Line 6B. Many landowners along the route were unhappy about the construction –
11 not because they didn’t want the pipeline to be replaced (they believed a new pipeline would be safer than the existing line) but because Enbridge and the company’s contracted right-of-way (ROW) agents were particularly difficult to deal with.25 However, the MPSC’s ruling gave Enbridge the right to invoke Michigan’s eminent domain laws if landowners refused to cede to the construction, in which case their property would be condemned. Although I use the word “landowner” throughout this thesis to refer to people who own property along the Line 6B replacement route, I do not treat it as a category of identity. Rather, I use the word as a way of situating emerging groups in the unfolding Line 6B controversy. Most of the people to whom I refer would not likely have identified as landowners prior to being interpolated as such when the first Enbridge ROW agent knocked on their door and informed them of the pipeline project. Like the “residents” along the Kalamazoo River to whom I refer in later chapters, landowners do not constitute a homogenous group. However, many have chosen to work across differences in coalitions aimed at common goals.
On methods, enunciatory communities, and ethnographic folds
Kim Fortun asks the important question of how to account for the ways in which a disaster creates communities (2001: 10). The groups that assemble around environmental controversies like the Kalamazoo River spill tend be described as “stakeholders”, as groups having a particular wager in the decisions made by corporations, governments, or other powerful organizations. While an advantage of the stakeholder model is its recognition of difference, in practice “the goal is usually to manage difference by forcing diversity into consensus” (ibid: 11). Fortun develops the term “enunciatory community” as an alternative to the stakeholder model. Enunciatory communities do not exist prior to the predicaments that bring them into being, and nor are they fixed units of analysis. Like a disaster, an enunciatory community is an “emergent effect of crosscutting forces” (ibid: 14), whose form is fluid and open. This way of apprehending the social formations that come about in the wake of a disaster is better suited to understanding responses to the Kalamazoo
12 River spill than the stakeholder model for two main reasons. First, because it doesn’t take for granted that the only possible responses to disaster will be articulated in terms of rational self-interest by pre-existing constituencies, and second, because it allows for heterogeneity and complexity among the groups that assembled in the aftermath of the spill. During my fieldwork I encountered many different understandings of the Kalamazoo River spill: of what exactly happened, of why and how it mattered, and of what should be done about it. These different understandings of the spill cannot be assimilated into a map of interests (as in the stakeholder map). They are not ‘sides’ of the story, nor do they consist of separate ‘parts’ or perspectives that could be pieced together to form a ‘whole’. Following Marilyn Strathern, the trope of perspectives falls short of capturing what I want to describe, insofar as it suggests that I could somehow piece together all viewpoints:
“But that would not account for the sense of movement or journey that one has in switching perspectives, nor for one’s implicit knowledge that the number of possible perspectives is in fact infinite. For that number is equal to the number of things from whose vantage points one could see the world, or to the number of purposes for which one might wish to see, plus one: plus the perspective that would result from seeing the world via perspective” (Strathern, 2004: 108, emphasis in original).
Instead of imagining the various perspectives on the Kalamazoo River spill as fragmented pieces of a larger puzzle, I borrow Strathern’s (2004) imagery of a fractal, in which self-similar forms proliferate. The point is certainly not to collapse into relativism but rather to observe the way in which I cannot entirely control the account – that my own comparisons and analytic articulations always betray remainders, “starting points for apparently new but not quite independent dimensions” (ibid: 82, 108).26 What I offer, then, is a partial perspective (cf. Haraway, 1989, also Strathern, 2004). I don’t pretend to capture the phenomena I deal with in their entirety. Instead, this situated intervention brings certain things to the fore, and not others. My complicity with some of my informants, most apparent in Chapters 3 and 4, made possible a great deal of the research that informs this text. But while this work opened up relationships with some (for which I am grateful), it also limited relationships with others. Mike Fortun’s (2008) account of “complicity” in ethnographic research has helped me to reflect on my own
13 ethnographic entanglements. For Fortun, complicity is a process of “becoming complicit, where complicity is a matter of folds, pli” (ibid: 85). Relations of complicity developed for me as I became more and more enfolded in the phenomena I had set out to describe. I did not attempt, nor did I desire, to extricate myself entirely from the mix. The folds left marks.27
The chapters
I came to understand the events and disputes that have spun out from the Kalamazoo River spill as revolving around contests over knowledge. I have thus organized the chapters of this thesis around some of the messiest knowledge controversies I encountered. The chapters hang together through questions about how knowledge is produced and to what effects; who has access to particular forms of knowledge and what happens when access is blocked for one reason or another; what counts as knowledge and under what conditions does knowledge travel authoritatively; and how are forms of knowledge mobilized towards particular ends. Andrew Barry (2013) remarks that the scope of a knowledge controversy is usually indeterminate. The question “of what should be included as a part of any particular controversy, the significance of particular sites, its spatial dispersion and temporal extension, its history and future, its urgency: all these issues may become elements of the controversy” (9). In order to account for this indeterminacy, and to make sense of the relations and dynamics between different knowledge controversies that might otherwise seem unconnected, Barry develops the term “political situation”. The “political situation” is a useful frame for understanding the Kalamazoo River spill, as it provides a means of holding together linked disputes rather than treating them as discrete cases (Barry, 2013: 183). Moreover, the term’s geographic sensibilities render it particularly germane for the analysis of this disaster and its related knowledge controversies, which span different parts of Michigan, but that also implicate a range of other localities, from northern Alberta to the Middle East. Across the chapters I have tried to treat the indeterminate movements of - and those enabled by - the Kalamazoo River spill as ethnographic objects.28
14 Chapter 2 examines how knowledge produced about the Kalamazoo River has informed debates about Line 9 in Ontario and Quebec. While opponents of the reversal never fail to evoke the Kalamazoo River spill to point to the risks of the Line 9 reversal, proponents of the project are adamant that Canada must either “pipe or perish”. This chapter explores the similar anticipatory logics that undergird both support for and opposition to the Line 9 reversal, and queries the blurry lines between environmental precaution and security preemption. I ask what a preoccupation with emergent risks enables, and what possibilities it might foreclose. I suggest that the iterative reference to the Kalamazoo River spill often means that existent issues of environmental violence implicated in Line 9 reversal are obscured. If Chapter 2 is in part an illustration of what kind of knowledge about the Kalamazoo River spill does travel, Chapter 3 looks at knowledge that can’t quite get off the ground because uncertainty weighs it down. By taking up some of the most pressing knowledge controversies about the spill, I examine how different sources of uncertainty cross into one another, creating a climate charged with secrecy. This sense of secrecy is at once what compels some residents to pursue particular knowledge, and what simultaneously enables others to discount their suspicions entirely as conspiracy or paranoia. Chapter 4 then turns to a science project on which I collaborated with a group of residents wanting to intervene in official accounts of the spill by producing knowledge about strange rock formations that began popping up in the Kalamazoo River. The chapter charts the group’s investigative process, paying careful attention to the material practices through which we came to produce information about these rocks. I reflect on the effects of the project, including how the subjectivity of those involved in rendering perceptible their own toxic exposures may be reconfigured in the process. In closing, Chapter 5 examines how the Kalamazoo River spill has provided a platform for the emergence of solidarities between residents affected by the spill and communities impacted by petrochemical industries elsewhere. I do so by drawing relations between the Line 6B expansion, and industrial activity in southwest Detroit and Ontario’s Chemical Valley in Sarnia and Aamjiwnaang First Nation. Whereas the previous chapters complicated the question of what exactly it is that we remember when
15 we heed the now popularized injunction to Remember the Kalamazoo, Chapter 5 looks at how that remembering is performed both along the river and elsewhere. The chapters pivot around different kinds of uncertainty and risk, concepts that likewise pivot around each other. In risk discourses, uncertainty is rendered problematic, as something that must be contained and calculated. But crises and catastrophes of many sorts - from financial crises to pipeline ruptures, for instance - dislodge the risk- uncertainty dyad, throwing into relief that not all risks can be managed: some unknowns remain radically so, some uncertainties cannot be neatly assimilated into a risk calculus.29 How, then, to approach the uncertain? Heeding to uncertainties has helped me to reroute my attention from questions of what is real or true, to questions of what gets to count in those calculations in the first place. 30 Uncertainty is unsettling. If engaged creatively it can provide an impulse to unsettle the grounds of a debate, or to take seriously what might have otherwise been dismissed. Will Line 9 spill? Have the chemicals in dilbit made people sick along the Kalamazoo River? The answers to these questions, which preoccupy much of this thesis, are uncertain, at least for the time being. I try to use these uncertainties as devices for generating other sets of questions, for getting to the politics implicated in producing knowledge about the Kalamazoo River spill as well as the Line 9 reversal. Who gets to participate and what comes to matter in these processes of knowledge production, including how risks and uncertainties are defined and engaged, has consequences for those impacted by both Line 6B and Line 9. These economies of knowledge also provide a small window into the wide range of stakes involved in the expansion of dilbit pipeline networks throughout North America.
16
17 Chapter 2 Anticipating the Line 9 Reversal31
Birds soaked in black goo; dead turtles on the riverbank; a kaleidoscopic sheen on the water; small children with skin rashes. These are just some of the frightening images that circulated in July 2010 in the aftermath of the Kalamazoo River spill. Two years later, across the border that separates Michigan from the Canadian province of Ontario, a motley crew of activists, municipal politicians, and landowners began deploying these same images to express concern about what might happen if another Enbridge pipeline that runs through Ontario is repurposed to begin carrying dilbit. This anxiety was spurred when Enbridge began seeking regulatory approval to reverse the flow of its Line 9 - a pipeline that runs westwards from Montreal, Quebec to Sarnia, Ontario, passing through 99 towns and 14 First Nations communities along the way (Paris, 2012).32 Line 9 has been carrying imported conventional oil for over a decade, but the reversed will carry dilbit eastwards. This proposed change in the pipeline’s contents was alarming for environmentalists because dilbit production is extremely energy intensive, and some suggest that dilbit pipelines are particularly prone to rupture (Swift et al, 2011). As response agencies learned in the aftermath of the Kalamazoo River incident, dilbit behaves differently than conventional oil when spilled. Most of the diluents will evaporate, exposing surrounding communities to intense airborne fumes, while the heavier bitumen will sink into water or soil. This makes for a very challenging cleanup process. Public opposition to the transportation of dilbit to Eastern Canada mounted, and was propelled by increased attention to the rate of pipeline spills, which has tripled since 2000 (Hildebrandt, 2013).33. However, the Canadian government remained adamant throughout the Line 9 debate that the expansion of pipeline networks is necessary in order to maintain economic and energy security. It argued that the Line 9 reversal “would make the country much less vulnerable to a supply disruption, particularly those resulting from geopolitical events” (NRCAN, 2008: 54). Moreover, as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) explained, the “current lack of global market access [to
18 transport tar sands] costs the Canadian economy approximately $40 million/day” in foregone economic activity (CAPP, 2013: 17). Thus, in order to avert potential economic and geopolitical risks, Canada must – as indicated by the title of a recent report commissioned by the Saskatchewan provincial government– “pipe or perish” (Holden, 2013). As these brief snapshots suggest, parties on all sides of the Line 9 reversal mobilized different kinds of potential risks that they associated with the project, which they claimed needed to be secured. However, in their encounters, these stances tended to talk past each other. In what follows I attempt to hold together mainstream positions of opposition and support for the Line 9 reversal in order to examine the similar anticipatory logic that underlies them. I ask what such a preoccupation with emergent risks enables, and what possibilities it might foreclose. As securing the future necessarily begs the question, ‘for whom’?, I suggest that one troubling consequence of a preoccupation with security is the potential to overlook which lives and ways of being in the world might be neglected in the rush to secure others. This chapter emerges from my ethnographic entanglements within environmental justice groups in Ontario who have articulated a position against the Line 9 reversal. Like those with whom I work, I too was captured by the story of the Kalamazoo River spill - both the spectacle of the event and its recurrent citation in discussions of Line 9. My fieldwork in Michigan with various “enunciatory communities" (Fortun, 2001) that assembled around the spill and its ongoing cleanup enabled me to appreciate the tremendous force of this comparison: the impacts of the spill continue to profoundly affect surrounding communities and ecosystems, as the next two chapters will describe. Meanwhile, my fieldwork in Ontario has helped me to understand what this comparison elides. One effect of the attention that Line 9 has received as a potential vector of disaster is that the actual and ongoing “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011) of dilbit’s cycles of production and consumption often goes unarticulated. I don’t mean that these concerns aren’t expressed by some, and coherently at that, but rather that they rarely articulate in the political sense of forging connections with a broader public (Choy, 2011). This chapter is thus in part an attempt to begin asking how we might attend to the multiple stakes of dilbit pipeline projects across spatiotemporal registers.
19 I situate the Canadian government’s and Enbridge’s preoccupation about the circulation of oil enabled by pipelines within a particular mode of governance – biopolitical governmentality. The chapter thus begins by reviewing Foucault’s account of biopolitics and its relation to security practices. I then chart what recent literature on biopolitical security has diagnosed as a shift towards various modes of anticipatory action, and examine how this shift has materialized in practices of environmental precaution. Pipeline debates in Canada illustrate these anticipatory motifs. Both the state’s injunctions in favor of pipeline projects and environmentalists’ opposition to this infrastructure are affectively charged in their forecasting of particular futures, whether in terms of anxieties about the economics and geopolitics oil on the one hand, or fear of a spill on the other. The last section of this paper thus reflects on the similar rationalities that join these differing positions on the pipeline, and offers ways to understand this contradiction. Finally, I end by posing some questions that demand further examination, and ask what it might mean to subvert security discourses by engaging in speculative practices that remain accountable to the past, present, and future.
Biopolitics, security, and circulation
As is often rehearsed, Foucault (1990) first described biopower as “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculation” (43). Whereas sovereign power binds and constrains, taking life or letting live, biopower works to foster particular forms of life, making live and letting die. Biopower developed alongside the advent of the life sciences and techniques of standardized measurements, such as forecasts and statistical analyses, which provide a means to intervene in a population at the level of its generality so as to maximize a particular form of life, while disallowing others (Foucault, 2003; see also Cooper, 2008). Importantly, then, as I will expand below, biopolitics always involves a form of necropolitics – “distributions of death effects and precariousness” as it concomitantly works to foster life (Murphy, 2012: 13). In his later lectures on Security, Territory, Population, Foucault (2009) suggested that biopower operates through security apparatuses, constellations of discourses, forms of knowledge, institutions, and built environments through which power operates. An
20 apparatus of security maps a range of contingent behaviors in a population and establishes correlations between these and various environmental and biological influences (cf. Dillon & Guerrero, 2008). Whereas disciplinary power acts on the individual, biopower secures a population by acting on its environment to ensure that the population is “not disciplined, but regularized” (Foucault, 2003: 247). In fact, Foucault (2010) later characterized biopower as “environmental” (Foucault, 2010). With its environmental techniques, biopower targets “the rules of the game rather than individual players”. It enables the “optimization of systems of difference”, and opens itself up to “fluctuating processes” (Foucault, 2010: 259-260). Foucault did not expand on the ecological connotations of biopower’s ‘environmental’ interventions – this wasn’t his project. What strikes me about his allusion to the environment as a space of relations to be acted upon is how it lends itself to thinking the eco-political and biopolitical together. 34 Foucault’s observation that power attends to the environment, broadly conceived, reminds the environmentalist in me that romanticizing ecological thinking without attention to its historical itineraries risks overlooking the ways that both the market and the state have also already captured this mode of attention. I return to these transpositions below. The environment, this space of security where power aims to affect a population, is what Foucault calls the “milieu”. The milieu forms a set of effects that condition the lives of those who inhabit it. It is both what enables actions to take place, and the space in which they circulate. For Foucault, “it is therefore the problem of circulation and causality that is at stake in this notion of milieu” (2009:21). It follows that biopolitical security is about regulating the circulation in which populations are embedded (cf. Dillon & Lobo-Guerrero, 2009). The regulation of circulation entails discrimination as to which kinds of circulation are desirable, and which kinds are not (Foucault, 2009). This observation becomes important below when I turn to discuss the circulations enabled by oil pipelines in North America. In order to facilitate circulation, security apparatuses embody an ethos of laissez-faire - not in the sense of leaving everything alone, but in terms of ensuring the possibility of movement of some of people and things, which is reflected in economic structures and the role assumed by the state (Foucault, 2009: 45-9; cf. Foucault, 2010).
21 Hence, biopower “was without question indispensable in the development of capitalism” (1990: 140-1). The birth of biopolitics hinged on a particular liberal notion of freedom, wherein the task of security was no longer that of securing particular bodies or territories, but rather of securing the “contingent freedom of circulation” (Dillon & Lobo-Guerrero, 2008: 292). Crucially, Foucault did not suggest that the emergence of biopolitics and its correlative security apparatuses supplant mechanisms of disciplinary and juridical governance. On the contrary, with these shifts the problem of sovereignty was “made more acute than ever” (2009: 107). Others have rightly argued, however, that Foucault was largely inattentive to those lives that are ‘let die’ through the regulation of others (Ferguson, 2005; Murphy, 2012; Stoler, 1995). As I suggest in the following sections, the apparatus in place to secure the movement of dilbit to market serves as a reminder that while biopower facilitates polymorphous flows, it does so only by severely restricting – and in some cases preempting - other forms of liveliness.
The circulation of Canadian tar sands
The circulation of dilbit from the Alberta tar sands is a priority for the Canadian state. The Canadian Department of Natural Resources (NRCAN) suggests that oil pipelines are critical to the growth of Canada’s lucrative energy industry, in which oil and gas are by far the most profitable resources. As 97% of Canada’s proven oil reserves are in the form of tar sands buried in Northern Alberta, NRCAN predicts that by 2030, tar sands production will account for 90% of national energy production (NRCAN, 2011). Between 2007-2012, Canadian oil exports via pipelines exceeded $100 billion annually, constituting one fifth of Canada’s total export revenues (NRCAN, 2012). But ensuring the continued profitability of the oil industry in Canada requires a means to get the expanded production of dilbit to market. In a 2008 report titled Canadian Refining and Oil Security, NRCAN explained “pipelines are the safest, most reliable and cost-effective way of transporting the large volume of petroleum products that must be moved throughout Canada each day” (NRCAN 2008: 30). However, NRCAN warns, “crude oil pipeline capacity out of
22 Western Canada continues to be tight and at this time there is an inherent lack of flexibility in the system” (49). NRCAN signaled that the lack of existing pipeline capacity renders the entire Canadian oil market susceptible to losses, and identified the Line 9 reversal as a means to augment the system’s resiliency.35 However, as opposition to larger dilbit pipeline projects in North America like the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway is mounting (cf. McCreary and Milligan, 2014), causing delays in their adjudication, the ‘inherent lack of flexibility’ in Canada’s existing pipeline infrastructure is growing more and more apparent. Circulating news headlines amplify these anxieties, with dire warnings that “Canada’s pipeline squeeze could be devastating to economy” (Krugel, 2013). In addition to Canada’s inadequate pipeline capacity, NRCAN (2008) identifies a host of other “market vulnerabilities and risk factors” (52) to the petroleum industry, ranging from the pressure to adopt more stringent environmental regulations, to aging refinery infrastructure; and from extreme weather events, to emergent geopolitical and terrorist threats. The Canadian government’s general concern with securing the country’s oil market by expanding pipeline networks is reflected in its support for the Line 9 reversal, which it celebrates for reasons of energy and economic security. Moreover, as Joe Oliver, then federal Minister of Natural Resources declared when asked about the Line 9 reversal: “I think Canadians take pride in the resources they have. And if we develop them responsibly, this is a national building exercise” (Pedwell, 2013). Implicit in this statement is another narrative that strengthens support for Canada’s oil industry: the ethical valence of Canadian tar sands, and how support for its extraction comes to stand as an index of national belonging. In 2011, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his then Minister of the Environment, Peter Kent, began promoting tar sands as “ethical”. This characterization takes a page directly from the organization EthicalOil, which was formed to bolster sales of Ezra Levant’s 2010 book Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands. That Ezra Levant was a former ministerial aid to Jason Kenney, Canada’s former Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism (and now Minister of Employment and Social Development & Multiculturalism), is but one of the many links between the Canadian government (under Stephen Harper) and EthicalOil. Independent journalists
23 have documented a host of problematic connections linking this tar sands advocacy group with various federal government officials and institutions (cf. Chase, 2011; Price, 2011; Pullman, 2012). EthicalOil (2012) launched an online petition and published several articles in support of the Line 9 reversal. For instance, Jamie Ellerton, EthicalOil’s Executive Director, asks in an op-ed: “If Canada has the third largest deposit of oil reserves in the world, why are we importing it from Nigeria, Venezuela and other OPEC tyrants?” (Ellerton, 2012). Line 9 should be reversed to carry dilbit, Ellerton suggests, because it is cheaper than imported crude and “even better, it’s ethical — from oil producers who provide women high-paying jobs, including top executive positions, instead of legislating them into black cloth sacks and making them slaves to their male masters” (ibid). Rather than rely on “bloodstained” oil from OPEC “tyrants”, Canada should be taking advantage of its abundance of oil in tar sands deposits, which it produces without causing environmental damage or inflicting human rights abuses. An Enbridge employee in charge of public relations for the Line 9 reversal echoed similar sentiments to me in an interview:
“It is in the best interest of Canada to develop and exploit our resources as opposed to being reliant on countries in other parts of the world that certainly can’t boast the same kind of standards that Canada does…. I think that, you know, it’s ethical oil. Really. It’s ethical oil, and it makes sense not just for the economics – but the economics are certainly a huge part of the driver for that.”
I draw attention to these normative claims made about Canadian tar sands by the federal government, EthicalOil, and industry proponents because I want to suggest that part of what is at stake in the securitization of the Canadian oil market is the regulation of normative subjectivity in Canada. The posturing of Canadian tar sands as “ethical” relies on transnational comparisons that depict the persecution of minority subjects in far away places, contrasting it to the alleged inclusion of these same subjects in Canadian society. In addition to the serious elisions in EthicalOil and the government’s account of tar sands production36 and their racist representations of other oil producing nations, their use of minority bodies to posit the superiority of tar sands oil serves to reiterate the normative Canadian citizen. As Foucault remarked, when power performs an environmental intervention, “minority individuals and practices are tolerated” so that action may be
24 brought to bear on “the rules of the game” rather than individual bodies (2010: 259-260). Not to be mistaken for celebrations of difference in Canada, these representations are haunted by the figure of the white Canadian heterosexual who graciously bestows citizenship upon his others, while also outlining the contours of acceptable minority- citizenship, in which minority subjects embrace the nation rather than contest their structural subordination.37 In this sense, tar sands development really is, as Joe Oliver put it, a “national building exercise” – one with clear (necro)-biopolitical dimensions, as it subtly delineates between those lives that should be fostered, and those that may be disallowed. Pipelines enable not only the circulation of oil and capital. I have tried to demonstrate that particular notions of Canadian citizenship have also come to adhere to dilbit pipelines. Sara Ahmed’s (2004) notion of an “affective economy” is helpful for thinking through this adhesion. Extending Marx’ analysis of the generation of surplus value through the circulation of commodities in a capitalist economy, Ahmed suggests that affect, like the market value of a commodity, does not reside in a subject or sign but instead “is produced as an effect of its circulation” (45). Through historically specific patterns of circulation over time, affective values accumulate and may “stick” to particular figures, binding some subjects and objects together, and not others. This stickiness helps explain how particular affects have become affixed to dilbit, and by extension, to the Line 9 reversal – both as objects of promise, profit, and national pride, and also of risk and fear, as I will explore below. The friction produced when these inconsistent affects rub up against each other is indicative of what Ahmed (2010) calls the slide between affective and moral economies. Indeed, thinking in terms of frictions – awkward, unstable, and productive connections of encounters across difference (Tsing, 2005) - helps to disrupt any notions of smooth, unhindered flows that may be implied in Foucauldian accounts of circulation.38 Thinking with frictions also elucidates how the spatial and temporal scales of pipeline debates are conjured and negotiated through contestation about how, why, and where pipelines matter, positing different futures that elicit different affective responses. In today’s “risk society” (Beck, 1992) the affective orientation of contemporary subjects turns increasingly towards the ever-emergent future. Heightened concern with
25 securing unknown, incalculable, and potential risks normalizes speculative and anticipatory practices and modes of attention (Anderson, 2010). Future-oriented narratives about Line 9 shed some light on how the nexus of biopolitical, disciplinary, and sovereign power operates today. As Jackie Orr (2006) puts it, “power operates in the channels of transmission for what you hear and don’t hear when terror talks” (10). Attending to both the presences and absences in anticipations of the Line 9 reversal is one method for tracking the workings of power. Some of Foucault’s interlocutors have suggested that his account of biopower, developed in the late 1970s, needs updating in light of the increasingly tight knot that ties capital and biological life together. It is precisely when Foucault ended his exploration of biopolitics – with the institutionalization of neoliberalism – that these inquiries must begin (cf. Cooper, 2008; Massumi, 2009). As Melinda Cooper argues “where Keynesian economics attempts to safeguard the productive economy against the fluctuations of financial capital, neoliberalism installs speculation at the very core of its production” (10). So while Foucault’s description of security apparatuses shows how risks to a population are identified through generalized techniques of calculation and subsequently regulated, recent explorations of the securitization of risk in neoliberal times and spaces suggest that security is increasingly conceived in terms of the capacity to preempt and develop technological solutions in response to incalculable risks (cf. Cooper, 2008; Dillon & Lobo Guerrero 2008; Massumi, 2009).
Precaution, preemption, resilience
The last decades of the twentieth century gave way to a new language of risk that defied the premises of classical risk theory, in which the likelihood of future risks could be predicted through the use of statistics and other forms of measurement. More information meant a better risk calculus. But in the semblance of global environmental disasters throughout the 1980s - such as ozone depletion, global warming, and a potential nuclear winter - the concept of a “catastrophe risk” began to permeate the discourse of insurance institutions, capital markets, and environmental governance (Cooper, 2008). Unlike the risks that classical risk theory can apprehend, catastrophic events happen
26 unexpectedly. They inhere in the contingent happenings of the everyday. We can only speculate when the next disaster will strike. In the face of such uncertain danger, preemptive action becomes a dominant approach to the future. Recent critical scholarship diagnoses an accelerated turn towards preemptive risk management of all aspects of life – from biosecurity to the securitization of global climate change (cf. Braun, 2007; Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow, 2004; Cooper, 2008; de Goede & Randalls, 2009). In domains of environmental governance, the “precautionary principle” emerged in the 1970s in response to threats of uncertain and emergent risks (cf. UNESCO, 2005). Of German origin, the precautionary principle has now been institutionalized in various international agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the 1992 United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. The latter defines the precautionary principle as such: “where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation” (UN, 1992). Nation-states have also adopted the precautionary principle; the Canadian government, for example, uses the Rio definition in its Federal Sustainable Development Act (Government of Canada, 2008). Fostering systemic resilience is a key component of the precautionary principle. In its guide to the principle, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) explains that while states, corporations, and other judicial bodies may not be held responsible when their actions result in consequences of which they were not fully informed, these actors “may still be morally responsible for acting to increase the resilience of the system to avoid possible breakdowns or catastrophes” (2005: 18). When dealing with complex systems that “can suddenly cross thresholds or flip to a new state” (25), taking precautionary steps to build resilience into public policy and corporate management practices is necessary. As Cooper & Walker (2011) show, the concept of resilience originated within the science of systems ecology of the 1970s. Resilience was conceptualized as the capacity of complex ecological systems to “absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist” (Holling, 1973: 17, cited in Cooper & Walker, 2011:146). But as seemingly innocent concepts like resilience and precaution travelled from the world of ecology back and forth between other domains, parallels were drawn between
27 the complexity of ecological and social systems. Biological metaphors spread increasingly to other disciplines, notably those of neoliberal economics and military strategy. 39 The result: in a neoliberal era, the dividing line between precaution and preemption blurs. Like precaution, preemption is a way of governing future risks. Both practices aim to secure a particular way of life beyond the present, and as such establish affective attachments to the future, albeit in distinct ways. On the one hand, precaution aspires to prevent damage to a system before it becomes irreversible. It hinges on the ability to empirically identify an existing or potential threat, in the face of which it pauses and waits until more information about a danger can be gleaned. On the other hand, preemption acts on threats that have yet to emerge (Anderson, 2010), acting before a danger presents itself. It assumes “that the only way to survive the future is to become immersed in its conditions of emergence, to the point of actualizing it ourselves” (Cooper, 2008: 89). In this way, preemption can be performative – it may bring about precisely that which it names and seeks to regulate (cf. Butler, 2011; Amoore & de Goede, 2008). The preemptive turn towards risk management has troubling political implications. By enclosing political discussion within the realm of risk mitigation, a discourse focused on securing the future from an imminent threat may obscure broader debates that should take place. Moreover, when an apocalyptic future is said to be urgently looming it becomes very difficult to question the terms of a political discussion, let alone destabilize the ways in which a ‘risk’ is being defined (de Goede & Randalls, 2009). And yet, despite - or perhaps because of – these troubling implications, anticipatory action remains central to the governance of everyday life.
Environmentalism’s ‘biopolitical topologies’
“It’s not a question of whether a spill happens – only when” reads a widely distributed pamphlet made by a coalition of groups in Toronto, Ontario, who opposed the Line 9 reversal. This sentiment was often repeated at public events organized by environmental activists to educate the public about Enbridge’s plans. To convey the
28 threats posed by the Line 9 reversal, its detractors invariably pointed to the Kalamazoo River spill. Opponents of the Line 9 reversal mobilized Enbridge’s wanting track record, the detrimental consequences of the Kalamazoo River spill, and the material constitution of dilbit - which makes it much more difficult to clean up and possibly more dangerous to transport than conventional oil 40 - to warn of the potential risks that the Line 9 reversal poses to communities in Ontario and Quebec. Not unlike Canada’s “possible energy futures” charted by the NEB (2009), the Kalamazoo River spill functioned, for critics of the Line 9 reversal, as a possible scenario that could legitimate action in the present. Scenarios are distinguishable from practices of traditional risk management insofar as they do not serve a predictive function. Indeed, as Anderson (2007) identifies, the etymology of ‘scenario’ is traceable through the history of theatrical performance. ‘Scenario’ first referred to a ‘scene’ (from the Latin scena, and Italian scenarius) in a play and thus had an explicitly fictional quality. It wasn’t until the early 1960s, when it became part of the vocabulary for Cold War military planning and future-oriented strategies, that ‘scenario’ acquired the meaning of ‘imagined situation’ (cf. Anderson, 2007: 162). In this sense, scenarios disclose potential threats (an oil spill) and opportunities to be secured (profit) within a given situation. Rather than offering a calculated prediction of the future, scenarios – such as the event of the Kalamazoo River spill – act as epistemic objects, or, in Massumi’s terms, as “affective facts” upon which preemptive action is grounded (cf. Anderson, 2007; Massumi, 2005)41. An affective fact is established through a simple mechanism: “threat triggers fear. The fear is of disruption. The fear is a disruption” (Massumi, 2005,). The Kalamazoo River spill has traveled through time and space to the areas touched by Line 9. It has been summoned into the present as a possible future that could be actualized at any time or place along the pipeline route, and the anxiety this passage creates induces a spill, “in effect” (ibid). This is not to say that the conceptualization of a pipeline rupture actually brings one about, but rather that the present reality of some of its affective effects – fear, anxiety, anger – means that it can be responded to in the present. Yet the limitations of an argument based on potential threats are troubling. As discussed above, de Goede & Randalls (2009) poignantly identify that a debate structured around risk is quickly rendered technical.42 In the case of the Line 9 reversal, Enbridge’s
29 response to concerns about an oil spill was to ensure the public of the integrity of its infrastructure, to emphasize how much it has learned from the Kalamazoo River spill, and to boast the millions of dollars it spends annually on maintenance and safety upgrades for all of its pipelines (cf. Enbridge, 2013). The debate came to a standstill, and opposing parties were left to dispute the factuality of each other’s science. But what if Enbridge were to prove – or at least convince federal regulators – that Line 9 would not rupture? There are moments, however, when a different genre of opposition to the Line 9 reversal emerged, especially from grassroots activists working in solidarity with members of some First Nation communities along the pipeline route. For instance, at a public event organized by Toronto residents in the lead up to the NEB’s decision, one of the speakers, Ron Plain of Aamjiwnaang First Nation, urged the audience to consider what “if Line 9 goes through and never leaks”. Even if a spill never occurred, argued Plain, the reversal would remain far from desirable: by transporting dilbit from the tar sands, the pipeline would still be complicit in the perpetuation of climate change and the poisoning of Indigenous communities and ecologies in those sites where tar sands are extracted and refined. These impacts, unlike the potential of a spill, are ongoing, and would only be exacerbated by the Line 9 reversal. However, the NEB could apprehend these broader effects of the Line 9 reversal in its judgment of Enbridge’s proposal. The Canadian government’s 2012 omnibus Budget Implementation Act (Bill C-38) pushed through hundreds of pages in changes to environmental legislation. Investigative reporting revealed that lobbyists for CAPP had recommended most of these changes, one of which mandated the restriction of public participation in NEB hearings (DeSouza, 2013). Here, the federal government has quite literally acted on Foucault’s “rules of the game” in a way that will facilitate tar sands circulation via the expedition of regulatory approval processes, all the while impeding on the freedom to participate in environmental decision-making. Members of the public who wish to provide input, whether in writing or orally, into a case being considered by the NEB must now submit a 10-page application form proving their ‘expertise’ in the area, or that they are directly affected by the project being considered. To be “directly affected” means to live, recreate, work, or own property along Line 9. In clarifying the list of issues
30 to be considered in the hearing, the NEB indicated that it would “not consider the environmental and socio-economic effects associated with upstream activities, the development of oil sands, or the downstream use of the oil transported by the pipeline” (NEB, 2013: 14). Thus, although preemptive power cannot do away entirely with judicial structures like the National Energy Board (NEB) that allegedly exists to curb risks to the population and environment, it can nonetheless build into those structures “escape holes” for itself in order to continue a flow of preemptive action (Massumi, 2007:18). Perhaps one of the most troubling repercussions of a preoccupation with preempting risks, then, is precisely what goes unarticulated. Here I mean to gesture, as did Plain, to the already present impacts of tar sands production and transportation, most of which occur on a profoundly uneven terrain. That climate change disproportionately affects marginalized populations who are often the least responsible for the problem has been extensively documented (cf. BPCJ, 2002; Bond, 2011; Di Chiro, 2008; Sandberg & Sandberg, 2010). The numerous Treaty violations and detrimental impacts of tar sands production for Indigenous peoples of the Dene and Cree First Nations and Métis communities living in Northern Alberta, downstream from the tar sands, have been the subject of grassroots protests for years (IEN, 2011; Short & Huseman, 2012). In Aamjiwnaang First Nation and Sarnia, Ontario where Line 9 begins, the last two decades have seen mounting dissent from both Indigenous organizers and occupational health and safety advocates about the environmental health impacts of industry in the area (cf. MacDonald & Rang, 2007). The Aamjiwnaang reserve is surrounded by 62 industrial facilities, many of which are oil refineries that were built on land seized slowly over time throughout Canada’s colonial history (Plain, 2007).43 Many residents of Aamjiwnaang fear the potential for Line 9 to rupture and contaminate the St. Clair River, a significant channel in the Great Lakes Waterway. However, for those who I spoke with, this concern is situated within a larger set of everyday experiences of injustices. Residents of the reserve face numerous health challenges linked to industry in the region, including cancers, respiratory illnesses, high rates of miscarriage, and an uneven sex ratio of newborns (Mackenzie et al, 2005). Frequent chemical releases from neighboring industrial plants produce anxiety in residents, who often have no way of knowing what they are inhaling, let alone how it will
31 affect their bodies. Reminiscent of what Jain (2007) calls “living in prognosis”, one young adult from Aamjiwnaang explained to me that when she became aware of the dangers posed by pollution, she began laying awake at night and wondering, “what age am I going to get cancer?” She went on to explain how difficult it was to connect with friends in high school about this preoccupation: “It’s hard to relate to people about what it’s like to feel like your life is a sacrifice for someone else’s”. Not all toxins circulate equally, and nor do their affective charges. Toxicity involves a different, more tedious “structure of feeling” (Williams, 1977) than the jittery anticipation that so often accompanies discussions of Line 9. Temporal lags, chronicity, latency, the many burdens of proof – the effects and affects of toxic exposures are unevenly distributed. I learned this from members of Aamjiwnaang First Nation as well as from residents exposed to dilbit in the aftermath of the Kalamazoo River spill. The difference across these cases, both horrendous in their own ways, is the contingent nature of the latter and the systemic nature of the former. As one Elder from Aamjiwnaang told me when expressing his thoughts on the Line 9 reversal (which would bring more dilbit through the region), the transportation of dilbit connects Aamjiwnnang First Nation in a struggle for self-determination with Indigenous communities living near the sites of tar sands extraction, and also in a widespread struggle to protect the planet. For groups like ASAP (Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia Against Pipelines), organizing against the Line 9 reversal, although a goal in itself, is also a strategic way to draw attention to and intervene in the “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011) taking place in the area and beyond. Yet none of these deadly instances of ongoing environmental discrimination map onto the NEB’s grid of intelligibility. Recall that for Foucault, an apparatus of security includes “the said as much as the unsaid” (Foucault, 1984: 194). The expansion of the tar sands, which Indigenous activists have called “slow industrial genocide” (IEN, 2011), is not that which confounds security, but rather an effect of its practices of laissez-faire. As Murphy (2012) stresses, biopolitical formations do not merely foster life: “they also designate zones of ‘lives less worth living’, less valued, more available to neglect, injury, precariousness, abjection, and open to violence not conventionally counted as such” (44). The slippage from sovereign power to biopower is indeed elusive. While securing Canadian tar sands helps
32 to achieve certain futures, it does so only by preempting others (Braun, 2007). We might then take up Puar’s (2009) invitation of a conceptual rapprochement of biopolitics and necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003) – a “bio-necro-collaboration” – in thinking through the lives – from northern Alberta, to Aamjiwnaang First Nation, to the racialized bodies depicted in EthicalOil’s transnational comparisons, or to the rising sea encroaching on small island nations in the Indian Ocean, for instance - that are disallowed through the securitization of tar sands expansion. How then can we understand the surge of concern about the Line 9 reversal that has emerged in the name of preempting a spill? I propose three different, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, avenues. First, not all of those wary about Enbridge’s project are interested in curbing tar sands production, and thus their concerns extend only to the spaces potentially directly affected by a pipeline spill. For instance, the Canadian Association of Energy and Pipeline Landowners oppose the Line 9 reversal because of the potential impacts on its members’ private properties (CAEPL, 2013). Likewise, the City of Toronto’s worries about the project would be assuaged if Enbridge could show that the reversal would pose no threat to Toronto’s water supply (Kinastowski, 2013). Second, as noted above, the emphasis of many environmentalists on securing risks might be strategic. Although a growing number of grassroots environmental justice groups, and even a handful of mainstream environmental organizations, list the impacts of tar sands production for Indigenous peoples throughout the country as a reason to oppose the Line 9 reversal, the risk of a Kalamazoo River-like spill is most staged often front and center.44 This foregrounding of risk can be rationalized as a necessary tactic in the face of state institutions that turn a blind eye to the ongoing detrimental effects of tar sands production. However, this strategy may be less effective if we conceive of differing political positions as more tightly woven together, in a knot where the responses of pipeline opponents and supporters structure each other in meaningful ways. This leads me to a third way of understanding the primacy of preemptive logics in environmental discourse around Line 9: that environmentalisms can offer a critical diagnosis of a historical moment, while also being “symptomatic of the conditions of their articulation” (Murphy, 2012: 178). Murphy’s notion of a “biopolitical topology” is useful for understanding how
33 environmentalisms may be both diagnostic and symptomatic of a time in which ecological destruction is carried out in the name of security. Murphy identifies the extraordinary capacity of biopolitics to iteratively fold onto itself while also generating new formations that may appear markedly different in some ways, but that bear the traces of previous folds and share similar underlying logics. Murphy thus invites thinking how biopolitics manifest in “recursive loops, sideway movements, circuits of appropriation, and other vectors of connection within the past” (12). Thinking biopolitics topologically sheds light on the entanglements of science, colonialism, neoliberalism, nationalisms, and environmentalisms that constitute the uncertain and uneven terrain upon which debates about the Line 9 reversal unfold. The modes of opposition and critical inquiry sparked by the Line 9 reversal might thus be understood as multiple instances of what Murphy (2012) calls “counter-conduct”. For Murphy, counter-conduct does not name a “line of flight that is an absolute deterritorialization”, but rather an “immanent unmaking that is also simultaneously a remaking of another minor, or nonhegemonic formation of conduct that remains conditioned by and entangled with the hegemonic” (184 n3; cf. also Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In other words, if environmental citizenship, or modes of caring about what comes to be understood as the ‘environment’, are conceived biopolitically (cf. Baldwin, 2013), even the most radical critiques of the Line 9 reversal cannot be entirely delinked from the forces that posit its approval. This is not to say that these critiques are not important, even necessary, but rather that alone they cannot reassemble the topology from which they emanate and simultaneously produce.
Anticipating otherwise
I have argued that in their calls to prevent, prepare for, and preempt risks through greater security practices, both proponents and opponents of the Line 9 reversal mirror the other’s mode of argumentation. That these parties conceptualize ‘risk’ in vastly different ways attests to the extent to which the work of problematizing the future in order to act in anticipation of it is closely tied to the securitization of certain forms of life, and the repudiation of others. Among the most troubling political implications of dwelling within a securitizing logic is the possibility of losing sight of how one might
34 struggle to redefine what constitutes a risk – a risk to what, and to whom. And yet, pipelines do spill, and frequently.45 Is it then not essential to employ precaution as a guiding principle in making a decision about Line 9? If the indeterminacy of matter, such as the properties of dilbit or the metals that make up pipelines, resists a traditional risk calculus (cf. Barry, 2010), is it not sound to act preemptively in order to avoid a potentially catastrophic spill? How does this materiality of risk encounter preemptive logics? These questions demand further inquiry beyond the scope of this chapter. However, I hope to have conveyed that there are reasons other than the risk of a spill to be concerned about the Line 9 reversal. This is by no means to suggest that a spill of dilbit in Eastern Canada would be a trivial event, but rather that we should think of a rupture in Line 9 as a potential effect of an existing security apparatus configured to ensure tar sands production and circulation. While the precautionary principle can help fuel demands from communities facing environmental injustice, it does not escape the politics of defining either cost or benefit. For instance, in Aamjiwnaang First Nation, the precautionary principle provides a basis for residents to insist that nearby industrial facilities stop emitting particular toxins until the human health impacts of cumulative exposures are known (cf. Scott, 2008). However, despite the Canadian government’s commitment to precaution in environmental governance, the demands of Aamjiwnaang environmental and health advocates have not been met. Perhaps this is because the precautionary principle is, in effect, self-referential. It operates within its own closed system that can metabolize critique. It forces opponents of industrial projects to inhabit this space and engage, in the principle’s own terms, in an uneven contest of ordering threats to security.46 The precautionary principle, in its slippery slide into preemption, contains ample room for biopolitical calculations of risk that are at best non-innocent, and at worst, deadly. I want to end with a brief consideration of what it could mean to anticipate in ways that might challenge security discourses. Cooper (2008) offers the abstract suggestion that “in the face of a politics that prefers to work in the speculative mode, what is called for is something like a creative sabotage of the future” (99). Along these lines, the anonymous authors of the manifesto Speculate This! (2013) formulate a mode of “affirmative speculation”. Rather than turning uncertainty into risk, affirmative
35 speculation locates uncertainty as central to all knowledge, without reducing the unknown to a ‘manageable certainty’. It affirms not what and who we are, but what we might become. Indeed, if preemptive governance acts on time itself by bringing an imagined future into the present (cf. Massumi 2005), then perhaps rather than refusing the temptation to anticipate we might better disrupt security in taking up the proposal put forth by Adams, Clarke & Murphy (2009): that we hold ourselves responsible for our practices of anticipation and the effects they may bring about. From here, “one might ask what kinds of desirable accountabilities to and kinships with the future might be fostered through such work” (ibid: 260). Whereas technologies of precaution, preemption, and preparedness operate to avoid an apocalyptic future, maybe this approach would create space to ask how we want to live in the world, including what kinds of energy infrastructures could more justly sustain us, all the while interrogating the very terms under which this ‘us’ is constituted. In experimenting with the temporalities at stake in the Line 9 reversal project, we might also work on forging more accountable relationships to the past and present - including Canada’s ongoing colonial history that has enabled tar sands production. Perhaps addressing this past by bringing it into the present could help inform how we perform the future.
*** This chapter has presented an extended example of what kind of knowledge about the Kalamazoo River spill most often makes its way outside of Michigan. The story of the spill that circulated in Eastern Canada provided a strategic hook for anti-Line 9 campaigns, and helped galvanize opposition to the project. But as opponents of the Line 9 reversal foregrounded the risk of a Kalamazoo River-like disaster, other crucial political and environmental impacts of the reversal receded into the background. Nor did opponents of the project manage to convince the NEB that Enbridge’s proposal posed substantial risks. The NEB approved Enbridge’s application to reverse and expand Line 9 on March 6, 2014. Meanwhile, much about the Kalamazoo River spill remains unknown and untold. The next chapter slows down the quick comparison to the spill and turns towards these uncertainties.
36 37
Chapter 3 Un/Knowing the spill
On the edge of an explanation
The story of the Kalamazoo River spill is replete with uncertainties. I have struggled with this in wanting to tell some of the stories that presented themselves to me. Not being able to link - or disentangle – causes and effects, intentions and responses, actions and reactions. Not wanting to make, or imply, unfounded accusations. Uncertainty often means that some stories don’t get reported in the news. Journalists who covered the spill made this clear to me in interviews. Sometimes they could get to the bottom of an issue and provide important information to the public. However, and as I experienced, sometimes that bottom was just so messy, convoluted, full of unknowns and barriers to more information that it was difficult to pull oneself out of the mess, let alone recover any proof. Like many residents along the river, I had to learn to sit uncomfortably at the edge of an explanation. But lack of proof doesn’t stop stories from circulating, their effects amplified with every retelling. Stories move through neighborhoods, phone calls, online chat-rooms, and insinuating Facebook posts. Sometimes details morph, as in a game of telephone. Some of these stories are likely ‘just’ rumors, but several exceed or escape that categorization. The words rumor and hearsay don’t quite capture many of the mysteries that linger in the aftermath of the spill, and how these mysteries shape the lives of those subject to them. Lack of proof doesn’t necessarily translate into lack of conviction on the part of residents who deeply believe, or know, that something isn’t quite right.
We don’t talk anymore
“We used to be friends; we met through the spill and worked together a lot. We supported each other. But we don’t talk anymore”. I hear this story and ones like it many times.
38 By the fall of 2010, divisions slowly but surely begin to form between residents who have been particularly vocal about the spill. Some of these divisions fall along class lines; some involve disagreements about how to approach the situation and what tactics to employ; some are due to clashing personalities. When Enbridge digs up dirt about a vocal resident’s criminal record, or when the media and local NGOs consistently highlight some voices and not others, fissures grow deeper.
Once you entertain the possibility that someone could be working for Enbridge, everyone is potentially suspect. Was your neighbor, or that local organization, bought off? Just how close are the regulator and the company it regulates? You trust fewer and fewer people.
Stress runs high. Everyone is exhausted. Some pull out of group efforts entirely; they can’t handle the bickering. “I wish I had never gotten involved with all of them. Should have just done my own thing”.
By the time I arrive in Michigan in 2013, the ‘impacted community’ I expect to find actively engaged in advocacy work is profoundly split, scattered, almost non-existent. There remain only a few individuals and the odd pair advocating separately.
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This chapter presents snapshots of the kinds of uncertainties that have unfolded from the Kalamazoo River spill. I examine specifically some of the uncertainties about what exactly spilled into the river, how much of it, and what health and ecological impacts it did or did not cause. I also relate some of the uncertainties that surround the outcomes of a legal battle between residents of the Baker Estate’s trailer park and Enbridge. I find it at once politically necessary to distinguish between these different kinds of uncertainty, as well as to tie them together, because there is a way in which these different orders of uncertainty bleed into one another. Along the river there is an impression that the frequent instances when knowledge about the spill and its impacts suddenly stops - either because it is being withheld, because it is contested, or because it does not exist – are related. The result is an atmosphere charged with tension and a sense of secrecy that is hard to shake. Secrecy functions not only to conceal or secure information. As Joseph Masco (2006) observes, secrecy is also “wildly productive: it creates not only hierarchies of power and repression but also unpredictable social effects, including new kinds of desire,
39 fantasy, paranoia, and, above all, gossip” (272). This productive capacity of secrecy is particularly important in the case of the Kalamazoo River spill, both in terms of residents’ relationships with each other, as well as how their responses to the disaster are received. The assimilation of different kinds of uncertainty into a general sense of secrecy is at once part of what so compels some residents to pursue what they believe is hidden, and one of the enabling conditions for Enbridge and government agencies to dismiss residents’ health and environmental concerns as mere conspiracy, fantasy, or paranoia. Before examining some of the most urgent mysteries that I encountered during my fieldwork, I identify several prominent modes by which nonknowledge47 is produced along Kalamazoo River. First, there is what Michael Taussig (1999) calls the “public secret”, that which is “generally known but cannot be articulated” (5). The “public secret” functions through a double movement of concealment and revelation: it is the unknown known. The public secret is reciprocal to Foucault’s critique of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ in The History of Sexuality. As Foucault declared, “what is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow of existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum as the secret” (Foucault, 1990: 35, cited in Taussig, 1999: 50). Knowing what not know, daring not to state what might seem obvious so as to make it so – the imperative to maintain the public secret is central to power’s operations (Taussig, 1999). Public secrets about the Kalamazoo River spill abound. Their contours can be gleaned through attention to brief and shrewd glances, shared laughter, and shared silences. They are widely known, but don’t quite enter into the domain of public knowledge. The scope of these public secrets is vast: who is working for whom; who was bought off or bought out; how many gallons of dilbit were released; and for residents who have experienced health effects since the spill, it is a public secret that the impacts of the disaster have been severely underestimated. This belief is public because it is shared by many residents exposed to the spill, and yet it remains secret insofar as these residents have no proof to substantiate. The question of the long-term health impacts of the spill constitutes a major area of uncertainty48 for many residents. This uncertainty can be traced to a second source: toxicology’s “regimes of perceptibility”. I borrow this term from Michelle Murphy
40 (2006) to designate “the regular and sedimented contours of perception and imperception produced within a disciplinary or epistemological tradition” (24). As Murphy shows in her historical ontology of Sick Building Syndrome, chemical exposures are made to matter through concrete and historically specific practices and technologies. The same practices and instruments that materialize - or render perceptible - certain exposures, also make others more difficult to perceive. As I will expand below, the imperceptibility of the link between chemical exposure and many of the health effects experienced by residents exposed to the Kalamazoo River spill enabled claims of non-existence of illnesses or threats by public health departments (Murphy, 2006: 92). At the congressional hearing on the Kalamazoo River spill in September 2010, Scott Masten, a toxicologist with the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, testified:
“There are hundreds, if not thousands of chemicals present in crude oil, and we have incomplete knowledge of the toxicity of many of them. … Given the chemicals present in crude oil, the potential for human health effects exist. However, understanding and quantifying these effects requires further study. There has been relatively little long-term research into the human health effects from oil spills. The few studies that have evaluated the human health consequences of oil spills have primarily focused on acute physical effects and psychological sequelae” (HCTI, 51)
Contemporary toxicology is constrained in its ability to assess the hazards posed by chemical disasters like Kalamazoo River spill. As Masten explained, there is limited knowledge of the toxicity of many of the chemicals contained crude oil, or of the effects of cumulative exposure to multiple chemicals. Moreover, there is limited and wildly contested knowledge on the effects of the kind of low-dose, chronic exposures that residents continue to experience along the river (Murphy, 2006; Nash, 2006; Sawyer, in press). 49 The effects of these kinds of exposures, as I will elaborate below, are particularly difficult for toxicology to apprehend. Masten’s comments also point to a third and related source of uncertainty pertaining to the Kalamazoo River spill: “undone science”. “Undone science” is a term that Frickel et al (2010) use to refer to “areas of research identified by social movements and other civil society organizations as having potentially broad social benefit that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored” (445). There is no long-term health study being conducted on the impacts of the Kalamazoo River spill, and the lack of
41 previous knowledge about how oil spills impact human health both reinforces the belief that there is nothing there worth studying, and made it difficult for local officials to know how to respond in a timely fashion to the incident in Michigan. Despite limited knowledge of the toxicity of particular chemicals, the burden of proof required to hold a company like Enbridge legally responsible for health impacts of exposure requires a resident to be able to tie a specific chemical to their specific illness, an extremely difficult feat (cf. Jasanoff, 2005; Murphy, 2006; Scott, 2008). This becomes even more challenging in the case of exposure to dilbit, because the exact composition of the diluent in this product is considered proprietary information. Here, public secrets encounter trade secrets. Indeed, there is “antiepistemology” (Gallison, 2004) at the heart of response to the Kalamazoo River spill. A fourth source of uncertainty is generated because some knowledge about the spill is hidden, classified, obscured, or simply missing.50 Here I refer not only to classified data sets but also to questions of who knew what when, and how consequential decisions were made. As Peter Gallison (2004) suggests, the universe of classified knowledge in the United States is “on the order of five to ten times larger than the open literature that finds its way to our libraries” (231). The classification of information about the spill has led some residents to give up on their quest for definitive answers, but also motivates others to dig deeper. For instance, when one resident requested additional information from the EPA and other agencies involved in the spill, officials within these agencies accidentally included her in their email discussion of whether or not to disclose the information. “Let her try to FOIA it” (file a Freedom of Information Act Request), they decided. In cases such as these, the ideal of transparency, so hailed in liberal democracies, is not the antithesis of secrecy but rather its complement. Transparency may make apparent that still much more remains secret and opaque (cf. Barry, 2013; Hetherington, 2012; Horn, 2011).
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I dwell with what is uncertain about of the Kalamazoo River spill because it is precisely through what is unknown and unknowable about the disaster that many
42 residents have come to know and respond to it.51 The sociality and the unevenness of unknowing and its effects is a thread that ran through my fieldwork in Michigan, and this chapter.
Technological disaster
“Sick children, sick dogs, sick people”, read the signs that Michelle BarlondSmith put up on the side of the road near the Baker Estates trailer park, where she lived at the time of the spill. Michelle sought to draw media attention to the troubling acute health impacts that she and many of her neighbors in the park were experiencing. Despite their extremely close proximity to the Kalamazoo River, most residents in Baker Estates had not yet been evacuated. Thirteen days into the spill, Michelle and her husband Tracy finally convinced Enbridge to pay for them to go, with their three dogs, to a hotel in a nearby town until the fumes died down.
It’s no overstatement to say that the Kalamazoo River spill changed Michelle’s life. The “technological disaster”, as she calls it, was a deeply politicizing event. As a photographer living within some 200 feet from the river, Michelle took out her camera, taking thousands of photos in those first months after the spill. She uploaded photos of the oiled river to CNN’s iReport, alerting the news network to the disaster on July 27, 2010. Michelle contacted local officials overseeing the cleanup, doing her best to advocate for her community and relay information to her neighbors. Her efforts didn’t go unnoticed: she was invited to testify in Washington, DC at the congressional hearing into the spill held by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. These activities were just the beginning of Michelle’s political work on the spill. “It’s about human rights”, Michelle often says, referring not just to the situation in Michigan but also to petrochemical industries globally.
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I had read about Michelle several months before I first met her in person in a Vancouver Observer article. “Enbridge Kalamazoo oil spill victim holds community meeting spellbound”, rang the headline (Chisholm, 2013). Michelle had been asked by the ENGO Forest Ethics to testify at the NEB hearings on Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline in British Columbia. The NGO had organized a community event after the hearings, where Michelle summarized the experience of the spill to the audience: “you get to say goodbye to a lot of friends” (cited in Chisholm, 2013). She told the packed town hall that 17 people she knew have died since the spill, implying their deaths were caused by exposure. The Vancouver Observer article is careful to state that it was not able to verify this claim.
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43 A few months later, when we first sit down together with her husband Tracy over coffee, I learn that Michelle had received a “cease and desist” order from Enbridge upon her return from British Columbia. Her claims about illnesses and deaths related to the spill, the order said, were unsubstantiated. At the time of that first visit with Michelle in May 2013, the number of deceased is up to 19, most from Baker Estates. At the time of writing, about one year later, the number is up to 25, with many ill.
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In and around Baker Estates, Michelle is not the only one counting the dead, however she is the only one to give voice to the public secret, uttering aloud what others dare not. The numbers vary, but the accounts I hear generally range from 18 to 26.
The “tar sands name game” and missing MSDS
The vast majority of those who I interviewed in Michigan had not heard of tar sands prior to the Kalamazoo River spill. Even after the spill, it took months for the term to percolate through neighborhoods along the river. Early reports of the incident were more concerned with the quantity of material spilled and what was being done to contain it. But the composition of the spilled oil mattered tremendously. Todd Heywood, a journalist based in Lansing, was the first reporter to break the story: this wasn’t just your regular crude. "I remember emailing my editors, saying we need to keep an eye on this. The reporter instinct in me said this is big, this is important ", Todd told me.
"So I drove down there Tuesday after the spill [July 27, 2010] and was literally there everyday for the next six weeks, in Marshall, walking along the river. I shot video standing on the 15th Mile Road Bridge, which was a mile from the spill zone. That's video of ribbons of oil flowing through the river. So I was just sucking in all of that, all the PAHs [polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons] and all that stuff. I had done some environmental stuff in my youth, but I had no understanding of what I was walking into".
Todd realized how “big” the story really was when he got Patrick Daniel, then CEO of Enbridge, to admit that Line 6B had spilled diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. The question of what kind of oil was spilled had been hovering in the air at press conferences in the weeks after the spill. Journalists and NGOs attuned to the politics of
44 tar sands pipelines in the US wanted answers (cf. Lydersen, 2010a). Enbridge maintained that this was not tar sands but rather crude oil, from the Cold Lake deposits in Alberta. But this didn’t make sense to Todd or to the NGOs. In an exclusive interview, Todd presented Patrick Daniel with data from the United States Geological Survey that showed the Cold Lake region to be a major site of tar sands production. Equipped with this information, Todd asked Daniel once again if he was sure it wasn’t tar sands oil that spilled into the Kalamazoo River. Daniel replied:
“I haven't said it's not tar sand oil. What I indicated is that it was not what we have traditionally referred to as tar sands oil. ... If it is part of the same geological formation, then I bow to that expert opinion. I'm not saying, ‘No, it's not oil sands crude.' It's just not traditionally defined as that and viewed as that” (cited in Lydersen 2010b).
And so the word was out. The NGOs blogged and began writing reports about the dangers of tar sands pipelines, using the Kalamazoo River spill as the prime example (cf. Swift et al, 2011). But not everyone along the river immediately caught wind of Daniel’s inconspicuous confession. Todd’s news outlet, the now defunct Michigan Messenger, was an online news site with limited traction compared to larger papers such as the Battle Creek Enquirer or the Kalamazoo Gazette, which were also covering the spill and initially publishing multiple articles per day. These larger outlets were very slow to relay the news that the pipeline had not spilled conventional crude oil, but rather dilbit, nor did they report that Enbridge had not been forthcoming about this. Those with a proclivity for research, like Michelle, dug in. Other residents who I spoke with did not find out until months later. “Tar sands was a new term for us” Michelle told me. “For most people oil is oil and that’s what spilled”, explaining why she thinks not more of her neighbors were concerned with the distinction. The environmental news organization InsideClimate News did not publish its Pulitzer Prize-winning series The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of (McGowan et al, 2012) until June of 2012. Local mainstream papers in Michigan do not appear to refer to the spilled substance as diluted bitumen until 2011, instead continuing to call it crude oil. But the “tar sands name game” (Lyderson, 2010b) mattered deeply to environmental organizations in the Midwest, and continues to matter today (cf. Horn,
45 2014; Lyderson, 2010b; Swift, 2013; Wallace, 2013). With battles ongoing about TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline and several other dilbit pipeline projects, it is important for environmental groups to underscore the particularly severe impacts of tar sands production. The “name game” was also important for public health decisions. At the September 2010 congressional hearing into the spill, Mark Schauer - then representative for Michigan’s 7th Congressional District - brought up this question. In the days after the spill, Enbridge provided the Calhoun County Public Health Department (CCPHD) with a material safety data sheet (MSDS) for generic heavy crude oil, and not for the exact products that were actually flowing through Line 6B at the time of the spill. An MSDS is a document that provides information about the general composition, directions for use, and potential hazards of a chemical product. Some MSDS sheets have more specific information than others when it comes to both the properties of the materials and recommended measures in the case of a release. Had Enbridge provided the CCPHD with the correct MSDS for the dilbit carried in the pipeline, Schauer suggested, County health officials would have seen that the MSDS recommended a 1000-foot evacuation of all non-necessary personnel.52 But instead, as I will expand below, only a small and voluntary evacuation was issued, four days after the spill.
I had no understanding of what I was walking into
When not wearing his journalist hat, Todd Heywood is an LGTBQ activist and a vocal advocate for the decriminalization of HIV/AIDS, a disease with which he has been living for years. At the time of the spill, his viral load and immune cell count were normal. He saw nevertheless saw a specialist once every six weeks or so for a check-up.
Todd’s reporting on the Kalamazoo River spill was instrumental, not only in getting Patrick Daniel to admit that Line 6B had been carrying dilbit from the tar sands, but also in breaking the story that one of Enbridge’s contractors had hired dozens of undocumented workers, mostly from Central America, to clean up the river. With the help of a concerned worker who had contacted him, Todd went undercover as a cleanup worker and reported that many employees, documented and undocumented, were not provided with the proper safety equipment or training for dealing this closely with petrochemicals.
After spending several weeks on the Kalamazoo River, Todd returned to see his doctor in Lansing, only to find out that he had experienced significant immune damage. Analyses showed slightly elevated
46 levels of benzene in his blood, which led the doctor to conclude that the immune damage had been caused by the spill.53 Most significantly, the count of his immune cells had dropped sharply:
"What we know is that my CD4s and CD8s [key immune cells involved in the body’s ability to fight HIV] were awesome before the event, and have never really properly recovered after," Todd told me. Shortly thereafter he had to begin taking HIV/AIDS medication, and has been ever since.
Todd now worries that others with weakened immune systems along the river may have also experienced damage to their health. But he knows that not everyone with an immune condition is as closely monitored as he is.
--- By mid-August 2010, cleanup crews observed that particles of oil were suspended in the water column and sinking to the bottom of the riverbed. The EPA’s existing toolkit of oil-spill response techniques was inadequate for dealing with such a large quantity of submerged oil. The agency had to work with Enbridge, hired contractors, and other organizations in the UIC to devise “site specific recovery” approaches.54 But when exactly did the EPA know that Line 6B had spilled dilbit, and not conventional heavy crude?
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Mark Schauer’s Senior District Representative lived in Marshall. From the day of the spill until the November 2010 midterm election - which Schauer lost to Republican Tim Walberg - she worked tirelessly to keep Schauer’s constituents informed about the spill and to advocate on their behalf. Her work was part of a team effort that combined many of Schauer’s staff as well as congressional employees at the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials, of which Schauer was a member. Through her work, the Senior District Representative developed relationships with many residents impacted by the spill, and was responsible for assembling the panel of six residents, including Michelle, who testified at the congressional hearing. On July 26, 2010, the Senior District Representative received an email from someone at the House of Representatives alerting her that there had been an oil spill near
47 the Ceresco Dam. She and her husband, who worked in environmental services, went to go check it out. Standing by the river, they saw an old disposable coffee cup on the ground. Her husband scooped it in the river, and it came back full of oil. “This is bad”, he told her as he inspected the contents of the cup. “You’ve got to get the MSDS and find out what this is”. She alerted Schauer’s Chief of Staff, and told him he should come down. Then she headed over to Enbridge’s office in Marshall. There were some Enbridge and EPA employees at the office, but those in higher positions who would soon arrive and assume supervisory roles were not yet there. “So I went, and they whisked me immediately into a little private office”, the Senior District Representative told me. Refusing to stay put, she went to join the conversations happening in the main room. There was a lot of discussion about the type of oil that had spilled – diluted bitumen. “So I called the Washington staff”, she said, suggesting they look into it.
SDR: And at that point in time, there was a PR [public relations] person from Enbridge but it wasn't their staff from Canada, it wasn't Pat Daniel, it wasn't Steven Wuori [then President of Enbridge’s Liquids Pipelines and Major Projects] - it was, you know, whatever staff they had available… And it was at that time that the conversations were very candid. Then when they started to figure out who was in the room and where this was going, that’s when the conversations got very different, and very controlled.
SG: That conversation [about diluted bitumen] was happening inside the Enbridge office before they admitted it publicly?
SDR: That conversation was happening before I even went to the first three-hour briefing!
SG: That's so interesting! Because Pat Daniel publicly denied that!
SDR [smiling]: He wasn't even there yet [shaking head]. He wasn't even there yet.
SG: Do you think EPA knew?
SDR: They knew, because they were in that meeting, they were in that room.
The Senior District Representative’s experience in the small Enbridge office in Marshall, just hours after the spill was reported, suggests that some officials within both Enbridge and the EPA knew from the get-go that they were dealing with dilbit. What remains uncertain is to what extent that information was communicated to others within both organizations as well as other federal, state, and local agencies. This is in part so difficult to decipher because the EPA’s account has been inconsistent.
48 On the one hand, in 2011 the EPA suggested that the type of crude that spilled mattered a great deal. “At minimum, we’re writing a chapter in the oil spill cleanup book on how to identify submerged oil,” reflected Ralph Dollhopf, Incident Commander and On-Scene Coordinator for the EPA. “We’re writing chapters on how it behaves once it does spill (and) how to recover it” (cited in Klug, 2011), Dollhopf continued, explaining that no one in the EPA expected to spend to so much time trying to recover submerged bitumen. As the first major dilbit spill in history, the Kalamazoo River incident was a unique scenario for which the EPA was not initially equipped. The EPA initially responded with techniques designed for oil that floats. A year later, Marc Durno, Deputy Incident Commander with the EPA, suggested to reporters that if the EPA had known more about the chemical makeup of the spilled oil, the agency would have immediately rushed air sampling equipment to the scene, which unfortunately didn’t arrive until days later (McGowan et al 2012). On the other hand, Dollhopf told me in an interview in 2013 that the ‘tar sands name game’ didn’t matter much, because with any heavy oil the EPA would be concerned with sinking and volatile lighter ends. The EPA’s task was to respond to the situation at hand rather than quibble over semantics. To complicate matters, I learned from a congressional investigator who had done extensive research on the spill in preparation for the September 2010 hearing, that she had verified with the EPA that the agency had received the correct MSDS July 26, 2010. Then why didn’t they order air-sampling equipment? Can this inconsistency be chalked up to the fact that the MSDS for the spilled materials called the substance as a blend of “heavy crude oil/diluent mix” and “heavy” and “sour crude” but did not specify “diluted bitumen” (and nor did Enbridge volunteer that information)? But then again, when the congressional investigator requested the MSDS from Enbridge, wielding the potential of a subpoena, the company took weeks to get back to her, claiming that they did not have the information but rather had to request it from their shippers. Enbridge provided her with about 30 MSDS of every product that had ever been in the pipeline, eventually confirming what exactly had flowed through it in late July 2010. This delay suggested to the investigator that Enbridge could not have provided the information to the EPA on July 26th. Something here was amiss.
49 While the EPA said it received the correct MSDS on July 26th, the congressional investigator verified that the CCPHD, which was ultimately responsible for determining whether an evacuation was in order, did not receive it until weeks later, when she herself provided it to the department. The MSDS that the CCPHD posted on its website for the public to see was for generic crude oil and did not mention the need for an evacuation. It is with this information, as well as some air-sampling data, that the department made decisions about an evacuation.
I lived a lifetime in that period
“I think about it [the spill] a lot sometimes, because it was very important for my life and what my commitment even was to the kind of work I was doing at the time, and why it mattered. There probably isn't a better example for figuring out why your work matters. You know what I mean? Because in this business you can go through two, three, or four years and think that ‘Sometimes my days don't matter. I look like a statesman, giving a speech and all that.’ But the value of why you're there, and the work - you know what Mark's [Schauer’s] philosophy was, and the mandate that he gave us was to represent him the way that he would represent himself. And so you really learned the value of why you elect the person you elect, and what are their values and what do they want…. So it was really good for me personally in that way. It was an experience. You carry it with you forever. I lived a lifetime in that period”.
“At one point, after Mark lost, there was a conversation that, since I knew so much about it, whether I ‘might be interested in going to Enbridge’. And I said, ‘I can't be bought, thank you very much’. … It was damage control. And that was indicative to me about how that industry operates. Of course I would be valuable to them: a) I would be valuable to them with my knowledge, and b) because I wouldn't be speaking against them”.
-Senior District Representative for congressman Mark Schauer at the time of the spill
How many gallons?
“We were never allowed to say one million gallons of oil has spilled. We always had to say ‘Enbridge has reported 819,000 gallons’, and the EPA would say ‘we estimate it was more than one million’ so we always had to be careful to use the right words, to be accurate, and to avoid saying in public what our personal opinion might be or what we shared candidly behind closed doors” – Calhoun County Administrator/Controller, commenting on the work of crafting messages to keep the public informed about the Kalamazoo River spill (personal communication).
50 o July 26, 2010 – 1:33pm: Enbridge reports to the National Response Centre that its Line 6B has discharged 19,500 barrels, or 819,000 gallons of oil into a wetland near Talmadge Creek, a tributary of the Kalamazoo River (HCTI, 2010). o July 28, 2010 – Late at night: EPA now estimates that Line 6B spilled more than one million gallons of oil (Associated Press, 2010). o November 2, 2010 – Enbridge revises its estimate to 843,444 gallons (NTSB, 2012). o Spring, 2011 - Enbridge has recovered 766,290 gallons of oil, which it has re- injected into its terminal in Griffiths, Indiana (Enbridge, 2010). o June 2012 – All along, EPA has been posting updates on its website dedicated to the spill, indicating how much oil has been collected thus far. By June 2012, the website indicates that 1,148,229 gallons have been recovered (cf. Song, 2013). o March 2013 – The EPA removes mention how much oil has been collected, instead indicating how many gallons Enbridge estimates were released. On March 27th, it cites 819,000 gallons (ibid). By May 2nd, 2013 that number has changed to 843,000. o March 14, 2013 – The EPA orders Enbridge to remove bitumen that remains in several depositional areas of the Kalamazoo River by dredging, with a deadline of December 31, 2013.
I am spending the weekend in Sarnia for a “toxic tour” of the refineries in Chemical Valley, and an Ontario-wide “Stop Line 9” strategizing session hosted by Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia Against Pipelines. Early on the Saturday morning of March 15, before the campaign planning begins, a few of us policy wonks sit with our eyes glued to computer screens, reading over the EPA’s dredging order. This could be useful for our case… o Between March and June 2013 – A battle erupts, via documents, between Enbridge and the EPA. At stake is how much oil from Line 6B remains in the Kalamazoo River. Estimating this involves complicated calculative procedures, forensic chemistry, and oil fingerprinting techniques, for which different methodologies exist. On March 21, 2013 Enbridge resubmits to the EPA its “Quantification of Submerged Oil Report” (Enbridge, 2013), for the third time since September 2011. The EPA commissions an independent review of Enbridge’s report (cf. Douglas, 2013), which finds that the methodology employed by Enbridge for estimating the amount of oil remaining in the river resulted in estimates 100 times smaller than the EPA’s methods. The EPA rejects Enbridge’s findings. o June 2013 – EPA announces: “about 180,000 gallons of Line 6B oil (plus or minus 100,000 gallons) remain in the river bottom sediment. EPA has ordered Enbridge to remove the recoverable oil (about 12,000 – 18,000 gallons) by dredging” (EPA 2013,
51 2). The remaining 162,000+ gallons cannot be recovered without causing undue harm to the river, but instead will be monitored and collected over time with the use of sediment traps. o July 2013 - An official with the EPA tells me in an interview that their estimate remains at 1.14 million gallons spilled. Investigations are ongoing into the discrepancy between their and Enbridge’s estimates. o June 2014 – The EPA website still states that an estimated 843,000 gallons of oil were released from Line 6B.
Why does it matter? In discharging oil into the Kalamazoo River, Enbridge violated the Clean Water Act, under which the company could be fined significant amounts per barrel (42 gallons) spilled. The amount of the fine could range from $1,100 per barrel, up to $4,300 per barrel if gross negligence or willful misconduct is proved (US Congress, 1972). The money would go to federal coffers, and some of it could be used to establish an environmental trust of sorts, like the national Pipeline Safety Trust (PST). The PST was established with an endowment collected from fines under the Clean Water Act in the aftermath of a 1999 pipeline tragedy in Bellingham, Washington, when a pipeline discharged over 225,000 gallons of gasoline into a creek. This spill resulted in an explosion that killed three youth and caused severe environmental damage (Pipeline Safety Trust, 2014). On August 2, 2010, shortly after the Kalamazoo River spill, the Detroit-based Great Lakes Environmental Law Centre filed a notice of intent to file a citizen suit against Enbridge for violation of the Clean Water Act. But the 60-day notice period passed, and nothing happened. In an interview the Centre’s Executive Director explained to me that after filing the letter of intent:
“I was then contacted by both the Department of Justice and the Michigan Attorney General’s Office asking that we hold off on filing any suit while they looked at possible enforcement action. So that’s basically it. A lot has changed since then, and nothing has changed since then. As for as our posture, we agreed that we would hold off and let the state and federal government seek fines or criminal charges depending on what caused the spill to happen.”.
Along the river, rumors circulate that the EPA is pursuing criminal charges against Enbridge under the Clean Water Act, and some wonder why the agency hasn’t done so already. Perhaps the delay might have to do with the ongoing dispute about how
52 much oil was spilled? Some residents are skeptical of the involvement of certain environmental NGOs, who they believe are vying for trust fund monies, while others welcome the idea of a Great Lakes pipeline safety trust. Members of the EPA, the MDEQ, and other relevant agencies that I interviewed would not comment on any of these issues.
There’s something about the people there [don’t drink the water]
“I bet she’s going to Battle Creek this morning!” says the man behind the ticket counter at the train station to his co-worker, loud enough so that I overhear as I walk by.
“Yup, that’s right”, I reply, smiling. I had developed a certain familiarity with most of the employees at the Ann Arbor train station, and they recognized me as that young woman from Canada who took the early morning train to Battle Creek several times a week.
“Why do you keep going to Battle Creek, anyways, of all places?” asks one of the employees.
I begin to explain that I am doing research there when he interrupts me: “Well, whatever you do, don’t drink the water!” I become animated at this. “Because of the oil spill?!” I ask, thinking he will relate a story of toxicity. But he looks at me blankly, and I realize he had been hinting at something entirely different.
“There’s something about the people there, they’re just not entirely with it”, he replies, twirling his right index finger in the air next to his ear, so as to indicate a loose screw.
Then, before I can clarify, a distant whistle warns of an approaching train, and the employee has to run off to his post along the tracks.
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This brief exchange stayed with me. It tacitly signaled the class and racial dynamics that seemed to become important during the spill response in both Battle Creek and the neighboring town of Marshall. Marshall is just 17 miles east of Battle Creek on the I-94, past the Firekeeper’s Casino, the old daycare center that is now the UIC headquarters, a strip mall and a few fast food joints. Despite their close proximity, both places are quite different. This is as much something that one can sense walking along Marshall’s historic main strip - with its American flags on every lamppost and the adjacent streets lined with Victorian homes - as it is something that statistics can reveal (see table 1).
53 Marshall is a predominantly white town – far whiter than the rest of Michigan. Marshall’s population is also relatively well off financially compared to the rest of the state, and certainly to the city of Battle Creek, where 21.5% of the population lives below the poverty line.55
Consistent with literature on environmental justice in the US (cf. Allen, 2003; Bullard, 2000; Cole & Foster, 2000; Di Chiro, 1998; Faber, 1998; Lerner, 2012), there is a sense along the Kalamazoo River that these demographic differences mattered when it came to how residents of Marshall and Battle Creek faired in their dealings with Enbridge. This unknown known is another of the public secrets that circulate through riverside communities.56
Non-disclosure agreements, scarce documentation, and inconsistent rumors make it hard to compare dollar amounts of any settlements, or the extent to which a person’s subject-position influenced the seriousness with which their concerns were met. But whereas homeowners along the river in Marshall and the close-by community of Ceresco could claim property damage or request to have Enbridge buy their home, residents of Baker Estates trailer park or renters in apartment complexes in Battle Creek could not. And insofar as poverty could be equated with poor health and ‘poor’ lifestyle choices, the health complaints of residents living in poverty were often already shadowed with doubt, further weighing down an already heavy burden of proof. As a public health official told me:
“Part of the challenge too is that one of the areas that was hit hardest was the trailer park [Baker Estates]. You're talking about a segment of the population that has health issues that pre-dated a lot of this, so it's really difficult if an individual smokes two packs of cigarettes a day, or is on oxygen prior to this incident, to really tie this in and say 'this took a year off of your life’, or ‘this has exacerbated your respiratory illnesses'. So there's a lot of gray area there”.
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You can tell you’re rolling into Battle Creek when you start seeing the cereal factories out the window, and you begin to anticipate the odor of sugary breakfast foods that will arrest your nostrils when you get off the train. Battle Creek is sometimes called “Cereal City”, for it is home to the world headquarters of the Kellogg Company, as well as Post Foods and Ralston Foods factories. If it’s Wednesday or Saturday morning, you might consider stopping by the Farmer’s Market near the Kellogg Arena, or perhaps going for a nice walk along the Kalamazoo River, which weaves through the city center. The train comes to a slow halt. Not many passengers get off at this stop.
54 Battle Creek, MI Marshall, MI State of Michigan
Population 51,911 7,058 9,882,519
People living below the poverty rate 21.5% 8.8% 16.3%
White 71.7% 95.1% 78.9%
Black or African American 18.2% 1.1% 14.2%
Hispanic or Latino 6.7% 3.8% 4.4%
Asian 2.4% 0.7% 2.4%
American Indian and Alaska Native 0.7% 0.6% 0.6%
Table 1 - Data retrieved from the US Census, based on 2008-2012 estimates. I am using the racial categories that the US Census uses.
Like a python swallowing an elephant
In June 2013, Judge Kingsley with the Calhoun County Circuit Court likens the backlog of cases against Enbridge in the local court system to “a python swallowing an elephant, and the elephant are these cases right here” (Anderson vs. Enbridge, 2013). There are 29 cases against Enbridge awaiting trial, some dating back to 2010. This does not include the handful of cases that have been resolved or dismissed over the past few years, or the many larger cases that were filed in State court. Judge Kingsley informs the courtroom that he will be working to expedite resolution of these Enbridge cases, especially those filed between 2010-2012, because the Court is having trouble keeping up with its regular business. “There is an old saying that is really true. Justice delayed is justice denied. And that’s true for the plaintiffs, the people that have brought these lawsuits, and it’s true for the defendants who are defending the lawsuits”, Kingsley explains (Anderson Vs. Enbridge Energy, 2013). Along the Kalamazoo River, many know that the three-year anniversary of the spill is fast approaching, and this date coincides with the deadline for filling a civil suit
55 against Enbridge. There is much speculation as to who has signed on to a lawsuit. Who is their lawyer and how much are they after? Have they settled yet? Did they have to sign a non-disclosure agreement? I hear about one lawsuit in particular from Michelle and several other current and former residents of the Baker Estates trailer park, who cringe at mention of the lawyer’s name.
***
A few days after the spill, an ad appears in the local Battle Creek Shopper News, a paper that is distributed for free in the Baker Estates trailer park. A lawyer with experience in tort law offers his services to residents of the park who are seeking justice from Enbridge. Michelle and two of her neighbors – Jessica and Olivia - rally up the park residents and organize a meeting with the lawyer. During the coming months, the three women act as liaisons between the lawyer and their neighbors.57 Since many park residents don’t have Internet access at home, knocking on doors is the best way to spread the word around. Michelle still feels guilty, she later tells me, for helping to organize those initial meetings. At first things seem promising. By September 7, 2010 the lawyer has filed a mass action lawsuit against Enbridge on behalf of 48 adults residing in Baker Estates and several of their children. 58 The lawyer suggests to residents that they should be able to get about $50,000-$75,000 per person in each household. It seems like Enbridge wants to settle this pretty quick, he tells residents. Weeks go by. Enbridge does depositions of all mass action plaintiffs. The lawyer is difficult to get a hold of. Michelle is frustrated, because residents are asking her for updates on the case that she doesn’t have. The lawyer, it turns out, is also juggling cases in Texas and Panama, and is therefore in and out of communication. A few days before Christmas, 2010. The lawyer comes back to the park. Enbridge has just made a final offer, he tells the plaintiffs, and he thinks they should accept it. The depositions didn’t go as well as he had hoped. This offer is probably the best they can do:
56 $4300, per family (not per person), and the lawyer will take one third. Most sign on, collecting some $2,400 and change after taxes and lawyer fees. “You’ve got like 60 people, days before Christmas, and they’ve got nothing for Christmas…. They’re hurting… So everybody’s like ‘ok’, and they signed”, Andrew, a resident of the park, later tells me. “I had to get my kid a Christmas gift. I signed, I was stupid”, says Andrew. But Michelle, her husband Tracy, and four others refuse to sign. The lawyer agrees to represent the few that remain in a second phase of the suit. “My life is worth more than that”, one of the residents who refuses to sign later tells me. She has had two surgeries since the spill, has had to quit her former job, and suffers from a chronic cold. She hopes for reimbursement of medical bills from Enbridge. Months and months go by. It continues to be difficult to get in touch with the lawyer. On January 25, 2012, Michelle and the others who remain in the mass action go into mediation with Enbridge. They ask for $50,000 each. Enbridge comes back with an offer of $8,500. Some plaintiffs sign on the spot, but others, including Michelle and Tracy, are required to return and present all medical bills they incurred since the spill. They do, but time goes by and they can’t reach the lawyer and haven’t received their check. Michelle and Tracy never do.
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Meanwhile, Michelle and Tracy are evicted from Baker Estates on April 9, 2012.59 They are not the only ones; several other residents had already been evicted starting in late 2011, and more will be in the months to come. The reason for the evictions is chalked up money owed, but the warnings that preceded them vary: delay in paying rent, unkempt front lawn, no fence for their dog, putting up a dog fence without permission. The evicted residents, and some of those watching closely hoping they are not next, suspect that the company that owns the park, Battle Creek Realty, LLC, is gearing up for a lawsuit against Enbridge, and this is why they want to vacate the property: have Enbridge buy out the land, which is no longer good real-estate. Jump to June 2013. Battle Creek Realty files suit against Enbridge, requesting damages “in whatever amount is found to be entitled, plus interest, costs, reasonable
57 attorney’s fees, and exemplary damages” (Battle Creek Realty LLC vs. Enbridge, 2013: 6). The lawsuit alleges that in addition to the handful of trailers that Enbridge bought out, at least 36 mobile homes had to be permanently vacated due to the spill, and the company is unable to market these because of the stigma of the spill and ongoing cleanup. Michelle and other residents catch wind of the lawsuit. They suggest to me that not all of those 36 homes were vacated out of the tenants’ own volition. Back to 2012, the lawyer tells Michelle and Tracy that he will represent them in fighting their eviction. But he doesn’t show up for the court date. It is rescheduled. He doesn’t show up again. The judge dismisses the case. Michelle and Tracy, in a tough financial situation, are forced to move. They relocate to Jackson, a small town about 45 miles away. Spring 2014, few people remain in Baker Estates. “It’s a ghost town, I can tell you that”, Jessica explains, recalling the last time she drove by. She has since relocated to another state. “It’s really sad, if you think about how lively it used to be”.
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June 4, 2012. The lawyer dismisses the cases of all Baker Estates residents, except for the woman with the chronic cold and her daughter.60 But the lawyer hadn’t told Michelle (or the other plaintiffs whose cases were still open) that he had closed it, and had not consulted with them on this matter. When Michelle finally gets word, she and her neighbors formally terminate the lawyer’s services on August 17, 2012 and request copies of all the documentation on their file, which they do not receive. And so that’s the end of their case.
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In June 2013, I manage to reach the lawyer over the phone. His telling of events is different, and at times starkly so, from the stories I had heard from residents of Baker Estates. I learn how hard Enbridge fought, with comprehensive discovery requests and depositions of all plaintiffs. Enbridge made a dirty move, he says, making that offer right
58 before Christmas. His clients settled too quickly. I learn that a 2005 citizen-suit against a Dow Chemical plant that released dioxin into a floodplain in Midland, Michigan, set a legal precedent in the state: individuals cannot claim medical monitoring or compensation for speculative injuries, only present problems. This means that plaintiffs in a case against Enbridge will not be successful in claiming damages for any health issues that have not yet developed and been proven as linked to the spill. The lawyer invites me to a meeting that he is organizing in Battle Creek for a group of about 174 residents, primarily from the city’s African American community and others who live in the inner city near the river where it follows Jackson Street. He has recently filed another mass action on their behalf, and this meeting is meant to provide an update on the case and the upcoming depositions. The meeting is set in a church basement in Battle Creek. People trickle in and out, and the lawyer repeats his speech for each new crowd: depositions will be tough, the number one rule is to tell the truth, I will prep you, make sure you dress appropriately, don’t share any information about the trial publicly, Enbridge’s settlement offer will increase exponentially as we get closer and closer to the court date.
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There is no way of knowing whether the public secret swirling around Baker Estates – that the lawyer was somehow conniving with Enbridge – is true. Nor is it possible to know whether the large number of evictions have anything to do with the real estate agency’s legal ambitions. I followed these threads as far as I could, so enthralled as I was by the secrecy and so captured by the affective labor required of residents in order to live with such ambiguity. Public secrets hang over the Kalamazoo River, making a “mockery of neat distinctions between reality and unreality”, and indeed sometimes making it difficult to be certain of anything (Taussig, 1999: 108). Perhaps my objective here should not be to discern between the reality and unreality of these secrets, and instead to attend to what Derrida (1994) calls their “secrecy effect”. To this end, what did become clear to me is that the evictions and the lawyer’s elusiveness, just like health problems and the dismissal of their relation to exposure – these events are all bound up
59 with how residents of Baker Estates came to understand and experience the Kalamazoo River spill as an injustice about which the truth is concealed.
NRDA
As per the US Oil Pollution Act (OPA), relevant agencies quickly established a Trustees Council upon notification of the Kalamazoo River spill in order to begin conducting a Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA). The Trustees Council in this case consisted of representatives from the MDEQ, the MDRN, the NOAA, the Michigan Department of the Attorney General, US Fish & Wildlife Service, the department of the Interior & Indian Affairs, the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi (NHBP), and the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of the Pottawatomi (Gun Lake Tribe).61 Trustees who I spoke with estimated that the NRDA would be completed by sometime around 2018. It’s a lengthy process that involves assessing ecological damage and the loss of services (recreational and cultural); planning restoration projects; and finally implementing those restoration projects. Restoration can include monetary fines collected from Enbridge as well as the reclamation wetlands and other sites harmed by the spill. Trustees described to me the complicated calculations used to put dollar amounts to the lost lives of macro-invertebrates, turtles, plants, and other beings, as well as putting a price on what surrounding human communities lost in not being able to recreate or use the river for other purposes during the two years it was closed to the public.62 Once an agreement is reached between Enbridge and the Trustees Council, Enbridge will cover the costs of all NRDA activities.63
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My first full tour of the affected stretch of Kalamazoo River is with Jay Wesley, a biologist with the MDNR who represents the department on the NRDA Trustees Council. We follow the spill in reverse, starting at Morrow Lake and driving east towards the point of rupture in a wetland near Talmadge Creek, making many stops along the way. Turtles
60 were the most impacted, Jay says. The MDNR has collected almost 5,000 turtles up until this point.64 So far it seems like the fish haven’t bio-accumulated PAH’s (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), and the insect populations are making a slow recovery. Now the department is studying macro-invertebrates. Jay knows the ‘old’ pre-spill Kalamazoo River like the back of his hand, and cares about the river deeply. He can point to where a cluster of trees or an island used to be. He can tell that Enbridge has re-dug Talmadge Creek about 10 feet too wide, which means that the water is far too shallow for fish to travel, and there is barely any insect life. He points out black rings left on tree trunks or stains under bridges from the oil. My first impression of the river, without Jay, would have been different. Jay taught me to see not only what the river looks like today - which is quite lovely at first glance- but also what is absent. The river has many ghosts. We stop at Bridge Park, one of the largest river access points that have received a makeover courtesy of Enbridge, complete with a walkway, play structures, picnic tables, and a restroom. “Nice park.” I remark. “Yeah, if you have an oil spill in your town you can get a nice park too!” Jay replies sarcastically, and we both laugh.
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The Trustee for the NHBP65 invites me to come for a visit of the reservation. On our drive there, he makes a point of taking a short detour onto a small back road in order to show me creek that is part of the Kalamazoo River watershed. At the reservation, he leads me out onto a wetland area where community members are cultivating wild rice. In both instances he wants me to notice how alive the water and surrounding vegetation is in comparison to that of the Kalamazoo River. How green. How many birds and insects are chirping. The feeling you get just being there.
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“The river will never be the same”, say many residents, for whom the word “cleanup” fails to capture the impossibility of returning the river’s ecology to its pre-spill
61 state. Others around town think the river looks better than ever: in the process of removing oil, Enbridge contractors have also removed old shopping carts and other bits of garbage, and improved river access points. Some say they never would have swum in the river before the spill to begin with - the Kalamazoo River has been a hotspot of industrial pollution for almost a century – but that’s beside the point: Enbridge said they would make “make us whole”66, and they need to live up to that promise. At the time of writing, there is no data available on the NRDA of the Kalamazoo River spill, and no indication of when data will become available. The extent of the ecological impacts of the spill remains unknown.
The island and the deer in the headlight look
“There was an island in the section of river that was affected, and what they basically had to do was just top down, where they took everything out including the island. But, you know, from my point of view that island had a spirit, and whether it was the spirit of the land or the water that created that island, it had a name at one point in our language. And having a name it also had to have a spirit. So when I heard that, I just thought, well did they offer tobacco, did they say anything to the spirit of that island, that you know ‘we’re going to take you out, please respect our decision’…? And I think, no, they probably just went in and destroyed it without any consideration to the spiritual side or what it meant, and how it was important to our tribe at one point historically…. They would probably just look at someone like me with a traditional perspective saying something like this and just shake their heads. And say: ‘what is she talking about?’ But that island has a spirit, it has a name, it was referenced in our oral traditions. Because it wasn’t written down, it has no meaning for them. It’s hard to really explain that to them, to explain about tobacco offerings, that when you take something you always have to offer something back… but they just give you that deer in the headlight look”.
-Member of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi reflecting on the spill
Show me the data
In June 2011 Jim Rutherford, Health Officer with the CCPHD, petitioned the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) to conduct a long- term health study of communities impacted by the spill (Rutherford, 2011).67 This
62 request was denied on the grounds that it “would not provide additional, or more specific, information on the community's potential development of health effects” (cited in Rutherford, 2011b). The regional director for ATSDR explained to me in an interview why the agency denied the request. Firstly, a study of this scale would cost millions of dollars.68 Secondly, it would have been challenging to undertake this project without substantial baseline data about the exposed communities. Thirdly, based on the acute symptoms reported at the time of the spill, neither ATSDR nor MDCH suspected there would be long-term health effects. Moreover, ATSDR and MDCH determined that since a long- term study would take years to complete and would unlikely be able to determine whether a specific illness was caused by the spill, it would not likely provide helpful information to those impacted. These kinds of answers are deeply unsatisfying to many residents who I spoke with, as well as to Jim Rutherford, all of whom believe a long-term health study of the first major dilbit spill in history could have been important for responding to incidents of this kind in the future. Further, for residents, a long-term health study could have been important for holding Enbridge and other parties accountable for the protracted effects of the spill. “How can they prove that there’s nothing long-term? What medical, scientific proof do they have to verify or certify that there’s nothing long-term?” one resident asks. ATSDR instead opted to support MDCH in producing several other reports, in addition to the November 2010 report on the acute effects of the spill. This first study found that 320 out of 550 of those surveyed (58%) reported at least one new or exacerbated acute symptom since the spill (Stanbury et al, 2010).69 In May 2012, MDCH released a report on the health effects of contact with submerged oil in the sediment of the Kalamazoo River. This study was cited one month later in CCPHD’s decision to re- open the river for public and recreational use in June 2012. Later that month, MDCH lifted the “do not eat” fish consumption advisory for the affected stretch of the Kalamazoo River, and released a draft report on surface water and fish consumption.70 In February 2013, the department released an evaluation of residential drinking wells. Essentially, all of these reports reiterate the same message: no long-term health impacts
63 are expected from the spill; at most, you may develop a minor skin irritation if you come into contact with submerged oil – simply wash it off with light soap and water.71 One much awaited MDCH report is still in the works: the evaluation of air contamination in 2010 after the spill and during the height of the cleanup in 2011. Some residents wonder why this is the last report to be released, since the inhalation of airborne fumes certainly felt like the primary pathway of exposure for people living near the river. A toxicologist with MDCH explained to me that while the agency did thoroughly review air-sampling data on a daily basis to ensure that there was no immediate threat to public health during the height of the cleanup, summarizing this data into a report is no small task. It involves analyzing and synthesizing over 900,000 individual data entries, coordinating among multiple employees at ATSDR and MDCH, as well as going through various processes of peer review. This explanation for the time it has taken to release the air contamination report doesn’t cut it for Tara, a Marshall resident and mother of two young children who were exposed to fumes at their riverside daycare. She, like many other residents I spoke with, scoffs at the various MDCH reports and their claims of no long-term problems. How can they know this without monitoring the impacted communities? Over the years Tara has frequently inquired about the air contamination report with MDCH, but the estimated release date has been pushed back again and again. She suspects there has been a delay with this report because the agencies involved are working to “fudge” the data and make it seem less worse than it is. It is not only Enbridge’s reputation, Tara believes, that is implicated in question of air-sampling data, but also that of the local, state, and federal agencies that made public health decisions based on this information. Tara is additionally concerned about how and when the samples that generated this data were collected. She and her friends observed that many air samples were taken upwind, and in some instances, like at her children’s daycare, officials refused to collect samples for the periods of time when the fumes were strongest. Some samples were taken way below ceiling height, contrary to standard practice. Moreover, while air sampling conducted after July 28, 2010 is available on the EPA and Enbridge websites, the data collected on July 26th and 27th, when the fumes were strongest, is not.
64 The ‘Summa canister’ equipment used for air-sampling had to be transported to Michigan all the way from the Gulf of Mexico where most of the country’s cleanup equipment was being used in response to the April 2010 British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon Spill.72 Air-sampling data from Summa canisters wasn’t available until July 28 – 3 days after the spill. However, in the interim, the EPA used hand-held air monitoring devices to test for volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including benzene (a known carcinogen) and other compounds that could be harmful to public health (Rutherford, 2011b). On the one hand, handheld air monitors record ambient levels of chemicals in real-time, providing a snapshot of what the air quality looked like at any give moment. Air monitors may thus record spikes a well as plummets in the level of chemicals in the air. On the other hand, Summa canisters can be placed in an exposed area to collect air samples over a period of 24 hours. This method can provide a more comprehensive sense of the range and concentration of VOCs that people are likely to inhale over a longer period of time than can be measured by the handheld monitors.73 Tara’s particular concern has less to do with the difference between these air- monitoring tools than with the EPA and other agencies’ refusal to share air-monitoring data from July 26 and 27th. She has filed several Freedom of Information Act requests for the data, but received only heavily redacted documents in return, which give no useful indication of the levels of VOCs in the air in those first days after the spill.74
The birds were not stressed
She is a senior environmental scientist with a private company hired by Enbridge to help with cleanup planning. She arrives in Michigan in October 2011. She has been there for about three weeks, and today she’s out on the Kalamazoo River near Morrow Lake. She sees some geese land in an area that has just been dredged and they begin “madly cleaning themselves”.
“Three hours later they were still cleaning themselves. I called wildlife, the number Enbridge provides to report stressed wildlife, and it is supposed to connect to the local federal office. Instead [an] Enbridge receptionist answered, and said she was with Enbridge. She took my report, and about two hours later I got a call from someone who is affiliated with EPA who said the birds were not stressed, and their continual pruning was 'normal' behavior’”.
The next day she receives a call from her boss. She is no longer needed in Michigan, she can return back to the company headquarters and resume other projects. Three months later she is laid off, after 6 years
65 of continual employment with the company.
Evacuation
There have been very few studies into the human health impacts of oil spills, and most existing studies have focused on acute and psychological impacts. Recent assessments have called for further bio-monitoring of communities exposed to oil spills because of the known potential for DNA damage and endocrine effects (Perez-Cadahia et al, 2008; Aguilera et al., 2010). Despite limited existing research, similar symptoms have been reported across several communities affected by oil spills. For instance, Riki Ott - a marine toxicologist, author, and activist who has been studying oil spills since the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska – tells me that she has worked with communities from Spain to Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico experiencing very similar acute and long-term medical problems in the aftermath of major spills. These same symptoms are popping up in Michigan.
Don’t take on this kind of project this early in your career
Sid is a doctor working in Kalamazoo, particularly interested in public health and environmental justice. She is within a year of finishing up her residency at a local hospital. We meet in 2013 through our mutual friends Jim and Carolyn, a radiologist and psychologist respectively, who think we could have a lot to talk about together. And we do.
Sid is serious about undertaking some sort of long-term health study of communities exposed to the Kalamazoo River spill. Michelle is delighted. We meet with some impacted residents, read up on existing literature on oil spills and health, and talk to people with experience in this area. There will be challenges, both technical and logistical: Will residents want to participate? How long will this take, and how much will it cost? What, exactly, should we be looking for? How to get around a lack of baseline data prior to the spill? By the time I leave Michigan at the end of August 2013, we’ve set out some loose goals, and Sid is feeling optimistic about making this work.
But now is a juncture in Sid’s career – she will soon be officially out of med school and needs to think about next steps in terms of employment. She decides to consult with several of her mentors, both in academia and medicine, about the study. The message from her mentors is clear: don’t take on this kind
66 of project, which has the potential to agitate some political waters, this early in your career. You might not be able to get a job afterwards. You might be discredited. It’s not right, but it’s true.
Sid decides that she can’t take on the project – not now. But she still wants to help. We contact dozens of professors in public health, epidemiology, statistics, and toxicology departments at various universities in Michigan to see if any are interested in collaborating. Some write back with supportive messages, saying they will lend a hand. But the study needs someone(s) to pioneer it, to take ownership and follow through. There is no one with the capacity. We abandon the project.75
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July 29th, 2010. Jim Rutherford, health officer with the CCPHD, announced a voluntary evacuation for about 50 homes near Talmadge Creek and parts of the Kalamazoo River in Marshall where levels of benzene are deemed unsafe. Because of his leadership position within the CCPHD, Rutherford had to make these final calls about the evacuation, but he did have members of MDCH, EPA, DEQ and others within the UIC to support him in making these difficult decisions. Health officials decided to use airborne levels of benzene – a known carcinogen - as the primary indicator for determining whether an evacuation was required. They believed benzene levels could provide a better metric for public health decisions than the recommendation in the North American Emergency Response Guidebook that suggests responders consider a 1000-foot evacuation in the case of a large spill of crude oil (cf. USDOT, 195-196), or the same suggestion written on the MSDS for the spilled product – that is, if the team making the decision had the correct MSDS in their possession at the time. The US federal government provides dozens of different recommendations for maximum safe exposure to benzene, but none of these are specific to oil spills in residential areas (National Toxicology Program, 2011; Song, 2013b). In Michigan, local officials set the threshold for benzene at 200 parts per billion (ppb), and lifted the suggested evacuation on August 18th when benzene levels were consistently at 6ppb. But health officials have responded differently elsewhere. For instance, in Arkansas, where an Exxon Mobile pipeline spilled about 200,000 gallons of dilbit in 2013, the threshold for benzene was set at 50ppb, whereas in Alberta where dilbit is produced, the threshold for
67 the province’s ambient air quality objective regarding benzene is set at 9ppb (Song, 2013).76 With no clear public health guidelines for how to respond to an oil spill in residential areas, it is up to the officials present to set their own thresholds for benzene (and perhaps other VOCs) based on the particular situation, existing guidelines for other scenarios, and the resources at hand. While residents wielding MSDS will often rhetorically ask, “which one of these chemicals is good for your health?!”, regulators approach the question of chemical thresholds from a different vantage point. As Linda Nash (2008) shows, toxicology in the US originated within factory settings in the 1920s, when industrial hygienists developed techniques to quantify and measure the health effects of chemical exposures in the workplace. With the productivity of the worker as their prime preoccupation, industrial toxicologists developed “threshold limit values” for discrete chemicals, below which workers could continue to labor without, so it was believed, enduring harm. In so doing, Nash suggests, industrial toxicologists “normalized the problem of low-level chemical exposure” within the workplace (2008: 654). Current regulatory approaches to chemical exposures in the US, as well as the instruments used to measure exposures, were born out of this history: building on the assumption that we need not be concerned with chemicals in the ambient environment unless their levels exceed a certain threshold. Moreover, this is a terrain in which both corporate and government actors have historically been highly invested in producing knowledge that dismisses or minimizes the effects of chemical exposures (Conway & Oreskes, 2010; Murphy, 2006; Nash, 2008; Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008; Sellers, 1998). Thus, while residents along the Kalamazoo River are alarmed by the presence of any chemicals that wouldn’t have been there were it not for the spill, there is little existing research to suggest to public health officials that there is a potential for harm. “I had to base my decision on science - not on emotion or just reaction”, Jim Rutherford told me in 2013, reflecting on the evacuation. This is where undone science can encounter public health decisions in consequential ways. Incomplete knowledge about the effects of exposure to the many chemicals in dilbit translated into inaction in the first days after the spill. This lack of knowledge about toxicity was equated with low
68 risk, and that low risk in turn later meant that it wasn’t necessary to conduct a long-term health study. Uncertainty can perpetuate itself.
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Outside of the suggested evacuation zone, several residents still wanted to leave their homes, and some did manage to negotiate hotel reimbursements with Enbridge, especially if they lived within 200 feet of the river.77 In the Baker Estates trailer park, an area not included in the suggested evacuation zone, Enbridge officials offered to evacuate a handful of residents who they approached individually, a few days after the spill. Other residents negotiated evacuations with the company by going to its office in Marshall. For some park residents, like Michelle and Tracy, it took almost two weeks to get Enbridge to agree to pay for hotel costs upfront. For others, the process was smoother. Cases were dealt with inconsistently and on an individual basis. There was no broad evacuation of the park or suggestion to park inhabitants that staying might put their health at risk. According to park residents with whom I spoke, however, the spill did result in profound health impacts.
Community health studies
Inspired by reading about Lois Gibbs and the story of Love Canal (cf. CHEJ, 2009), Michelle begins going door-to-door with a simple health survey she has devised. In the summer of 2011 she knocks on about 60 doors in Baker Estates, makes a handful of phone calls to Ceresco, and visits 75 homes in the city of Battle Creek. The survey asks readers to “please check the health symptoms you have experienced since the Enbridge Disaster”, and lists dozens of possible symptoms, from headaches to hypertension to aplastic anemia. Michelle synthesizes the data she collects, and finds that 51% of those 115+ surveyed reported new or worsened symptoms since the spill. She tells Riki Ott, a toxicologist with whom she has been communicating (who will be introduced more fully in Chapter 4) about the results. Riki says the data is more or less consistent with what is
69 she would expect, but suggests that Michelle’s survey design would limit the traction of the results. She supports Michelle and a handful of other residents in designing a new survey that maintains the anonymity of the responders and collects more demographic information. The following summer (2012), Michelle and a handful of residents organize several community meetings to have people in the Marshall and Battle Creek areas fill out the surveys. They collect about 110 completed surveys, which they plan to mail to Riki. The hope is that, if their data shows strong anecdotal evidence, the survey results might help them push for a long-term health study despite ATSDR’s decision. But somehow the majority of the surveys disappear. Michelle can’t find them amongst her other things. When I arrive in the summer of 2013, Riki asks me to see if I can collect the surveys, make photocopies, and send them to her co-worker in Colorado for analysis. But Michelle only manages to dig up 17 surveys. She has a hunch where the others have gone – stolen, she suspects, by one of those residents who she thinks now works for Enbridge - but she cannot prove it. I take the 17 surveys nonetheless, and make three sets of copies: one for Michelle, plus the originals; one for myself; and one for Riki’s co-worker. I pour over the pages, these few precious accounts. After respondents are asked to check which, if any, symptoms they have experienced (either as new or worsened symptoms) since the spill, there is room at the bottom of the page to share any other information if they wish. Five respondents took up the invitation and wrote the following:
“My health has gotten worse. I went from working + going to school to now being fully disabled + partially paralyzed w/ neurological issues.” -Female, 28, Caucasian, annual household income $9,500
“Didn’t realize it was “spill” related until I found out my entire building had been evacuated, and they missed my children and I. I think that the oil spill effected everyone in the city, but my children were effected because they have asthma + they tell me that they still smell it sometimes.” -Female, 32, African American, annual household income less than $20,000
“5 year old [son] was diagnosed with acute lymphoid leukemia on 3/9/12. Began symptoms 1/28/12.” -Male filling out survey for son, ethnicity not specified, annual household income $84,000
“Thinning hair, dental issues.” -Female, 65, African American, annual household income $65,000
70 “My son has ALL.” -Male, 41, Caucasian, annual household income $94,000 (does not report symptoms of his own).
I offer these statements not in order to comment on their truth, falsity, or the relation of these symptoms to the spill, but rather to wonder aloud what might be gained by taking these accounts seriously. I mention both rounds of health studies to highlight Michelle’s hard work and how close she and her collaborators may have been in rendering perceptible a pattern of illness, as well as to point to yet another instance where uncertainty creeps in, both for Michelle and her collaborators, and for myself as an ethnographer: were the missing surveys stolen? Moreover, I offer these statements because they are consistent with the testimonies I heard from many along the river:
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Respiratory difficulties. A cyst under my left eye. One inhaler used to last me a month and now I go through one every week. My cancer has gotten worse. I have been diagnosed with cancer. My husband lost his foot, and then his leg to an unknown infection. Then he passed. My dog died. I have been diagnosed with cancer. The two women in that trailer who used to be alcoholics but had been sober for years – they died shortly after the spill. It was the worst thing to see, watching them deteriorate. Their skin turned all yellow in the last few days. I never used to have this many seizures. I know two young boys who had a father at the time of the spill and no longer do. My teeth got infected and they had to pull them all out. My dog died. I had a seizure for the first time. Skin lesions. My neighbor is on dialysis like four times a week. I have this rash that never went away, and sometimes it swells up and gets infected. Any underlying condition you might have had, the oil spill just accelerates it. I can’t be around chemicals anymore without getting sick. Not even the cleaning product isle in the grocery store. I can’t stand the smell. My son has neurological problems. I’ve always had allergies but now they last all year round.
71 All her pet birds dropped off, one by one. Headaches. Two months in, this woman, Shannyn Snyder, she was an anthropologist and she had been down in the Gulf of Mexico studying the BP oil spill, and other spills too. Well she came up to Michigan and she told us what to look for, and what would happen. Who would die first. And things happened just as she said. First the alcoholics would pass. Then the elderly folks. Then those who have immune difficulties. Then people will start getting weird diseases. And to this day, when I look back at my notes, everything happened just like she said it would. My mom’s chickens died. ‘Oil spill amnesia’ – we forget things a lot, we can’t articulate right. My dog had a seizure. I’m okay now, but what about ten years down the road?
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Public health official: “Show me a physician who is going to sign on to that. I've asked every resident that has ever brought to my attention any concerns about short term or long term health to provide their physician involvement, but I haven't got that from anyone. I do believe that there are a lot of individuals and residents that are trying to gain from this from a financial standpoint. I've seen the best come out and I've seen the worst come out from the community, which is not uncommon; you'll get that in any tragedy”.78
A resident would rebut: “I’ve literally begged doctors to come forward.” “From an insurance standpoint what doctor is going to want to have Enbridge coming after them?”
Public health official: “You know I think they've got a lot of conspiracy theories and - so I don't buy into a lot of that. I think that everybody did the job that we could have done with the resources we had at every level, at the federal, state, and local level”.
A resident would rebut: “It’s not a conspiracy. It’s about looking [at] who is calling all the shots. It’s about looking at what information you’re given and how it was gathered”.
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72 Taking a cue from Murphy (2006), I want to bracket the question of whether these illnesses reported by residents are or are not really caused by the spill. The very terms of questions like these, Murphy suggests, are an effect of historical processes through which chemical exposures have been made to matter. Toxicology has developed in such a way that it is better equipped to register and determine the risks for straightforward and singular exposures than the kind of complex, low-dose, and chronic exposure still present along the Kalamazoo River (Murphy, 2006; Sellers, 1998; Nash, 2006).79 Without long- term monitoring of exposed communities, the reports that MDCH has released can only build on this existing knowledge. And without the MDCH’s much-awaited report on air contamination after the spill, it is not possible to begin apprehending all the risks that exposed residents face. Of course, after four years of declining trust in government agencies, residents like Tara and Michelle are unlikely to believe the conclusions of the air contamination report when it is released, regardless of what it says – but that is another matter. My point is that the imperceptibility of the relation between residents’ health complaints and the spill is not a good reason to dismiss these concerns, even if they are articulated in different terms than the dominant “civic epistemology” would have it (Jasnanoff, 2005).80 The imperceptibility of a relation is not synonymous with its non- existence. Instead, I want to echo Murphy (2006) in supposing that bodies “are always multiply materialized in ways that do not exhaust the potential for future materializations” (154). Residents’ bodies have been materialized by the MDCH as no more at risk to illness than non-exposed populations, and as such state and county health officials don’t or won’t understand claims to the contrary as legitimate. However, the preliminary surveying that Michelle and her friends undertook, as well as the circulating accounts of illnesses along the river, suggest that other materializations may have been, and may still be, possible.81
The diner
Michelle takes me to a local diner across the river from Baker Estates to meet with two former residents of the trailer park, Martha and Katie. At lunchtime the diner is bustling, but we manage to find a table
73 near the back. It’s the kind of place that serves big breakfasts all day long with bottomless cups of fresh, strong coffee, which we sip as the three women catch up.
Martha and Katie’s stories about the impacts of the spill have concordances with those of other Baker Estates residents: the incredible odors in that first week; the difficulty in getting evacuated; that mass action lawsuit that they wish they had never signed on to.
“I have cancer”, Katie says, referring to a cancer that was diagnosed after the spill. “Bladder cancer. I’ve had one tumor removed and now it’s back… And I lost five Chihuahua puppies because of the oil spill. They were all born deformed and didn’t make it past six weeks”.
“I just buried my husband three months ago because of this”, Martha says, looking down. “I have a quarter million dollars in medical bills”. She is quiet for the next while.
Out of the corner of my eye I see that Tom Burns is sitting at a table near the front window with a friend. I turn to look and he sees me too. At first I feel nervous, because just as I could overhear Tom and his friend talking about Enbridge, I’m sure they caught snippets of the conversation at my table. Then I realize that this must be a common occurrence for many who live in the area: people with vastly different understandings and experiences of the Kalamazoo River spill inevitably run into each other, in places like the grocery store, the gas station, the diner…
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I had met Tom a few weeks prior on a scheduled visit to his farm in Ceresco. When I arrived he was in the middle of doing construction work on a new barn. He put his tools down and we hopped into one of his golf carts to tour the 200-acre corn and soy farm, one side of which borders the Kalamazoo River.
On July 26, 2010, the day Enbridge reported the spill, Tom walked over to Ceresco dam after work to join a group of local residents watching oil travel down the river and rush over the dam. There he met an Enbridge employee, who he invited over to his farm. “I had access to the river. I just wanted them to get this cleaned up as fast as possible”, Tom recalled, not quite understanding why most other property owners with river-access hadn’t wanted the same. Tom leased about 25 acres of his land to Enbridge for various cleanup operations, including two boat-launches, access roads, and a large field where Enbridge took oiled equipment to be cleaned. At the peak of the cleanup, 450 workers toiled away on Tom’s farm, bringing with them 170 boats and lots of heavy equipment. Cleanup workers got to know Tom, and they knew he liked ‘red-flavored’ Gatorade. Whenever Tom would pass by the boat launch in his golf cart, a worker would throw him a cold bottle.
Overall, Tom has had a positive experience dealing with Enbridge, with the exception of a few minor disagreements. No one in his family suffered health impacts from the spill. He made a lot of money
74 leasing his land to the company, with which he was able to pay off his farm mortgage and support his daughters in college. He was also compensated for three years worth of crop loss in the areas where Enbridge had set up its operations. Tom knows that some other residents look down on him for taking money from Enbridge, but Tom doesn’t care. Although he would certainly have preferred that Line 6B never rupture, he is pleased with the work that Enbridge has done so far to remedy the situation. He loves the Kalamazoo River, and is happy that it’s looking cleaner. He acknowledges that there is still oil in the river, but thinks it’s safe enough to allow his cows to wade in the water and drink, like they had done for years before the spill.
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We leave the diner after a satisfying meal and go for a drive along the river.
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In the winter of 2014, Michelle tells me that Martha has been diagnosed with bone caner.
Unknowing
In this chapter I have presented instances of uncertainty that linger in the aftermath of the Kalamazoo River spill. Just as various kinds of uncertainty bleed into one another for residents along the river, so too do the analytic categories with which I have tried to understand this process. Public secrecy, the limits of done and undone science, and information that is withheld - these sources of nonknowledge become entangled and reinforce each other, making it easier for agencies involved to dismiss residents’ requests for information and support as unreasonable or paranoid. Meanwhile, unknowing - but strongly suspecting - becomes a central way for many impacted residents to know the spill. As I followed these uncertainties I was seized by an impulse to know, to somehow calculate a prognosis or devise a course of action. I recognized this urge as bearing similarities to the analytic of risk that Chapter 2 urged moving away from. As my research neared its end and it seemed like I had found no definite answers to the questions that continue to afflict residents, I struggled with whether or not to provide an account of unknowns nonetheless. I chose to do so because the uncertainties related in
75 this chapter too often go unaccounted for precisely because they are uncertain. I understand and support residents’ attempts to recover solutions and reach for accountabilities, though ultimately this chapter has not made headway in that regard. Instead, by following uncertainties I have tried to draw attention to how authoritative knowledge about the spill has been produced, who can participate meaningfully in its production, what voices and concerns are taken seriously, and who bears the brunt of nonknowledge. Many of the uncertainties in this chapter, especially those regarding the health impacts of the spill, call less for preemptive action than for pause: for a slowing down to (re)assess the situation and the terms by which it is defined.82
76
77 Chapter 4 Toxic Rocks
The results are in
Late August 2013. A packed high school auditorium in Comstock Township, Michigan: the setting of a contentious township planning commission meeting. On the agenda is whether or not Enbridge will be granted permission to use two sites near Morrow Lake as dredge pads. The company must carry out orders from the EPA to dredge out lingering bitumen from the bottom of the lake. Surrounding communities are divided. Some want this cleanup to be over as quickly as possible. Others argue that the sludge Enbridge will dig up from the lake could be toxic and thus should not be processed on dredge pads near residential or business areas. A local brewer whose brewery sits near Morrow Lake has filed a lawsuit against Enbridge, hoping to force a relocation of the dredge pads. Sid, Riki, and I are overflowing with excitement. The results have finally arrived via email, with impeccable timing, during our drive to Comstock. Whispering to each other in one of the back rows of the auditorium, we try to figure out what they mean. I am exchanging frantic text messages with Craig, who couldn’t be at the meeting that evening but who was copied on the same message that I had just received moments ago from Robert Naman, an analytical chemist in Alabama. Jim, Carolyn, and their guests from Texas – who happen to be suing TransCanada for building part of the Keystone XL pipeline on their farm - are sitting in the row adjacent to ours. We glance at each other, knowingly. After Enbridge has presented its case and the brewery’s lawyer has spoken against it, a local resident stands up at the microphone. He addresses the commissioners, motioning towards their water bottles: “Would you ever drink from one of those bottles if there was one drop of oil in it?” It’s a rhetorical question, and the commissioners just
78 stare. “Well, we don’t want to drink out of that water either. We live there. We have families there”. It’s a good segue for Jim, who gets up and introduces himself as a radiologist living in Kalamazoo. In addition to extensive study of medicine, Jim also holds a PhD in bioinorganic chemistry. “I expected to have to come before the board today and explain some chemistry to you”, he says. “I did not expect to have to explain chemistry to Enbridge. But apparently I do”, he continues, referring to Enbridge’s claim that the dredged material would pose no public health risks. He then launches into a description of the general chemical composition of dilbit. Jim is a charismatic speaker. He carries the audience along with him, his cadence building in a slow crescendo as he comes to a point. His expertise allows him to do without niceties, which means that his orations are often both humorous and blunt. “Now they [Enbridge] want to put their operation on your uncontaminated site because if they put it on a contaminated site in the area of the industrial park where it really belongs, then they might have to clean up somebody else's mess! Sound familiar guys?!” he asks the audience. “Sounds like poetic justice to me.” Jim tells the commission that Enbridge’s proposal for the dredge pad site is stupid. And he has some preliminary scientific evidence to prove it.
Planes of in/commensurability
The Kalamazoo River spill tainted many residents’ perception of local, state, and federal agencies, and various levels of government (not to mention Enbridge). The information released by these institutions about the impacts of the spill was often met with skepticism and disbelief from residents, who did not see their experiences reflected in official accounts. What about their health? What about their dog, who has died from a rare cancer of environmental origins? What about their young children, who attended the riverside daycare that wasn’t evacuated in a timely fashion? What about that time when they witnessed cleanup workers doing something suspicious? What about that strange foam they observed floating on some parts of the river near Battle Creek?
79 The answers hinged on the science and reassurances of experts within those same agencies. And the conversation usually stopped there. When residents’ situated experiences were incommensurable with the scientific data or authoritative explanations, some, exhausted, ceased asking questions. However, for a handful of others this incommensurability only heightened their suspicions. This chapter tells the story of efforts by a team of residents with whom I collaborated to push the conversation further. For this group, pointing out gaps in the official science about the spill, and requesting additional information that they rarely received, no longer seemed like enough. They sought to fill those gaps with science done on their own terms. This wasn’t merely an attempt to provide a more complete account of the situation, but also to position themselves and their concerns on a plane of commensurability with explanations given by corporate and government actors, so as to elicit a response that wasn’t just another dismissal. Sciences play crucial roles in environmental politics. The regimes of perceptibility and imperceptibility (Murphy, 2006) that sciences outline can have profound effects on struggles for environmental justice. As discussed in Chapter 3, the imperceptibility of the relation between the Kalamazoo River spill and the health problems that residents along the river continue to experience justifies claims of non- existence by both Enbridge and government agencies. The recognition that challenges of imperceptibility are widespread among communities exposed to toxins of all sorts is increasingly met with grassroots efforts to document and produce publicly accessible information about toxic exposures – part of what Fortun (2012) calls the “informating of environmentalism”. Environmental science conducted by, or in collaboration with, non-scientist communities is often designated by terms like “citizen science”, “community science”, or “crowd sourced science”. While it is not a new phenomenon (Miller-Rushing et al, 2012), increased accessibility to information technologies and environmental monitoring tools has led to the growth of public participation in scientific practices (Dickinson et al, 2012; Fortun, 2012; Newman et al, 2012). Community-led studies in regions exposed to toxins - often done in collaboration with NGOs - have at times contributed to new environmental regulations or provoked larger studies (for some examples, see the work of Global
80 Community Monitor [see Chapter 5], Public Lab, Scorecard, and The Endocrine Disruption Exchange). These kinds of collaborations among scientific and ‘lay’ communities aim to render perceptible what industry or state-sanctioned science may not, as well as increase meaningful public participation in scientific knowledge production about environmental issues. Scholars have analyzed how “citizen science” projects can talk back to (and sometimes be complicit in) dominant logics about what should count as knowledge. This literature shows that “citizen science” can both empower those who participate in it while also throwing into relief their subordination to expert regimes (cf. Allen, 2003; Ottinger, 2010; Hess, 2009; Frickel, 2008; Landstrom & Whatmore, 2011; Murphy, 2006 & 2012; Wylie, 2011; Wylie et al, 2014). The experiment described in this chapter can be situated within this growing turn in environmentalisms of local communities engaging in acts of scientific knowledge production and working to foster forms of “civic science” – science fashioned to serve the public good (Fortun & Fortun, 2005). Disjuncture between what industry or state science proclaims, and what experiments performed by community groups suggest, raises questions about objectivity. How can analyses of the same situation yield different results? Rather than conceive of objectivity – a virtue that many informants expected of me in my renderings of the spill – as a view from nowhere, what Haraway (1988) famously critiqued as the “god trick”, I draw on historians of science to think of objectivity as something that is produced through historically and culturally specific material engagements with the world (cf. Barad, 2007; Daston & Gallison, 2010; Stengers; 2008). Objectivity is not merely a matter of epistemology but also of ontology. Different ways of configuring an experiment can produce different results; knower and knowledge are deeply intertwined. In the case of toxins, variations in the equipment used and frequency of sampling, as well measurement criteria, the chemicals that practioners do and do not look for, and where, can paint distinct pictures of a situation and thus provoke different kinds of response and regulation (cf. Frickel, 2008; Ottinger, 2010; Sawyer, in press; Wylie, 2011). Many of those involved in the project described in this chapter were not only engaged in acts of knowledge making. They were also subject to the knowledge they produced, often in extremely visceral ways, recalling what Joe Dumit (1997) has termed
81 “objective self-fashioning”. Objective self-fashioning refers to the ways in which persons incorporate the facts they encounter in the world into their lives (cf. also Sunder Rajan, 2006). For some of the people with whom I worked, incorporating the information we produced about the Kalamazoo River affected how they understood their own exposure to the spill, the health effects they have experienced, and those effects that may still be felt. In this chapter, I try to perform some of the sense of mystery, urgency, and contingency that animated the project I describe. I then examine how Enbridge, regulatory agencies, and local anti-tar sands activists received the information we produced. Finally, I reflect on how the project affected those involved, and what this might suggest about the ambivalent quality of “community science” for those engaged in it.
It was almost like a slurping sound
I reached out to Craig Ritter online, through the “Battle Creek Oil Spill Group” that Michelle had created on Facebook years prior as a forum for those impacted by or interested in the spill.83 Craig had posted a trailer for a documentary he was working on about the impacts of the spill called “Talmadge Creek and the Tar Sands Truth”. The preview struck me because of the position of the camera – most scenes seemed to have been shot from the woods along the riverbank, out of sight from cleanup crews. After chatting for a while, Craig and I arranged to meet in person. He offered to take me on a tour of the Line 6B replacement route, which he had meticulously mapped out. And thus began what would become a routine for us: he would meet me in downtown Ann Arbor early in the morning, and I’d jump into his Chevrolet Tahoe truck, with green tea (for him) and coffee (for me) in hand. Then we’d hit the highway and head west. Craig describes himself as an outdoorsman, and a Michigander, born and raised. He is passionate about spending time outdoors, and taking photographs and videos of Michigan wildlife. These hobbies are what brought him to love the Kalamazoo River. Craig lives an hour or so east of the river in a small rural town, but because he works as a facilities engineer in Battle Creek, over the past decade he has developed a habit of going to the river after work to fish and hike along the banks. He recalls reading on social
82 media on the evening of July 25th, 2010 that there was a strange smell in the air in Marshall, but didn’t think much of it. The next day he heard on the news that there had been an oil spill in the Kalamazoo River. He went to go check it out. “I’ll never forget. That water never sounded the same again for a while. It sounded almost like a kid trying to drink a shake with a straw. It didn’t have a natural sound. It was almost like a slurping sound”, Craig explained, describing his first impressions of the spill. Since then, Craig has continued to visit the river frequently, but swears he will never eat the fish again. Instead, he has been diligently documenting the impacts of the spill and cleanup. In the weeks after the spill, Craig noticed that official accounts of what was going on were inconsistent with what he had been observing, day after day, on the river. This inconsistency pushed him to be even more attentive to the unfolding cleanup. In the process, he met many residents impacted by the spill, and developed relationships with people living along Line 6B. He has been moved by the stories of residents whose health has been impacted by the spill, and those of landowners along the pipeline replacement route, many of whom he has reached out to and worked with to help organize community meetings.
Something Gulf-like
On the day of that first drive, Craig and I spend about 8 hours together, going up and down the replacement pipeline route. We stop to visit with Roger McAllister, whose home sits on a large conservation area that he had developed decades ago. Roger gives us a tour of his expansive 225-acre property, which is crosscut by Line 6B. We follow one of the many beautifully cared for trails through the thick woods until we come to a road- sized clearing. Roger tells us that Enbridge has recently cut down hundreds of trees in the conservation area for the Line 6B replacement. Knowing that the Michigan Public Service Commission had granted Enbridge the authority to invoke eminent domain if landowners did not cooperate with pipeline construction on their property, Roger decided to negotiate a settlement early on with the company. But the loss of trees in the conservation area saddens him deeply, he expresses,
83 breaking our silence as we stand in the clearing. Now that Enbridge has completed work on his property, he is eager to plant new trees and native grasses. We start walking back. Craig and Roger have a lively conversation about local bird species. Then, standing outside the McAllister home, Craig and I say our goodbyes to Roger and his wife, Andrea. Just as he is about to embark in the Chevy, Craig hesitates and instead reaches in to pull out an old coffee tin. “There’s something I want to show you”, he says to the McAllisters. I had been privy to the contents of the tin just hours earlier.
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“Remember when I said there was something Gulf-like going on?” Craig had asked me in the car, referring to an online chat of ours a few days prior, in which he had insisted on waiting until we met in person before disclosing any further details. The Gulf, I quickly learned during my fieldwork, referred to the explosion of the British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in April 2010, a disaster that led to the release of approximately 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico from an underwater well. “Well, these are coming up in the river in certain spots”, Craig continued, opening the tin to reveal several pool-ball sized rocks (see figure 4.1). “They look like sandstone, but they’re not natural, I can tell you that. They break open, almost like chalk”. He believes the rocks, which seem to be made up of river sediment, also contain bitumen and a chemical that he thinks cleanup crews may have used in the spill cleanup. “This stuff [some sort of chemical product] has just been rolling around the river, picking stuff up like a sponge”, Craig suggests, theorizing that bitumen has been gradually “entombed” within formations like the ones he was showing me. What really struck him about the rocks, when he first found them in the river a few weeks back, is that upon breaking them apart small droplet of sheen appeared on the water surface. “And I think there’s a lot more like this, sitting on the bottom of the river”, he tells me. Craig, like several other residents along the river with whom I spoke, recounts having seen cleanup crews dump powdered materials and spray liquids into to the river
84 during the height of the cleanup between 2010-2012. Craig suspects that these products were oil dispersants or other forms of surfactants.
Figure 4.1 - Craig holding two of his rock formations from the Kalamazoo River. Photo: Craig Ritter
Dispersants are oil spill treating agents that are composed primarily of solvents and surfactants. Some forms of surfactants are found in common household products such as laundry detergents and shampoos. They contain molecules that are soluble in both oil and water, and work by reducing the interfacial tension between two liquids, enhancing the separation of oil slicks. When applied effectively to an oil spill, dispersants encourage the oil to break up into small droplets and ‘disperse’ away from the water surface. Dispersants are used primarily to reduce the shoreline impacts of oil spills, to reduce the harm done to birds and mammals on the water surface, and to speed up the biodegradation of oil in the water column (cf. Fingas, 2008).84 The toxicity and effectiveness of dispersants has been disputed ever since these products were first introduced in the 1960s (Fingas, 2012). However, this controversy was reanimated when an unprecedented deep water application of 1.8 million gallons of Corexit 9527, Corexit 9727A, and Corexit 9500 were used in the response to the BP Deep Water Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The Georgia Institute of Technology and Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes found that the mixing of Corexit with the spilled crude oil made the combination 52 times more toxic (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012) than the oil alone, and community organizations have documented how the application of dispersants in the cleanup has affected human and ecological health in the Gulf (Devine & Devine, 2013).
85 The rock formations Craig found remind him of the ‘tar balls’ that continue to wash up along beaches in the Gulf. The Gulf tar balls are composed of the spilled crude oil, remnants of Corexit, as well as sand and sediment from the ocean floor. Scientific analyses have shown that some of these formations contain dangerous quantities of persistent polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (Kirby III, 2012), as well as high quantities of marine bacteria, including Vibrio vulnificus (commonly found in oysters), which can cause serious or deadly infections (Arias et al, 2011).
Figure 3.2 - Unusual foam observed on the Kalamazoo River in 2011. Photo: Michelle BarlondSmith
Craig thinks that the rocks he has been finding in the Kalamazoo River could be the result of a phenomenon similar to that in the Gulf. Michelle, Craig, and other residents who I spoke with have observed strange substances floating on the water (see figures 4.2 and 4.3), which recall for them the large plumes that appeared both underwater and on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico after Corexit application, as result of oil droplets dispersing.
86
Figure 4.3- Another unusual foamy substance observed on the Kalamazoo River in the fall of 2010. Photo: Craig Ritter ---
Roger and Andrea seem nearly as bewildered as I feel about the situation when Craig shows them the rocks. But Craig has an extraordinary capacity for rendering intelligible things that might otherwise seem abstract, complex, or even farfetched. His knowledge of local ecology, amiable character, and down-to-earth-ness engenders a sense of trust. The McAllisters shake their head in disbelief, not of Craig but in dismay of the possibilities he had just revealed. On the drive home from, Craig and I decide to keep in touch about the rocks. I tell him I have an interview scheduled with Dr. Riki Ott in a couple days, and he asks me to talk to her about the formations and report back. Dr. Ott, like the Gulf, came up frequently among residents that I interviewed. Riki, as I later came to know her when we spent a week together in August during the Occupy National Gathering in Kalamazoo85, has been studying oil spills for decades. After obtaining a PhD in marine toxicology from the University of Washington in 1985, Riki travelled to Alaska to spend the summer enjoying the outdoors before embarking on an academic career. But her plans changed as she fell in love with the Alaskan coast and began working as a commercial fisher, deciding to settle in Alaska. A few years went by and Riki became more and more involved in labor organizing with the regional Cordova
87 District Fishermen United and the statewide United Fishermen of Alaska. Then the Exxon Valdez spill happened. The disaster marked a new chapter in Riki’s life. She began organizing in her community of Cordova to respond to the Exxon Valdez spill, and delved into extensive research on existing regulations around oil spills in the US. She has written two books (ciations) on the Exxon disaster, in which she documents the narratives of cleanup workers whose health was negatively impacted, the ecological devastation brought on by the spill, and how the event has reconfigured the lives of fishing communities in Alaska. She has become an advocate for the transition to renewable energy, for a federal ban of oil dispersants, as well as an educator around issues of democracy and the elimination of corporate personhood in the US. Riki was in the Gulf at the time of the Kalamazoo River spill, working with impacted communities and helping them advocate for adequate protection of their health and livelihoods. Michelle Barlond-Smith reached out to Riki after the disaster in Michigan, searching for someone who would believe that her community was experiencing frightening health impacts. After spending a year in the Gulf, Riki made her first trip to Michigan in 2011. There she met with Michelle, Craig, and many other impacted residents. She gave presentations at community meetings and strategized with residents on how to move forward. Riki’s strong impression on residents became evident during my fieldwork. Several people offered to give me a copy of her 2005 book Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, which she had delivered to Michigan in pallets in 2011. Others had begun calling themselves “accidental activists”, a term Riki introduced and with which she herself identified, to indicate the contingent politicization they experienced in the aftermath of the Kalamazoo River spill.
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A few days after that first outing with Craig, I speak with Riki on the phone from Hawaii, where she is housesitting for a friend. We chat at length about her work and about the situation in Michigan. She is keen to enlist me in a handful of projects with
88 which has been supporting Michigan residents, and points me on a path to start investigating whether a cleanup product could have been used in the Kalamazoo River. She provides me with a list of people to contact within the EPA, Environment Canada, as well as people who had done work on dispersants in the Gulf. I get to work, and promise to keep her posted.
Backyard experiments
Meanwhile, Craig is busy working on his own set of experiments, which he videotapes and posts on YouTube. He takes two clear, glass vases and fills them with water. Then he adds some motor oil, which floats on the surface of both vases. He grinds up some of the rock formations from the Kalamazoo River, and dumps them into one vase (see figure 4.4). In the other, he adds some regular gravel from around his home. He waits and observes. Whereas the gravel passes through the layer of oil and sink to the bottom, the sediment from the river rocks seem to be slowly pulling down small amounts of the oil to the bottom of the vase. Craig emails one of the Incident Commanders with the EPA to express his concerns about the formations, and shares one of his videos. The Incident Commander thanks him and says he will pass this along. Craig doesn’t hear back. Craig brings one of his experiments to Jackson, where I am visiting with Michelle and her husband Tracy. We sit in Michelle’s backyard around a lawn table, with the vase of water, oil, and river rocks in the center. After a day or two, the crushed river rock seems to have dragged down quite a bit of oil, but there still remains a thin layer on the surface. We speculate. What could this mean? Does it mean anything? Dinner is ready, so we move the vase far away from the table. Michelle says it is making her feel queasy.
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Figure 4.4 - Vase with water, motor oil, and a crushed formation that Craig found in the Kalamazoo River. You can see some of the motor oil on the surface being pulled down. Photo by Craig Ritter.
***
Subpart J of the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan (NCP), developed pursuant to the US Clean Water Act and Oil Pollution Act, requires the EPA to maintain a “product schedule” of dispersants and other products that may be used in oil spill responses. In the case of a spill, only those products listed on the product schedule can be considered for application, and only the Federal On-Scene Coordinator (the EPA, in the case of the Kalamazoo River spill) can authorize the use of a particular product. I speak with the manager of the NCP product schedule at the EPA, who tells me there are absolutely no legal freshwater dispersants in North America. In some parts of
90 the world (such as France and parts of South America) dispersants may be used in non- marine environments, but they tend to be more effective in saline water. Recent reports prepared for the EPA and other government agencies have nonetheless begun examining the effectiveness of dispersants in freshwater (cf. SL Ross Environmental Research, 2010; Wren, 2008). While dispersant use must be reported, there is no requirement to publicly document the use of other substances on the product schedule. The other products, such as surface washing agents (which also contain surfactants), surface collecting agents, bioremediation agents, and other miscellaneous products are “fair game” to use in freshwater settings, the manager tells me.
Morel mushrooms
Craig teaches me how to find the rocks in the Kalamazoo River. It’s not hard, once you know what to look for. The porous, heterogeneously shaped formations can be identified all along the stretch of river affected by the spill. If you think you’ve spotted one, pick it up – but make sure to be wearing rubber gloves. Hit it against the beam of a bridge, on the cement steps of one of the new river access points that Enbridge has built, or even against a ‘regular’ rock. Listen for the sound the formation makes when it comes into contact with a hard surface. It’s a soft dull thump – unlike the sharp staccato sound of two regular rocks bumping up against each other. If it’s one of Craig’s formations, bits of it will likely crumble apart upon contact. Craig has his underwater camera with him. He is crouching down to film my feet (protected by the big rubber wading boots that he insisted I wear) shifting along the river bottom. I hear him shout suddenly: “stop!” I had just stepped on one of the formations. I jump back and he reaches underwater where my foot had been. The formation had broken apart. This scares Craig. The idea that someone – especially a child – could wade along the river and unwittingly break open one of these things, perhaps exposing their own bare skin, and releasing the toxins that Craig fears the rocks contain.
***
91
“It’s almost like morel mushroom hunting”, Craig often says, employing a metaphor that only he would. “Once you find one, you start seeing all kinds of them”.
***
Craig mimics experiments conducted on tar balls in the Gulf by shining an ultraviolet (UV) light on some of his formations (see figure 4.5). Under UV light, hydrocarbons shine a different color than other materials – a yellowish-orange. This technique was used in the Gulf to distinguish tar from other debris on the Coast. Craig’s formations, like the Gulf coastlines, are speckled yellow.
Figure 4.5 - One of Craig’s rock formations under ultraviolet light. Craig believes the yellow-specks indicate hydrocarbons. Photo by Craig Ritter.
Canary in the coal mine
We go meet with Jim and Carolyn Timmons in the city of Kalamazoo on a Saturday morning in early July. Carolyn has prepared one of her wonderful fruit salads, adorned with berries from the backyard. We sit in the big, bright living room, and Carolyn makes sure everyone has a mug of warm coffee in hand before we get down to business. Jim sits in the rocking chair, with Bogart on his lap and Safronia by his side – the Timmons’ two small canine companions. They have also invited Chris Whamoff, a
92 member of the MICATS who had recently halted construction on Line 6B by skateboarding inside a segment of new pipeline and remaining for 10 hours.
---
Like Craig, I had met Carolyn through the Battle Creek Oil Spill Group on Facebook, where she is an active participant. I sent her a message of introduction to which she responded immediately, urging me to call her. Over the phone I learned that Jim and Carolyn are both from Texas, but have been living in Michigan for over a decade. Jim works as a radiologist at Bronson Hospital in Battle Creek, and Carolyn is a psychologist with an independent practice. In July 2010, her office was located in Battle Creek along the Kalamazoo River. In the days after the spill, she found herself becoming violently ill as soon as she debarked from her car to enter the office. The spill eventually forced her to relocate her practice further away from the river. Shortly thereafter, Carolyn happened to reconnect with an old friend from her adolescence, Julia Trigg Crawford, who lives in northern Texas where she owns and operates a large family farm. Julia has become an unlikely but prominent voice in pipeline resistance in the United States through her ongoing legal battle against TransCanada’s attempts to build a part of the Keystone XL pipeline on her farm. The confluence of the Kalamazoo River spill and the revitalization of her friendship with Julia sparked in Carolyn an interest in joining movements to oppose tar sands pipelines. “We are the canary in the coal mine here in Michigan”, Carolyn often told me. As the first major dilbit pipeline spill in history, the Kalamazoo River disaster could provide fodder for Keystone resistance, and so Carolyn took it upon herself to join with Julia and others in the southwestern United States who are engaged in such work. During that initial phone conversation, I mentioned one of Craig’s videos of his experiments with the formations. Carolyn became animated. Her husband had a PhD in chemistry, she said, and may be able to shed light on the phenomenon Craig was observing with the rocks. So, she suggested, Craig and I must come over on the weekend, and bring some of the rocks with us!
93 ---
And so we do. At the Timmons’ home we talk about the spill, about pipelines, climate change, and energy politics in the United States. It’s an unlikely crew of people, most of us meeting in person for the first time. Craig has brought a large bucket full of formations from the river, and we spend time examining them. Jim keeps one to take to the hospital where he works and run it through a computerized tomography (CAT scan) (see figure 4.6). This strikes me as an odd thing to do, but Jim’s unconventional approach ends up revealing something very interesting.
---
Fast-forward to the Comstock Township planning commission meeting, Jim describes one of the formations to the audience:
“We did a CT scan of one of them, because I happen to have a CT scan. These things consist of concentric layers of outer rock, surrounded by oil, surrounded by sand, surrounded by oil, surrounded by sand. Why? Because it’s tar sand – it likes to go to sand. That’s why they find it [bitumen] in the tar sands to start off with… so then you end up with not a whole lot of oil in a great big rock of concentric rings of little layers. And a big surface area. Now why does that matter? Because now we have a catalytic surface, a huge catalytic surface. These materials, clays, sands, zeolites, are used as industrial catalysts to change these exact types of chemicals [hydrocarbons] into all sorts of other chemicals.”
The potential for the formations to catalyze other chemical reactions in the river is particularly concerning for Jim. He fears that catalysis from the formations coming into contact with bitumen that still lingers in the river could change the nature of the pollutants, for good or bad.
---
Back to the Timmons’ living room, where I explain that I am currently looking into options for having the formations chemically analyzed, and for ways to fund the project. Craig is working on tracking down a control sample of the oil that spilled. Jim says to keep him in the loop: he would be happy to pay for the chemical analysis once we
94 find an appropriate practitioner. Jim and Carolyn have been environmentalists for years, they said, and it made sense for them to get involved in this local issue. Jim was, he admitted, also in it for the mystery. Jim and Carolyn host our growing investigative team in their home several other times over the next two months, with Michelle, Riki, Sid, Todd, and others joining in, as we continue to search for answers about the rock formations.
Figure 4.4 - CAT Scan of one of the Kalamazoo River rock formations. Scan conducted by Dr. James Timmons.
95 I was holding them ransom
“I’ll be the guy in the blue truck, with a trucker hat. Probably a John Deer hat”, Patrick Jackson tells me over the phone.
Sure enough, when I get off the train in Battle Creek, he is there waiting for me in the parking lot, hat and all, in the biggest pickup truck I have ever seen. I clamber aboard and we set out on a tour of the river and other sites. After we exchange greetings, Patrick sighs deeply and says: “Enbridge is my worst enemy”. He then begins telling me about how he and his family have been displaced by the spill.
Before I met Patrick, several other people had taken me to see his old home in Marshall, which now sits empty. At the time of the spill, Patrick and his family lived at “ground-zero”, on Talmadge Creek before its confluence with the Kalamazoo River. Oil came up over 40 feet onto his yard. His family was evacuated around 10am on July 26, 2010, curiously before Enbridge reported the spill to the National Response Centre. Local Enbridge employees showed up to the Jackson home around 10am and told the family they had to leave. Enbridge bore the cost of the Jackson’s stay in a hotel over the next 62 days.
Patrick is a man of many trades. He owns and manages several businesses, including an excavation business and a farming operation. He and his wife also run a small food truck from which they produce and sell candied apples, cotton candy, and caramelized popcorn at carnivals and other community events in the area. Before we part ways, Patrick gives me a bag of homemade caramel corn, which I enjoy on the train ride home.
That big blue house in Marshall along Talmadge Creek had been Patrick’s home for 27 years. He kept most of his work equipment and vehicles in the large garage. His children grew up there. His grandchildren had known it as their grandparents’ home. There was a pet cemetery in the backyard, and many cherished trees. "You can't take that stuff with you, you know", he tells me, as we stop the truck in front of his old house.
Patrick did get Enbridge to buy his family a new home, further away from town. But it took him nearly three years to come to a full settlement with the company. The clincher was a soil sample he taken from his backyard near Talmadge Creek, a day or two after the spill.
Patrick had experience with oil companies through some of his various jobs. "I was holding them ransom”, he tells me, laughing. “I knew what I had, you know, cause of work. Doing tests for any company, if you're going to do dirt or liquid you have to have a glass jar with a cellophane top over it, and then screw the lid down tight". He had kept the sample secret for over two years. “I didn't give it back to them until I told them what they had to do to settle with me”, Patrick explains.
96 “And the guy [an Enbridge lawyer] says ’well that ain't gonna happen’ and I said ’that ain't gonna happen, huh?’ and I cannot tell you the words I used on that guy, but I was over the top. I played their little cat and mouse game for two and a half years. I'd had enough. I slammed it (the sample of oiled soil) up on the lawyer’s desk, and I said 'What do you think of that?' and he goes 'That's ours!' and I said 'No it ain't, it ain't yours. You might think it's your but it ain't yours. It’s mine. It was on my property, it was on my property, it’s mine'. So he says 'I'll be getting back with you in a week or so' and I said 'well you get back to me in less than two hours because I'm gonna take it to Kalamazoo and have it analyzed!’”
Within hours, the lawyer called back. Enbridge was prepared to meet Patrick’s conditions for settlement. But he had to give back all the soil samples.
I ask Patrick why he thinks Enbridge didn’t want him to get the samples analyzed. "Because there's stuff in there that they don't want you to know about", he tells me. “It is cancer-causing”.
After a few hours, Patrick brings me back to the train station. I thank him profusely. Patrick is happy to do it, he expresses. For him, the most important thing is to get the word out:
"Anybody, beware. If you come in contact with the Enbridge oil company, they will screw you. That’s the bottom line. And if you don't believe me, talk to all the people [in the town]. But a lot of them have gag orders, right. 80% of these people have gag orders".
Do you smell fire?
On our way back from the Timmons’ home, Craig and I stop to collect some more samples in the Kalamazoo River. It’s drizzling a bit, and the air is humid. We go to Saylor’s Landing, an access point recently built by Enbridge. A plaque mounted on a step out-looking the river describes the history of the area and explains that the small park is named after its former residents, the Saylor family. There is no mention of the spill, or why the Saylors can no longer live there.86 We wade in the river, under a bridge. The formations are all over the place. Craig has a crowbar and is poking around in the river bottom. Droplets of sheen come to the surface of the water. We collect some of the formations and pour sediment into mason jars for more of Craig’s experiments. “Do you smell fire?” I hear myself ask.
97 “Yeah”, says Craig, looking around, puzzled. We get out of the river. On the bank we identify tress with blackened trunks. Craig points out a raspberry bush, and we hope that no one has been eating these berries. Craig picks one and crushes it between his fingers. It smells like oil, we think. But at this point everything around us does too. About one hundred meters ahead we see a group youth in bathing suits, going for a swim. Do they not smell what we smell? We go back in the river, but the odor quickly overwhelms us again. We return to the truck with our samples. The drive home is uncomfortable, as we both sit with nausea and headaches. We pull over a couple of times to take a breath of fresh air. Craig drops me off in Ann Arbor and I find myself mimicking some of the strategies that Michelle had shared with me about dealing with chemical exposure – tips that she and others often post on the Battle Creek Oil Spill Group: I go to the local food cooperative and order a fresh-squeezed beet juice with ginger and lemon. I go for a long walk and try to breathe in clean air, and take a bath with Epsom salts. I feel better in the morning and I don’t know if this has anything to do with the beet juice, but Craig is sick for several days.
---
Michelle tells me that those who endured significant exposures after the spill are now more sensitive to all kinds of chemical exposures, including the use of household cleaning products. A day by the river, Michelle says, is all it takes to aggravate latent symptoms.
***
The timing was important. Controversy erupted in the Gulf of Mexico about the widespread use of Corexit around the same time as the Kalamazoo River spill. During town halls and press briefings the question floated around: are any chemicals being used in the cleanup of the Kalamazoo River? Local officials in the EPA, the US Coast Guard and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), as well as Enbridge
98 representatives, maintained that all cleanup techniques were mechanical. Cleanup crews physically removed the oil with machines and absorbent booms. This was reiterated in my interviews with members of these organizations working on the spill response. Absolutely no products were used.
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Residents who witnessed cleanup workers spray liquid along the banks or into the water were told that it was simply mosquito spray (see figure 4.7). Others saw workers dumping powdered substances into the river and were told it was sand.
Figure 4.5 - Cleanup worker spraying unknown liquid into the Kalamazoo River. Photo: Michelle BarlondSmith
99 Pulled over
Craig and several other residents had told me about being followed from the river for miles by an Enbridge truck, or at times by local police. These kinds of intimidation tactics, as Craig understood them, made him back off from documenting the cleanup for a week here and there. But they also further propelled his detective instincts. Out on the river or along the replacement pipeline route, the sense that “they” might be watching was pervasive, and rendered even more palpable when a helicopter would fly overhead, as one did on an afternoon in July when Craig and I were out exploring.
On his way home from work, Craig picks me up in Lansing where I had been looking at legal documents in the state courthouse. We drive around Ingham County to see how construction on the new Line 6B is coming along. A helicopter is hovering above an active construction site. Enbridge seems to have increased its security since the MICATS action (see Chapter 5).
Workers are piling into school buses with Wisconsin license plates, perhaps heading home for the day. Craig has the utmost respect for these workers, but points out that Enbridge has tended to hire from out of state for both construction and cleanup tasks. Craig stops the truck at an idle construction site up the road and I get out to take a picture of bits of pipe lined up in a row, extending for miles under arches of colorful flags.
As we resume our drive, the helicopter reappears and swerves sharply. It seems to have spotted us. We chuckle – certainly “they” can’t care much about our taking photographs. Moments later, however, we are being pulled over by an Ingham County police officer. Craig rolls down his window as the officer approaches.
What are we doing? Who are we? I am a student from Canada researching oil pipelines, Craig says, and he is just showing me around. The officer asks for some identification, which we both oblige. He calls for backup, and another policeman arrives shortly thereafter.
Craig is asked to step out of the truck. I disembark as well, but one of the officers says, “Excuse me, Miss, would you mind going back in the car?” I sit and wait for about half an hour as the two policemen interrogate Craig on the side of the road. When he returns, Craig ignites the engine and hits the gas. We are silent for a moment, until we are far enough away, and then we burst into an uncomfortable laughter.
---
The next day the local news is reporting that the company contracted by Enbridge to do construction on Line 6B in Ingham County has hired deputies from the Sheriff’s Department to secure its construction sites, at a rate of about $9000 per/week (Clark, 2013).
100
With help from Riki and her co-worker Lisa-Marie, I get in touch with a handful of people who ran chemical analyses of tar balls in the Gulf after the BP spill. One such chemist is Robert Naman, of Analytical Chemical Testing, Inc (ACT) in Mobile, Alabama. Naman helped local activists in the Gulf identify traces of Corexit and oil in tar balls and water samples that continue to wash up on southern beaches. Naman and I discuss the Kalamazoo River spill over the phone, and in his thick southern accent he explains how he would go about the chemical analysis of Craig’s formations. He is keen to help work on this project. Once everything is in place, Naman and I connect again so that he can give me detailed instructions of the samples Craig and I should collect from the river, and how to package them. Jim and Carolyn generously finance the experiment.
Anniversary
July 26, 2013: the third year anniversary of the Kalamazoo River spill. Craig and I make another trip to the river, this time to collect samples to ship to Naman. Craig has sterilized several mason jars in preparation for this expedition. We film ourselves filling two jars with water from the river, and two with some freshly picked rock formations. We label, date, and sign them, and fill out the “chain of custody” forms Naman had sent us. The jars are put in a cooler, as per Naman’s directions, to preserve the samples. Our control sample is an oiled piece of paper that was dipped into Talmadge Creek (a tributary of the Kalamazoo River, where the spill first hit water) exactly three years ago, by a television reporter trying to convey the gravity of the spill to her viewers. A friend of Craig’s on whose property that newscast took place had kept the oiled paper all those years in a ziplock bag, and happily gave it to Craig for the purpose of our experiment. Craig and I pack up the samples with bubble wrap and icepacks, and express-ship them overnight to Naman in Mobile, Alabama. Then we wait.
***
101 Are we being watched? Some residents most active in raising awareness about the impacts of the spill tell me that when they began their advocacy, they also began experiencing difficulties with communication technologies. Their emails and text messages not received. Blocked from Facebook for days on end, with no explanation. Their computer freezes without warning, won’t turn on for several days. And then things go back to normal for a while. Are these experiences just a series of coincidences? At first I cannot help but think so. That is, while I take seriously the concern that Enbridge is responsible for these technological hiccups, I find myself searching for less excessive explanations. But then, just as Craig and I are beginning to feel that we might be on to something, Edward Snowden, an ex-agent with the National Security Agency (NSA), leaks information about the NSA’s programs of mass surveillance of foreign nationals and US citizens. Suddenly the entire country is hyperaware of surveillance. In grocery store lineups and at the coffee shop I overhear jokes about how “they” are watching “us”. Along the Kalamazoo River, this “they” bleeds into the “they” that follows you home from the river or won’t allow you access to data of air monitoring data from your own backyard. Recalling Foucault’s (2005) (via Bentham) panopticon, whether you are actually being watched begins to matter less than whether you think you might be. What is and isn’t deemed a conspiracy theory – be it about a corporation monitoring the public’s telecommunications, the health effects of exposure to oil, or the use of chemicals in environmental management – is an effect of the economy of knowledge in which explanations circulate. Conspiracy theories, understood as excess, are the constitutive outside of accepted paradigms of interpretation. They are the ‘necessary possibilities’ of what can be thought of as interpretation (Birchall, 2001; cf. also Derrida, 1975). My point is not to celebrate conspiracy theories as inherently oppositional, or to denounce them as false, but to attend to “how knowledge gets situated by virtue of its ideologically and materially constructed location(s) in the circulation of public discourse” (Briggs, 2004: 184).
102 Fingerprint match and TICs
Fast-forward again to the Comstock Township planning commission meeting. Jim has just finished his impassioned speech. “I’m going to yield the microphone to a world- famous marine sedimentary toxicologist who investigated the BP deep Water Horizon Spill. Her name is Riki Ott…. And she can tell you more about the toxicity of what you can expect from this.” Riki introduces herself briefly, and says: “Before I go any further I want to give my actual condolences”, she states, looking at the audience. “I'm sorry, genuinely, that you all have to go through this. I know what you are all going through, all of you, I’ve been through this, and I'm sorry that you have to do this. It's not going to be over for a while”. Riki then explains how she came to know residents in Michigan, and tells briefly of her year spent in the Gulf of Mexico, during which she helped document the “public health epidemic from chemical illnesses that arose coincident from exposure to the BP oil and dispersants”. Upon arrival to Michigan in 2011, Riki met residents who were experiencing the exact same illnesses as the people with whom she worked in the Gulf, and that were also consistent with experiences in Alaska in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. She goes on:
“The diluents used in tar sands contain the same base chemicals as we just as heard of the dispersants used in the Gulf. These target the same body organs, so it's like getting a double- whammy. The emerging evidence and science from the Gulf is one of long-term harm, because the combination of oil and the chemicals that are in dispersants - a lot of the same chemicals that are in diluents - are worse than the oil alone. The combination is worse than the oil alone”.
The combination is worse than the oil alone. Preliminary results from tests conducted by Michigan residents, Riki tells the planning commission, suggest that more questions should be asked of the EPA and Enbridge about what exactly is in the river. At minimum, she suggests, the dredged materials should not be placed near residential areas, and workers should wear adequate protection. “There are three things I want to point out on this”, Riki says, referring to he chemical analysis Naman had just sent us.
103 “One was that there was a fingerprint match, which is to say that the oil, the PAHs [polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons] that are in the water samples and the tar ball samples match the BP - sorry, wrong disaster – they match the Enbridge Kalamazoo spill. That shouldn't surprise anyone, because it's already been identified as a problem. But there was something more. There were other compounds that were tentatively identified in these samples. I want to read this little bit, it's very short.”
Reading aloud from Naman’s report, Riki says:
“ACT [Analytical Chemical Testing, Inc] also took the opportunity to review previous data from archived samples that show the resultant compounds from the mixture of Corexit 9527, Corexit 9727A, and Corexit 9500--all surfactants used in the BP Gulf Oil Spill of 2010, and Macondo 252 Crude Oil. The TIC [tentatively identified compounds] compounds present in the water column and in the tar balls recently analyzed from the Kalamazoo River Spill of 2010, showed resulting compounds that are clearly identical to the TIC compounds produced from mixing Corexit compounds with crude oil, as in the BP Oil spill of 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. It is blatantly clear that surfactants were used as well in the Kalamazoo River Spill of 2010 and the resulting compounds present mimic those formed and still present in the areas affected by the BP oil spill of 2010”.
Riki proposes two possible - and not mutually exclusive - avenues for making sense of Naman’s interpretation of the data. One, as she suggested moments earlier, the diluents used to transport bitumen contain surfactants. The Tentatively Identified Compounds (TIC) showing up in Naman’s analysis could have been formed from the interactions between bitumen and diluents in water. Or, second, perhaps a surface washing agent or another product containing surfactants was used in the response to the Kalamazoo River spill, as corroborated by the eyewitness accounts of residents seeing cleanup crews spray liquid and dump powdered substances into the river. Regardless, the presence of the TICs in Naman’s analysis is troubling.
***
Chemists use gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), an analytical testing method, to identify organic compounds in environmental samples. This is the technique Naman employed to analyze the water and rock formations from the Kalamazoo River, which Craig and I had sent him. When using GC/MS, a practitioner will calibrate the instrument to identify, or ‘target’, particular classes of compounds. At times, an analysis will reveal non-targeted compounds. The practitioner may then search
104 the GC/MS Wiley library, which contains over 250,000 compounds, for a tentative identification of the unknown compound. If no good match for the compound is found, it may remain unknown, or the practitioner may be able to identify its general class. However, at times the compound can be closely linked to existing analytical information. This was the case for Naman’s analysis of the Kalamazoo River samples. Because Naman had done extensive analysis of water and tar ball samples in the Gulf, he possessed archived data of the TICs that were produced when Corexit compounds and crude oil were mixed. He was able to compare this data with the TICs in the Kalamazoo River samples, and very similar resulting compounds when compared to the BP Oil Spill. The presence of these TICs indicated to Naman that surfactants were likely used at one time in the Kalamazoo River. 2-Butoxyethanol and Propylene Glycol are compounds that are found in the Corexit 9527, 9527A and 9500 used in the Gulf. Surfactants like these evaporate within a period of hours or in a day after application, upon which they mix with the petroleum and produce a combined substance that is heavier than water, allowing it to sink. It further decomposes and degrades into a host of other organic compounds that may easily be overlooked. Because of their quick evaporation, Naman didn’t think it was worth testing for surfactants in our weathered samples. However, the TIC approach did enable him to look for traces that surfactants - if once present - may have left behind. A practitioner has to look for TICs in order to find them. In Enbridge’s EPA- approved sampling plan, there is no mention of looking for TICs in water samples (Enbridge, 2010). By 2011 Enbridge does begin looking at TICs, but only in air samples. The EPA does not require that TICs be disclosed, and does not regulate these compounds. Naman’s data about the Kalamazoo River samples was not inconsistent with the EPA’s or Enbridge’s – rather, Naman used different parameters in his analysis that allowed for additional information to become visible.
***
The Comstock Township Planning Commission denies Enbridge’s request to use the proposed dredge sites. The company eventually secures other sites further away from
105 residential and business areas, but the delay means that it does not meet the EPA’s December 31, 2013 deadline for completing the dredging. Enbridge resumes dredging operations in the spring of 2014. At the time of writing, these operations are ongoing.
The most visible reminder [not mere metaphor]
In the waning months of 2013, Craig, Michelle, Jim, Riki, and I work on getting media coverage of the rocks, and the health concerns that the results raise (cf. Grant, 2014; McNeil, 2013a; Nikiforuk, 2013a and 2013b; Smith, 2014; Tol, 2013; Uechi, 2013). We release the initial media advisory through an organization that Craig has recently founded: The Great Lakes Dilbit Defenders. Our messaging is careful not to make accusations but rather seeks explanations for the presence of surfactants in the river and rocks. We also want to know if removing these formations is part of the cleanup plan. Enbridge categorically denies that any products were used (McNeil, 2013b), and suggests the chemicals present could have come from multiple other sources. The EPA and DEQ do not respond to requests for comment. Meanwhile, the MICATS (Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands)87 circulate the news about the rocks throughout their networks. They call for a federal investigation of Enbridge and the EPA in light of the test results (MICATS, 2014). They make online ‘memes’ with the damning text of Naman’s report. At times the message gets blurred through translation. The questions we had posed turn into accusations. Rocks that contain Corexit-like compounds turn into balls of Corexit (cf. Lewis, 2014). Corexit was used, the MICATS allege. This is a matter of strategy, says Chris Whamoff, an activist with the MICATS whose own health has been impacted by the spill. As the group behind the science, The Great Lakes Dilbit Defenders must be cautious about how to present the situation, Chris tells me. But the MICATS’ role is to push the envelope: make Enbridge employees squirm at public meetings when Chris brings up Corexit, let the audience see them whisper to each other in their suits and ties. If Enbridge wasn’t hiding anything, they would have already sued him for libel, he says. Craig doesn’t agree with this strategy, wary of how quickly statements like these might discredit the entire cause. The MICATS
106 nonetheless begin bringing formations from the river with them to media events, either displaying small formations in jars or at other times boasting much larger ones, always handling them with rubber gloves (see figure 4.8).
Figure 4.8 – In this widely circulated online meme, Chris Wahmoff, member of the MICATS, holds up a rock from the Kalamazoo River at an anti-Keystone XL rally in Washington, DC. March 2, 2014.
“The formations are the most visible reminder of how much Enbridge has gotten away with”, Chris tells me, explaining why he has worked so hard to facilitate their travel. And I understand. Throughout this project I too experienced some of the uncomfortable ambivalence that those who I worked with conveyed in anticipation of what we would find out about the rocks. There was a part of us that hoped to have our suspicions disproved. It seemed somehow wrong to want for the rocks to contain traces of hazardous chemicals. And yet there was a part of us that did. The rocks held the promise of being able to render perceptible some of the harm experienced by communities affected by the spill, harm that has largely been dismissed by those responsible. This is why Craig continues to pursue the project with such intensity, and also why the rocks have become an important emblem of struggles still to come.
107 The rocks are not mere metaphors. Rather, they are material configurations of the spill and its drawn out spatial-temporality. Naman’s report is not a representation of the rocks but an extension of them, and of the spill itself.88 Insofar as the rocks became part of how we came to know the spill, they also became part of the secrecy – public and otherwise – that surrounds the disaster and ongoing remedial responses to it. In addition, the rocks informed how some of those involved in the project came to understand their own exposure to the spill. As we learned more and more about surfactants and oil, and as we spoke increasingly in terms of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and 2-butoxyethanol, Chris, Craig, Michelle and others performed more and more internet searches, cross-comparing the health effects that they and their neighbors have experienced with those reported by residents in the Gulf, Alaska, and other sites where the health impacts of oil spills and surfactants have been documented. There is a particular kind of self-fashioning at play here, akin but not identical to Dumit’s (1997, 2003) “objective self-fashioning” referenced above. Like in Dumit’s research on how persons with mental illnesses incorporate facts about themselves revealed through brain-imaging technologies, information produced about the rocks contributed to the self-identification of some of those who I worked with as “chemically poisoned”, to borrow a phrase from Michelle. The investigation into the rocks powerfully reinforced the sense that exposure to the spill and remaining oil was more harmful to human health than official accounts suggested, and provided additional fodder to string together a slew of different symptoms under an umbrella of environmental illness. However, while the imaging technologies Dumit examines “bear the objective authority of science” (Dumit, 2003: 44), the relationships between knowledge and power were quite different in our investigation into the Kalamazoo River rocks. If the objective self is “an active category of the person that is developed through reference to expert knowledge and invoked through facts” (Dumit, 1997, 88-89), then the ‘toxic self’ in the case of the Kalamazoo River spill is developed through skepticism of particular expert knowledge and invoked through reference to experiences of illness, comparisons across disaster zones, anecdotal evidence, preliminary tests: in short, through strong convictions that have not quite achieved the status of facts.
108 Indeed, throughout this project and all its excitement I often found myself forgetting a key lesson I have learned from science studies: scientific truth claims become facts when they garner a consensus among a community of experts (Oreskes, 2004), are verified by ‘modest witnesses’ (Shapin & Schaffer, 1985), or when they successfully move through what Latour (1999) calls “trials of force” (cf. also Hetherington, 2013), displacing or disproving other theories. A single laboratory test of a few samples – like the project described in this chapter – may provoke further research but will not stand on its own as a matter of fact. In some ways, our team knew this from the get-go. But we hoped that by speaking in the language of science we would render our concerns intelligible to the EPA; that our data would incite broader testing for TICs in the river. Most importantly, we hoped our findings would prompt an inquiry of whether surfactants in the Kalamazoo River – regardless if they introduced through a product or contained in the diluent - made exposure to the oil more toxic to humans and other organisms, as it did in the Gulf. We thought that our project would elicit a response from the EPA, other than silence.89
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Commensurability remains a perhaps distant goal. We came closer, and have not given up. The research continues. Craig still has some tricks up his sleeves. We come across new leads every few weeks, following them as far as we can, and think of new lines of questioning to pursue. Over the summer of 2014, while Enbridge continues its cleanup for the fourth year, we begin preparing for further analyses of water and rock formations.
Black out
It might not have happened. The contingencies of these encounters seemed astounding to us all: encounters between Craig and a rock, between Craig and I, between Michelle, Riki, the Timmons, Bob Naman, the MICATS, and still others who were drawn into this network that spanned out from a ball of clay with traces of oil. And yet it did
109 happen, and it began with Craig’s attunement to the Kalamazoo River and its mutated ecology.90 Craig’s affective and embodied entanglements with the spill formed the conditions of possibility for this project, and those knots are only tighter now.91
***
November 20, 2010. Craig spends the day out on the Kalamazoo River, filming. The next day, outdoors near his home, he walks through the woods. Suddenly, he blacks out. He awakes on the ground some time later. He is shaken, and feels ill. A friend drives him to the hospital, where a cardiologist gives him a tentative diagnosis: heart attack. Craig doesn’t think to ask whether his symptoms might be related to chemical exposure, and the doctor doesn’t ask. Amidst the commotion at the hospital, with loved ones in the room and Craig feeling disoriented, he is discharged before seeing the results of his blood work. He would read his lab report years. It showed kidney and liver damage, and suggested his loss of consciousness might be due to “myocardial injury, which may be due to an acute coronary syndrome or non-cardiac cause such as chronic renal failure, shock, or trauma” (emphasis added). Craig doesn’t connect the symptoms he has been experiencing since the spill – muscle spasms, abdominal pain, memory loss, fatigue – to chemical exposure until Riki Ott comes to Michigan in 2011. Riki tells Craig that his symptoms sound very similar to those of cleanup workers in the Gulf. Still, Craig is reluctant to think that the spill had anything to do with his recent health problems. His doctor used to call him “Iron Man”, and he wants to believe it’s still true. In 2011 and 2012 he is preoccupied with filming Enbridge contractors tearing out and reconstructing Talmadge Creek. Between that and a very busy work schedule, he doesn’t follow up with the cardiologist. Summer 2013. Things begin to click for Craig. The backyard experiments, feeling dizzy near the river, Naman’s report. He knows he has been exposed to something dangerous. He goes to see the cardiologist. There is no damage or scarring to his heart, as is usually the case with a heart attack. Craig shares that he has been documenting the oil spill for the past three years. His symptoms and the blood work from 2010 now make sense to the doctor, who tells Craig he would support him in a lawsuit against Enbridge if
110 he chose to pursue one. “He told me that he could talk to me all day about the effects of those chemicals”, Craig recalls. Spring 2014. Craig hasn’t been online for almost a week. This is very unlike him, but I figure things must be hectic at work. Michelle notices, too, and sends me a message to ask if I’ve heard from him. Then one day he is back online, and we chat. He has decided to take the cardiologist’s advice and follow up with an urologist. This decision was precipitated by an intense period of sickness: “I just got sick after playing in the river again. Hit me for 5 days this time…. Almost put myself in the hospital. Everything started crashing again on me, felt like my body was shutting down. Got to give it up [being in the river] for a bit, or try to…”, Craig tells me. Craig is given medication to address his kidney issues, and has appointments booked for more tests. He is now committed to continued medical follow-up until the doctors can figure out what exactly is wrong. He is afraid. (I am too).
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How to explain the TICs that Naman found in the samples from the Kalamazoo River? Are they, as Enbridge says, from another source? For Craig, this explanation doesn’t cut it. If Enbridge is so confident, why won’t they disclose what’s in the diluent formula? The foam on the river, the dumping and spraying that he and others witnessed, conversations he overheard between cleanup workers about ‘that product’ producing white bubbles… all of this leads Craig to believe that something was used, whether it was a type of surfactant and/or an absorbent material. So, back to the TICs – are they a result of surfactants in the diluent, or of a surfactant that was applied, or a combination of both? And what does this mean, if anything, for the health of the river and life around it? These questions, as we learned, take much time and labor to answer. At the height of our investigation over the summer of 2013, time moved in curious ways, compressed, sped up, and drawn out. Our adrenaline ebbed and flowed similarly, as we worked long hours to cobble together a strategy, and as we came closer and closer to what we thought would be some sort of decisive stroke. Now, in the anticlimax of yet another dismissal, Craig’s determination is slower, steadier, but still strong.
111 I close this story, for now, by emphasizing these issues of time, labor, and affective attachments because these are among the thickest threads that that tie this experience together for me. The time needed for residents like Craig and Michelle to draw serious attention to their concerns about the spill far exceeds the time in which they want to see action from Enbridge and government agencies to mitigate the risks that they believe their communities face. The work required to make toxicity perceptible further binds residents to the spill in an iterative process: the more they learn about the spill, the deeper they dig; the more research they do about the chemicals involved, the more they reflect on their own bodies’ permeability to those same chemicals. 92 For Craig, the more intrigued he became, the more time he spent by the river, the more he got sick.
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It is important to attend to the successes and failures of “community science” in achieving recognition, and to what consequences it does or does not in different places. It is also crucial to carefully examine how these efforts of knowledge production are often at odds with or obscured by much better funded research undertaken by governments and corporations. Less academic attention has been paid to the ways in which residents who engage in scientific practices aimed at rendering perceptible their own exposures are affected – corporeally and emotionally - by this work. I think the still-unfolding story of the Kalamazoo River rocks illustrates that this is could be a fruitful line of inquiry for understanding why and how residents become attached to particular scientific projects, and how they incorporate what they learn through the process into their lives and understandings of themselves.
112 113
Chapter 5 ‘Remember the Kalamazoo’
The primary question with which I began this research went something like ‘what were the impacts of the Kalamazoo River spill?’. In the asking of this question I had conjured a disaster that was contained spatially – along the river – and temporally – mostly in the past. I slowly learned to rethink the very terms of the question I had posed. My rethinking began as I observed, and participated in mobilizing, the growing opposition to the Line 9 reversal. By the winter of 2013, as Line 9 began garnering significant media attention, it became clear to me that the Kalamazoo River spill was not ‘over’ nor contained in Michigan, insofar as the story of spill continued to do forceful political work in Eastern Canada, and indeed in other locations where dilbit pipeline projects were being debated. As I discussed in Chapter 2, the spill functioned as a potential worst-case scenario invoked by opponents of the Line 9 reversal as a means to advocate against the project. While pipeline safety is of great importance, this comparison between the spill and a potential rupture in Line 9 created little space to ask whether Line 9 should be reversed in the first place, and nor was it successful in convincing the NEB as much. This chapter instead points to different bases for comparison that might better register what is at stake in the Line 9 reversal as well as the lesser known impacts of the Kalamazoo River spill. In Michigan I learned that the spill’s temporal and spatial reach was still larger than I had assumed - or rather, I learned that its reach extended indeterminately. For one, I had vastly underestimated how much information was still unknown and contested about the spill. As I discussed in Chapter 3, what is unknown about the spill shapes how residents have experienced the disaster as much as what they do know about it. Defining the scope and scale of the disaster is part of what is at stake in residents’ efforts to dig up and produce information that might render perceptible health and environmental impacts that have not been accounted for by the various agencies involved in the spill response (see Chapter 4 for a detailed example). 93 What exactly constitutes an “impact” of the
114 spill - and to what and to whom - is negotiated and made through everyday responses to and experiences of the disaster. Secondly, I learned to trouble renderings of the spill that situate it entirely in Michigan’s past. The spill’s effects continue to spillover onto people’s lives, local ecosystems, regulatory regimes, proposed infrastructure projects, and research agendas. The displacement of riverside residents, the ongoing cleanup, the Line 6B expansion, and illnesses that residents attribute to exposure: these are all continuations of the spill. Toxins, in particular, have forced me to think about the spill’s recursive spiraling through time, and to open up the limits of the spill as an object of comparison. Thinking with toxins – those that circulate and accumulate over time in bodies in Northern Alberta where tar sands are extracted, those that are emitted from smokestacks in industrial corridors where dilbit is refined, and the toxins that linger in and around the Kalamazoo River – became a way to slow down thinking in order to attend to forms of slow violence. Finally, I became fascinated by the knowledge exchanges and relationships formed between residents along the Kalamazoo River and people affected by petrochemical industries in distant places. Michelle probably best exemplifies these wide- ranging itineraries, having travelled to speak in several places, having actively solicited the advice of others who have been “chemically poisoned”, and having now begun to relay advice to others in turn. But she is certainly not the only “survivor” of the Kalamazoo River spill to have done research on the Gulf or Exxon Valdez, for instance, or to have entered into networks of environmental and pipeline safety advocates from across the country. A newfound alertness to the potential effects of chemical exposure made residents along the river more aware of the permeability of their own bodies and also prompted some to think about other sites where chemical exposures occur – not just in the aftermath of unexpected catastrophes like a pipeline rupture, but also in sites where fossil fuels are extracted and processed. Pipelines, after all, connect these kinds of sites. This chapter draws its inspiration from residents’ gaze outwards from the Kalamazoo River. I look in particular to southwest Detroit and Aamjiwnaang First Nation (adjacent to Sarnia, Ontario). There are, however, many other places I could have looked. Perhaps most obviously, I could have looked to the Gulf of Mexico and the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster; or to Texas, a hotbed of industrial activity and resistance to
115 the Keystone XL; to Arkansas where a dilbit pipeline owned by Exxon spilled over 200,000 gallons of dilbit into a residential neighborhood in March 2013; to Bellingham, Washington, headquarters of the Pipeline Safety Trust; to Marktown, a neighborhood in East Chicago, Indiana surrounded by a significant industrial corridor, and where the country’s second largest dilbit refinery owned by BP spilled about 1,600 gallons of an undisclosed oil into Lake Michigan in March 2014.…Vocal residents along the Kalamazoo River have developed connections in all of these sites, and several others. I look to Detroit and Aamjiwnaang First Nation because Line 6B brought me directly there.
PetKoch
On the Eastern side of the Detroit River sits the city of Windsor, Ontario, where Ruth Germain enjoyed a lovely view of the water and of Detroit’s skyline from the high- rise riverside condo in which she lived with her husband and daughter. In November 2012, however, the view was tarnished as Ruth watched bulldozers tear down a thick cluster of trees across the river. Then, large trucks began unloading massive amounts of what looked like black sand, forming three-story high piles (see figure 5.1). The piles were hard for most passersby in Detroit to see, I later learned, tucked away as they were behind old buildings along the river in the southwest part of the city, just east of the Ambassador Bridge. Ruth began noticing films of black dust accumulating on her patio, with some dust even migrating inside her home. She decided to notify a journalist with the Windsor Star about the black mounds across the river. The journalist then discovered that the black piles weren’t made of sand, or even coal, but another product called petroleum coke - petcoke for short - that a refinery in Detroit had just begun producing (cf. Batagello 2013a & 2013b). In late 2012 the Marathon refinery in southwest Detroit completed a series of $2.2 billion upgrades to its facilities in order to process about 28,000 barrels per day of dilbit from the Alberta tar sands (see figure 5.2). Petcoke is a byproduct of that industrial process (Morris, 2012; Stockman, 2013).94 Marathon sells the petcoke it produces to
116 Koch Carbon, a bulk-trading company controlled by the (in)famous “Koch brothers” – hence some environmentalists call the black substance petKoch.95 Since the EPA no longer grants new licenses for refineries to burn petcoke in the US, most petcoke produced by US refineries is shipped to other countries – primarily China and Japan, or stockpiled (ibid).96
Figure 5.1 - A view of the petcoke piles from Windsor. Photo: James Fassinger (reprinted with permission).
Once Ruth had alerted Canadian media and created a Facebook page called Petroleum Coke Awareness, Michiganders soon caught wind of the petcoke. By May an in-depth article in the New York Times brought international attention to the black piles, framed by the New York Times journalist Ian Austen (2013a) as an eyesore that Americans would have to get used to if the Keystone XL pipeline is approved and more dilbit is refined in the US. By the spring of 2013, Detroit-based environmental justice activists and residents living near the petcoke piles were actively demanding that the petcoke be removed, citing black dust in the air and increased difficulties breathing. The MDEQ, however, assured residents that the petcoke posed no public health or environmental threats (Sills, 2013). Activists also sought to draw attention to the conclusions of a recent report by Oil
117 Change International entitled “Petroleum Coke: The Coal Hiding in the Tar Sands”, that petcoke is “like coal, but dirtier” (Stockman, 2013). Burning petcoke for fuel, the report suggests, produces about 53.6% more carbon dioxide emissions than burning coal. Thus dilbit pipeline projects like the Keystone XL, which would lead to the production of enough petcoke to fuel 5 coal plants each year, must be assessed for their output of petcoke in addition to their other environmental impacts (ibid). The petcoke was just the latest environmental hazard along the shores of southwest Detroit, an area commonly referred to as “the 48217”, Michigan’s most polluted zip code (Lam, 2010).97 The 48217 is a low-income, primarily African American community living in the midst of heavy industry, including oil refineries, salt, asphalt, and coal plants (Anderson, NDa)98. The 48217 is also highly mobilized. For years residents have been actively raising concerns about pollution by documenting the high rates of asthma, cancer, and other illnesses in the area, doing their own air monitoring, and giving toxic tours of the industrial corridor.
Figure 5.2 – A view of part of the Marathon refinery in southwest Detroit. Photo: James Fassinger (reprinted with permission).
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118 In June 2013 I join in a series of protests against the petcoke piles organized by the DCATS (Detroit Coalition Against Tar Sands) and the MICATS, in collaboration with other local groups. On a hot, sunny Sunday, protest participants gather in a park in the southwest side of the city, where community leaders give speeches about environmental in/justice, the right to clean air, and demand that the petcoke be removed. We then march through the colorful streets of the city’s Mexicantown, with its ice cream shops and taco joints, carrying placards and wooden sunflowers – relics from the US Social Forum held in Detroit in 2010. The march comes to a stop near the lot where the company Detroit Bulk Storage has been trucking in loads of petcoke daily. We hear more speeches and enjoy some snacks. A few of the organizers camp out in preparation for the morning, when we all gather again at sunrise to greet – and stop – trucks delivering more petcoke to the storage lot. We stand in rows, holding hands to form a soft blockade, obstructing the trucks from advancing any further (see figure 5.3). Black dust sticks to the sunscreen on our perspiring bodies, producing a rash on my legs and those of others. After several hours of standing in the sun, chanting, and negotiating with police, the group manages to stop the delivery of petcoke to the site for the day. It’s a temporary victory, but a symbolic one that propels widespread calls from Detroiters to ban the petcoke. It turns out that Detroit Bulk Storage did not have the right permitting to store this kind of material along the river. By the end of August 2013, Koch Carbon removes the petcoke from the riverside and begins shipping it to Ohio for storage (Battagella, 2013c; Muller, 2013). While we stand against the petcoke in Detroit, MICATS member Chris Whamoff is on a construction site in Calhoun County where he uses a skateboard to lodge himself deep within an open segment of the new Line 6B pipeline to protest the expansion. For Michigan-based environmentalists, the petcoke piles, the air contamination in southwest Detroit, the Kalamazoo River spill, and the Line 6B expansion are intimately linked. Indeed, some of the placards at the Detroit petcoke protest read: Remember the Kalamazoo. By March 2013 Enbridge had completed construction on a new pipeline, Line 79, which connects to Line 6B at the terminal in Stockbridge, Michigan. With the help of smaller pipelines that the company has leased from other companies, Line 79 takes dilbit to the Marathon refinery (MPSC, 2012; Enbridge, 2014) (see figure 5.4). The
119 expanded Line 6B will thus facilitate the transportation of more dilbit to be refined in southwest Detroit, producing air impacts that the community believes are worse than the processing of convention oil (Morris & Hamby, 2012). In 2011, when Marathon’s expansion to process dilbit was almost complete, the refinery launched the first phase of its home buy-out program. It offered to buy approximately 300 houses in parts of Oakwood Heights, a neighborhood sitting on the refinery’s fenceline, in order to create a 100-acre “green buffer zone” between the refinery and residential areas (Anderson, NDb). About ninety percent of residents opted to leave, and over 275 working-class ho mes in Oakwood Heights adjacent the refinery have been demolished (Panetta, 2014).
Figure 5.3 - Protesters blocking a truck delivering petcoke from entering into the storage lot. Photo: James Fassinger (reprinted with permission).
When I tour the neighborhood in June 2013 with long-time environmental justice activist Rhonda Anderson and two of her summer interns at the Detroit Sierra Club Environmental Justice Program, many of the houses that remain standing are boarded up, with only a few still inhabited by residents who refuse to leave their homes. Rhonda is from River Rouge, just south of Oakwood Heights along the river’s industrial corridor. She knew from a young age, when she first began seeing “the orange skies”, that the surrounding industries were impacting her neighborhood’s health. “We fought the Marathon expansion every step of the way”, Rhonda tells me, but the expansion went
120 through anyways and now many residents feel like they have no choice but to leave. Those residents outside of the 100-acre buffer zone, however, have not yet convinced Marathon to expand its buy-out program.
Figure 5.4 - Enbridge Line 79 Project. Photo from Enbridge (2012: 2).
Action camp
The MICATS are organizing an action camp in late July to bring together activists from across the Midwest for a weekend of direct action training, culminating in an act of civil disobedience that will intervene in Enbridge’s construction of the new Line 6B. They ask me if I know a landowner along the Line 6B replacement route that might be interested in hosting the camp.
I call up Barb Taylor, who along with her husband Andrew owns a large property near Howell, Michigan. Enbridge had condemned 35 acres of their property when the Taylors refused Enbridge’s offer of compensation for the land it would take for the new pipeline easement. I thought Barb might be sympathetic to the MICATS’ project, herself a vocal critic of Enbridge’s Line 6B expansion project, as she makes evident by posting large anti-Enbridge signs on the roadside edge of her small farm (see figure.5.5)99.
The Taylors are indeed interested, albeit a bit nervous. They even decide to reschedule their vacation plans in order to host the MICATS for a weekend in late July.
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I arrive to the Taylors’ early on the Saturday morning of the camp. Behind the house the MICATS have set up an outdoor kitchen, workshop sites, port-a-potties, and dozens of tents to accommodate the 50 or so camp participants. Barb and Andrew pull up their lawn chairs and audit some of the various
121 workshops on themes ranging from tar sands 101, anti-oppression, and how to shut down a construction site by locking oneself to heavy equipment.
After a full day, the MICATS dish up some vegetarian chili for dinner.
“Oh, it’s just like the 60s! This is wonderful!” exclaims Patti, greeting me with a warm hug. She has just arrived, along with Michelle, to partake in the informal panel discussion that will soon take place around a campfire. I had met Patti a couple of months earlier, when she invited me to see where a segment of the new Line 6B had just been installed in her backyard. A longtime environmentalist, Patti made a point of telling me that she knew the surge of anti-Enbridge sentiment emerging along the Line 6B route was a form of “NIMBYism”. Normally she doesn’t engage in that kind of work, she said, but Enbridge has treated landowners so poorly that she was left with no other choice but to be vocal about the issue. When Enbridge was beginning construction, she worked with Craig Ritter and organize community meetings in Howell that were attended by over 100 concerned residents looking for information about their land rights and how to take on Enbridge collectively. It’s through this work that Patti has met the many new friends, including Barb, who she now calls her “pipeline buddies”.
Everyone gathers in a circle near the tents to listen to Barb, Andrew, Michelle, and Patti speak. It’s the first time that many of the campers hear about the impacts of the Kalamazoo River spill from someone like Michelle who experienced it first hand, or the tales of landowners who have been standing up to Enbridge. Barb, like several audience members, is in tears as she tells of the day that Enbridge contractors cut down hundreds of native trees in the forest on her property. Barb’s mother had been fatally ill in a care facility at the time, and had expressed a strong desire to come home to die. Barb’s mother’s last day alive coincided with when Enbridge had planned to cut down the trees. Barb pleaded with the right-of-way agent for the company to reschedule, but they would not. Barb was unable to bring her mother home to die, not wanting her to witness the destruction of trees she had loved. Patti went over to Barb’s that day, while both Barb and Andrew sat with Barb’s mother, and watched the trees come down one by one.
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The Monday after the camp, the MICATS successfully shut down construction of Line 6B in Ingham County. Twelve activists are arrested, and three out of the four who locked themselves to equipment are convicted of felonies.100
122
Figure 5.5 - One of the signs on the edge of Barb and Andrew's property. Photo: Sonia Grant
Buckets
“Accidental activists” in both Aamjiwnaang First Nation and southwest Detroit have developed a relationship with Global Community Monitor (GCM), a California- based non-profit that supports communities on the frontlines of industry globally in the use of environmental monitoring tools. In particular, GCM has supported residents in Aamjiwnaang First Nation and Detroit, as well as in many other sites, in launching their own “bucket brigades”. With bucket sampler kits, residents capture air samples of a several liters into specially lined plastic bags, which are then sent off to an EPA-certified laboratory in California where the air samples are analyzed for several VOCs and sulfur compounds. GCM has provided campaign training and technical assistance to the Aamjiwnaang Environment Committee, and to Rhonda Anderson and the residents with whom she works in southwest Detroit. In both these instances, residents have been successful in materializing their environmental health concerns with the use of buckets.101 In Detroit, Rhonda tells me how residents of Liebold/Pleasant community in the 48217 used buckets to monitor air in their basements where they found 20 VOCs, including ethyl benzene that could be traced to the Marathon refinery. Marathon offered to buy homes where the VOCs were detected, an offer that several residents took up.
123 In Aamjiwnaang First Nation I visit with Ada Lockridge, one of the founding members of the Aamjiwnaang Environment Committee, which initially formed in 2002 to protest the construction of a new Suncor ethanol plant on the reservation – a struggle that the community eventually won in 2004.102Ada and Aamjiwnaang member Ron Plain have used data gathered with buckets to support their Chemical Valley Charter challenge on behalf of their community against Ontario’s Ministry of Environment (MOE). The suit, represented by the environmental law firm EcoJustice, alleges that the MOE’s permitting of industries in Chemical Valley to release increased pollution violates Aamjiwnaang members’ rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom to life, liberty, security, and equality of the person (Lockridge and Plain, 2012). Ada brings out her bucket from the closet and demonstrates how she would go about taking a sample (see figure 5.6). “It’s on a stink scale from 1-10, for my nose. My nose is probably different from your nose”, Ada tells me: her nose is more accustomed to those odors that made my nostrils tingle and my throat seize up a bit on the bike through Chemical Valley on my way to her home. When there’s a smell of 6 or higher on the ‘stink scale’, Ada takes a sample. “It’s the equivalent to breathing in air for 4-5 minutes”, shouts Ada over the vacuum cleaner sound of the bucket’s pumping mechanism, as the clear plastic bag gradually inflates. “So you fill the bag and then close the bucket. Then you fill out this form and say which way the wind was blowing, where you took the sample, and what time.” The sample is shipped overnight to the lab, and a few weeks later Ada receives the results.103 Ada pulls out a stack of old calendars dating back to 2004. She has kept records of every incident, out-of-the-ordinary chemical release, or spill from industry. In her nine calendars between 2004-2012, only three months have gone by without at least one incident. Often, when there is a chemical release, life goes on as usual on the reserve. Sometimes, however, Ada tells me, a loud siren sounds. Residents may be evacuated or told to “shelter in place”, taking immediate shelter indoors and closing all windows and vents.
124
Figure 5.6: Ada Lockridge and her companion bird Smee demonstrating how to take an air sample with a bucket. Photo: Sonia Grant
“Toxic” tour?
Journalists and students from all over flocked to Aamjiwnaang First Nation after a 2005 study (Mackenzie et al.) found a declining sex ratio in the community (with two females being born for every male) and suggested a link between the surrounding industry and endocrine disruption. A 2007 documentary, The Beloved Community, drew international attention to health concerns on the Aamjiwnaang reserve, including high rates of miscarriage (39%), asthma, learning difficulties, and other challenges (cf. MacDonald & Rang, 2007). Ada and other outspoken members of Aamjiwnaang who I interviewed were generally pleased to see the issues of pollution and environmental health getting coverage that puts pressure on the MOE and industry, and were happy to work with responsible researchers. However, this work is certainly not without its burdens. Ada recalls driving through Chemical Valley a few years ago with one of the several documentary filmmakers that have come to capture stories and images from the region. “She said ‘I think I’ll call this part ‘Ada’s toxic tour’”, Ada tells me. Ada was not yet familiar with the tactic of the toxic tour, widely employed by environmental justice
125 movements, of bringing ‘outsiders’ into communities (primarily communities of color and low-income areas) burdened by chemical exposures (cf. Di Chiro, 2003; Pezzullo, 2009). “Toxic? I’m just showing you where I live!” Ada had responded to the filmmaker, who explained that she had meant no disrespect. Ada is now famous around town for her “toxic tours” of Chemical Valley. But coming to know her own body and the land as “toxic” comes at a profound emotional cost, at the same time that this knowledge helps her and others in the community to advocate for stronger pollution standards.104
Ain’t no jobs on a dead planet
Tucked away in a small cove of the St. Clair River is Sarnia’s beloved Centennial Park. At dusk the waterfront park boasts an eerily beautiful view of the city, with the turquoise water and lights from the refineries in Chemical Valley bright in the background. The park is home to the Victims of Chemical Valley Memorial, which commemorates workers who have died from occupational diseases. Built in 2002, the memorial was initiated by the Victims of Chemical Valley for Asbestos and Occupational Disease (VCVAOD), a group made up of mostly women whose deceased husbands worked in industry in the valley.
Sandra Kinart, the current chair of the VCVAOD, got involved after her husband died of mesothelioma - a cancer linked to asbestos inhalation – in 2004. There is a “public health epidemic” of mesothelioma and other asbestos-related cancers and occupational diseases, Jim Brophy, former director of the local occupational health clinic tells me (cf. also Mittelstaedt, 2004).105 The lives of “blue-collar workers” have been made to “count less” in this industrial landscape, Jim maintains.
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Mid-May 2013. I’ve just arrived in Sarnia for an anti-Line 9 campaign-planning gathering hosted by Aamjiwnaang & Sarnia Against Pipelines (ASAP). The city is a-buzz with the news that Centennial Park has been fenced off because unsafe levels of asbestos were detected in the soil. The asbestos may be linked to a salt mine that used to be located where the park currently sits (1903-1964), or to the some 70,000 cubic yards of dredged materials used to build up parts of the land in 1966 when old salt wells had begun leaching natural gas. The new fence erected in 2013 to protect the public from asbestos has made the Victims of Chemical Valley Memorial inaccessible, just out of reach, and the irony is lost no one (see figure 5.7).
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Toxins can come back to haunt you.
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The ASAP gathering culminates in a protest march through Sarnia to a hotel where a conference is taking place: “Bitumen: Adding Value – Canada’s National Opportunity”. The conference was organized by the Sarnia-based Bowman Centre to provide a space for discussion about promoting increased transportation of bitumen to Sarnia and building a bitumen upgrader in Chemical Valley.
The protesters chant loudly through the quiet streets on this sleepy summer day: “Stop the tar sands/don’t expand it/there ain’t no jobs on a/dead planet!” is the most popular chorus. Like in Detroit, one of the placards pleas onlookers to Remember the Kalamazoo. Once outside the conference venue, the crowd boos and shouts “Shame! Shame!”. Custodial staff shut the curtains of the large window into the boardroom. Inside, Vanessa Gray, a young activist from Aamjiwnaang First Nation, feels out of place. She had fundraised the $500 conference registration fee in order to attend and deliver a message. She uses the distraction provided by the protesters to get up on the stage and unravel a banner that reads: “You are killing my generation”.
Figure 7 - The Victims of Chemical Valley Memorial, fenced off due to asbestos contamination in Sarnia's Centennial Park. Photo: Sonia Grant
127 15 Detroiters, and I don’t have the luxury Several similar refrains are echoed in Sarnia, the neighboring Aamjiwnaang First Nation, and southwest Detroit: what about the cumulative impacts of exposure? Sure, maybe each refinery is keeping to its maximum emissions, but what about the impacts of all of those emissions together? Current standards and regulations on either of the border don’t address this conundrum, and the science on which these standards might draw is full of gaps.106 One of the most divisive refrains goes like this: what about the jobs? There are no easy answers. The environmentalists say, green jobs now! The companies that own facilities in Sarnia and Detroit say they give back to the community through employment and green initiatives. Enbridge points to its Sarnia Solar Project, one of the biggest solar voltaic facilities in Canada, and Marathon points to its new “green buffer zone” in Oakwood Heights.107 Members of Aamjiwnaang who I speak with tell me that nowadays, very few people from the reserve are employed on a full-time basis in Chemical Valley. However, there is a history of community employment in the valley, and the Band Council does receive some revenues from industry. These factors mean that the work that people like Ada and Vanessa do can stir up controversy. The Marathon refinery in Detroit came under the scrutiny of residents in the 48217 and the City Council when the Detroit Free Press published an article entitled: “$175M tax break for Marathon refinery buys Detroiters only 15 jobs” (Guillen, 2014a). In 2007, when Marathon first announced its plan to expand the refinery in order to process dilbit, the Detroit City Council granted Marathon a $175 million property tax abatement. In exchange, the company said it would try to hire qualified Detroit residents, and established a scholarship program at the Henry Ford Community College to train Detroiters. At the time, Marathon employed approximately 320 workers, 15 of whom lived in Detroit. Marathon completed its expansion in late 2012, and currently employs 514 workers. But only 15 of the additional hires since the expansion live in Detroit, meaning that out of 514 workers, only 30 are local. None of the 37 workers who completed the training program at the Henry Ford Community College were offered a job at Marathon (ibid; Guillen 2014b).
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I sit down with Ray Fillion, President of the Sarnia District Labour Council (SDLC) in the bar at the union hall on Devine Street. The lights are dim but the bar is cheery, with upbeat tunes from the 1980s playing in the background. The SDLC represents about 35 locals, or 6,600 workers, many of who work in Chemical Valley, Ray tells me. He has just spent the past two days at the “Bitumen: Adding Value” conference, which his membership had decided he should attend. He explains:
“Oil was discovered in this county 155 years ago in this county, and we in this county have depended on oil ever since. It’s the building block of our economy. Without the oil and chemical industry in Sarnia and Lambton County, Sarnia would barely exist…. The position of the Sarnia District Labour Council is we want Alberta’s oil, Saskatchewan’s oil, Newfoundland’s oil, oil from the Northern Seaboard of the United States, even oil from North and South Dakota. We want it all”.
Ray says the SDLC shares the VCVAOD’s concerns about occupational health and safety, and environmental concerns expressed by members of Aamjiwnaang First Nation. In fact, the SDLC, VCVAOD, and the local occupational health clinic awarded Vanessay Gray – the woman from Aamjiwnaang who disrupted the Bitumen conference - with an award for her environmental activism in 2012 at their annual award gala. But Ray explains that the SDLC must be firmly in favour of the Line 9 reversal because of the additional oil it will bring to Sarnia. Line 9 is, Ray tells me, is “part of the lifeline of this community. Because that’s what it is, we get it [oil] from pipelines, whether it’s Line 9, Line 5, 6, or A or B…”. He pauses, and continues: “The environmental groups, and the Idle No More,108 they do what they have to do. And as a labour leader, I do what I need to do. My primary concern is my constituents … I don’t have the luxury of saying I don’t want oil”.
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In a “dream” scenario, Ada Lockridge would like to see Chemical Valley shut down, but she knows “it ain’t going to happen”. Still, Ada insists, there is a lot that the industries could do to be cleaner, to make it a little less perilous to coexist beside them.
129 Drawing relations
In both Detroit and Sarnia, relations are drawn between the Kalamazoo River spill and chronic industrial pollution. Line 6B draws the relation, facilitating flows of dilbit to both sites; Activists draw the relation, bringing stories from one site to another and keeping the memory of the spill alive through their placards and speeches; I draw the relation, juxtaposing sites in this text.109 These kinds of comparative practices across difference have distinct effects from the comparison that I examined in Chapter 2, that spectacular comparison that first brought me to the Kalamazoo River. The stories I presented in this chapter are examples of what recedes to the background when the Kalamazoo River spill, as an isolated event, is mobilized as a scenario to avoid. Chapters 3 and 4 also provided examples of concerns that linger in the aftermath of the spill but that are not typically registered in paradigmatic comparisons to the disaster. It is impossible to render the full repleteness of what it means to talk about pipelines like Line 6B or Line 9 in a single account – and certainly not in a sound bite for the media. There is indeed much to account for, from the devastation of a spill, to the upstream and downstream impacts of tar sands and other fossil fuel production, as well as the resulting emissions sent out into a global atmosphere. But there is nevertheless a politics to what we bring to the fore in our analyses of these pipeline projects. Rather than transplanting a worst-case scenario (the spill) from one locale to the next, I have tried to route the relational comparisons in this chapter laterally in such a way as to hold on to the constitutive differences of these locations all the while recognizing their constitutive similarities.110 I think this kind of comparative work, which maintains partial connections across differences, may hold more promise for building solidarity in support of environmental justice movements pitted against a petrochemical industry whose effects are at once general and specific; at once widespread and violently uneven in their distribution.
*** In closing this chapter and this thesis I want to draw one last relation, between the competing and entangled injunctions to Remember the Kalamazoo; and the sometimes
130 cold or impatient, and other times desperate yearning or caring plea from a loved one, to just move on. As a window into these demands I offer the following extended quotations: a reflection that Michelle posted to Facebook on July 26, 2013, the third-year anniversary of the spill, and an excerpt from my interview with Jim Rutherford, Health Officer with the CCPHD, as he reflected on the decision about the evacuation after the spill:
Michelle BarlondSmith: Jim Rutherford:
“Morning my peeps ... yes today is the 3 “We've been criticized about not year anniversary of our 1.1 million gallon evacuating fast enough, early tar sands oil spill by Enbridge Energy ... I enough. But you have to think I am going to call it a Day of remember that all my detection Remembrance ... an anniversary you equipment was in the Gulf celebrate ... I have noticed an upsweep in shores. We did evacuate some the stress of my former neighbors and homes that were in immediate friends ... and even feel it myself ... When danger. We had to set up a the spill happened many of us who have decision tree relative to what been impacted had no idea how this was areas to evacuate. This wasn't a going to change our lives forever ... The contained spill; it wasn't in an devastation it brings to the communities, area that was 5 acres. It was a dividing neighbor against neighbor.. The travelling target, and it took devastation on the environment, days for us to be able to identify communities, and human health is and articulate exactly what that ongoing. area was…. Nobody died from the incident. I don’t think that I have learned to call it what it is.... A we could have reacted any technological disaster (man made) that quicker than we did given the has created a sacrifice zone of the poor, nature of this particular incident. destroyed communities, and ripped apart 40 miles of our river. The lawsuits So, you know there is always continue, and the activists among us going to be criticism in terms of continue to stand up, and the corporation 'oh, we should have done it this responsible continues with PR spin and way', and I get that, and trust me destruction. there are about a million things I would have done differently. One of the things that is not discussed is But in the end, unless you live it, the stress and psychological damage that unless you've been through occurs with a technological spill. I was something like that, it's really approached by a mental health difficult to understand all of the organization worker who asked me if I issues that you have to take into would be willing to speak to some of her consideration prior to making colleagues regarding this. I asked her if decisions. Sometimes they're they were seeing wild mood swings right decisions, sometimes among those who had prior issues to the they're not ideal in retrospect, spill? She nodded... I asked if they were but you've got to move on”. seeing an increase in those that needed help for the first time? She nodded ...
You see this I knew because I have seen
131 it in the friends and neighbors along the river ... but few discuss it publically... but among ourselves yes we do... The stress of having physical illnesses, the stress of dealing with the spiller, the stress of losing your home or job due to the illness, the stress of dealing with lawyers, the stress of losing your home and moving, the stress of taking care of those who have been made ill.
So when people ask me why I speak out. I tell them simply that I do not want this to happen in their community... I went earlier this year to Canada to testify before the Government regarding a pipeline Enbridge wants to build there called the Gateway. I tell them it’s a Human Rights Issue.... because that is what it is. We as human beings are part of the environment so what damages the environment damages us.... A First Nation leader tells me that we need to work towards healing... So today I say a prayer ... for healing of my neighbors, 111 community and the earth.”
There are many layers here, and I will try to peel some back. First, and as I have implied throughout this thesis, it is clear from these quotations that the event Michelle urges that we remember is different – and has had different consequences – than the event from which Jim Rutherford says we must move. I suggested in the introduction to this chapter that these differences could be conceived in terms of disagreement about the spatiotemporal scales of the spill. In this sense, Michelle and Jim Rutherford’s statements are simply incompatible. But the way in which these simultaneous injunctions to remember and move on play out is of course more complicated than that. On the one hand, it is not only residents like Michelle who keep the spill alive through remembering. Jim Rutherford, like many other members of the UIC, has been invited on several occasions to share lessons-learned with others in his field. This is an act of remembrance, of conjuring the disaster back again. He explained to me: “I've been asked to do presentations all over the country as a result of this [the spill] and one of the takeaways that I always tell environmental health directors or health officers is you need to have a clear understanding of your infrastructure in your community”. He is tired of weak regulations that allow companies to continue operating weak infrastructure. This
132 sentiment is not dissimilar to one that Tara expressed to me about why she has become active with the Pipeline Safety Trust. But for Tara, learning from the Kalamazoo River spill is not enough: “They hurt my children and for that I will never go away. I’ll never stop. I’ll keep holding them accountable until I’m not breathing anymore. They hurt kids, they hurt people. That’s not okay”. In Tara’s case, the hurt to which she is referring are medical symptoms that she thinks (but cannot prove) were caused by the spill, as well as potential illnesses her children may develop when they are older. On the other hand, the desire to move on from decisions that were made in the aftermath of the spill is not unique to Jim Rutherford and other UIC members who I interviewed. The exhaustion of not moving on is why some residents have had to find ways to do so: it’s why there are far fewer residents advocating for accountability today than there were back in 2010 and 2011. Michelle articulates this exhaustion beautifully in her third-year anniversary statement. But the intensity that drove many residents away presents itself in a different form to others like Michelle, Craig, or Tara: it presents itself as an impossibility of turning away. This doesn’t mean that they sometimes might not want to move on, but rather that there is an active force compelling them back again. This is a force that captured me too in some ways, as I became increasingly enfolded within the unfolding disaster. Reflecting on her own ethnographic entanglements in the fallout of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy in India, Kim Fortun (2001) suggests that in the aftermath of a disaster advocacy can become “a way of knowing, a prosthetics for making sense of a world asphyxiated with meaning” (349, emphasis added).112 I have come to understand the work of residents who I followed (as well as my own collaborative interventions in Michigan) in a similar way: as their only conceivable response. And this response is also a way of knowing through the spill’s unknowns, of contesting what counts as knowledge, of producing knowledge, and of sending that knowledge into the world as a mode of “reaching for a way to figure the future differently” (ibid, 353). It is in the name of something like what Fortun calls the “future anterior” that residents along the Kalamazoo River continue to act and remember. 113 Remembering in this sense is an iterative practice of transversally carrying the past through the present in order to reimagine a different
133 kind of future to-come; a practice that shares an affinity with the affirmative speculation towards which I gestured in Chapter 2. And yet… and yet of course this is still deeply unsatisfying. There will always be an “and yet”.114 This is the space in which residents must continue to live. Remembering, and remembering that ‘learning from’ disaster cannot erase the marks that were made. And yet, and still yet again, it is from within this force field of unresolvable contradictions and irreconcilable imperatives that they find ways to give and receive solidarity. ‘Moving on’ becomes a collective moving through time that remains rooted in remembering why such a moving on is necessary in the first place.
1 From the frontlines of tar sands extraction to the myriad pipeline projects throughout Canada and the US, members of Indigenous nations have been at the forefront of resistance to tar sands development and transportation on Indigenous territories. See Reclaim Turtle Island, Indigenous Action Alliance, the Unist’ot’en Camp, the Yinka Dene Alliance and the Indigenous Environmental Network for examples of this grassroots resistance.
2 Isabelle Stengers’ writings have helped inspired this impulse to slow down thinking. See for instance Stengers (2005, 2008, 2011).
3 Oil companies are increasingly turning to rail as a temporary mode of transportation, as pipelines are facing increasing opposition and slow approval processes. Oil-by-rail transportation increased by 28,000% between 2009 and 2013 (Brewster & Shingler, 2013), prompted by rapid development of ‘unconventional’ fuel sources, such as shale and tar sands deposits. (cf. Lewis J, 2013).
4 I conducted 19 formal interviews in Sarnia and Aamjiwnaang First Nation related to the Line 9 reversal and the impacts of industry in the area (including two scientists who I reached over the phone, who do not currently reside in Sarnia but had done health-related studies there). I interviewed members of the City
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Council, the leader of a major labor organization in Sarnia, a representative with Enbridge, environmental and occupational health activists from Sarnia, and members of Aamjiwnaang First Nation. I also attended two gatherings of activists working against Line 9, hosted by ASAP (Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia Against Pipelines) in March 2013 and May 2013.
5 The NEB held hearings on the Line 9 reversal in Montreal and Toronto in October 2013, where 172 parties were granted permission to participate or comment. The hearings were subject to numerous small interruptions and a large protest rally in Toronto. Enbridge’s customer refineries and various business associations argued in favor of the reversal, while many others expressed safety concerns about the project, either opposing it outright or requesting further precautions. The five First Nations councils that participated in the process argued that no meaningful consultation on the project had occurred between First Nations and the Crown, as should have been required under the Canadian Constitution. On March 6, 2014, the NEB authorized the Line 9 reversal, acknowledging the concerns that were expressed. Enbridge hopes to have the reversed pipeline running by late 2014 (NEB, 2014). The Chippewas of the Thames First Nation has appealed the NEB’s decision in federal court, but a decision will not be made for quite some time.
6 The tar sands sit on land that falls under Treaty 6, Treaty 7, Treaty 8 and with immediate downstream impacts in areas ceded in Treaty 4 and 11. These treaties are agreements between the British Crown and Dene and Cree First Nations and Métis peoples of the region, which enshrine in the Canadian Constitution the rights of Indigenous peoples to hunt, fish, trap, and subsist on the land (Droitsch & Simieritsch, 2010; IEN, 2012; Short & Huseman, 2012). Numerous First Nations have sounded alarms about the negative environmental impacts of tar sands production, which some have termed a process of “slow industrial genocide” (IEN, 2011). For instance, the Beaver Lake Cree Nation has documented over 15,000 Treaty violations due to tar sands development (Lameman et al, 2008), and higher than usual rates of cancers have been reported in animals and members of the Mikisew Cree First Nation and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation living downstream from the tar sands (cf. Chen, 2009; McLachlan, 2014). Resistance to tar sands development from Indigenous peoples, as well as from environmentalists concerned with greenhouse gas impacts of tar sands production, is countered with subsidization and strong government support for the industry. As is already likely clear, I situate myself in opposition to tar sands development – it was a point of departure for this research. I do not expand in depth about my reasons for this opposition, for it is less important to my broader aims of examining how knowledge claims about tar sands are made through the story of the Kalamazoo River spill. For information on the impacts of tar sands, see Environmental Defence (2014); IEN (2011); Nikiforuk (2009).
7 Line 6B first came into operation in 1969 and began carrying dilbit in 1999. See NTSB (2012) and Enbridge (2012) for more on the structure of both pipelines at the time of the spill.
8 I obtained documents about the spill from regulatory agencies, local courts, online news archives, and from residents who generously gave me access to their own repositories of articles, correspondences, photos, and videos.
9 See Girard (2010) for a comprehensive corporate profile of Enbridge.
10 TransCanada is in the process of proposing its Energy East pipeline, which, if approved, will run from Alberta to refineries in New Brunswick, carrying 1.1 million barrels of dilbit and other crude oils a day.
11 Enbridge’s US Mainline expansion hinges on the expansion of the Alberta Clipper (Line 67), which runs from Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin, and the construction of the Flanagan South (from Flanagan, Illinois, to Cushing, Oklahoma) and the Seaway Pipeline (from Cushing to Port Arthur, Texas). See Horn (2014b) and Song (2013c) for overviews.
12 Controversy around what spilled, and how much of it, will be discussed in Chapter 3.
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13 The primary agencies that responded to the spill were: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment (MDNRE), Michigan State Police Emergency Management Division, Calhoun County Public Health Department, Calhoun County Sheriff, and the Kalamazoo County Sheriff. Thirty-one supporting agencies also formed part of the Unified Command.
14 The ICS was devised in the 1970s in response to extensive forest fires in California. It was soon adopted by a handful of federal agencies including the US Forest Service, but it wasn’t until 2005 that ICS became a national standard for crisis response. In 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the Secretary of Homeland Security to develop a National Incident Management System (NIMS). By 2005, all federal department and agencies were required to adopt the NIMS, of which the ICS was a part. The Department of Homeland Security’s document on NIMS makes an implicit connection between the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as well as the emergency brought on by Hurricane Katrina, and the need to develop NIMS (FEMA, 2008. cf. Buck et al, 2006; Moynihan, 2008).
15 Some of my informants who live along the river suspect that the oil went past Morrow Dam, where they have observed sheen on the water. For an overview of the Superfund site, see (EPA, 2013a). Michigan has a long history of industrial contamination. See (Egginton, 2009 [1980]).
16 The river was reopened for public use in June 2012, which I will explain further in Chapter 3.
17 The whistleblower in question is John Bolenbaugh. I formally interviewed John in-person and spoke with him several times over the phone, but I do not expand on his particular allegations or lawsuit against his former employer. See (Genoways, 2012) for more details.
18 Many residents who lived along the river at the time also recounted to me in interviews having seen cleanup crews attempt to bury or hide oil and leave it there. A congressional investigator told me in 2013 that reports of this sort continue to trickle in from residents to the federal Department of Transportation.
19 See Barad (2007) and Schrader (2010) on ‘cutting together and apart’ causes and effects, and Strathern (1996) on “cutting” in social scientific analyses. I use the phrase “cutting together causes” here to refer to stemming the flow of knowledge for long enough to stop a network from proliferating beyond interpretative use. I find the NTSB report immensely interesting for how it determines and temporalizes the causes of the spill, but haven’t followed this line of inquiry further. I summarize the report because its condemnation of both Enbridge and PHMSA became extremely important in both Michigan and elsewhere, insofar as it affirmed that the spill was no “accident” in the conventional sense.
20 A congressional investigator tracked down the air purifiers. They were inexpensive apparatuses from a nearby Home Depot, and did nothing to protect residents from fumes.
21 Shortly after this letter was issued, the Democrats lost the majority in the House in the November 2010 election. James Oberstar told me that neither he nor Mark Schauer were able to follow up with the issue of release waivers, but said they would have had they remained in office. The waivers have not been rescinded.
22 It is worth noting that the timing of the Line 6B replacement/expansion application coincides with that of the Line 9 reversal. Like the Line 9 reversal, Enbridge also pursued the application for the Line 6B replacement in two phases.
23 Once the entirety of the new Line 6B is running, the old Line 6B will sit beside it and remain unused, according to Enbridge.
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24 Enbridge’s permanent easement increases by 25 feet, but the company needed an additional 60 feet to complete the work, for a total of 85 feet. The company is supposed to restore all 85 feet of the temporary and permanent easement upon completing construction. This has yet to happen on many properties.
25 I do not expand on the varied concerns of landowners, which ranged from difficulties getting a hold of Enbridge, disagreements with the company about how much they should be compensated for the loss of vegetation on their land, and many other issues. See Jeff Insko’s “Line 6B Citizen’s Blog” for a comprehensive overview of these issues: http://grangehallpress.com/Enbridgeblog/
26 Strathern grapples with the tricky business of ‘narrowing down’ one’s data so as to make interpretation possible. As Holbraad and Pederson (2009) point out in their exegesis of Strathern, this is a comparative practice insofar as it is about figuring “which data go with each other and which do not” (373). Anthropologists tend to deal with this problem, Strathern (2004) suggests, by changing scales, by which she means “switching from one perspective on a phenomenon to another” (xiv, cf. Holbraad & Pederson, 2009). But in the process of switching perspectives one realizes that complexity remains a constant at every scale.
27 My complicity with some of my informants need not necessarily be read as a celebration of their politics. Complicity is instead a process through which “the languages and demands of the ethnographic Other…. get folded into the ethnographer’s thoughts and acts like beaten egg whites into a chocolaty liquid” (Fortun, 2008: 85). For Fortun, who is working from the Derridian assumption that all grounds are already undermined (304), there is an indeterminacy that both separates and joins ethnographic distance and complicity. I have also found it useful to think with Karen Barad (2007) and Michelle Murphy (2012) about how enfoldings always leave marks, creases, traces.
28 Anna Tsing (2005) has helped to inspire my analytical attention to the travels of the Kalamazoo River spill. The spill, I suggest, plays a role akin to Tsing’s “activist packages” (2005: 234-235) in sites where other dilbit pipelines are being contested – including Line 9. Following Tsing, I understand the spill’s “movement” both in terms of its mobility and mobilization (ibid, Ch. 6).
29 See Douglas Holmes (2011) and uncertain commons (2013) for helpful discussions of the distinction between risk and uncertainty, where uncertainty cannot be reduced to a calculable risk. Both texts suggest that Frank Knight, an American economist and one of the founders of the Chicago school, was the first to make the distinction. The uncertain commons elaborate how this distinction may be productively engaged outside of (or at least on the edges of) an analytic of risk.
30 This discussion draws inspiration from the manifesto Speculate This! (uncertain commons, 2013). Contra to a securitizing discourse that pathologizes uncertainty, the authors suggest creatively engaging uncertainty as a way to materialize different futures that are latent in the present. The uncertain commons is not, however, “suggesting the wild west of potentiation” (no pagination). Like Adams et al (2009) they emphasize taking responsibility for the futures that speculative practices bring about.
Notes for Chapter 2
31 This chapter is a lightly edited version of a forthcoming paper in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (Grant, forthcoming). It has been modified slightly to fit into this thesis.
32 As mentioned in Chapter 1, the NEB approved the Line 9 reversal in March 2014. This chapter reflects on the debate that emerged between 2012-2014, before the pipeline project was approved.
33 The rate of other pipeline safety accidents, including spills and accidents like fires or workplace injuries, has doubled, with 1,047 incidents reported in Canada between 2000-2012 (Hidelbrandt, 2013).
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34 See Grove (2014) for a lively discussion of environmental power, and Braun, 2013; Cooper, 2008; Collier & Lakoff, 2008; Kosek, 2010 and Olson, 2010 for other relevant analyses of the eco and biopolitical.
35 This report was published in 2008 when the Line 9 reversal formed part of Enbridge’s now-shelved “Trailbreaker Project”, which would have brought dilbit to the East Coast of the United States for export. NRCAN later reasserted its support for the Line 9 reversal as a stand-alone project but emphasized that in an ideal scenario Line 9 would connect with another pipeline to bring oil to international markets (NRCAN, 2012).
36 See IEN (2011) for an account of tar sands production that underscores impacts for Indigenous peoples and the local environment, and Environmental Defence (2014) for climatic impacts.
37 This analysis is indebted to Puar’s (2006) work on homonationalism in the US. See Ferguson (2005) for an analysis of the genealogy of morality in political theory, which shows that its history is deeply intertwined with that of colonialism and the policing of sexual and gendered normativity. I suggest that the ethics of EthicalOil function in a similar way.
38 I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer of the published version and to Emily Gilbert for pushing me to attend to frictions and other forms of movement.
39Bruce Braun (2013) remarks that the conceptual relations between systems ecology and neoliberalism are contingent and historically specific achievements. The ethos of resilience is not in itself necessarily neoliberal. Rather, resilience can be, and has been, taken up in ways that lend credence to neoliberal projects. The contingency resilience’s encounter with neoliberalism, Braun suggests, means that it may be possible to redeploy resilience’s ecological impulses in the making of non-capitalist socio-ecological projects.
40 Whether or not dilbit is more dangerous to transport than conventional oil is disputed. See for example NAS, 2013 and Swift et al., 2011).
41 Although I draw on Massumi’s work to think about the importance of affect in preemptive governance, unlike Massumi I do not conceptualize affect as autonomous or asocial. Rather, as Claire Hemmings (2005) suggests, it is precisely because affect is always already entangled with the social that I think attending to the affective dimensions of pipeline politics can help us better understand this terrain, and what is at stake (cf. also Martin, 2013).
42 See Tania Li (2007) for an important discussion on “rendering technical”.
43 See Jackson (2011) and Scott (2008) for more detail on the impacts of industry in Aamjiwnaang First Nation and ome local resistance strategies.
44 Tim Choy’s (2011) concept of “unarticulated knowledges” – knowledges that don’t manage to link and translate across scales and domains - nicely registers the limited traction of environmental justice concerns about Line 9. This concept is “less concerned with establishing the agency, knowledge, or eloquence of a speaker than it is with assessing the lay of the political and discursive terrain within which she expresses herself” (101). I suggest that the failure of environmental justice concerns about Line 9 to articulate signals a need for their amplification alongside, rather than suspension to, safety concerns.
45 Between 1999 and 2010, Enbridge pipelines alone spilled 804 times, an average of 73 spills per year. A total of 161,000 barrels of crude oil were released (Davis & Girard, 2010).
46 See Cooper & Walker (2011) for a similar discussion regarding complex systems theory.
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Notes for Chapter 3
47 For other related uses of the word “nonknowledge” in environmental politics see Adriana Petryna (2004), who uses the word in her ethnography of post-Chernobyl Ukraine, arguing that “nonknowledge became essential to the [the state’s] deployment of authoritative knowledge” regarding chemical exposures (258). Andrew Mathews (2014) writes about nonknowledge in the context of Mexican forestry debates.
48 Karen Barad (2007) points out that uncertainty is a question of epistemology. It refers to a lack of knowledge, or gaps in existing human knowledge (cf. also Schrader, 2010). For Barad it is important to distinguish between epistemic uncertainty and ontological indeterminacy. (Of course, for Barad, the distinction between epistemology and ontology is problematic in the first place: she proposes an “ethico- onto-epistem-ology” to signal the inseparability of practices of knowing and being, and the ethical responsibilities that this entails – but she still does maintain the importance of the distinction between uncertainty and indeterminacy for understanding scientific unknowns (185)). Whereas an epistemic uncertainty can be resolved when more knowledge is produced or becomes available, ontological indeterminacy is inherent in every phenomenon. For Barad, indeterminacy is resolved within a phenomenon through the enactment of what she calls an “agential cut”. An agential cut is “determined by the materiality of the larger experimental arrangement, which delineates “measured object” from “measuring agency”, while providing the material conditions of possibility for particular concepts to be meaningful at the exclusion of others” (345, emphasis added). I have provided this brief sketch of indeterminacy in Barad’s theory of “agential realism” because I have struggled with whether to characterize the relation of residents’ illnesses to the spill as uncertain or indeterminate. This distinction seemed crucial to me at first because whereas uncertainty implies that something cannot be known for now, indeterminacy “is a question of what can simultaneously exist” (Barad: 118). I held onto the notion of indeterminacy for quite some time because a part of me wanted to show that if “cuts” had been enacted differently in the minimal health assessments that have been done in Michigan, the results would have affirmed what many sick residents told me about the association of their health problems and the spill. I still think this could be the case, but the residents with whom I worked have not yet been able to perform a different account of cause and effect that would link the spill to their illnesses. Because I think that historical ontologies (cf. Hacking, 2002; Murphy, 2006), careful ethnographies (cf. Mol, 2003; Verran, 2001), and detailed descriptions like Barad’s and Schrader’s provide more productive accounts of how particular objects are materialized than sweeping theories of ontological multiplicity, I do not put forth the proposition that the relation of residents’ illnesses to the spill is indeterminate (Michael Lynch (2013) makes a similar point about the need to empirically demonstrate ontological claims). As I will expand in this chapter, the Michigan Department of Public Health (MDCH) and other agencies involved in evaluating the existing and potential health impacts of the spill relied on existing knowledge in toxicology – knowledge that is full of its own gaps or epistemic uncertainties – rather than conducting any actual monitoring of exposed residents. The “cut” in this situation has been enacted. Something has been determined, which of course doesn’t mean that other materializations are not still possible. I have decided to qualify the relation of residents’ illnesses to the spill as uncertain, precisely because of the uncertainties at the foundation MDCH’s and other agencies’ conclusions. This discussion only affirms Barad’s observation about the (always more-than-human) entanglements of being, knowing, and ethicality.
49 See, for instance, debates about the toxicity of low-dose exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), which are particularly relevant in exposures to chemicals used in the oil and gas industry (Kamrin, 2007; Rhomberg & Goodman, 2012; Vandenberg et al, 2012; Wylie, 2011).
50 See also Allen (2008) on “missing information”.
51 See McGoey (2012) for a discussion of ignorance (not knowing) as a form of knowledge. See Proctor & Schiebinger (2008) on “agnotology” – the study of ignorance.
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52 While only one of the most specific MSDS for what was in Line 6B at the time of the spill did explicitly suggest a 1000-foot evacuation, all of the MSDS provided have the same four-digit identification number used to correlate a product with the Emergency Response Guidebook, a document that provides standardized response recommendations across Canada, Mexico, and the US. The MSDS for all of the possible products that had flowed through Line 6B all share the identification number “1267” for petroleum crude oil. The Emergency Response Guidebook recommends handling products with this identification number under “Guide 128 for Flammable Liquids (Non-Polar/Water-Immiscible)”, which states: “Consider initial downwind evacuation for at least 300 meters (1000 feet)” (United States Department of Transportation et al, 2012: 194). I asked a toxicologist with the Michigan Department of Community Health about this, and she told me that the group making decisions about an evacuation did initially consult the Emergency Response Guidebook, but found it more useful to make public health decisions with the real-time air-monitoring data gathered by the EPA. The real-time air monitoring data is not publicly available. The EPA began gathering air-sampling data with Summa canisters, which provide more comprehensive data, on July 28, 2010 – 2.5 days after the spill. This data can be obtained on both the EPA and Enbridge websites.
53 As per Todd Heywood’s request, his physician provided me with the lab reports showing this immune damage.
54 An EPA official explained to me that cleanup techniques included: excavation to remove vegetation and soil; the use of containment booms; soaking booms; skimmers; vacuum trucks; hoses to flush oiled vegetation (with the oily water contained at impoundments); hydraulic dredges; and mechanical aeration techniques.
55 I would have liked to attend more carefully to how racialization may have affected the response to the spill in certain neighborhoods – particularly in downtown Battle Creek. Michelle often recounted to me how she had done door-to-door surveys in that part of town - where there is a large African American community - and encountered many health complaints. Because of the projects that I did get swept up into (see especially Chapter 4) and my limited time in Michigan, I did not get to pursue this further. The workings of race constitute an absence in my account of the spill, and this is an area where future research could be done.
56 See Geissler (2013) on public secrets in public health in Africa, and the work of “unknowing difference”.
57 The vast majority of residents that I met who are, or were at one point, particularly vocal about the spill are women. Others have made the important observation that women (and often women of color, especially in environmental justice movements) have played leadership roles in protests of toxins and environmental justice more broadly, and that environmental problems can often have gendered effects that burden women in particular (cf. Di Chiro, 1998; Fortun, 2001; Krauss, 1993; Murphy, 2006; Shiva, 1989).
58 The lawsuit was filed on the counts of nuisance; negligence; trespass; strict liability; injunctive, declaratory and equitable relief; and negligence per se. I obtained these court documents, and those referenced below, from the Calhoun County 37th District Circuit Court archive in Battle Creek.
59 Michelle scanned her eviction notice, and those of several other Baker Estates tenants, and provided me with copies.
60 This woman’s case was settled in late 2013, under representation of a different lawyer. She received about $3,000 from Enbridge.
61 While neither NHBP nor the Gun Lake Tribe reservations are situated near to the impacted stretch of the Kalamazoo River, the river is an important part of the home territories of both tribes, where tribal members retain the right to hunt, fish, and gather. In the NRDA process both tribes are assessing damages under the
140 category of “loss of human services: cultural losses” (Trustees Council, 2012). Trustees from both tribes who I interviewed remarked that it was difficult to participate meaningfully in the NRDA process. The Trustee from the Gun Lake Tribe explained: “I can tell you that most Tribes are ill-prepared to conduct NRDA work. Federal and State agencies, who are more accustomed to serving on NRDA Trustee Councils, have many more resources to devote to such efforts.” Nevertheless, participating in the NRDA was important because “the approximate 40 miles of river directly impacted is in the heart of the home territory of the Matchebenashewish Band.”
62 For examples of the kinds of calculative procedures that can be used in NRDAs, see Penn & Tomasi (2002), and DARRP (2013).
63 When I arrived in Michigan, Enbridge had recently declined to cooperate with the NRDA process because it deemed that enough data had already been collected, but the Trustees disagreed (Lawrence, 2013). In addition, Enbridge did not recognize the jurisdiction of the NHPB or the Gun Lake Tribe to participate in the process, and therefore had refused to reimburse both tribes for their involvement in the NRDA thus far. At the time of my interviews, Trustees could not expand much on these legal matters. No updates have since been posted on the NRDA website for the spill as to where things stand between the Trustees and Enbridge.
64 Many of the turtles were rehabilitated and released. It is unclear how many died.
65 The staff persons for the NHPB and the Gun Lake Tribe who are acting as Trustees in the NRDA are non-Indigenous. They have worked for the tribes for years, and are working on the NRDA in consultation with their respective tribal councils. Had I been in Michigan for longer, I would have liked to learn more about how the Kalamazoo River spill has affected both tribes. The legal issues between the Trustees Council and Enbridge, referenced in the footnote before last, meant that it took quite some time before the Trustees from both tribes were able to do an interview. In addition to the Trustees, I interviewed one member of the NHPB (quoted in the text below) but was not able to develop relationships with others due to time constraints. The ways in which tribes in the US navigate NRDA processes could be an important point of departure for future research.
66 Several residents as well as members of the UIC cited Enbridge’s promise to “make whole” those impacted by the spill. This was also an expression used to reassure landowners along the Line 6B replacement route. I later learned from Riki Ott and others that “we will make you whole” was a phrase oft- repeated by both Exxon and BP in the aftermath of the Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters.
67 Jim Rutherford also contacted several universities in the area to see if there was interest among faculty and graduate students in conducting a long-term health study. No one volunteered.
68 ATSDR did not formally ask Enbridge to fund a long-term health study. In an interview, an Enbridge spokesperson for Line 6B told me that the company would have gladly financed a study, but since ATSDR deemed this wasn’t a useful undertaking, Enbridge didn’t make any funding for health monitoring available.
69 According to the MDCH report on the acute health effects of the spill, the most common acute effects were headaches, nausea, and respiratory symptoms (Stanbury et al, 2010).
70 Although MDCH does conclude that there are no oil-related compounds in the fish from the Kalamazoo River, the department had previously issued fish consumption guidelines due to levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in some fish along the river (MDCH, 2012b). The final version of this report was released in June 2014 (MDCH, 2014).
71 The reports each analyze the risk of developing health effects for different pathways of exposure. There is no report that analyzes the risk of exposure via multiple pathways.
141
72 Some air sampling was also later conducted with Tedlar bags, which provide similar kinds of analyses as Summa canisters.
73 See Ottinger (2009) for an analysis on the use of different air-monitoring techniques across an ‘epistemic fenceline’ in a refinery community in Louisiana.
74 I was also unable to obtain the air-monitoring data from July 26 and 27th, 2010.
75 Sid is nonetheless finding other ways to incorporate her passion for environmental justice with her medical practice through other projects.
76 See Choy (2011) for a beautiful account of the at once universal and particular, shared but uneven act of breathing; and how “standards for danger are different in different places” (163).
77 It is difficult to determine how many residents outside of the suggested evacuation zone chose to self- evacuate, with or without support from Enbridge. This was not comprehensively documented at the time. Song, McGowan, & Hasemyer (2012) suggest that over 100 families outside of the evacuation zone chose to leave. The 200-foot zone was one drawn by Enbridge early on as the limit within which it would buy-out homes, and the company was thus more amenable to paying for evacuations within those spatial limits.
78 This snippets quoted in this section are pulled from interviews with a public health official, and with two different residents (who echoed what many other residents told me). The point of this textual arrangement is to demonstrate the roundabout way in which residents and public health officials communicate about the spill, unable to find common terms of reference for a conversation.
79 See Fortun & Fortun (2005) for an account of how toxicologists are working to better respond to concerns about complex low-dose exposures.
80 “Civic epistemology” is a term developed by Sheila Jasanoff (2005) to signal how “modern technoscientific cultures have developed tacit knowledge-ways through which they assess the rationality and robustness of claims that seek to order their lives; demonstrations or arguments that fail to meet these tests may be dismissed as illegitimate or irrational” (255).
81 I don’t mean to imply here that residents’ concerns would or could necessarily be resolved by another study based on exiting toxicological knowledge. As environmental historian Linda Nash (2008) poignantly remarks: “Rather than wringing our hands over the problem of scientific “uncertainty”, we might grant that the modernist hope for perfect knowledge will always be unfulfilled. Rather than hoping that increased scientific knowledge will – like some deux ex machina – reveal the solutions to contemporary environmental problems, we might instead insist upon the need to consider more critically the cultural models and historical assumptions that guide contemporary regulatory policy” (657). What kind of responses to residents’ health problems might this approach open up?
82 See Stengers (2005) on this ‘slowing down’.
Notes to Chapter 4
83 The group’s brief description on Facebook reads “neighbors helping neighbors and trying to deal with an oil spill”.
84 More recent studies suggest that dispersants are not necessarily effective in encouraging the biodegradation of oil (cf. Fingas, 2008).
142
85 In late August 2013, the local Occupy Kalamazoo chapter hosted the Occupy National Gathering. Activists from different parts of the United States converged in Kalamazoo for programming that focused in particular on poverty, democracy, and environmental issues. The organizers invited Riki Ott to speak and run several workshops at the gathering. Riki’s co-worker was unable to attend the gathering, and asked me to accompany Riki and assist her with some logistics during the workshops, as well as set up meetings with residents impacted by the spill.
86 Jeff Insko, who runs the Line 6B Citizen’s blog, first alerted me to this “historical erasure”. Jeff teaches English at Oakland University, and also lives along the Line 6B replacement route. Since 2012 he has been documenting his family’s experience with the pipeline replacement, and his blog also serves as a platform for other landowners to share their stories about Enbridge. In the spring of 2013, Jeff was invited to participate in a multi-day workshop hosted by the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, which focused on the Kalamazoo River spill. In a blog post, Jeff wrote that the experience “put us in mind of some fancy French theorizing we read way back in graduate school”. He likens the ‘hyperreality” of the Kalmaazoo River and Talmadge Creek, parts of which have been re-created by Enbridge contractors with the use of Google maps images, to the thesis put forward in Baudrillard’s (1995) Simulacra and Simulation. Jeff writes: “As Baudrillard puts it, “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory”” (Insko, 2013).
87 The MICATS is a group of grassroots anti-tar sands activists spread out across Michigan. There is a Detroit specific chapter called the DCATS. Both groups were founded in the spring of 2013.
88See Kregg Hetherington’s (2011) ethnographic work in Paraguay for an analysis of documents extending objects they pretend to represent.
89 I can only speculate as to whether the EPA’s silence on this issue should be read as a dismissal of the information we produced, or whether, like several people whobI spoke with believe, that the agency is not responding because “we are on to something” that may be incriminating to Enbridge, EPA, or both.
90 See Joseph Masco (2006) on “mutant ecologies”. Hydrocarbons do not have nearly as long a half-life as the plutonium (24,000 years) that forces Masco to work with the concept of mutation (rather than hybridity) in apprehending radioactive ecologies. However, residents along the Kalamazoo River do still apprehend the spill as extending into the future and having unpredictable, multigenerational effects.
91 See Murphy (2012) for a description of the figure of the “immodest witness”, which Craig invokes in some ways insofar as his embodied and affective entanglements were crucial to the process of knowledge production about the Kalamazoo River rocks. “For the immodest witness”, Murphy explains, “subjectivity was not an abstract problem of seeing but a question of concrete and particular embodiment that promised a better – a more proximate and intimate – route to objectivity” (74). See also Haraway (1997) on the figure of the “modest witness”, which she mutates from Shapin & Schaffer (1985).
92 See Linda Nash (2008) for an important overview of how “debates over chemicals and their regulation are, at root, debates about the relationship between bodies and their environments” (651), and how dominant notions of the interaction between bodies and their environments have changed over the course of the 20th century.
Notes to Chapter 5
93 Neil Smith (1992) underscores the “double-edged nature of scale” (78). Just as a spatialized politics can be used to set boundaries and create exclusions, and it can also be a means of “enlarging identities” (ibid), as is the case in residents’ efforts to expand the scale and scope of Kalamazoo River spill’s impacts, and the impacts of petrochemical industries in general. As Choy (2011) remarks, knowledge practices such as these
143 both produce and generate scales of comparative analysis. I don’t mean to imply a formulaic ‘small scale + small scale = big scale’. Rather, I am gesturing towards a topological notion, in which different scales are iteratively produced through one another. Barad (2007) draws on Smith (1992) to make this point, citing Smith (1992): “scale is produced in and through societal activity which in turn produces and is produced by geographical structures of social interaction” (62, or Barad 2007:245) (Smith does not actually use the word topology.) One aspect that I find particularly promising about both Smith’s and Barad’s formulations is the possibility of working to reconfigure scales, and thus politics. On topology, see also: Collier, 2009; Law & Mol 1994 & 2001; Murphy, 2012
94 When dilbit reaches a refinery via pipeline, the diluent is separated from the bitumen and only the bitumen undergoes refining. The diluent may be used again for future bitumen shipments.
95 See (Greenpeace USA, 2011) for an account of how the Koch brothers have funded climate change denial and the Tea Party movement in the US.
96 Petcoke is also a by-product of refining other very heavy crude oils. In California, for instance, refineries processing heavy crude ship about 128,000 barrels per day to China (Glantz, 2012). Stockman (2013) points out, however, that the arrival for dilbit from Canada to the Gulf Coast via the Keystone XL and other dilbit pipelines “was a stated aim of many recent coker and hydrocracker projects in the region” (26). These dilbit pipelines would be a source of more petcoke to be shipped abroad.
97 The five zip codes adjacent to the 48217 are also among the top ten most polluted in the state of Michigan (Lam, 2010).
98 The 42817 has 85% African American, 10% White, 5% Latino inhabitants (Anderson, NDa).
99 Much could be said about this sign and the kinds of liberal and colonial logics that can characterize “landowner rights” or NIMBY movements. While I do think it is crucial to query these logics, I chose not to dwell here in this project, and instead focused on the alliances forged across political lines when people like the Taylors, Patti, Michelle, and the MICATS find ways to work in solidarity. Marty Cobenais, Pipeline Resistance Coordinator with the Indigenous Environmental Network in the US, emphasized the importance of this kind of solidarity to me in an interview. In this regard, Cobenais pointed me to the “Cowboy and Indian Alliance”, a network of ranchers, farmers, and Indigenous peoples united in strong resistance against the Keystone XL pipeline. In Understories, Jake Kosek (2006) writes beautifully about deep emotional attachments to land that emerge from mixing one’s labor with nature (in Northern New Mexico). His analysis complicates easy dismissals (usually from progressive types like me) of arguments that turn around property rights. Kosek’s work, as well as the stories I heard from the Taylors, Patti, and other landowners, helped me to further understand the myriad reasons why pipeline construction in one’s backyard is far from desirable.
100 Three MICATS were convicted of felonies. They spent one month in prison in March 2013, and were then released on probation. Together, the three face fines of around $35,000.
101Bucket data is not received without pushback from industry. For instance, Ada recounts one of the first times she presented bucket data in a meeting with industry. The samples she took had detected multiple kinds of benzene. The industry representatives came prepared to the meeting with a list of potential sources of benzene, including cigarette fumes or car exhaust. (“We weren’t smoking a cigarette when we took the sample! And there was maybe three cars that drove by in the whole five minutes!” Ada tells me). Disputes over how to interpret bucket data was one of the factors that led to a partnership between the MOE, the federal government, and Aamjiwnaang First Nation to install an air monitoring station on the reserve in 2008. In Detroit, residents’ bucket samples prompted the EPA to do tests; the buckets were not in and of themselves considered progenitors of facts. It is also important to note that there are no standards regulating
144 many of the chemicals that residents in southwest Detroit and Aamjiwnaang First Nation inhale on a regular basis, nor standards for their cumulative impacts. See also Ottinger (2010) for a discussion of buckets vs. industry air monitoring.
102 Suncor’s ethanol plant was instead built several miles away from the reserve, but the company did soon proceed to build a desulphurization plant next to the Aamjiwnaang cemetery and traditional burial grounds.
103 The Aamjiwnaang Environment Committee generally funds this process. It costs about $30 for each bag, $80 to ship one to California, and several hundred dollars for each analysis.
104 Ada’s story about “toxic touring” resonates for me with the ways in which the subjectivity of some residents along the Kalamazoo River has been reconfigured as they have come to understand the river and their bodies as “chemically poisoned”. See Chapter 4 in particular.
105 Residents and health professionals in Sarnia have had mixed reactions to the work of people like Sandra Kinart and Jim Brophy, who continue to advocate for occupational health and raise awareness about the risks of particular chemical exposures. Their message has resonated with some people who have lost loved ones to cancers, but has not been well received by others who perceive this advocacy to be an attack on industry – a major source of employment in the city.
106 See Dayna Scott (2008) for a discussion of legal issues around cumulative emissions in Chemical Valley. See Chapter 3 for an overview of some of the gaps in toxicology about low-dose, chronic exposure.
107 The Blue Green Alliance and Blue Green Canada, partnerships between labour unions in the US and Canada, are making inroads in bridging employment and environmental imperatives.
108 By Idle No More, Ray is referring to Indigenous activists, primarily from Aamjiwnaang but also from Six Nations and Walpole Island, who took part in the protest. Idle No More is a grassroots movement in support of Indigenous sovereignty across the lands known as Canada.
109 “In the elaboration of relationships, it is the elaborations that increase, not the relationships” (Strathern, 2004: 113)
110 For Gillian Hart (2006), “relational comparison” is “a strategy that differs fundamentally from one that deploys ideal types, or that posits different “cases” as local variants of a more general phenomenon. Instead of comparing pre-existing objects, events, places, or identities, the focus is on how they are constituted in relation to one another through power-laden practices in the multiple, interconnected arenas of everyday life” (996).
111 This post is reprinted with Michelle’s permission. A few typos were corrected.
112 Advocacy in this formulation can be of any political persuasion (Fortun, 2001).
113 Here, Fortun (2001) is in conversation with Derrida notion of justice a-venir. See Derrida (1992).
114 Derrida (2001) writes beautifully about insoluble difficulties as they relate to politics and forgiveness, in which one is always “tempted by two types of response” (53). I find his reflections particularly useful insofar as ‘moving on’ from the spill implies the need for residents to muster some sort of forgiveness of the situation and those involved in creating it. True forgiveness, for Derrida, “forgives only the unforgivable”. It “must announce itself as impossibility itself” (33). Forgiveness is thus always split between the two “irreducible but indissociable” poles of the conditional and unconditional, the demands (political, personal, juridical) of the present and the demand that if forgiveness is to mean anything at all it
145 must be able to forgive the unforgivable. It is between these two poles “that decisions and responsibilities are to be taken” (45, emphasis in original).
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