Michigan Line 5 Event: Pipe Out Paddle Up
The Council has called for shutting down Enbridge's Line 5 since its founding in 2019, and Chair Michelle Deatrick returned to Pipe Out Paddle Up, the annual water protection gathering organized and led by Indigenous leaders, to say so again.
Speaking on a rise overlooking Lake Michigan, Deatrick called Line 5 both a wrong in itself and a symptom of fossil fuel dependence, of corporate profit taken at the public's expense, and of a federal permitting system built for a different century.
Deatrick called for shutting down the pipeline, rebuilding federal permitting with climate science, environmental justice, and Indigenous treaty rights at the center rather than the margins, and ending the billions in annual federal subsidies that sustain the industry driving the crisis. "Water is life is not a slogan," she said. "It is a fact. It is a commitment. And we intend to defend it."
The morning program included a paddle out onto the lake in Indigenous watercraft.
The gathering came five weeks after the Michigan Supreme Court ruled 6-1 that state regulators had reviewed the proposed Line 5 tunnel far too narrowly, vacating a key permit and sending the project back for a fuller assessment of its harms. Governor Whitmer has since directed regulators to re-examine the pipeline's water permit.
