US Army Corps approves a pipeline project it knows harms Indigenous lands

Filed 1w ago · Via Grist · The Buffoon Desk

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Plaint

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Superbass · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The Army Corps of Engineers issued a key permit for Enbridge's plan to replace an aging Line 5 pipeline segment beneath the Straits of Mackinac with a tunnel-buried replacement, fast-tracked under Trump's national energy emergency order.

The agency's own review found the tunnel construction would cause permanent adverse impacts to wetlands, vegetation, land use, and cultural resources sacred to Anishaabe peoples, including burial grounds and treaty-protected fishing waters — yet concluded the project served the public interest and didn't impair tribal treaty rights.

Seven Michigan tribal nations withdrew from the permit process last year citing ignored expertise and undermined treaty rights; state permits, including a pending wastewater discharge decision and a Michigan Supreme Court-ordered do-over, still stand between Enbridge and construction.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

There is a particular species of honesty in an agency that writes down the permanent harm, files it, and then signs the permit anyway — the paperwork equivalent of reading someone their rights while already loading the truck. Note that the phrase ‘public interest’ has now been stretched so thin you can read a treaty through it. When the seven parties whose expertise you solicited walk out of the room, the polite interpretation is that they lost the argument; the honest one is that there was never an argument to lose.

Source: Read the original at Grist → Scored: Plaint · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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