Colorado-based Water Protector Faces Trial, Shares Wisdom: A Line 3 Tale

Enbridge’s pipelines have leaked many times. The Line 3 oil spill in 1991 at Grand Rapids, Minnesota, remains the largest inland oil spill in US history. What’s more, the deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions associated with Line 3 — and the other numerous projects like it — are centrally implicated in intensifying climate change. Then there’s the impact of industrial encroachment on Indigenous communities — particularly women, who experience violence at twice the rate of other American women, in most cases at the hands of non-Indigenous men.

Documents show how a pipeline company paid Minnesota millions to police protests

Water protectors contend that the state of Minnesota’s arrangement with Enbridge trampled their constitutional rights. With 97 criminal cases unresolved across the state, five defendants in Aitkin County are pursuing motions arguing that the escrow account created an unconstitutional police and prosecutor bias that violated their rights to due process and equal protection under the law.

Minnesota Governor Walz “Can’t” Stop LINE 3, by Susu Jeffrey

Minnesota is home to the headwaters of the three major North American watersheds that drain north to Hudson Bay, south down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, and east out the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River to the North Atlantic Ocean. Slicing across all three watersheds are two black Enbridge tar sands oil pipelines from North Dakota to Superior, Wisconsin. The southern pipeline is the new “replacement” Line 3 that would carry more than 31-million gallons of oil daily, with a huge dump of carbon emissions into the earth’s atmosphere.

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