Community members and scientists protested Oct. 1 in Madison after a contested a legal case that will decide the fate of a Canadian oil company’s pipeline through Wisconsin.
Enbridge Inc.’s Line 5 pipeline has come under fire for a planned reroute through Wisconsin, which critics say raises environmental, public health and tribal sovereignty concerns.
Enbridge says their pipeline route poses minimal health and safety concerns, but a UW-Madison physician argued the path of the reroute could easily lead to crude oil spills into surrounding communities’ water supplies, potentially causing birth defects.
Line 5 initially ran directly through the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa's reservation. However, in 2023, a federal judge ruled that Enbridge had been trespassing on tribal lands ever since their initial easements expired in 2013, and Line 5 was ordered out of the reservation entirely by 2026. As a result, Enbridge was granted building permits for a 41-mile pipeline reroute around the reservation instead.
In December 2024, less than a month after the reroute permits were first issued, the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and several environmental organizations petitioned against the reroute. The petitioners questioned whether the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ (DNR) issued reroute permits complied with state environmental requirements.
Robert Striker, an infectious disease physician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Medicine, spoke against Enbridge’s reroute at a press conference put on by Healthy Climate Wisconsin.
“So much of health is really the environment that we grow up in,” Striker said. “And this is a serious, serious risk to our environment.”
Last year, a degraded gasket caused 69,000 gallons of oil from a different Enbridge pipeline to leak out near Jefferson County, though Enbridge’s report claims only four of those gallons reached groundwater.
“These spills can lead to cancer, they can lead to birth defects, they can lead to immune problems,” Striker said. “This is just not something that we want or need in the world that we want our children to grow up in.”
Crude oil is composed of mixtures of various hydrocarbons, molecules made of hydrogen and carbon. Striker told The Daily Cardinal the Line 5 pipeline could route those hydrocarbons into local food supplies, potentially causing birth defects.
"The fact that this pipeline will go near aquifers in the whole region, and that water is critical for farming, means contamination to our whole food supply,” Striker said. “Once the pipeline is in it's going to be very, very hard to get rid of it.”
According to Healthy Climate Wisconsin, Line 5 could also have a negative impact on the water quality of the Bad River Watershed, which is home to the largest manoomin (wild rice) bed on the Great Lakes and stocks over 15 million walleye each year. Both manoomin and walleye hold immense cultural and historical significance for the Bad River tribe, and degradation to the watershed could put them in jeopardy.
"I don't want to see my future being decided by the greed of others, and I don't want my state government to be afraid to stand up for their constituents because they're worried about what a Canadian oil company might think,” 17-year-old Waunakee High School student Clara Olson said.
Olson, a member of Waunakee High School’s ECO Club, said several of her peers have sat in on the hearings over the past several weeks.
"As a young person it's infuriating to see our government allow private corporations to burn our planet and my future to ashes,” Olson said. “High school students like myself will continue to push for the rejection of Line 5 and stand up for tribal sovereignty."
In an email, Enbridge told the Cardinal a DNR analysis found Line 5’s reroute would have “no measurable adverse effects to water quality or wetlands.”
The report analyzed over 13,000 scenarios with differing environmental variables and concluded that a leak from the proposed reroute was “highly unlikely at any volume.”
Additionally, Enbridge estimated the project would generate millions in construction spending in local communities and create 700 union jobs.
The case hearing for the Line 5 reroute concluded Oct. 3 with a decision expected in the near future.
