Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association

If there is an issue that is troubling to Midwesterners, it is the proliferation of oil and gas extraction and transport in the region. In particular, since 2013 the Canadian oil company, Enbridge, has been attempting to expand its pipeline system to connect North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields to its Superior Terminal in Wisconsin, spending millions of dollars in the process on public relations and community investment in order to win the hearts—and assent—of local citizens. Unfortunately, the facts about Enbridge are troubling. The company is responsible for the largest onshore oil spill in our nation’s history: the Kalamazoo River disaster in 2010. Ignoring warnings for seventeen hours, Enbridge allowed a ruptured oil pipeline to pour 843,000 gallons of tar sands crude into Michigan’s Talmadge Creek and Kalamazoo River, depositing the carcinogenic sludge thirty-five miles downstream. About sixty percent of people in nearby communities have since reported health issues, and 150 families have permanently evacuated their poisoned homes. Now, the company responsible for the Kalamazoo disaster is trying to build the Sandpiper Pipeline across the state of Minnesota to channel tar sands crude from the Bakken region to Superior, WI. Of course, Enbridge’s preferred [End Page 7] route is the shortest one, but it is also a path that would run through eight Minnesota state forests, three wildlife management areas, thirteen trout streams, the North Country Trail, wild rice lakes, and the head-waters of the Mississippi, which supplies most of the Twin Cities’ drinking water. Pipes leak (the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster remains a potent reminder), and with so much at stake in Minnesota, various groups have been fighting to keep Enbridge out. They have used grassroots politics, community organizing, social media, and legislation, among other methods to prevent what many argue would be an ecological disaster to the region. This particular fight in the Midwest, like the many climate justice fights around the world, demands an urgent turn toward articulating new positions and stories that depart, or are fugitive from, what Naomi Klein calls the “fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet” (93n). Indeed, they spur a turn toward the arts and humanities as sites of cultural production that have long served as vehicles for witnessing, remembering, imagining, and reinventing tropes. Alternately, our moment in environmental history also demands new questions about what the place of artistic production is in environmental activism, as well as what might be considered “fugitive.”¹

The ongoing issue of the Enbridge pipeline in Minnesota is just one example of the real ecological issues facing society in the newly-coined Anthropocene—the era in which human activity has irrevocably changed our planet. These environmental concerns are apparent in our daily lives—in dramatic climate-related disasters, in the status of climate refugees around the world, and in the extinction scenarios that we regularly see on the news. Moreover, the issues connected to climate change and the environment show themselves in our cultural production—in the arts, literature, and popular media. It is important that we engage with issues concerning the environment in as many forms as possible—that we realize that the concerns that make up a significant part of our lives are also represented in our cultural production and should be attended to every bit as critically. In the case of another of Enbridge’s pipelines, the Northern Gateway Pipeline, artists have become powerfully involved in forms of protest. The March 15, 2015 edition of the Vancouver Observer ran a story about four artists who used creative forms of expression—poetry, dance, design, and the visual arts—to bring an emotional element to the issue. For example, painter Brandon Gabriel [End Page 8] painted a twenty-five foot canoe “with images telling the story of the great flood” (Watson). He then traveled 1000 miles, starting in Ft. Langley and finishing in Kitimat, along the British Columbia coastline, his purpose being “to raise awareness and bring attention to the marine ecology of the BC coastline which is now under threat by a proposed oil pipeline” (Watson). Regarding the necessity of making these threats visible...