Leelanau Christian Neighbors is auctioning off one pass for two people to experience a once-in-a-lifetime climb of the 552-foot tower of the Mackinac Bridge as part of the Mackinac Bridge Authority’s limited Tower Tour. As of press time, bidding was at $350. Bidding ends on Sept. 29. Click here to bid in the auction: LeelanauChristianNeighbors.org/auction.
Environmentalists, activists, citizens and a growing number of Michigan policymakers worry that if Pipeline 5 under the Mackinac Straits were to rupture and spill oil directly into the world’s largest freshwater resource, the damage could decimate aquatic ecosystems, local economies and the tourism industry. One in five Michigan jobs are tied, directly or indirectly, to safe and clean water.
Fifteen-year-olds Annabel Skrocki and Annie Lively, both sophomores at Glen Lake School, stood in complete silence with more than 400,000 other climate activists at the People’s Climate march on Sept. 21—mourning, for the melting glaciers, the rising oceans, the dryer mid-continents, the stronger storms, the disappearing islands and the paralyzed politicians.
Three years after the July 25, 2010 Kalamazoo River oil spill, this tragedy holds important warning signs for communities and municipal and state governments. Oil pipelines now crisscross the entire country, running through Midwestern states that are not oil producers but have become oil transit zones. Many of them already carry Canadian Tar Sands oil.
Traverse City author Jerry Dennis will read “This Land, This Water: A Winter on the Great Lakes”, excerpted from his book “The Windward Shore” at the July 14 oil pipeline protest at the Mackinac Bridge.
On Sunday, July 14, a group of state and national environmental organizations intend to bring the two lines out of the depths at a noon rally in St. Ignace, Michigan. The goal of “The Oil & Water Don’t Mix Rally”, say organizers, is twofold. The first is to define the potential risks of a leak or rupture to the Great Lakes, the largest body of clean surface freshwater in North America. The second, more ambitious, is to clarify the role that Enbridge and its customers are playing in expanding the transport and processing of a gusher of oil and natural gas under development on the American and Canadian Great Plains, and from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada.
When I spoke on the phone recently with Derek Bailey, current chair of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and now Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress, he was crossing the Mackinac Bridge and returning home to Traverse City. The tires on his 2005 Saturn VUE hummed loudly as he passed over the rumble strips on the majestic arch that connects Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas.