Burdickville resident Jim Lively, a program director with the Traverse City-based Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities (formerly the Michigan Land Use Institute) is a key player in the Oil & Water Don’t Mix campaign, which calls on the state to shut down two aging oil pipelines under the Straits of Mackinac.
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.
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.