Reroute or Shut Down? Treaty Rights and Natural Resource Risk in the Pipeline 5 Dispute
Jesse Huckstep (Not Pictured)
Ecosystem Restoration and Management
The conflict surrounding this pipeline reflects a direct tension between continued fossil fuel transport and treaty-protected natural resource rights in the Great Lakes. The pipeline crosses the Straits of Mackinac and the Bad River watershed—freshwater systems that sustain fisheries, wetlands, wild rice, and tribal treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather. After the 2010 Kalamazoo River spill and anchor damage beneath the Straits, legal challenges intensified. In 2023, a federal court ruled that the pipeline had trespassed for over a decade on the Bad River Band, ordering rerouting or potential shutdown by 2026. This underscores an unresolved conflict between energy infrastructure approval, freshwater protection, and treaty obligations. This study applies a stakeholder governance framework using qualitative content analysis method of media reports (2010–2025), judicial filings, regulatory documents, and peer-reviewed scholarship on treaty rights, environmental justice, and settler-colonial infrastructure. Findings detect three dominant stakeholder blocs: (1) corporate actors prioritizing energy reliability and capital stability; (2) tribal governance institutions asserting treaty-reserved usufructuary rights and stewardship of fisheries, wild rice beds, wetlands, and freshwater systems; and (3) federal actors emphasizing industrial continuity within existing regulatory regimes. At the level of underlying values, results reveal a structural clash between market-centered development paradigms and biospheric governance models grounded in relational environmental ethics. This demonstrates that treaty rights operate as active legal constraints on natural resource risk and expose the limits of fossil-fuel-dependent governance.
Advisors: Hadi Veisi, Ph.D.
Subject Area: Fisheries and Water Human Dimensions
Type: Poster
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Jim and Katie Krause CNR Student Research Symposium
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