Early one December morning, from the pilot’s seat of her single-engine Piper Warrior, Kathie Brosemer told her passengers to look down. “The sediments near the shore, they swirl,” said Brosemer, an environmental scientist as well as an amateur pilot. “You get turquoise; you get yellow. Sometimes, when the tannins are high in the streams, you get purple—my favorite thing.” Below us, Lake Huron was all azure and hammered foil, but along its edges, at the mouths of rivers and creeks, sure enough, colorful plumes spiraled out into the currents.

At the Straits of Mackinac, the four-mile-wide channel between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, there appeared the Mackinac Bridge—the longest suspension bridge in the Western Hemisphere. From this vantage, 1,000 feet high, its illuminated cables looked like garlands of Christmas lights. To the east, against the rising sun, the forested hump of Mackinac Island seemed to float in midair.

The island’s name is an abbreviation of Michilimackinac, Anishinaabe for “place of the great turtle.” Anishinaabe is the common language spoken by the Ojibwe (or Chippewa), the Odawa (or Ottawa), and the Pottawatomi. Several centuries prior to the arrival of the Europeans, the tribes gathered on the island to form an alliance known as the Council of Three Fires. In Anishinaabe legends and histories, Michilimackinac, at the confluence of three Great Lakes, is the center of the cosmos and the birthplace of creation. Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, put it this way: “If there were a Garden of Eden, that is what the Straits of Mackinac is to our people.”

Now the place of the great turtle is home to an aging pipeline known by an antiseptic name: Enbridge Line 5.

By the time they shut off the oil, according to the EPA, almost a million gallons of crude had spilled into Talmadge Creek, which, swollen by recent rains, swept the oil into the Kalamazoo. Beth Wallace, a staffer at the Great Lakes Regional Center of the National Wildlife Federation, grew up in the vicinity of the spill. “The river was completely saturated in oil,” she said. “You couldn’t even see water. It was just black, thick oil at the surface. The trees were saturated in oil. Everything.” Before cleanup crews could corral it, the oil traveled 38 miles downstream. Another 80 miles and it would have reached Lake Michigan.

Some people are determined to shut down Line 5. People like like Gravelle and Brosemer; Patty Peek, a retired professor of nursing who lives a quarter mile from Line 5 in a house overlooking the Straits of Mackinac; and Jacques Le Blanc Jr., a commercial fisherman and vice president of the Bay Mills Indian Community.

Like his father and grand­father before him, Le Blanc has spent his life gillnetting for whitefish in the waters around the Upper Peninsula. “It’s my heaven to be out on the Great Lakes and watch the sunrise, to feel that water, to feel the earth moving with you at the same time,” Le Blanc said. “There’s nothing better in the world to me.”

“I’m a retired nurse practitioner. I worked for the last 27 years of my life in resource-limited places, mostly with very low access to health care. It doesn’t matter where I worked: One of the major causes of disease was a lack of access to potable water. We have a substantial amount of the freshwater in the United States—actually, in the world—here. Think about what’s more important. Is oil more important? Or is this water that grows our food? We say, ‘Water is life.’ It is much more valuable than gold. It’s more valuable than diamonds. It’s more valuable than oil.”

—Patty Peek, retired professor of nursing who lives a quarter mile from Line 5.

“The question of Line 5 is really three questions: How do we keep the lakes clean? How do we keep our houses warm? And where are jobs going to come from? You have to handle each of those separately. Labor has to be at the table. Contractors have to be at the table. When I was first elected to [Marquette’s] city commission in 2018, we had two giant coal-fired power plants. Now, they’ve not only been turned down; they’ve been torn down. We’re going through a rapid energy change.”

—Michigan state representative and energy policy expert Jenn Hill

“It’s not just the Straits of Mackinac. That’s where you could have absolute devastation. But along the Upper Peninsula, from Manistique to St. Ignace along Route 2, if there’s any breach, there could be a disaster in Lake Michigan. Lake Superior is also vulnerable to a Line 5 spill, notably near the Bad River Band reservation in Wisconsin. The pipelines cross more than 200 waterways. There have been at least 34 known documented spills along Line 5’s pathway. It’s only providing 5 to 10 percent of the oil for Michigan’s needs. That can easily be picked up with other pipelines. A society that treasures its most precious resource—water—would not allow this to continue. That’s what this battle is about: This is a battle for the future of the Great Lakes.”

—Liz Kirkwood, executive director of For Love of Water. She lives in Traverse City with her husband and two children.