Spartan Sierra Club looking to halt crude oil flow from Line 5
Spartan Sierra Club, an on-campus and student-run environmental group, is on a mission to stop the "dangerous" flow of crude oil through Enbridge’s Line 5 in Michigan’s Great Lakes, grabbing signatures for petitions and hoping for President Lou Anna K. Simon’s support with their mission.
“We have a three-fold approach,” said international relations senior Courtney Bourgoin, vice president and co-founder of the club. “We do environmental campaigning on environmental issues that affect Michigan, we do service and volunteer in Flint and recycle every weekend after basketball games and then the third thing we do is outdoor exploration, so like hiking and camping trips.”
Line 5 is a 645-mile petroleum pipeline, which is part of a larger system, that transports crude oil from Wisconsin, across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and through northern Michigan to Ontario. Most notably and controversially, the pipeline moves through the environmentally sensitive Straits of Mackinac, which connect Lake Michigan to Lake Huron.
