The first week was a hunt for content. Once I had formulated the idea of exposing media coverage of the Northern Gateway Pipeline project I needed to find content that would support both sides of the argument while making it clear that the book did not support the pipeline. In my research I found The Enpipe Line book. The book is the publication of a project that took place during the fight against the pipeline. It accumulates poetry against the project, Enbridge and the government from writers all around the world. The goal was initially to gather 1177km worth of poetry to match the length of the proposed pipeline, however in the end, the Enpipe Line Project was so successful that they received enough submissions to cover 17000 km with text printed at a kilometre in height.
My initial plan was to work with the entire text of the book however it soon became clear that this was an unrealistic goal and not cohesive to my concept. In the end I decided to choose only one poem from the book titled “Dear Enbridge”. I chose this poem because it outlines many of the issues that Enbridge avoided in their project. It also has a shift in mindset half way through which I really liked. The author Andrea MacDonald goes from “I’m angry…” to “I’m inspired…” which I really appreciated as it highlighted the community and amazing movements that happened in protest to the pipeline. It also provided a good base to attach quotes and excerpts to from news coverage and articles surrounding the debate. The statements such as “I’m angry that your words clearly mean nothing to you” acted as headlines for the pulled quotes.
I then spent the next four weeks reading and reading and reading. Finding various articles from all different news sources about the pipeline and the different opinions surrounding it. From these I chose quotes that highlighted either the absurdity of what Enbridge was proposing or the stance of the government or talking about the protests held by different environmental groups. This process was very long and frustrating as there are so many articles published surrounding the issue and many of them say contradicting information. While this was the point of my book to expose the inaccuracy and bias present in news coverage, I found it challenging to do this effectively with the information provided. It was very easy to get sucked in to reading many many articles but coming back with nothing from them. However in the end I was able to put together some content that highlighted specific issues with the pipeline and controversial areas surrounding the project.
If you're interested in reading some of the articles I read here they are!
https://www.desmog.ca/enbridge-northern-gateway