Before the planetary thaw: Sensing permafrost infrastructure at the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry

The Mackenzie Valley Pipelines were two competing natural gas pipelines proposed in the early 1970s that faced unprecedented scrutiny after then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau called for an inquiry into its impacts at the behest of the Dene, Inuit and Métis whose ways of life would be impacted by these lines, appointing Justice Thomas Berger to be its commissioner. After holding formal hearings with stakeholders and a series of hearings in the primarily Indigenous communities along the proposed path of the pipelines, which made the Inquiry take about twice as long as normal, Berger recommended a ten-year moratorium on construction to resolve outstanding Indigenous land claims and devise a new route to avoid disrupting the annual migration of a caribou herd numbering in the 100,000s. Around fifty years later, the pipeline has not been built. This short article turns to the senses and sensing of permafrost communicated at the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, speculating on what figuring permafrost as infrastructure and media might offer us today as we enter an age of planetary thawing.