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“Enbridge Covered Up Oil” reads the hat that John Bolenbaugh wears while filming submerged tar sands crude along the banks of the Kalamazoo River in Battle Creek, Michigan. Bolenbaugh was fired by a contractor for Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge, Inc., in October 2010. He says he was wrongfully terminated for threatening to go to the EPA with reports of hidden oil following a July 2010 spill. 

Roughly 20 percent of America’s crude oil, according to the U.S. Interior Department, is now imported from Canada, and most of that is derived from tar sands. With the national jobless rate still high, more and more Americans are willing to accept the environmental and health risks associated with pipelines that carry tar sands crude. And as oil prices continue climbing, Canadian companies are racing to cash in. Enbridge is poised to become the largest transporter of tar sands crude in the country, and its top competitor TransCanada is seeking to build the controversial $7 billion, 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline across the Great Plains to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast.

As people in Nebraska and elsewhere fought to stop the Keystone XL project last year, staging mass protests at the White House and forcing President Obama to delay a decision until after the November election, they looked toward the Michigan spill as a cautionary tale about what could happen to their own communities if a tar sands pipeline failed and polluted their land and water with vast quantities of chemical-laden crude.

Read: The Whistleblower