Text by Erin Moore
Photographs by David Paul Bayles

The Pipeline Project comprises three pavilions (Portals) recently installed along the surveyed routes of the Pacific Connector Pipeline, which is planned to move fracked gas from Canada to the US Pacific Coast for export to Asia. These installations are both direct action pipeline resistance and meant to completely transform human perception of these places.

The three portals are sited in three different locations along the surveyed routes, in three different Oregon watersheds: the Coos, the Coquille, and the Umpqua. As you are sitting on the bench in any of the three portals, you can only see out the two round ends, as if you were sitting cross ways in the center of a telescope. Through these portal ends, over each one of your two shoulders, you can see the surveyed route of the excavation for the planned Pacific Connector Pipeline. The pipeline is meant for profit. The portals are meant to inventory riches by other measures.

At the Haynes Inlet Portal, over your right shoulder you can see an estuary that holds one thousand years of Indigenous fish weirs in its muds and you can see old growth forest where the seagoing marbled murlet nests. Over your left shoulder, you can see branches of a fir tree that an eagle uses to spot fish. At the Coquille Portal, over your right shoulder, you can see water seeping up into a marshy pond that is a stopover for migrating geese and a nesting place for marsh birds. There were frog eggs last month and there are frogs this month. Over your left shoulder, you can see the agricultural outbuildings of the family home. At the Salmon Portal, over your right shoulder, you can see right into the pebbled riffles of a salmon and lamprey spawning ground. Over your left shoulder, you can see the home of the family who welcomed the salmon back to this land.

These three portals have been in place for over a year now, and the list of their mostly transitory inhabitants includes birds and insects, many children, one family dog, a lot of anti-pipeline activists and visiting university students, a bat, and some river otters. The portal pavilions provide reasonable shelter for people. If you tuck yourself onto the bench, the loose thatch that covers your side of the portal sheds rain and holds your warmth even in winter. The other half of the circumference where loose thatch spirals upwards is for other things—catching rain, catching nutrients, offering purchase for a bird’s nest.

Nonviolent resistance is powerful when the fundamental wrongness of something is made most visible and when something that is the subject of care is in the path of harm. I am thinking of the image of the arrest of Rosa Parks, of the most wrenching images of the children of war, and of a vegetable garden planted on coal train tracks last year. My hope is that the images and experiences of these three portals magnify the immeasurable good of these indivisible ecosystem communities and that they make it impossible to miss the truth: that the construction of a gas pipeline in these places is visibly, immeasurably, wrong.

erin moore 250.jpg — Haynes Inlet Portal for shelter of humans and other species, 2019. Photograph by David Paul Bayles

Haynes Inlet Portal with Juncus effusus thatch, 2019. Photograph by David Paul Bayles

Portal construction detail, 2019. Photograph by David Paul Bayles

Children with birds and fish at the Haynes Inlet Portal, 2019. Photograph by David Paul Bayles

FLOAT’s Haynes Inlet Portal at low tide, 2019. Photograph by David Paul Bayles

Haynes Inlet Portal, 2019. Photograph by David Paul Bayles

Bio

Erin Moore is an architect and a facultymember in architecture and environmental studies at the University of Oregon where she is the director of the School of Architecture & Environment and associate dean in the College of Design. Moore uses her design practice, FLOAT architectural research and design, to explore ways that buildings shape and reflect cultural constructions of ideas of nature.