![On the back of a Dragonfly [B&W]](http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6194/6128449851_14ec409b56_s.jpg "On the back of a Dragonfly [B&W]")
I'm sitting a daze in the waiting room of the Fort McMurray airport contemplating the dozens of flashy mini-billboards for every sort of specialist oil field company imaginable. If Fort McMurray has a gender it is Man's man - tough, cold and all about bringing home the bacon. The jobs are many and the pay is high, but the turnover rate is even higher and this is one of the best places to snag a disillusioned worker on their way back to Newfoundland or Manitoba or India.
From where I sit the Tar Sands stretch for dozens of miles in all directions and are filled with vast pits and the monstrous machines that dug them and countless miles of pipes that weave together the giant erector sets of stacks and silos and furnaces and thousands of acres of settling ponds surrounded by propane cannons firing at geese and ducks in a Wonderland sort of way, not to kill them but to keep them from landing on and dying in the toxic ponds themselves. Where the ponds have dried a fine, pungent dust blows in the wind and stings the eyes and throat and smoke billows far across the land from upgraders that transform the base bitumen into a higher form of drug that can be shot directly into the veins of modern society.
Aerial view of tar sands mine
How did it come to this - that we are willing to slash and gash the earth to claw from it one of the dirtiest forms of fossil energy and in the process sacrifice a pristine wilderness and countless communities of plants, animals and people? In the 1970's Alberta was on a slower track of energy development that would do less harm to the environment and create more benefit for the citizens of Alberta. And then the plates shifted and by the 1990's a modern PetroState emerged. How? Why? No one seems to know but it is clear is that the new politicians had sold the rights to the Sands for a song, development was occurring at warp speed, and the people and environment of Alberta were left with the short straws.
Dust storm over a tar sands upgrader outside of Fort McMurray
Today those who speak the truth are discredited and banished. Openly criticize and your job will disappear. Write a story and your services will no longer be needed. Publicize a health threat and you will be run out of the province. Try to enact a Climate Law and the Minister of Environment will go to the far reaches of the continent to make sure it does not pass. The Giant Machine just rolls along as million dollar PR campaigns are trotted out at the first sign of dissent and PetroPolitics ensures ever increasing voter apathy and victory margins.
Finally my plane arrives and I'm winging South to where PetroPolitics involves oil rich States who hate us; a giant underwater gusher that is devastating our oceans and our livelihoods; and our best buddy to the North who is looking to sell us some nasty stuff so we don't have to kick our habit just yet. It's hard to say no to our friend, but we can say "Only if you clean up your act first." We can do that at least.
What's at stake. The Athabasca boreal. Image credits: David Hawkins (top, bottom); Ken Colburn (middle)
Having been receiving hundreds of "uninvited" comments regarding the proposed Imperial Oil mega-load shipments along U.S.12 in Idaho en route to the tar sands, the Idaho Transportation Department has now set a comment deadline date of July 14th. I want to URGE ALL OF YOU TO COMMENT. As you write your comments, please keep in mind that the focus here is not the tar sands per se. Instead the focus is on such things as potential decline in the Highway 12 corridor's only growing industry -- travel/tourism if the route becomes known as a mega-load industrical truck route, and such risking de-designation of the Northwest Passage Scenic Byway, risking damage to the Wild & Scenic Middle Fork of the Clearwater and Lochsa River, your own pleasurable and/or thrilling experiences along the U.S.12 corridor in Idaho, the notion that Big Oil is riding on the backs of the rural people of Highway 12 to save money and time while they reap enormous profits, and so on. To find talking points, please go to www.FightingGoliath.org and just pick a topic, read about it, and write. All information on the site is freely usable. PLEASE TAKE TIME TO COMMENT TO ITD PRIOR TO JULY 14TH.
Comments can be made by mailing the Idaho Transportation Department at P.O. Box 7129, Boise, ID 83707-1129, or by emailing comments@itd.idaho.gov. WE NEED YOUR HELP. Thank you.
The usual unsubstantiated drivel. Did you even come to Fort McMurray, or just cut and paste the same old misrepresentations ?
I was in Fort McMurray and experienced it and the tar sands operations first hand. I spoke at some length with engineers, workers, oil executives, academics, community members, writers, doctors, etc. In the case of sanctions against critics there are names attached to each instance, but I am not going to list them here as they have suffered enough. The trajectory of development and the impacts throughout Alberta society should not be so surprising has they mirror virtually every other oil rich State in history where the interests corporations and government have become highly entwined.
As someone who has spent 40 years in the north and was there in the beginning of Canada's natural resource placed by nature, it is no surprise to get typically unintelligent drivel by cult thinkers whose IQ is generally lower than their shoe size. Its OILSANDS of course, its correct name but who cares, coal, diamonds, gold, potash, tin, iron, copper, etc all get extracted from the earth for human needs. There is no current substitute for fossil fuelled energy..the demand is there every day, it provides Canadas needs, jobs, prosperity for all, has done for 100 years.
Pension plans depend on it, families depend on it, so who cares about whacko writers who wont reduce one single drop of production, they are a dime a dozen, they produce WORDS. We produce PRODUCTIVITY.
Get a life, put on real work boots and join the rest of us. We are real Canadians and proud of it.
Thank you for a powerful close-up of what cerain elements of our culture are doing to the Earth. The combination of photos and your evocative prose is journalism at its best, and citizen responsibility at its best. As for oddballs who disparage your truth telling, they are operating from fear. I lived in Canada for five years, and Canadians are mostly sane and thoughtful folks.
Kitty Beer
author of Human Scale, the new novel about climate change
planetprospect.blogspot.com
kittybeer.net
Kitty, I do understand the fear factor and the ad hominem attacks underscore the weakness of their arguments as well. At the same time many jobs are at stake and it's back to the old "environment or jobs" debate. I think we are in a new world where it has to be environment and health and jobs, and I think we are creative and intelligent enough to make it so.