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OnEarth: Tar Sands Dreams
By NRDC | Adam Albright
Friday, June 18, 2010
Read the original post, including photos, links and comments.
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.
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.
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.
Tagged with: alberta, natural resources defense council, fort mcmurray, onearth
