Tar Sands – The Concordian

The tar sands are a toxic wasteland that shall poison our nation

“In short, it is an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China’s Great Wall. Only bigger,” said former prime minister Stephen Harper back in 2006, as he vividly discussed the development of the tar sands.

It’s now almost a decade later, and the surrounding forest is disappearing, as the process of industrialization has spread like a deadly virus. The animals are diseased and the river has been exposed to toxic pollutants. The air now carries a pungent odor, as noxious fumes fill the atmosphere and plumes of vapor block out the sun.

The thirst for oil has undoubtedly transformed the landscape of northern Alberta. As a Canadian, I strongly oppose the development of the tar sands and I’m quite frankly ashamed we have allowed these nefarious operations to continue onwards.

You may be wondering ‘What the hell are these so called tar sands?,’ sometimes referred to as ‘oil sands.’ According to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Alberta has some of the largest deposits of bitumen, a type of crude oil that is trapped within the sandy soil. Bitumen is a gooey substance that shares a similar texture to molasses, and requires various chemical processes to separate the oil from the sand—hence the name tar sands.

According to an article published by The Globe and Mail in 2014, the size of the tar sands is 140,000 square kilometers, and only 4,750 square kilometers are mineable. The development can now be seen from space, as parts of the boreal forest have been decimated due to operations in the region, as mentioned in the same article. Most of the extracted oil is consumed domestically, with 1.5 million barrels consumed per day, while the rest of the oil heads mainly to the U.S., according to the same article.

This data highlights our grotesque addiction to oil.

The development has heavily impacted the indigenous communities living around the Athabasca River. An article published by the Vancouver Observer revealed that Health Canada warned several communities living downstream of the tar sands that there were toxins present in the animals. Testing revealed that fish contained abnormally high levels of mercury, meanwhile wild game contained high levels of arsenic. This inevitably led several communities to stop eating wild game, forcibly altering their traditional way of life. The same article also mentioned how many community members have developed rare forms of cancer, leading many in the community to speculate there exists a link between the tar sands and these diseases.

Immediately after the article was released, the then Health Minister Rona Ambrose refused to comment on the matter. In my opinion, this demonstrates the level of devotion the Conservatives had towards the development of the tar sands. Throughout Harper’s dark reign over our country, he notoriously endorsed the Keystone pipeline proposal that would see millions of litres of crude oil transferred across the border.

We have yet to see the true consequences of the tar sands here in Canada, although for reference we can look towards the incident regarding the Kalamazoo River. In 2010, a Canadian pipeline carrying diluted bitumen spilled into the tributaries of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. Over the course of 17 hours, roughly 3.3 million litres of crude spilled from the pipeline, before the company Enbridge shut off the flow, according to the CBC.

The diluted bitumen behaves very differently from refined oil, and sinks in water, making cleanup efforts extremely difficult, according to the same report. The entire spill costs almost US$1.27 billion according to EcoWatch, meaning that it was the most expensive inland oil spill in U.S. history.

With the new Liberal government coming into power, it is unclear which path they shall take in addressing this very contentious issue. Catherine McKenna, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, was in Paris for the climate talks, but hasn’t publicly addressed the government’s policy towards the tar sands.

Can we not learn from these horrible mistakes? Can we not see the tar sands spell disaster in capital letters written bold? The region has become a toxic blemish on our beautiful landscape, altering the ecosystem and indigenous communities’ way of life. Our nation may be filled with desirable resources, ready to be exploited, but at what cost?

Two different narratives on the outcome of the People’s Climate March
by Milos Kovacevic and Johanna Pellus

The figures vary — 100,000 according to some, over 300,000 according to others — but a human wave of protesters converged on New York on Sunday and Monday in an ostensible rejection of the environmental status quo.

Over 1,500 organizations were present in the city for the eve of Tuesday’s UN summit on climate change, where world leaders will meet to discuss strategies and possibilities on mitigating the human impact on the environment. It is seen by some as an attempt by the UN to salvage the ineffective Kyoto protocol and come up with a new working model.

Two Montrealers – Marcus Peters and the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Environment Commissioner Kristen Perry – formed part of their city’s delegation. Peters and Perry came to two different conclusions.

“The trouble with climate change is that it’s such a large-scale problem in terms of scope and timeframe that it is easy to push it out of our day-to-day lives,” said Perry on the long-term effects on people’s consciousness of the massive effort of the march, which included participation from Hollywood celebrities, intellectuals, and political figures like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.

According to Peters and Perry, the groups converging in New York each represented their own particular situations, with Canadians in particular focused on tar sand development and divestment.

Perry called Canada’s recent climate and environmental policies as regressive and ‘dreadfully insufficient.’ To her, a nation like Germany with its progressive energy policies is a more admirable example.

The apparent success of the march belies a visible dissatisfaction from those who see the whole exercise as a temporary grab of headlines without substance. For these groups the confluence of interests waters down the strength of a common goal, and the movement on display at the march was a tangled thread more than a tightly woven weft without commonality in goals and demands.

Perry sees strength in a broadening of the appeal, and welcomed increased participation by the masses. The trick now may not be garnering attention as making practical use of it.

Undoubtedly, the march did display certain undeniable truths. One was that climate change is becoming this generation’s rallying call.

“Policy-makers also need to be cognizant about the reach and effects of their policies, especially how it is going to affect marginalized communities, including indigenous peoples across the world and those who are on the front lines of the effects of climate change,” said Perry, whose concerns highlight the second major shift from an urban, Western concern to something equally involved with its effect on non-white, non-Western, often local or aboriginal communities.

“The main challenge that we need to figure out is how to use our knowledge to galvanize action at multiple levels, and include all affected parties in a meaningful way as we work toward mitigation and adaptation,” Perry said.

Others see it as a clever PR stunt by the multitude of international companies who’ve financed an event whose raison d’etre is very much antithetical to corporatism and the bottom line.

“In a lot of ways, it felt sanitized, choreographed, and overdone,” said Peters. “After retrospectively reading some articles on the march, I learned about how the founders, despite claiming to look for an ‘Occupy-style protest’ actively undermined the ‘Flood Wall Street’ demonstration scheduled to take place the following day,” he said, referring to the more confrontational march on Monday which encouraged aggressive protesting. Indeed, several dozen protesters were arrested on Monday in the aftermath of Flood Wall Street, according to The Guardian.

“Despite the fact that I have so many misgivings about the way the march turned out, it was nevertheless a symbolic move around the most important issue of our generation. Protests aren’t all about the day you hit the streets, there’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes, and it’s that kind of work that instigates change,” Peters said.

Both Peters and Perry unanimously agree that the opportunity given to them by meeting other groups and learning from their experiences and strategies was perhaps the greatest boon the event could offer.

“That’s part of the beauty of the dispersed structure of the organizing for the march and the events surrounding it,” Perry said.

“Regardless of the impact interest groups may have had on the organizing in general, we made some very real connections with other environmental groups from around the world,” said Peters. “Protests aren’t all about the day you hit the streets, there’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes, and it’s that kind of work that instigates change.”