We’ve heard a few rumblings about the Alberta tar sands during this election. The NDP’s Jack Layton has called for a halt to any further expansion of the project, and his candidate in Vancouver Centre, Michael Byers, suggested they be shut down altogether.
What should we know about this massive enterprise to extract “heavy oil” in Northern Alberta? Plenty, according to award-winning Alberta writer Andrew Nikiforuk. In his new book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, to be published October 15 by Greystone Books, the author looks at the effect that the massive tar sands project is having on the environment and on the people of Northern Alberta. It’s been recognized that the tar sands are the largest contributor to the growth of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada, but that’s not all. Mr. Nikiforuk also looks at issues such as the ability to undo the damage to the land itself.
“Reclamation in the tar sands now amounts to little more than putting lipstick on a corpse,” he writes. “Unless Alberta and Canada soon address the pace, effectiveness and transparency of reclamation, a rich forest will become an impoverished industrial park littered with salts, grass, polluted water and spindly trees. It might, with a bit of luck and some regular rainfall, eventually resemble a third-rate golf course in the Sudan.”
Read an excerpt here: www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18878
Photo by Sherlock77. Creative Commons licensed on Flickr.
1 Comment
It's sad that such richness is also the cause of such devastation. Though the Tar Sands are very valuable economically for the Canadian economy, I oppose them. Instead of supporting such dirty and unnatural resources, we should harness what Nature gives us in plenty and in safety. I understand that for Albertans it's very difficult to let go of such a Golen hen, but what about to give them an incentive to replace the Tar Sands with wind, solar, geothermal or biomass renewables?