Scraping Bottom - The Canadian Oil Boom - National Geographi
Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 10:02 amCanada: Scraping bottom
http://forests.org/shared/reader/welcom ... kid=119036
Once considered too expensive, as well as too damaging to the land, exploitation of Alberta's oil sands is now a gamble worth billions.
Source: Copyright 2009, National Geographic Date: February 19, 2009 Byline: Robert Kunzig
One day in 1963, when Jim Boucher was seven, he was out working the trapline with his grandfather a few miles south of the Fort McKay First Nation reserve on the Athabasca River in northern Alberta. The country there is wet, rolling fen, dotted with lakes, dissected by streams, and draped in a cover of skinny, stunted trees--it's part of the boreal forest that sweeps right across Canada, covering more than a third of the country. In 1963 that forest was still mostly untouched. The government had not yet built a gravel road into Fort McKay; you got there by boat or in the winter by dogsled. The Chipewyan and Cree Indians there--Boucher is a Chipewyan--were largely cut off from the outside world. For food they hunted moose and bison; they fished the Athabasca for walleye and whitefish; they gathered cranberries and blueberries. For income they trapped beaver and mink. Fort McKay was a small fur trading post. It had no gas, electricity, telephone, or running water. Those didn't come until the 1970s and 1980s.
In Boucher's memory, though, the change begins that day in 1963, on the long trail his grandfather used to set his traps, near a place called Mildred Lake. Generations of his ancestors had worked that trapline. "These trails had been here thousands of years," Boucher said one day last summer, sitting in his spacious and tasteful corner office in Fort McKay. His golf putter stood in one corner; Mozart played softly on the stereo. "And that day, all of a sudden, we came upon this clearing. A huge clearing. There had been no notice. In the 1970s they went in and tore down my grandfather's cabin--with no notice or discussion." That was Boucher's first encounter with the oil sands industry. It's an industry that has utterly transformed this part of northeastern Alberta in just the past few years, with astonishing speed. Boucher is surrounded by it now and immersed in it himself.
More: http://forests.org/shared/reader/welcom ... kid=119036
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----- Original Message -----
From: Elaine Hughes
To: ngsforum@ngm.com
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 4:38 PM
Subject: Scraping Bottom - Alberta's tarsands
Thank you so much for exposing the ugliness and danger to all living things posed by the Alberta tarsands.
But, they don't end at the Alberta/Saskatchewan border as your article shows.
They continue eastward into northern Saskatchewn, deeper and larger than those in Alberta, and will be have to extracted 'in situ', requiring more energy and emitting more GHGs than even conventional tarsands extraction.
So, we are not only faced with the social, health and environmental nightmare of our own "Mordor", we are also threatened with Bruce Power's proposed nuclear power plant to cook the muck beneath our pristine wilderness.
Location for this potential deadly contamination of our water, air, soil, wildlife and every other living thing for miles around - forever?
Where else? On the banks of our beautiful North Saskatchewan River!
Elaine Hughes
Archerwill, SK CANADA
http://forests.org/shared/reader/welcom ... kid=119036
Once considered too expensive, as well as too damaging to the land, exploitation of Alberta's oil sands is now a gamble worth billions.
Source: Copyright 2009, National Geographic Date: February 19, 2009 Byline: Robert Kunzig
One day in 1963, when Jim Boucher was seven, he was out working the trapline with his grandfather a few miles south of the Fort McKay First Nation reserve on the Athabasca River in northern Alberta. The country there is wet, rolling fen, dotted with lakes, dissected by streams, and draped in a cover of skinny, stunted trees--it's part of the boreal forest that sweeps right across Canada, covering more than a third of the country. In 1963 that forest was still mostly untouched. The government had not yet built a gravel road into Fort McKay; you got there by boat or in the winter by dogsled. The Chipewyan and Cree Indians there--Boucher is a Chipewyan--were largely cut off from the outside world. For food they hunted moose and bison; they fished the Athabasca for walleye and whitefish; they gathered cranberries and blueberries. For income they trapped beaver and mink. Fort McKay was a small fur trading post. It had no gas, electricity, telephone, or running water. Those didn't come until the 1970s and 1980s.
In Boucher's memory, though, the change begins that day in 1963, on the long trail his grandfather used to set his traps, near a place called Mildred Lake. Generations of his ancestors had worked that trapline. "These trails had been here thousands of years," Boucher said one day last summer, sitting in his spacious and tasteful corner office in Fort McKay. His golf putter stood in one corner; Mozart played softly on the stereo. "And that day, all of a sudden, we came upon this clearing. A huge clearing. There had been no notice. In the 1970s they went in and tore down my grandfather's cabin--with no notice or discussion." That was Boucher's first encounter with the oil sands industry. It's an industry that has utterly transformed this part of northeastern Alberta in just the past few years, with astonishing speed. Boucher is surrounded by it now and immersed in it himself.
More: http://forests.org/shared/reader/welcom ... kid=119036
---------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: Elaine Hughes
To: ngsforum@ngm.com
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 4:38 PM
Subject: Scraping Bottom - Alberta's tarsands
Thank you so much for exposing the ugliness and danger to all living things posed by the Alberta tarsands.
But, they don't end at the Alberta/Saskatchewan border as your article shows.
They continue eastward into northern Saskatchewn, deeper and larger than those in Alberta, and will be have to extracted 'in situ', requiring more energy and emitting more GHGs than even conventional tarsands extraction.
So, we are not only faced with the social, health and environmental nightmare of our own "Mordor", we are also threatened with Bruce Power's proposed nuclear power plant to cook the muck beneath our pristine wilderness.
Location for this potential deadly contamination of our water, air, soil, wildlife and every other living thing for miles around - forever?
Where else? On the banks of our beautiful North Saskatchewan River!
Elaine Hughes
Archerwill, SK CANADA