On Oil

Wow! Life goes too fast to maintain a blog, evidently! A whole lot has happened since my last post sometime in March, and I guess I'm going to try to pick this thing up again because I really enjoy writing about my concerns in an informal medium.

I suppose the latest happening has been my recent trip to Fort McMurray for the U of A's second Oil Sands Delegation. I have been wanting to go and see the tarsands for myself for a very long time now, and it was an incredible experience filled with smart and passionate people who gave me interesting and informative views on issues that are sometimes hard to sort out by yourself. The trip started with a tour of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, and then went on to a meeting with SunCor Representatives, whereby I learned a lot about their attempts at a restoration program from tailings ponds (where t

he water and chemical effluent from separating the oil and the sand goes - not hugely successful by my standards...you can't replace wetland muskeg with hardy, non-native species in a toxic environment that's simply been covered up with 1.5 meters of sand...), the RAMP scientific monitoring program (essentially owned by the oilsands - impression not helped by a fairly clueless "water expert"), and various other bits and pieces.

I think essentially what I took away from that meeting (after I asked the question: since producing oil enables the burning of greenhouse gases, which causes climate change, what will you do in terms of corporate social responsibility to help solve this problem?) is that they "will not stop mining the resource." Period. Though they have begun some initiatives in renewable energy, they are certainly not leaders in their field (it constitutes less than 1% of their funding) and it seems to be more of a PR stunt than an actual attempt at advancing their energy services.

That night we watched the movie H2Oil which goes into the issues of water use and pollution by the tarsands operations (note, "oilsands" and "tarsands" are both appropriate terms, used for different views of the situation). Mostly, the movie examined the possible effects of heavy metal and chemical pollution leaching into the Athabasca River and plaguing the downstream community of Fort Chipewyan with cancer and ill health. It was brought to our attention that there have been no baseline health exams for the residents of this area, but the cancer rate is unarguably high for a population that size. We then had a discussion with a representative from Keepers of the Water - an Aboriginal community group that holds these concerns and are are trying to make their plight known.

The next day we set out to tour around the actual tarsands sites - unfortunately due to our group size, and perhaps due to the affiliations of some of our members, we were unable to get an inside tour to see the actual mines. We drove a good half hour north of Fort McMurray, where giant dump trucks dwarfed semis and huge shimmering lakes (certainly not "ponds") spread across the landscape. There was the inescapable smell of chemicals - like asphalt, and "sleeping giants" of machines lay scattered about in disuse. Steaming towers poked out of the horizon and it just generally was a surreal place to be...though the day was bright and beautiful, making the juxtaposition a little bit unsettling.

We hurried back to town in time for a panel meeting, which may have been the highlight of the trip for me - three people representing different groups spoke to us and answered our questions. There was a First Nations elder from the area, a Greenpeace activist (coincidentally she was also Aboriginal, giving a double whammy to the cons of the tarsands), and a stakeholder relations representative from Suncor, who was actually very personable and seemed like a nice guy (he let it slip that he was a philosophy major - good move, Suncor). Some hard questions were ready, especially since we were coming to the end of the trip and had accumulated new information from the past 24 hours that we wanted to verify. By the end of our time with them I think many opinions were settled, but I doubt solutions were readily on anyone's mind.

One of the things I thought the hardest about coming out of that trip was the cognitive dissonance I felt about my lifestyle versus my personal beliefs about oil. How do people reconcile the undeniable dependance of our own lives on oil, when we know it is bad for us as a whole? I know that everything in my life is made possible by oil, and as an Albertan, especially by the production of oil in the tarsands. Even supposed solutions to the problem of oil are often only made possible by oil - the creation of renewable energy sources such as wind turbines and solar panels requires huge amounts of energy to manufacture the parts and materials, and a major source of that energy is oil or coal based. Many people look to nuclear power for the future of energy, and it has its merits, but it certainly has its drawbacks - the mining of uranium is hugely damaging, and one only needs to mention "radioactive nuclear waste" to bring up a string of controversy.

As a designer and creative thinker, I often dream about solutions to problems such as these as they pertain to public action and awareness, however, I'm not sure that'll be enough. All the bike riders and tree planters in the world can't fix our society that is fundamentally designed around this one resource. We're going to have to rethink everything. Are we up for that challenge?