Mother Nature’s Protest
The image of 500 ducks, silently lying at the bottom of a toxic lake, speaks volumes
A flock of birds has done what a gaggle of environmental protesters could not — embarrass the Alberta government over development of the oilsands and focus a critical eye on how Alberta protects the environment.
Almost all of the estimated 500 migratory ducks that innocently landed on a Syncrude tailings pond Monday are dead or dying today. Maybe half a dozen survived.
It was an environmental protest as staged by Mother Nature — and couldn’t have been more effective if each bird had worn a little “Stop the Tar Sands” T-shirt as it disappeared beneath the surface of the toxic lake.
The end wouldn’t have come quickly for the ducks. The oil and other chemicals in the sludge would have poisoned them inside and out, robbing them of their natural waterproof coating, and they would have eventually drowned. According to Syncrude officials, the bodies have sunk to the bottom of the lake so we don’t have an exact number of dead.
Not that it matters if it was 400 or 500. The story made headlines around the world and has focused attention on the environmental impact of the oilsands with a drama that protesters and opposition politicians could only dream of.
It’s one thing to tell people the oilsands produce toxic byproducts but quite another when people learn that animals die by the hundreds after swimming in those chemicals. It is one thing to call the giant pools of toxic waste by the innocuous term “ponds” but quite another when people learn the ponds are in essence gigantic open sewers from oilsands production. One of Syncrude’s “ponds” has a circumference of 20 kilometres. You’d need more than two hours to walk around it.
Not that you’d be allowed anywhere near the ponds. They are closely guarded by the oilsands plants, which are supposed to use high-tech methods such as radar-operated noise cannons that frighten birds away before they can land on the toxic lakes. Syncrude has said its noise makers weren’t working because “extreme winter weather conditions” the past week delayed the deployment of the cannon. Then a rapid spring thaw melted the ice on the tailings ponds, which presented the migrating birds with what to them looked like an enticing place to rest for a bit.
Both Syncrude and the government insist that the deaths of hundreds of birds from a single flock is unprecedented, that maybe a few dozen birds at most die in the ponds each year.
We’ll just have to take the government’s word for it. And the government will just have to take Syncrude’s word for it.
When it comes to reporting these kinds of environmental disasters, the companies are pretty much on a self-monitoring or honour system. And it would appear the system didn’t work smoothly, at least not from initial government finger pointing.
“The issue here is that there is a non-compliance of a very strict condition of the licence to operate,” said a sombre Premier Ed Stelmach in a news conference on Tuesday.
Stelmach said the government wasn’t told about the incident by Syncrude but by an anonymous tipster at 11 o’clock on Monday morning.
Syncrude officials insist they were just about to alert the government about the dead and dying birds at noon on Monday when the government called.
The government says the incident is under investigation and if Syncrude broke government regulations it faces penalties up to $1 million. Not that Syncrude couldn’t afford to pay such a fine. On Monday, as the birds made their fateful landing on the tailings pond, Syncrude announced a first-quarter profit of $298 million, an increase of 14 per cent over the same period last year.
Dead and dying birds never make for positive headlines, but this week’s environmental tragedy had particularly bad timing for the government. Deputy Premier Ron Stevens is in Washington, D.C., as part of the government’s $25-million public relations campaign to counter claims the oilsands is “dirty oil.”
The government should be grateful, in a morbid way, that the dead birds sank to the bottom rather than bobbed to the surface. Otherwise, Syncrude workers would have to scoop up the carcasses of 500 birds — and that wouldn’t make for the best of photo ops if you’re trying to convince the world your oil is not ethically and environmentally dirty.
Stelmach did try to put a brave face on the incident on Wednesday, saying his tough talk about punishing Syncrude if necessary “gives us an opportunity to tell not only our American trading partner but all the world that we mean business when it comes to the rules and regulations we have in place with respect to protection of environment.”
He also predictably tried to present himself as a victim of the environmental lobby, saying the government’s $25- million public relations campaign “is small compared to the combined money of the various lobby groups that are out there.”
Oh, there are surely victims here — roughly 500 of them lying silently at the bottom of a toxic lake.
gthomson@thejournal.canwest.com
© The Edmonton Journal 2008
Oil’s time is over. I’d like to see my country, Canada, lead the world by developing ways to cleanly turn our coal, oil, and natural gas in Hydrogen. We would export only hydrogen and we would scrub and sequester all of the pollutants created in making it. Impossible?
Stelmach is hard for this Albertan to stomach. A million dollar fine??? That’s not even a slap on the wrist, it’s a frickin hand waiving at the wrist of Syncrude. Not too much of a surprise tho, this province’s rulers seem to worship at the alter of the dollar… If I could afford to move I would have done so already.
Not that it matters if it was 400 or 500. The story made headlines around the world and has focused attention on the environmental impact of the oilsands with a drama that protesters and opposition politicians could only dream of.
Made headlines around the world?
Guess Um-erica is not part of this planet anymore?
Sigh!
Second that lexington, my first thought. They missed it at my local ABC/NBC/CBS affiliate news broadcasts and the local Chicago papers. To Skippyagogo… your desire to move hurts me as an American! The only hope I cling to is the thought that when it gets bad enogh I’ll move to Canada.. now what the heck am I going to do!
To all the Americans who don’t know anything about Alberta, many of us Canadians call Alberta “America-lite” because of the right-wing leanings of many of it’s inhabitants.
As well, the oil sands projects are quite different than your standard oil operation. It’s not building a rig and drilling down and sucking up the oil… this is scraping layer after layer of ‘oil sand’ off the ground, and running it through toxic processing to extract the oil… the sludge is then dumped into these ‘ponds’. The result of all this is the detestation of millions of square km of wilderness environment. It’s the same sorta idea as the mountain removal the coal companies do in West Virginia.
Conservatism is the plague.
From the article:
“Syncrude officials insist they were just about to alert the government about the dead and dying birds at noon on Monday when the government called.”
Someone was paid to come up with this?
“Dude! What a coincidence! We were seriously just about to call you guys about that! That’s so weird!”
I bet Mr. Stelmach wishes he had the authority to order the Syncrude officials catapulted into their own toxic lake.
What’s really sad, folks, is that the tar sands oil is not being shipped east or west out of Albert; it’s going south. Hello NAFTA. The Atlantic provinces have to import oil. Mulroney sold us down the river on energy and Alberta is laughing all the way to the bank (for now) even as it fouls its land.
The problem with lobby groups is the same as with groups in general - the group takes on a life of its own which diminishes the lives of people by overriding the people’s interests, fundamentally to be free from domination. Lobby groups will compete with each other to influence government allocations, effectively enslaving taxpayers. The only recourse for the people is to try and ensure they are sharing the spoils achieved by the lobby groups. There is an approach that eliminates lobby groups and the waste and destruction that results from their self-perpetuation and control agendas: That is to limit the role of government to working to maximize the dispersion of political/economic power among the people, which means enforcing limits on the size of all non-individual entities (all groups, all organizations, e.g. businesses, institutions, parties), enforcing full dissemination of high quality information, civic, social, environmental responsibility for all, land, water, food security for all, and advanced rights to highest value in education, healthcare, shelter, transport.
Mr. Thomspon and the Edmonton Journal didn’t mention the contaminants in the Syncrude tailings ponds. That’s too bad - we really need the media to inform the people. According to Greenpeace Canada, the tarsands process uses naphtha, paraffin, naphthenic acid, and alkyl-substituted polyaromatic hydrocarbons. Greenpeace isn’t very clear but some quantities of these end up in the tailings ponds, along with residual bitumen - bitumen being the tar that is extracted. The other components in the tailing ponds are water, sand, clay. The purpose of the ponds apparently is to allow reuse of the water after the sand/clay settles out.
The energy balance of tar sands has been stated as 1.5:1, meaning 1.5 units of energy consumed to produce 1 unit. Given that the energy balance isn’t well publicized, a high energy balance is to be expected. The total energy balance from tar sand to gasoline would be 3.12:1. If the energy source were infinite and processing were free, the energy balance wouldn’t mean much, but when carbon-spewing fossil fuel is consumed to make more fossil fuel, the world’s premiere commodity of class war aggression, such an energy balance is a big problem. In contrast, biodiesel has an energy balance of 0.33:1, the lowest figure of all the liquid engine fuels, requires no processing chemicals, and may help to emancipate the people through local independent production. The proper selection of energy sources relates to the issue of lobbies in the above paragraph, in that both are typical projects of “laissez-faire” capitalism - the domination of capital over markets, governments and people.
These are decisions made by men, they violate the creative principle and balance of life on earth. I don’t understand why women do not assert thier influence in the world. Women support religious structures that rob them of thier spirituality, political structures biases against them, and life paths that exploit the very essence of life.
elmysterio said: “The result of all this is the detestation of millions of square km of wilderness environment.”
The slip of the fingers (if that’s what it was) is exactly right.
I expect the word was supposed to be ‘devastation’, but DETESTATION - a deep-seated HATRED - of wilderness is at the root of devastation.
Squwack all they want about environmental protection, the people who dump this shit, and allow the dumping and profit mightily from it, simply hate the natural world.
(Writer Derrick Jensen has a lot to say on this score.)
TREEFROG: This woman (i.e. yours truly) DOES take issue, but as Chomsky related, consent is everywhere being manufactured. A few reasons why some women do not speak out is religion. The adage that “God gave MAN dominion” is a dangerous one… there is also a failure of imagination of enormous proportions that a great many people confuse reality with the status quo. Carlos Casteneda once was told, “You confuse the world with what people do…” Most are so ensconced in lives apart from nature that the power of the seasons, the rhythms built into the natural world are lost on them.
I am not arguing FOR the limitations on the part of people, women or men, but rather seeking to explain why a paralysis has set in that has allowed so many treasures to slip away. There are a purported 50 million Americans who believe in the Rapture, that JC will show up to save them, and/or fix it all. Others depend on “their leaders” for a similar salvation function. The POWER of the individual has been slowly undermined by passive TV watching, food that does not nurture, belief systems that force or enforce conformity, fear of the body, rejection of intuition, suspicion of things alien to the uni-formity group, etc.
Were people to truly connect with their own aliveness and recognize their kinship with the natural world, the teachings of the Indigenous would be greatly respected and provide a roadmap for saving our over-taxed ecology, and the web of life so shorn, torn and tattered.
Paddy Ha! Thanks for pointing out my Freudian slip. lol And you’re right… that was subconscious. But it works.
elmysterio, you’re welcome…anytime.
And Siouxrose: “the web of life so shorn, torn and tattered”. So true, so sad.
SiouxRose
I know you understand this probably better than most people. Once you experience a level of balance it is hard not to notice all the things that contribute to decisions, even institutions that devalue that balance on so many levels. Witness that how it is perpetuated in common everyday life. Thanks for all your enlightened posts.
TREE FROG: Indeed, it is ALL about balance. On a funny related note, lately I have been biking with my 2.5 year old grandson into a state park to treat him to a shaman’s connection with the natural world. He’s a hefty, delightful little boy who already recognizes the sound of woodpeckers, and is in awe of the jumping fish, baby deer, and creatures we daily encounter. In any case, I carry his snacks and today the plastic bag managed to get inside my front tire… I was able to stop the bike, but it did fall over scaring my grandson. I had been explaining to him that he could not move too much or it upset “the balance.” I think today’s demonstration was his first lesson in that primal teaching! (He was not hurt at all.)
siouxrose
Be sure to tell him to thank the woodpecker for his message, it is a good message and things will get better. He must be your gift..