Oil Sands Truth: Shut Down the Tar Sands

Grandma vs. the Tar Pit Mine

Grandma vs. the Oil-Sands Mine
By Kevin Graham
E/The Environmental Magazine
September/October, 2007

Eighty-five-year-old grandmothers aren’t typically subject to
censorship, but Liz Moore is no ordinary grandma. After touring an
oil-sands operation in Canada, Moore returned to her home in Colorado
and began researching the mining process. Eventually, she spent
$3,600 on a website that chronicles the destructive environmental
impacts of oil-sands mining.
“I was appalled at what I saw—the devastation of the land,” she says
of her visit to a Syncrude mine in Fort McMurray, Alberta. “I came
home and decided people in the U.S. needed to hear about this,
because we’ll be buying more and more oil from Canada.”

Soon legal threats arrived. The mining giant Syncrude Canada Ltd. and
a branch of the Alberta government threatened legal action if Moore
did not remove certain photos from the website, she says.

“It made me angry at a very deep level,” Moore says. “I don’t like
censorship, and if it’s done to me, I like it even less.” Moore later
learned that a release she signed before her tour gave the company
the right to limit the use of her photos.

“Syncrude had a right to stop me,” she says. “But it was still
censorship.”

The oil-sands mining company saw things differently. “We see this as
an issue of copyright, accuracy and quality,” a Syncrude spokesperson
told the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper.

Oil sands, also referred to as tar sands, are a mixture of clay,
sand, water and bitumen. The latter is a form of oil that does not
flow at normal temperatures or pressures. Typically, oil sands are
strip mined and then processed to produce extra-heavy crude oil.

Moore’s website offers a slide show about the destructiveness of the
oil-sands mining process. The show includes photos she took during
her trip to Fort Mc-Murray, but 17 of the site’s roughly 70 images
have been re-moved and replaced with “censored” banners.

But help is on the way. Moore has been contacted by a Canadian
nonprofit organization and individual photographers who have photos
to replace the images that were censored.

Those responses, along with hundreds of “you go, girl”-type e-mails
and invitations to return to Canada to give talks, have been
heartwarming, Moore says.

“It’s why I keep it up,” she adds.

website: www.oilsandsofcanada.com

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