The word on 'dirty' oil
Authors take critical look at oilsands;
Eric Volmers, Calgary Herald
Published: Sunday, November 02, 2008
Andrew Nikiforuk may feel let down by the various vanguards of Canada's establishment -- our government, our media, our industry.
But the journalist and author acknowledges Canada can be a relatively benign place to operate if you're a pot-stirring writer looking to topple apple carts and criticize what has been, up until recently, a bit of a sacred cow in his home province.
"I would expect in Russia or Nigeria, someone like me would just disappear," says Nikiforuk. "Thank God I live in Alberta. Where they just send letters to the editor."
It's a sly reference to a recent letter drawn up by the Energy Resources Conservation Board, the provincial regulator of the oil and gas industry that gets raked over the coals in Nikiforuk's latest book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent.
The board fired off a letter-to-the-editor to the Calgary Herald before the newspaper had printed anything about the book, pointing out what it sees as errors.
Nikiforuk, who offers a rebuttal on his website, makes no apologies for ruffling feathers. In fact, he seems at least a little pleased that the ERCB - tar Sands: dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent by andrew nikiforuk (douglas&McIntyre, 208 pages $20) - the tyranny of Oil: the world's Most Powerful Industry-- and what we Must do to Stop It byantonia Juhasz(Harper Collins Canada, 480 pages, $26.99)
has opted to participate in the debate at all. Tar Sands paints an unflattering picture of oilsands development as a poorly-planned, badly-regulated free-for-all to frantically liquidate northern Alberta's precious bituminous sands and feed "irrational global demands."
The result, he says, is a $200-billion behemoth that has swallowed the province's economy and identity, altered the nation's foreign policy and inflicted still-unknown damage to Alberta's environment. Yet, he claims, it has received scant attention over the years. If such a project were active in the U. S., Fort McMurray would have long ago been populated with newspaper bureaus of the L. A. Times, New York Times and Washington Post, he says.
"We are just catching up with a nation-changing event with continental and global implications," Nikiforuk, 53, says. "This is the world's largest energy project, which is in our own back yard and has so demonstratively changed Alberta. . . . The media has failed to really tackle this story. This is a story that is just as dramatic as the Klondike, only 100 times better."
If oilsands development remains under-reported by the mainstream media, as Nikiforuk believes, it has become a lightning rod for certain areas of the political spectrum, in entertainment-as-activism. Documentary films such as To the Tarsands and Downstream have tackled the controversy, with the latter even being shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination. The recent miniseries Burn Up--while fictional and rather conspiratorial in nature--paints oilsands development in Alberta as a less-than-noble pursuit.
Even Canuck-turned-Hollywood-starlet Neve Campbell has weighed in, voicing her disapproval of the development after flying over it in a helicopter.
But unlike artists who work in those mediums, authors attempting to write the quintessential last word on the topic face the specific challenge of painting the big picture, in all its dauntingly complex glory. Authors like Nikiforuk need to wrap an enormous amount of scientific, geopolitical, economic and social data into something the average reader will enjoy, or in the very least understand. It's not an easy task, he says.
"There is so much information, and a lot of it is not readily available to the public," says Nikiforuk. "I interviewed 100 people in Fort McMurray alone to try and get a sense of where everyone is coming from. The book doesn't capture everything because it is so damn large. I did two years of basic reporting just to begin to understand how big this thing was and what a true, nation-changing development it is."
Few authors wading into the subject have much positive to say about the oilsands. There's little discussion of green initiatives in the region, for example, or the financial benefits of the industry.
Montreal Gazette reporter William Mardsen was among the first authors to shine a critical light at Alberta's oil industry for a mainstream audience. Last year's bluntly titled Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care) was an unabashed polemic, intent on shattering any comfort the average citizen may have taken in the assumption that Alberta knows what it's doing when it came to managing resources (it's original title: Albertans are Stupid). Tony Clarke's up-coming book, Tarsands Showdown, follows a similar path but also delves into its geopolitical implications of how the oilsands will change Canada's reputation and footing in the world. U. S. writer Antonia Juhasz's The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry -and What We Must Do to Stop It, takes on Big Oil in general, but reserves a good deal of space to bemoan oilsands development in Alberta. Dr. Andrew Weaver, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and expert on climate change, touches on the issue in his new book Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World.
"I don't like to pick on the tarsands, it's one part of a much bigger issue," says Weaver, who will be speaking in Calgary, Edmonton and Lethbridge later this month. "But what the tarsands captures is the end-to-end environmental degradation. The wildlife activists can attack it because of its specific impact on wildlife; the water conservation types can attack it because of the amount of water it uses; the natural habitat types go after it because of its impact on existing habitat and on and on. It has become like the spotted owl in the U.S. It's an icon, it epitomizes the whole spectrum--the very worst aspects of humans interacting with the environment."
Such drama, the authors hope, will help the debate bubble up from the underground realm of activists and scientists to the public at large, preferably a public beyond Alberta.
But as a writer, how do you ensure the average reader doesn't nod off as you passionately rail against lax regulations, geopolitical shifts and the law of petropolitics?
"It's a challenge and different people have approached it different ways." says author Tony Clarke, who is executive director and co-founder of the Polaris Institute in Ottawa. "I have come at it from the standpoint, that while there's certainly economic and social impacts, there is a larger impact from a geopolitical framework. You have to get Canadians to realize how important this mega-project is and how it could become the centrepiece of the economy for the first half of the 21st century. We need to push Canadians to look at the deeper implications of this and how it relates to who we are as people."
Nikiforuk says he took pains to ensure his book went beyond preaching to the converted. Tarsands begins with a bluntly worded 22-point "declaration of a political emergency" and ends with a 12-step plan to regain "energy sanity," which includes action the general reader can take. In between, Nikiforuk writes not only about environmental and political concerns, but takes the reader into the frenzied boom of Fort McMurray and along the so-called "highway to hell" that leads to it. He tells the story of Fort McMurray physician Dr. John O'Connor, who Nikiforuk says faced severe "political persecution"when he went public about an increase of cancer cases in Fort Chipewyan, downstream from oilsand projects. He tells these tales with old-fashioned good writing, whether it be describing the yearly level of carbon dioxide emitted from tarsands projects as enough to "fill one million two-storey, three-bedroom homes and suffocate every occupant" or the provincial and federal governments as "joyous peanut hawkers who can't believe the size of the crowd" in Alberta's "global energy playground."
In its three-page letter, the Energy Resources Conservation Board has claimed Nikiforuk's reporting to be either inaccurate or incomplete on issues relating directly to the board's duties as provincial regulator. But Nikiforuk stands by his reporting and his reasons for tackling the oilsands in the first place.
"I try to choose subjects that will make some difference to my children," Nikiforuk says. "I have three boys in Calgary. This project has tremendous implications for young people in the province. If we can get it under control and manage it's financial and political impact properly and reduce its environmental footprint, then maybe we can use this project to make Alberta the greenest province in Canada and Canada the greenest country in the world."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
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