Introduction June 9, 2013

“Bearing Witness to the Alberta Oil Sands” Project

Water is a sacred gift, an essential element that sustains and connects all life. It is not a commodity to be bought or sold. All people share an obligation to cooperate to ensure that water in all of its forms is protected and conserved with regard to the needs of all living things today and for future generations tomorrow.
- Keepers of the Water Declaration, Sept. 7th, 2006

My name is Eli Pivnick and I am a high school teacher, a former federal government research entomologist, and a wilderness guide. I will admit here to my biases. I believe that clean and healthy food, water and air are a basic human right, and that any project that seriously impairs these should be radically modified or shut down. I used to believe that the ethics of the consumer society we live in would some day cause the breakdown of our civilization. As I said, I used to believe this. I now believe that that day is getting uncomfortably close. I am very concerned for the future but also for the present. In the present, I see every year increasing numbers of areas that are no longer fit for life, human or other. Last time I checked, the planet has not been producing any new areas to replace the areas that are seriously degraded. One of these areas is the Oil Sands area of northern Alberta.

I am organizing a canoe trip along the Athabasca River from Ft McMurray to Ft Chipewyan in the province of Alberta, Canada on August 6-17, 2013. The river flows right through the entire Athabasca Oil Sands deposit (see map below), but the part that has been exploited so far is the part north of Ft McMurray (and to the west of the river) which is why we are paddling this part. We are going all the way to Ft Chipewyan on the northwest shore of Lake Athabasca because this community is seeing elevated incidences of cancer and tumours in fish which they are attributing to the oil sands.

A long way to the east in Saskatchewan but still on Lake Athabasca are radioactive tailings from the no longer active uranium mine at Uranium City. Uranium, a water-soluble metal, emits radiation until it stabilizes into lead after about 4.5 billion years and is known as  "dada-thay" in Dene, which translates as "death rock." Saskatchewan makes Canada the world’s second largest producer of uranium. Welcome to pristine northwestern Canada!!! And it does not end there. BC and Alberta are seeing increasing hydraulic fracturing (fracking) activity where water and toxic chemicals are injected deep into the Earth at high pressure to break up rock layers and release natural gas. It works but also risks contaminating the water table. No wonder people in the north of the western provinces are getting more and more concerned. In 2006, Aboriginal groups in the north along with other concerned citizens created an organization called Keepers of the Water to discuss environmental issues and plans for the Arctic watershed. Every summer they hold a gathering to talk about pollution issues one would think would never be a problem in the north. But one would be wrong. Their first gathering in 2006 in Ft Smith, NWT, was specifically to discuss issues on the Mackenzie River basin (pictured below), the basin of which the Athabasca River is part. 

The idea of our canoe trip is to experience or bear witness to what is going on in the Oil Sands, as well as to interview people whose backyard, food and water supply is being impacted. Our plan is to film, blog about and report what we see, hear and feel on this trip. As far as I can see, it is too easy for the general public  to be comforted by the slimy half-truths currently being presented in slick campaigns by CAPP (Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers), the oil companies exploiting the oil sands, the oil pipeline companies transporting the bitumen being mined in the oil sands, and regrettably, both the Alberta and Canadian governments.  These governments seem to see the aforementioned to be their main constituency rather than the Alberta and Canadian populations who own and are ultimately responsible  for these resources and the lands in which they lie. Therefore, it is important to keep bearing witness to what is going on, to help the many organizations that are pushing to slow down or stop the expansion, or even to phase out the exploitation of the oil sands. It is my hope that the other participants of the canoe trip will also be contributing to this blog.