by Dan Rubinstein / Photograph by JProcktor
The first time I went to Fort McMurray, in the fall of 2002, I was working on a magazine feature about the human impact of the pace of growth. For a week, I slept in my tent in a highwayside campground. My neighbours were three young drywallers from Vancouver Island; there was no work at home, so they left girlfriends and children behind and moved to Alberta. They planned to spend the winter in their tents.
The next time I went to Fort McMurray, in early 2006, I flew in from Edmonton for a day and got a behind-the-scenes tour of an oilsands plant. It was a very different assignment, for a very different type of publication. Drywallers living in campgrounds weren’t part of the storyline, which focused on industry getting bigger and better (and, naturally, cleaner and more socially-conscious).
The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle. My first article didn’t delve deeply into the complex economics – locally, provincially, nationally and internationally – behind oilsands development. Nor the livelihoods it supports, the innovation it funds. Conversely, my second trip wasn’t intended to expose the social and environmental costs of such intensive development. Alberta’s oilsands are the province’s main economic driver and its biggest eco-pickle. And while it may seem an omission for unlimited’s inaugural green issue to not dig into the oilsands, the challenge facing the industry is the same as the challenge facing everybody featured in this issue: to truly change how they work, or what their work produces, in a manner that considers both the environmental and economic impacts. As a growing chorus of voices is saying, we can’t have one (quality of life, comfort) without the other (a sustainable planet).
So, the ducks.
The 500 (or so) dead ducks.
The ducks that landed on a toxic tailings pond at the Syncrude mine site north of Fort McMurray this past spring.
That they died is not the most important fact. We know those ponds are poison, we know that new-and-improved dry tailings (if the technology gets us there) will help alleviate the problem; we even know that pollution getting into the Athabasca River and flowing downstream is a more dangerous prospect than a few hundred dead ducks. But the ducks landed on that pond right when Ron Stevens, Alberta’s deputy premier and minister of international and intergovernmental relations, was in Washington, D.C. on a mission to reinforce to Americans the province’s “commitment to environmentally sustainable development” of the oilsands. And like my neighbours at that campground in Fort McMurray, the ducks are a powerful symbol: They show the world that there’s a huge gap between what we’re saying and what we’re doing, and that we urgently need to address this disparity.
The stories that populate this issue show people working to close this gap. Whether they’re retailers, lawyers, engineers, home builders, environmental consultants or energy company managers, they’re committed to the type of incremental, long-term change that will be necessary to turn this ship around in increasingly tumultuous seas. As Jeff Gailus writes in the introduction to the profiles he compiled for our eco-leaders package, the real transformation we’re (hopefully) on the brink of “will be neither technological nor economic – it will be cultural.” It will be a shift of consciousness, a growing awareness that, for instance, we will enjoy lives of greater fulfillment once we begin in earnest the conversion to renewable energies such as wind and solar power that seem so destined to be our future.
For now, though, the oilsands remain part of the equation. And they really should’ve been my first stop after checking into that highwayside campground back in 2002. Because we have to look at the whole picture to see where we’re going. As Preston Manning says on the back page of this issue, the environment and economy should be viewed as two sides of the same coin. I might not have listened to him with an open mind in years past. But if it’s truly a time for action now, then first it must be a time to listen.
Dan Rubinstein
issue 6
Category: Articles
