2/03 Heroes: David James Duncan and Rick Bass
The Conoco Phillips trucks started rolling this week. It’s not the end of the world. There are only four. It’s the hundreds that ExxonMobil plan on sending through that must be stopped. Still, it feels like the end of the world. For a much more eloquent and moving account of this travesty, please read The Heart of the Monster: Why the Pacific Northwest & Northern Rockies Must Not Become an ExxonMobil Conduit to the Alberta Tar Sands by David James Duncan and Rick Bass. They wrote it and produced it in less than three months. It’s a true inspiration. Great men. Great writers. Great friends. Bless them. You can buy the book at allagainstthehaul.org.
An excerpt:
A single example of how strip-mining for tar kills birds is all my heart can bear.
Step One: Consider again the Essick photos of boreal forest, and of what replaces it.
Step Two: Imagine a bird, expecting the world in the first photo, trying to land, rest, feed, and drink amid the post-world in the second.
On April 8, 2008, the bodies of 1,606 dead waterfowl were scooped from a Syncrude tailings pond. Syncrude’s effluent “pond” is formed by the second largest dam on earth. The massive sludge reservoir this dam encloses is perched at a higher elevation than all the surrounding water. Gravity, of course, is constantly forcing the poisons into the ecosystem, and the reservoir itself is Poison Central. The reservoir is located amid the ancient nesting grounds of millions of waterfowl and other birds. During a blinding early morning snowstorm the birds were forced to rely on migratory memory, and landed on the death lake. Birds (need I say it?) are about as discerning as human toddlers. The death lakes are a ceaseless offering of poison Halloween candy. The industry’s idea of a “warning system:” when a flock of waterfowl flies close to the biggest reservoirs, a cannon might fire. Thousands of dreck ponds possess no such cannon.
On the morning of the 1,606 duck kill, the cannon didn’t fire because it was snowing. A Syncrude spokesperson later acknowledges, on film, that the actual number of birds killed that morning, or any morning, is impossible to determine because mired birds sink fast in the sludge. The bodies of moose and bear have been found in the same sludge. In May, 2008, the same “pond” was responsible for the death of at least 500 ducks, but the kill was not reported by Syncrude. It only became known after it was discovered by passersby. The number of incidents like this in the Tar Sands are incalculable.
ExxonMobil’s ads celebrate their willingness to go after the “tough oil.” This is way beyond “tough.” To reward a migratory bird that has survived the Gulf oil devastation with a breeding ground replaced by Tar Sands effluent is a cruelty worthy of the Dark Lord of Mordor. A few of the birds in increasing crisis due to Big Oil’s love affair with tar: Bohemian wax wings. Canada warblers. White-throated sparrows. Blackpoll warblers. Gray jays. Bay-breasted warblers. Boreal chickadees. Dark eyed juncos. Evening grosbeaks. Rusty blackbirds. Olive-sided fly-catchers. American robins. Swainson’s thrushes. Golden plovers. Buffleheads. Short-billed dowitchers. Horned grebes. Lesser yellowlegs. White-fronted geese. Ross’s geese. Lesser sandhill cranes. Canada geese. Canvasbacks. Greater and lesser scaups. Western grebes. Mallards. Sandhill cranes. Whooping cranes.
Are we to pray that ExxonMobil suddenly discovers human kindness and a Franciscan regard for birds despite the corporate by-laws that make it illegal to do so? Are we to pray Syncrude’s cannons “successfully” scare every duck and shorebird off the death ponds for the next thousand years? Are we to pray that blizzards at dusk will magically cease to be blinding? Are we to seek a house of worship with a God so dumbed down that He might deign to answer such stupid prayers? Or does the Dalai Lama nail it? Prayer is good, as is meditation – but we also need prompt action!
- David James Duncan
- Posted by Spider McKnight
- News
- 1 Comments
Comments
The reason we drive cars is that gasoline engines are so dang big and complicated. If we did not have our collective head up where the sun don’t shine in Big ‘OL we’d ride around on electric bicycles like the Dutch, the Chinese and the Japanese are now doing.
Where are you going with that buggy whip America? If Calgary and Huston are the arm pits of the world…. does not that make Lolo the heart?
Let’s not be short sighted, visionless and married to the tar-baby.
Take one ride on an electric bike, and l be we’ll be talking about redoing our roads so they are safe. Good jobs, no wars.
“Tar-Baby ain’t sayin’ nuthin’, en Brer Fox he lay low.”
Brer Fox, he peddle away, jez smilin. Jez smilin wide.
Posted by David Bean at August 13 2011