Fourteen wheels, ambitious goals

Young environmental activists back to pushing

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Over 11 sweltering August days, Marya Folinsbee and six other environmental activists will challenge the biggest energy names in Alberta—think Syncrude, Suncor and Stelmach—with nothing more than their bicycles.

Folinsbee is the trip coordinator for “Return to the Tar Sands,” a Sierra Youth Coalition (SYC) project now in its second year that might be described as halfway between a Tour de l’Alberta and a regular, boring old protest rally. This year, the group chose to start their ride in Fort Chipewyan, which is the northernmost Albertan settlement on that pillar of bitumen extraction, the Athabasca watershed.

After two weeks and countless pedal strokes and flat tires, they plan to arrive in Calgary. Along the way, they’ll talk to locals in a dozen communities—including Edmonton—to get their perspective on the tar sands, deliver contaminated water to fossil-fuel company executives, and—who knows—maybe get Fort McMurray to hit the brakes.

Well, probably not. There are only seven riders taking on some of the most powerful corporations in the world, as well as a provincial government that recently won a crushing majority while virtually ignoring rampant environmental degradation.

“For us as a group, we’ve got pretty good morale. We have a pretty good strategy for supporting each other,” says Folinsbee. “And it is as much about bearing witness to atrocity as it is about being able to affect change. I don’t have a lot of faith in the Alberta government in particular to represent citizens.”

The change the bikers are trying to affect is nothing if not ambitious.

“We’re joining with a lot of groups across the province who are asking for no more approvals on tar sands developments,” says Folinsbee. “We’re asking that the government respect Aboriginal title and treaty, which they should be doing anyways because it’s Canadian law.”

Finally, Folinsbee says, the group is asking for “Canada to reassess its national energy policy and renegotiate energy security under NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement].”

Folinsbee argues that there are stipulations under the terms of the trade agreement that would stop the Alberta government from being able to revoke the water licenses an oil company requires to extract oil from the tar sands, even if the levels they were taking out were damaging the integrity of the watershed.

Just as bad, argues Folinsbee, is that NAFTA also includes the proportional sharing agreement, which makes it nearly impossible to reduce the amount of oil we ship south.

“The proportional sharing agreement is the clause that makes it so that we have to maintain the same proportion of trade to the US,” explains Folinsbee. “We can’t take more of the oil that’s produced in the oil sands for our domestic energy needs; we have to maintain the proportion. Right now, I think Alberta’s exporting between 70 and 90 per cent of tar sands fuel to the United States.”

Addressing national energy policy is not usually seen as the domain of green groups like the SYC, but getting past a purely environmental angle, says Folinsbee, is key to addressing an issue as large as the tar sands.

“There are multiple levels at which it’s destructive: socially, in terms of health, in terms of human rights, environmentally and in terms of trade and long-term energy security for this country,” she says. “We’re really putting a lot of those things in jeopardy.”

But how can seven people hope to change Canada’s national energy policy or even get the attention of a provincial government drowning in royalty revenues?

“I guess we do have some pretty ambitious goals,” says cyclist and SYC member Aly Ostrowski. Ostrowski, like most of the activists, is on her first tar sands ride.

“We really want to and need to be heard by politicians and corporate executives throughout Alberta, maybe even Canada. I’d really like to engage in direct contact and some sort of dialogue, because right now it’s fairly distanced,” she says.

Distanced enough that the demands of the “Return to the Tar Sands” trip might not be heard by any significant elected official, let alone realized.

“Realistically, I don’t see our demands being answered at the end of the trip,” says Folinsbee. But maybe that’s okay. The group has goals that go beyond changing the face of Fort McMurray.

One of these, according to Ostrowski, is “standing in solidarity with native communities and impacted communities. Even just hearing them out and promising to pass on their message, and better understand what we can do as individuals to help.”

Folinsbee agrees that promoting more dialogue is one of the main things the cyclists are hoping to accomplish.

“A big part of our goal is to push the democratic movement forward—try to encourage more citizens in this province to speak out, and to get more issues on the table,” she says.

“I think our message is accessible enough to a broad enough group of people that in that way it’s effective. It’s inspiring, I think, when you see people standing up to, or even mobilizing against, the powers that be.” V

Return to the Tar Sands cyclists will be arriving in Edmonton on Sun, Aug 24. For updates on the tour, visit tothetarsands.ca.

Fourteen wheels, ambitious goals

Young environmental activists back to pushing

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