Aug. 06, 2008 - Issue #668: Power to the People
Keepers of the Water III: Water is Boss!
Something in the water
Since early July, members of the Keepers of the Athabasca Watershed Society
(KAWS) have been travelling the length of the Athabasca River Basin. Along
the way, they’re holding conferences in communities alongside the
river as part of their Keepers of the Water tour. The tour started on Jul 6
at the river’s origins in Jasper, and is set to culminate in a
five-day gathering of environmental organizations, community leaders and
First Nations groups in Fort Chipewyan—where the river
ends.
The aim of the event, according to KAWS, is to highlight the importance of
the river, as well as the effects that the ongoing abuse of this precious
resource is having on the ecosystem and the communities that live along the
Athabasca.
“I think a major concern for many of us is around what quantities of
water need to be left in the river [during the river’s] low-flow
conditions in the winter,” explains KAWS co-chair Harvey Scott,
from his farm in Athabasca.
A professor emeritus at the University of Alberta who specialized in
outdoor education and eco-tourism, Scott is a deeply insightful man of
nearly 70 who has been making noise about environmental sustainability
since long before it was in style to do so.
As Scott points out, last year—and only after a lot of
criticism—the Alberta government finally came up with a
water-allocation framework to protect the Athabasca River and the
communities that depend on it. But these new regulations on corporate water
usage by companies like Suncor and Syncrude, Scott charges, amount to
little more than a farce, and fall far short of addressing the concerns
raised by those that live by the river.
“Alberta Environment is not doing its duty in monitoring and
addressing what the impacts are. They tend to minimize [the impacts of the
tar sands development], and their position seems to be primarily to run
interference for the [companies],” Scott continues. “They would
never close the taps on tar sands projects, even if the water levels became
very, very low.”
Essentially, Scott proclaims, a number of people in Alberta are now finding
themselves living in what he calls the government’s “sacrifice
zone.”
The people of the Mikisew Cree First Nation make their home in part of that
sacrifice zone, in Fort Chipewyan. The remote northern community is just
downstream of the tar sands developments, and the Mikisew depend on the
Athabasca River for their livelihood. George Poitras is the former chief of
the Mikisew and shares Scott’s concerns about the enormous amount of
water used by industry, an amount that some reports say would have
otherwise been enough to sustain a human population of two million
people.
Poitras cites studies that have found the river level has dropped by a
third in just a few decades, but adds that in addition to the oil
industry’s negative impacts on water quantity, communities are also
seeing frightening effects on water quality.
“Recently, we’ve been observing multiple health issues in the
community of Fort Chipewyan. In the worst cases, we’re seeing very
rare types of cancer showing up in our people,” Poitras notes.
“These are cancers that our doctor says that you should find one case
of in every 100 000 people. Our community is 1200 people and we’re
finding five to six cases currently.”
The doctor Poitras is talking about is John O’Connor. When
O’Connor was hired as the town’s fly-in doctor in 2000, he was
quickly astounded by what he called a disproportionate number of citizens
suffering from sicknesses that ranged from thyroid disorders to a rare form
of bile duct cancer. Concerned that something might be wrong,
O’Connor first brought it up with his colleagues. In 2006, he took it
a step further and publicly announced on CBC radio his suspicions
that tar sands development was responsible for these health problems.
However, instead of praising him for bringing to light his concern, Health
Canada demanded that O’Connor be investigated for causing
“undue alarm” and called on the College of Physicians and
Surgeons of Alberta to revoke his medical license. Today, government
officials admit that O’Connor may have been right, and a
comprehensive report on cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan is due out this
fall.
The situation is reaching a critical point not only in matters of human health, Poitras stresses, but in terms of the environment as well. Horror stories about grossly deformed fish downstream of the tar sands developments abound, as do stories about moose and other animals with massively enlarged livers. Many Mikisew are now afraid to eat animals that were once a traditional part of their diet. The area around Fort Chipewyan is also home to endangered species like the whooping crane. Until they are given more answers, Poitras concludes, the Mikisew First Nation is calling for a moratorium on tar sands development.
Kim Capstick, a spokesperson for Alberta Environment, isn’t ready to
commit to such a bold move. She says that the ongoing government
monitoring of the river, in place since the 1970s, has shown no significant
change in water quality. Any chemicals in the river, she says, are
naturally occurring, and originate from the oily soil in the
Athabasca’s riverbank.
“What’s unique about the Athabasca River, and I think needs to
be considered when we look at that river and where it goes, is that the oil
sands deposits—quite a large one—are there, and the Athabasca
River actually runs right through the middle of [the deposit],“
Capstick points out. “So if you go upstream of the oil sands
development projects, you will see—on a hot day, for
example—you can see the oil actually seeping out of the river banks,
out into that water.”
As for water level concerns, Capstick adds that the government has very
stringent regulations in place about how much water industry can take out
of the river.
“It’s actually limited on a week-to-week basis based on how
much water is in the river, and when levels are at their lowest—which
is typically in the winter months—we can limit industry back
significantly on the amount of water that they can take. And we put that
regulation in place to ensure that the ecosystem is protected downstream of
the Athabasca.”
As Scott points out, though, independent studies have found serious flaws
with the way the government conducts its monitoring and its assessments of
environmental impact. He points to research done by University of Alberta
ecologists Kevin Timoney and David Schindler—among others—that
has shown that industry is indeed having a significant effect on water
quality and the environment.
Scott adds that while the issues surrounding the Athabasca River and the
tar sands are the easiest to use as an example, the Keepers of the Water
are concerned about other rivers and industrial projects as well.
Coal-fuelled power plants, the recently proposed nuclear power plants and
several massive damming projects that are currently being planned are among
the other projects that pose a huge danger to Alberta’s
watersheds—not just the Athabasca River, but the Peace and the Slave
Rivers as well. He wishes that the government would force industry to find
more sustainable ways of using these resources, or encourage the use of
more sustainable power sources like solar, wind and geothermal.
“The governments seem to think [the oil’s] going to go bad,” Scott muses. “But it’s already been in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. So why do we have to develop, all of a sudden, all of it in such a short time frame? I don’t know the answer to that.
“I have friends who are geologists, and a bit of geology background
myself, and it seems that the stuff isn’t going to go bad in the
ground. So why is there such a hurry?” V
Wed, Aug 13 - Sun, Aug17
Keepers of the Water III: Water is Boss!
Fort Chipewyan
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