As a songwriter, Neil Young is known for his poetic turns of phrase. He has, after all, seen the needle and the damage done. So, it’s not surprising that when describing Alberta’s oilsands, he compared them to the site of an atomic explosion.
“There’s no way to describe it, so I described it as Hiroshima, which was basically pretty mellow compared to what’s going on out there [in the oilsands],” said Young at a news conference in Toronto on Sunday in advance of the first of four concerts to raise money for a First Nations legal fight against the oilsands.
Young is certainly right that there is nothing particularly pretty about Alberta’s oilsands operations. Huge open-pit mines look like an excavation project as conducted by an asteroid strike. Even the less invasive in-situ method involves burning massive amounts of natural gas to turn water into steam that is injected underground to free the bitumen.
Not only does the process release large amounts of carbon dioxide, making the industry the fastest-growing source of greenhouse-gas emissions in Canada, it disturbs the land with networks of cutlines that from the air make the forest look like a waffle iron.
The oilsands operations look like many things, none of them pretty. However, they are not Hiroshima in 1945 after the atomic bomb. Young’s analogy — especially when he says Hiroshima was “mellow” in comparison to the oilsands — is hyperbole that trivializes the deaths of more than 100,000 people who perished in the Japanese city. Some First Nations downstream from the oilsands have complained about higher rates of cancer and other diseases (which the provincial government disputes), but even the staunchest critics of the industry haven’t blamed it for the deaths of 100,000 people.
But then, Young is a poet, not an epidemiologist.
Raising the spectre of Hiroshima certainly grabs your attention more than quoting scientific papers that, for example, raise questions about the impact of the oilsands on wildlife by concluding “co-exposure of fish to arsenic and benzoapyrene can increase rates of genotoxicity eight to 18 times above rates observed after exposure to either carcinogen alone.” Try putting that to music.
Young’s “Honour the Treaties” concert tour of four Canadian cities makes it sound as if all First Nations are against the oilsands. They’re not.
Some First Nations people have learned to make the oilsands work for them through jobs and investments.
The oilsands company Syncrude calls itself the largest employer of aboriginal people in Canada and has conducted $1.7 billion worth of business deals with aboriginal companies since 1992.
The Fort McKay Group of Companies, for example, is among the country’s most successful aboriginal business ventures with $100 million a year in revenues. That’s not to say the oilsands is the employer of first choice for First Nations; it’s just that there are no other options. In the pragmatic words of Jim Boucher, chief of the Fort McKay First Nations: “I think our community is benefiting from oilsands development, but we do so because there are no other economic opportunities.”
The exploitation of the oilsands is a complicated business whichever way you look at it. Saying it looks like Hiroshima, though, does nothing to encourage a meaningful discussion on how we should be exploiting the resource.
Having said that, the oilsands industry has nobody to blame for its public-relations black eye except itself. Well, other than the Alberta government.
It was the Alberta government that opened the door to unfettered expansion of the industry with little environmental oversight. It was the Alberta government, under Ralph Klein, that dismissed climate change as the fault of “dinosaur farts.” It was the Alberta government, under Ed Stelmach, that refused to put its foot on the brake of bigger, faster oilsands expansion.
The government, under Alison Redford, has made plans to improve environmental monitoring of the oilsands, but it is change moving at the pace of bitumen in January. For those upset with Young’s simplistic and cantankerous attack on the oilsands, the real culprit is a provincial government that for too long ignored or ridiculed the voices of opponents.
It’s not surprising that in an attempt to be heard, those voices have become a little shrill.
