It's a really cool piece from National Public Radio about some spontaneous oil and gas activism in the States on the part of a student named Tim DeChristopher. He basically walked into a land auction and started bidding on parcels that were set up for oil and gas developers in Bush's last-ditch fire sale of public lands, driving the price up to reflect the "true cost of oil." He ended up with a bunch of parcels, an angry oil industry, and a bunch of trouble.
Maybe these photos of oil exploration in Northern Alberta, watched FROM the sky, will demonstrate why I feel so strongly about this.
This is what Alberta's Boreal forest and Athabasca river system, breeding ground of songbirds and snowgeese, fish and furbearing animals, are supposed to look like:
This is what they are becoming as we stripmine the Boreal to pull out tar sand and convert it to synthetic crude. That's the real cost of oil!
And now, a more traditional (though no less disturbing) Skywatch Friday vantage point. Northern skies ripple across Mildred Lake, or what used to be a lake but is now a desert of toxic tailings. If you'd like to know more about how it got this way, you can read my previous posts And No Birds Sang and Dig, Baby, Dig.
I hope that on this Skywatch Friday we'll all think about the real cost of oil, and what steps we can take to extract and use it more responsibly.
8 comments:
That is all just SO WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Your views are very nice although they make me sad too.
How funny that I reached this at the same time I was talking about strip mining with the hubby.
I love your sky view shots.
Grammy
Missouri, USA
Wow is all I can say. Thanks for sharing.
Have a great weekend!
Guy
Regina In Pictures
...and what we do to the land affects the sky and so on, and so on....
Edgy and clever cousin 3. It certainly contradicts the old saying that What you see( or know) can't hurt you.
Sickening. Devastation forever, for a one-time return. Who made that deal for all of us?
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