by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 15, 2012 | ACTION, Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying, Mining & Drilling
By Shawn McCarthy / The Globe and Mail
Ottawa is headed for a legal showdown with British Columbia first nations if it insists on proceeding with the Northern Gateway pipeline, the leader of the Yinka Dene Alliance warns.
Chief Jackie Thomas, of the Saik’uz First Nation, was part of a delegation in Ottawa Tuesday meeting with opposition members of Parliament to build support for their anti-pipeline stand. She said her group will pursue a legal challenge if Ottawa approves the pipeline over their objections.
Along with other first-nation communities, the Dene alliance has taken a firm stand against Enbridge Inc.’s plan to build a crude oil pipeline across their land to transport oil-sands bitumen to the B.C. coast for export to Asia.
“We will defend our rights, no matter what bully tactics the federal government throws at us,” she said. “Our decision has been made: Enbridge will never be allowed in our lands.”
Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver has lashed out at opponents to the Gateway pipeline, saying they are undermining the country’s national interest and oppose all resource development.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made it a key priority of his government to diversify oil and natural gas exports beyond the traditional U.S. market to target growing Asian markets.
Ms. Thomas said the Saik’uz community is not anti-development. It is working with other mining, forestry and energy companies on projects. It is partnering with Apache Corp., a U.S. oil company, on a pipeline to feed a liquefied natural gas plant in Kitimat, which would also be aimed at exporting energy to Asia.
But the community feels an oil pipeline would be far more risky, and far more disruptive to the salmon fisheries and other species.
“They can’t attempt to offset the water needs of my community, the salmon that goes in the water, and the animals and plants on the land that are in jeopardy,” Ms. Thomas said.
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Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 28, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Ecowatch
Each year, mining companies dump more than 180 million tonnes of hazardous mine waste into rivers, lakes, and oceans worldwide, threatening vital bodies of water with toxic heavy metals and other chemicals poisonous to humans and wildlife, according to report released on Feb. 28 by two leading mining reform groups.
An investigation by Earthworks and MiningWatch Canada identifies the world’s waters that are suffering the greatest harm or at greatest risk from the dumping of mine waste. The report, Troubled Waters: How Mine Waste Dumping is Poisoning our Oceans, Rivers, and Lakes, also names the leading companies that continue to use this irresponsible method of disposal.
Mine processing wastes, or tailings, can contain as many as three dozen dangerous chemicals including arsenic, lead, mercury, and cyanide. The report found that the mining industry has left mountains of such waste from Alaska and Canada to Norway and Southeast Asia.
“Polluting the world’s waters with mine tailings is unconscionable, and damage it causes is largely irreversible,” said Payal Sampat, international program director for Washington, D.C.-based Earthworks. “Mining companies must stop using our oceans, rivers, and lakes as dumping grounds for their toxic waste.”
The report says some multinational mining companies are guilty of a double standard.
“Some companies dump their mining wastes into the oceans of other countries, even though their home countries have bans or restrictions against it,” said Catherine Coumans, research coordinator for Ottawa-based MiningWatch Canada. “We found that of the world’s largest mining companies, only one has policies against dumping in rivers and oceans, and none against dumping in lakes.”
There are safer methods of disposing of mine tailings, including returning the waste to the emptied mine. In other places, dumping of any kind is too risky. No feasible technology exists to remove and treat mine tailings from oceans; even partial cleanup of tailings dumped into rivers or lakes is prohibitively expensive.
“We are really suffering because of the millions of tons of mine waste that Barrick Gold dumps in and around our river system every year,” said Mark Ekepa, chairman of the Porgera Landowners’ Association. “Our rivers run red, our houses have become unstable, we have lost fresh drinking water and places to put our food gardens, and sometimes children get carried away by the waste.”
A number of nations, including the U.S., Canada, and Australia, have had restrictions on dumping mine tailings in natural bodies of water. Even these national regulations, however, are being eroded by amendments, exemptions, and loopholes that allow destructive dumping in lakes and streams. Even though U.S. law long banned lake dumping, in 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Coeur D’Alene Mines of Idaho to dump 7 million tonnes of tailings from the Kensington Gold Mine in Alaska into Lower Slate Lake, filling the lake and destroying all life in it.
In Canada, Taseko Mines Ltd. is proposing to reclassify Little Fish Lake and Fish Creek in British Columbia as a tailings impoundment for its proposed Prosperity Gold-Copper Mine. The watershed is home to grizzly bear and highly productive rainbow trout, and is an important cultural area for the Tsilhqot’in People. After being refused environmental approvals for the past 17 years, the company has re-applied with plans to build a tailings impoundment to dispose of 480 million tons of tailings and 240 million tons of waste rock in the basin of the creek and lake, burying the ecosystems under a hundred meters of waste.
From Ecowatch
Photo by Dominik Vanyi on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 20, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling
By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times
The prime minister is talking about being “held hostage” by U.S. interests. Radio ads blare, “Stand up to this foreign bully.” A Twitter account tells of a “secret plan to target Canada: exposed!”
Could this be Canada? The cheerful northern neighbor: supplier of troops to unpleasant U.S.-led foreign conflicts, reliable trade partner, ally in holding terrorism back from North America’s shores, not to mention the No. 1 supplier of America’s oil?
Canada’s recent push for the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the nation’s West Coast, where it would be sent to China, has been marked by uncharacteristic defiance. And it first flared in the brouhaha over the bananas.
Responding to urgings from U.S. environmentalists, Ohio-based Chiquita Brands International Inc. announced in November that it would join a growing number of companies trying to avoid fuel derived from Canada’s tar sands, whose production is blamed for accelerating climate change and leveling boreal forests.
Then in January, President Obama abruptly vetoed a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, Canada’s $7-billion project to deliver oil across the U.S. Midwest to the Texas Gulf Coast , which environmentalists have long opposed.
Mix in a touch of nationalism, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s view that Canada needs to hedge its oil bets by diversifying its export markets, and the fight was on — not only with the neighbor to the south, but also among Canadians.
“Canada is not what it used to be,” said Todd Paglia, executive director ForestEthics, an environmental group that has been calling for the international boycotts on tar sands oil. “It’s hard to believe, but it’s tilting toward becoming more of an authoritarian petro state, positioning itself as a resource colony for China.”
On the other side, a lobbying group pushing Canada as an alternative to unstable and sometimes unsavory oil producers in the Middle East ramped up a boycott of its own, this one targeting Chiquita bananas.
“Stand up to this foreign bully. Don’t buy Chiquita bananas,” said a radio spot by the group, which calls itself EthicalOil.org, complaining about what it called Chiquita’s record of supporting terrorist groups in South America. A Twitter profile was set up for @bloodbananas to expose the allegedly hypocritical campaign against Canada.
Over the last few weeks, a two-agency review panel has convened the first in a long round of hearings on Northern Gateway, pointedly described as a pipeline that won’t deliver much oil to the U.S. Instead, it will allow Canada to end its sole dependence on American buyers for its most important export by opening up markets in Asia, and allow it to attract the badly needed foreign investment to develop the sands.
“I think what’s happened around the Keystone is a wake-up call, the degree to which we are dependent or possibly held hostage to decisions in the United States, and especially decisions that may be made for very bad political reasons,” Harper, whose government has labeled pipeline opponents as foreign-funded “radicals,” told CBC television in January.
The $5.5-billion Northern Gateway project, which would carry 525,000 barrels a day of crude 731 miles from a town near Edmonton through the Rocky Mountains to a new port on the British Columbia coast, has long been in the works as a companion to Keystone XL.
But with Keystone’s recent turmoil in the U.S., Northern Gateway has risen to new prominence as a defiant Plan B for a nation increasingly aggressive in combating international hurdles, whether it’s greenhouse gas treaties, low-carbon fuel standards or U.S. presidential politics.
“There has always been very strong support by the Harper government, by the province of Alberta and by the oil industry for the Northern Gateway pipeline. But there’s no question that for all three of those entities, that urgency increased dramatically with the apparent defeat of Keystone XL,” said George Hoberg, a political scientist and professor of forestry at the University of British Columbia.
“The Harper government’s view is that, especially in the Obama years, the U.S. is becoming a less reliable partner for the oil sands.”
Officials at Enbridge Inc., which is proposing the western pipeline, say it has been in the works for nearly a decade, though its need has become more apparent as the economy in Asia has boomed while the American one, which until now has consumed 99% of Canadian oil exports, has slowed. By some estimates, Canada has the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world, with 175 billion barrels.
“It’s an attempt to respond to the reality that the geographical location of the demand is changing,” company spokesman Paul Stanway said, though he said the U.S., which imports more than 2 million barrels a day of Canadian oil, will remain the country’s biggest export market. Chinese state companies have more than $16 billion invested in Canadian energy development and are helping fund Northern Gateway to ship their oil.
The Northern Gateway pipeline faces its toughest opposition in Canada. More than 4,000 people have registered to speak at hearings over the next several months — more than for any project in the nation’s history.
Debate is especially intense here in British Columbia. Although some residents are eager for the tax revenue and thousands of local jobs the pipeline could bring, many who live along the corridor and in many First Nations territories, homelands of Canada’s aboriginals, are mobilizing to fight it.
Crucial are the streams and tributaries of the Fraser and Skeena rivers that lie in the pipeline’s path — possibly the greatest salmon rivers on Earth.
Along the coast, there are fears that piloting more than 200 oil tankers a year through the fiords of Douglas Channel and then southward could jeopardize the spectacular coastline of the famed Great Bear rain forest, full of azure waters and rocky waterfalls.
“We truly live in one of the most beautiful places on Earth. We live right at the start of the Fraser River watershed, and if we have a spill, it will devastate everything from here straight to the Pacific Ocean in Vancouver,” said Bev Playfair, until recently a municipal councilor in Fort St. James, where a hearing on the pipeline this month was preceded by dozens of townspeople marching down the main street with signs such as “Say No to Enbridge.”
The most formidable opposition comes from the First Nations of British Columbia, most of which, unlike those in other provinces, have never signed treaties with the federal government and thus have never relinquished title to their historic lands.
“We have the ability to go to court in Canada and say, ‘What you are proposing violates the Constitution of Canada.’ And that’s the trump card in all of this,” said Art Sterritt, director of the Coastal First Nations’ Great Bear Initiative.
On the Saik’uz Reserve, near the town of Vanderhoof, schoolchildren spent part of the afternoon before the pipeline hearing making signs and sitting quietly as tribal leaders explained the project and why it must be stopped.
“You’ve got to understand that it’s a huge, multibillion-dollar project that they’re trying to put through our lands. And it’s going to be a tough fight, because they have so much money. They probably have 10 lawyers to our one,” Geraldine Thomas-Flurer, the Saik’uz First Nation’s liaison on the Northern Gateway issue, told the students.
Tribal Chief Jackie Thomas has held meetings and written letters pointing out Enbridge’s record on accidents, including the spill of 810,000 gallons of oil from a pipeline in Michigan in 2010, much of which flowed 30 miles downstream into the Kalamazoo River. Enbridge has spent $700 million so far and workers are still trying to clean it up.
“It’s going to be a war,” she predicted of the fight ahead. “The only question is, who’s going to draw the first blood?”
From Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-canada-pipeline-20120220,0,4067907,full.story
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 19, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change
By Bob Berwyn, Summit Voice
Forest Service scientists say huge Alaska tracts of yellow-cedar trees have been dying because their roots are freezing during cold weather in late winter and early spring, when there’s no snow to protect the roots.
Most climate models suggest that coastal Alaska will less snow but a persistence of periodic cold weather events in the future.
Yellow-cedar is a culturally and economically valuable tree in southeastern Alaska and adjacent parts of British Columbia. The slow-growing trees can reach 700 to 1,200 years in age. The tree has long been culturally significant to Native Alaskans who use it to make paddles, masks, dishes, and woven items. The wood is also very valuable commercially (for home and boat building) because of its straight grain, durability, and resistance to insects.
Yellow-cedar decline affects about 60 to 70 percent of trees in forests covering 600,000 acres in Alaska and British Columbia.
When snow covers the ground, it protects the shallow roots from extreme soil temperatures. The shallow rooting of yellow-cedar, early spring growth, and its unique vulnerability to freezing injury are all factors in the regional die-off.
A new paper from the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, “Shifting Climate, Altered Niche, and a Dynamic Conservation Strategy for Yellow-Cedar in the North Pacific Coastal Rainforest,” summarizes 30 years of research and offers a framework for a conservation strategy for yellow-cedar in Alaska.
- The complex cause of yellow-cedar decline is related to reduced snow, site and stand characteristics, shallow rooting, and the unique vulnerability of the roots to freezing in low temperatures.
- Low snow levels and poor soil drainage lead to impact root injury and the eventual death of yellow-cedar trees. The tree thrives in wet soils, but its tendency to produce shallow roots to access nitrogen on these sites made it more vulnerable when spring snow levels were reduced by climate warming.
- Yellow-cedar health depends on changing snow patterns, thus locations for appropriate conservation and management activities need to follow the shifting snow patterns on the landscape.
- Some responses to shifting climate are expected to be complex and difficult to anticipate. Long-term multidisciplinary research was needed to determine the true role of climate in the health of yellow-cedar and untangle it from other processes and natural cycles in forests.
Scientists are working with partners in the Alaska Region of the Forest Service to use this new information as the framework for a comprehensive conservation strategy for yellow-cedar in Alaska in the context of a changing climate.
From Summit County Citizens Voice: http://summitcountyvoice.com/2012/02/07/forests-tracing-the-cause-of-yellow-cedar-mortality/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 2, 2011 | Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling
Aboriginal groups in the Canadian Pacific province of British Columbia said on Thursday they had formed a united front to oppose all exports of crude oil from the Alberta tar sands through their territories.
The declaration is another political blow to the Canadian energy sector and Canada’s right-of-center Conservative government after Washington decided last month to delay approving a pipeline carrying oil sands crude to the Gulf Coast.
It adds to the uncertainty over Enbridge Inc’s planned C$5.5 billion Northern Gateway oil pipeline, which would move 525,000 barrels a day of tar sands-derived oil 1,177 km (731 miles) to the Pacific port of Kitimat, British Columbia.
Aboriginal groups, also known as First Nations, say they fear the consequences of a spill from the pipeline, which would pass through some of Canada’s most spectacular mountain landscape. They also oppose the idea of shipping oil from British Columbia ports.
“First Nations, whose unceded territory encompasses the entire coastline of British Columbia, have formed a united front, banning all exports of tar sands crude oil through their territories,” more than 60 aboriginal groups said in a statement.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper says the Northern Gateway – which would open up a new supply route to Asia – is important for Canada, especially after the United States delay to approval of TransCanada Corp’s Keystone XL pipeline.
Washington announced the delay after a high-profile protest campaign against oil sands crude, which requires large amounts of energy to produce.
Aboriginal opposition is one of the biggest risks to Enbridge in its efforts to move Northern Gateway forward. The company has offered native groups equity stakes in the pipeline as well as large sums of money for community development.
Enbridge spokesman Paul Stanway said the affair had to be handled by government and regulators rather than by the company. “This is a ban that would have serious implications for the entire province of British Columbia,” he said.
But groups such as the Yinka Dene Alliance and Coastal First Nations have said they will not support the project under any circumstances.
“We have banned oil pipelines and tankers using our laws, and we will defend our decision using all the means at our disposal,” said Chief Jackie Thomas of Saik’uz First Nation, a member of the Yinka Dene Alliance.
Hearings into the Northern Gateway pipeline are due to start in January 2012 and could drag on for years. Even if Enbridge gets approval, native groups are likely to appeal the case through Canada’s sluggish courts system.
Thursday’s declaration could also affect a planned expansion of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners’ Trans Mountain oil pipeline, which runs from Alberta to Vancouver. The company is seeking commitments from potential shippers for the project.
“We respect First Nations territories and we have always and will continue to extend an open invitation to First Nations along our pipeline and near our facilities to meet with us when and if our expansion plans move forward,” said a company spokesman.
Federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, who strongly backs the Northern Gateway, said interested groups could make their views known to the review panel.
“It is a strategic objective of this government to diversify our energy exports. However, all regulatory processes will be followed before any final decision is made,” he said in an e-mail.
From Reuters
