Drawing a Line in the Tar Sands
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- Published on Sunday, 09 November 2014 20:44
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1053 .... November 10, 2014
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Drawing a Line in the Tar Sands
Adapted from A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice, edited by Toban Black, Stephen D'Arcy, Tony Weis, and Joshua Kahn Russell (Between the Lines, 2014).
Of all possible futures, the least likely is one in which business as usual continues unabated. Peoples’ movements will either succeed in transforming our economic and political systems to build a new world, or we will burn with the old one.
Our title invokes a metaphor of uncompromising resistance because the tar sands are an environmental injustice of the highest order. A ‘Line in the Sand’ means: it has gone this far, but no further. We are confronting an industry that is worth trillions of dollars, and is driven by some... of the largest corporations on Earth, which have no goals that are any nobler than maximizing short-term profits and growth. The fight to stop this industry is clearly one of the epic challenges of our age, and only serious and sustained mobilization can turn the tide.
The Athabasca River Basin in western Canada contains one of the world's largest reserves of fossil energy in the form of bitumen, a tar-like substance that must be heavily refined to separate oil from sand and clay -- hence the name tar sands. The world's largest industrial landscape now sits atop the Athabasca tar sands, where the industry is wreaking devastation on the homelands of Cree, Dene, and Métis peoples, immense tracts of boreal forest, and the habitat of many animal species.