A Response to the Mineable Oil Sands Strategy
14.12.2005
Read the report (PDF, opens in new window)
The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Edmonton, and the Federation of Alberta Naturalists today released a report on proposed development in the province's oil sands. The report provides a critique of the government's Mineable Oil Sands Strategy and makes recommendations for policy change.
"Now that the provincial treasury is bursting at the seams, and skilled labour is in critically short supply, the idea that damage to Alberta's environment must be accelerated for the public good seems completely absurd. Yet, that is exactly the message embodied in the new Mineable Oil Sands Strategy," says Rick Schneider, Conservation Director with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Edmonton.
To its credit, the Mineable Oil Sands Strategy makes no attempt to hide the fact that mining of oil sands is fundamentally incompatible with maintaining forest health. The critical flaw in the Strategy is that it contains no provisions for offsetting the ecological damage that will be done. Instead, it makes the untenable assumption that the damage will be temporary. "The bald fact is that oil sands mining will produce the equivalent of a glaciation event across nearly 3,000 km 2 of Alberta's boreal forest. Reclamation efforts can get the process started, but nature will have to do most of the heavy lifting, and that will take time - hundreds of years before anything resembling the existing forest ecosystem is again found in this area," says Glen Semenchuk, Executive Director of the Federation of Alberta Naturalists. In effect, we are passing an environmental debt on to future generations.
The conservation groups are calling on the government to slow the rate of development by raising royalties, to explore alternatives to mining such as electrical heating, and to implement conservation offset measures that balance the environmental harm being done in the mining region with environ-mentally positive steps taken elsewhere. For example, there are several large sites in northern Alberta with high ecological value that do not have underlying oil reserves. These sites should be established as new protected areas, providing huge conservation gains with essentially no conflict with the petroleum sector. There is also great potential for implementing new low-impact industrial practices and integrated planning to reduce the impact of petroleum development outside of surface mineable region.
