Beaver Lake Cree Case Unveils Flaws in Environmental Review Process
In the 1980s, essential oil companies looked to the Arctic making it plans to drill in environmentally sensitive areas like Lancaster Sound. The sound is icebound intended for much of the year, but in the course of its brief summer months, it provides near constant sunlight, giving habitat for birds, striper and mammals to grow. Fossil fuel exploration in addition to development would threaten this entire web of everyday living.
For a Nature of Things telly episode called "Arctic Oil", I surveyed a spokesman for Panarctic, Christian Louboutin Sale Clearance one of several companies that wanted to drill in this particular unforgiving environment. Pressing his pen onto a map of the planned site, he said the environmental effects of a single test well had been insignificant, less than the impact with the dot. He was probably right.
For a program within the proposed Great Whale Dam in To the north Quebec, Hydro Quebec's CEO showed me a roadmap and offered a similar point: Although the dam would flood countless hectares, considering the massive size of the largely uninhabited north, that it was a small area. Again, he could have been right, in a limited sense. But while the human population was sparse, I discovered the area as fully filled by countless plants Buy Supra Canada and animals that had evolved to thrive because specific location, and people who received lived there for thousands of years.
This illustrates a fundamental flaw in the environmental assessment procedure: It focuses on each offered development as something that stands alone. But an individual well or dam is not separate and also isolated from its surroundings air flow, water, plants and animals Louis Vuitton Shoes Toronto pay no awareness of our imposed, artificial borders.
We only have limited idea of the exquisite ways in which all the things on Earth is interconnected. Think environmental assessments had been executed before we sprayed DDT on to open fields or covered up spray cans using CFCs. We didn't know about biomagnification or chlorine degradation of the ozone stratum until long after these systems were approved. This is a standard problem. We can't anticipate lasting consequences of any major technology if we are ignorant of how the planet works and too excited to invest the time and effort to learn more by scientific research.
A second defect while in the EA process is the case simply by case examination of projects as if there were no collective effects. In Alberta, energy review snowboards rubber stamp proposals so that you can drill wells. Again, each individual well might have a tiny relation to surroundings, but wells drag a lot with them, including seismic collections, electrical wires and paths that later entice predators and adventurers in 4wd vehicles.
A lawsuit launched with the Beaver Lake Cree Nation, described by Carol Linnitt in a DesmogBlog article, demonstrates the problem. The Beaver Lake people are Abercrombie And Fitch Canada Outlet suing the federal and provincial governments to get failing to uphold indigenous proper rights, guaranteed by treaties as well as Constitution, to fish, look, trap, and gather plant life and medicines. The BLCN demands that "cumulative impacts" of the Alberta tar glass beads are destroying activities nations are legally bound to shield.
BLCN lands cover an area how big the Switzerland and overlap the black sands. The territory currently yields Nike Air Force One Canada 560,000 barrels involving oil a day. Industry wishes to raise that to 1.6 000 0000. BLCN land already has 35,000 oil and gas sites, 7,700 kilometres of seismic strains, 4,028 kilometres of pipe lines and 948 kilometres of street. Traditional territory has been created into a patchwork quilt, using wild land reduced to be able to small pieces between highways, pipes and wires, threatening animals like woodland caribou which can't adapt to these makes use of.
As Alberta scientist David Schindler while others point out, provincial and federal government applications monitoring the impacts connected with tar sands development in air, water and property are so desultory that the data people collect are essentially pointless. This echoes the federal united state's evasive approach to climate change. The concept seems to be that if proper research aren't conducted, we won't master what's happening, so we can pay no attention to any problems. That won't be able to go on.
The BLCN court case makes us look at the impact of increase in a cumulative, holistic way. As BCLN lawyer Jack Woodward claimed, the case "is based on protection with the entire ecosystem." If you don't take that perspective, your hacking away with little cuts will destroy your underpinnings of the Mont Blanc Pen Canada whole system.
