I could hardly believe my eyes looking out the window of the small plane flying me from Fort McMurray to Fort Chipewyan in northern Alberta. The route parallels the Athabasca River running north above the boreal forest.
Author
- Allan Greer
Professor Emeritus of History, McGill University
But there is as much brown as green here; the land is covered in a patchwork of torn-up ground where bitumen is being mined by gigantic excavators. From 4,500 feet above all you can see is desolation in every direction.
The visible devastation ends before the plane finally swoops down over the western end of Lake Athabasca, where the Peace and Athabasca rivers join to form one of the world’s largest and most biologically rich freshwater deltas.
Prime Minister Mark Carney recently listed the proposed Pacific Link pipeline as a ” project of national interest .” The pipeline – running from Bruderheim, Alta., to Delta, British Columbia – is designed to enable Canada to export an additional 100 million barrels of oil from the Athabasca tar sands. This can only exacerbate the environmental devastation caused by centuries of extractivism in the region.
My research on the history of resource extraction in northern Alberta situates oil industry developments there within centuries of activities that have significantly impacted the region’s environment and Indigenous Peoples.
Canada’s extractive history in Athabasca
Fort Chipewyan, home to a mixed population including Dene, Mikisew Cree and Métis communites, sits on Lake Athabasca, near the Athabasca Delta. It has been a permanent settlement since 1788 when the North West Company established a post there , making it the hub of its vast fur-trading empire.
The wetlands of the Athabasca delta provide an ideal habitat for beaver and other fur-bearing animals. Fur traders brought the first resource extraction industry to northern Alberta, and their methods were not gentle.
They offered valuable merchandise on credit and expected Indigenous hunters to repay in beaver pelts at the end of the winter hunting season. Hunters unable to turn in as many furs as the traders said they owed were confronted with beatings at the hands of the numerous voyageurs who wintered at the post. Alternatively, the head trader would kidnap the man’s wife or daughter and auction her off to the highest bidder from among his crew.
This exploitative regime damaged both the people and the ecology of the region. Pressure from the North West Company led to over-hunting and reduced the local beaver population. There were also knock-on effects on fish, wild fowl and moose, creatures that had thrived in the watery environments created by beaver dams
Conditions were becoming desperate by 1821 when the Cree and Dene received a reprieve of sorts. That was when the North West Company was absorbed by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), a tight-fisted but non-violent enterprise, less frantic in its pursuit of furs and profits.
The HBC gave hunters less for their pelts, but they did not force them to hunt one species at unsustainable levels. What ensued was a long period where the Indigenous population subsisted comfortably on a diversified hunting, trapping and fishing regime, while exchanging some furs for the imported goods they needed.
Peace River dams
When the federal government pressed the First Nations to sign Treaty 8 in 1899, it promised undiminished hunting and fishing rights to secure their agreement. The Indigenous nations accepted the treaty on the clear understanding that they could continue living off the land.
By and large, they did just that until the 1960s when BC Hydro erected the first of three dams across the Peace River, dramatically changing the flow of water into the Peace-Athabasca Delta and Lake Athabasca . The health of the wetlands depended on occasional floods, and these were blocked by the dams.
The regulated streams moved more slowly, silting up channels where fish had always flourished. The delta, internationally recognized by UNESCO and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands , was adversely affected, as were the livelihoods of the Indigenous people who lived there.
Arrival of the oil industry
First, bitumen was dug directly from the Earth in gargantuan excavations, then deeper deposits were tapped by drilling down and shooting steam through pipes to melt the tar and separate it from the surrounding sand. Both techniques consume immense amounts of water and natural gas. The scale of these operations and the resources they consume boggles the imagination.
Apart from their astronomical greenhouse gas emissions, they spread pollution through the air, affecting the health of the people and other living creatures of Lake Athabasca . Perhaps the most distressing effect of the tarsands industry is on the waters that flow downstream to the Athabasca delta .
Over the years, the industry has accumulated over a trillion litres of oily, toxin-filled wastewater, which it stores in immense reservoirs called “tailings ponds.”
There has long been seepage into the Athabasca. Many of the “ponds” are almost full, and some oil companies have proposed treating and dumping this chemical stew into the river . A better solution would be to stop filling the ponds, but that’s unlikely to be considered by governments hell-bent on increasing production.
The national interest seems to be defined as the enhancement of corporate profits, whatever the cost to disempowered people and environments of the North. After more than 200 years of exploitation, the life-sustaining forests and wetlands of the Athabasca Delta are still being treated as a sacrifice zone.
With the government’s recent announcement, it appears a habitat of numerous animals, maintained by Indigenous nations for centuries, will continue to matter less than corporate profits.
