Dispatch from Fort McMurray, AB: Not “Mordor”, but something else

The unearthly ambiance in the skeletal forest which the “Road of Death” runs through was reminding me of a persistent meme: Alberta’s tar sands were like Mordor. Black, foul-smelling industrial works stretching across inconceivable swaths of land.

 

I was then jarred to see that the local newspaper, Connect— featuring “the greatest chess weekend in Fort McMurray” on its cover, presented an editorial called “Mordor”. The editorial celebrates the northern lights, the lushness of the boreal forest, and the joy of spring’s first flowers.

“To sling around the phrase Mordor is a pretty huge insult, and shows a complete lack of understanding of reality,” the editorial charges. “I often wonder about those who level terms such as Mordor at us. I realize it as an attempt to dramatize us, to polarize opinion about us, but are those who use these words and games truly so blind? … Do they not see that this place is more than an industry? … Or perhaps they cannot see what they choose not to see, and they see only dark, and scary, and grim. They see Mordor where we see wonder.”

This brought me back to the coalfields in Saskatchewan, and the dilemma of seeing: do we choose to see the flowers that have been planted, or the coal plant looming behind them? Mines on the horizon, or the picnic table in front of us? No, Fort McMurray is not Mordor. Mordor didn’t have image management.

Fort McMurray, on the other hand, had a Community Image Summit which “helped encourage ambassadors and key messaging”, according to an article in the glossy magazine YMM.This was version 3.0 of the annual summit, which brings together the Twitteratti to message out “embrace the beauty of Wood Buffalo” and “a land of opportunity for all.”

“This year’s installment focused on taking the Wood Buffalo message — why it is a great place to live, work, and play — far and wide. And you can help too!” The summit was organized in partnership between the municipality, the local college, and the Oil Sands Developers Group. The Executive Director of the Oil Sands Developers Group facilitated, saying “I’m of the strong belief we’ll eradicate the (negative) image by making it obsolete not in PR boardrooms but through Fort McMurray’s people.” Smart guy.

Mordor would be much too easy; reality is of course more complicated. Mordor’s capital didn’t have what may be the largest lesiure and recreation facility in Canada, funded by oil sand developer Suncor, or a soon-to-open $127 million entertainment complex by Shell. Mordor isn’t blanketed with flowers, flags, and randomly placed benches in awkward spots where no one will ever sit in a rapid beautification effort. This is something else entirely.

The tar sands are a landscape where the companies try to rehabilitate the land and install buffalo, complete with buffalo viewing points. Soft thuds of the gas-fired sonic cannons go off at intervals, to warn the birds off from the toxic tailings ponds. A more recent addition to the avian monitoring tech are the robotic falcons, part of the Acceptir Bird Protection Radar System. The “animatronic falcons”, aka Bird Deterrent Modules, light up and flap and screech when the radar detects an incoming real bird. Expensive defense-industry grade solution, but likely cheaper than the $3 million dollar fine leveled at Syncrude in 2008 for 1,600 duck deaths.

The few other extraction sites I’ve visited— a tin mine in Lllallgua, Bolivia; the oil fields on the Absheron Peninsula— didn’t have robotic eagles, or fines for dead wildlife. There was no spin on the wastelands. People lived among the tailings, hung their laundry in the oilfields . This does not mean the tar sands are okay because they have to make elaborate public relations efforts and install robot falcons. What it means is that the tactics in dealing with them can be different, perhaps have to be different.

Nature: are we or aren’t we a part of it?

It’s not easy to make industrial projects like this seem benign, but the groups are likely employing some of the top talent in the messaging business. From “Fast Facts” in Fort McMurray Today’s special issue on Extracting Energy:

“The oilsands’ greenhouse gas emissions were about 48-million metric tonnes in 2010. Emissions from the last World Cup in South Africa in 2010 were estimated at 2.75-million metric tonnes, not factoring in emissions from infrastructure projects.” So really, the tar sands are just like having an extra 16.5 World Cups per year.

(The same publication, however, features an interesting article titled “Owners of the oil sands,” which cites a statistic from ForestEthics that 71 % of all oilsands production is owned by non-Canadian owners. “Canadian companies like Husky Energy, MEG Energy, and Imperial Oil are more than 85% owned by foreign shareholders.” This is one often under-reported issue, in light of the Harper administrations’ rhetoric that tar sands extraction is in Canada’s national interest. )

More skillful messaging can be found in the Oil Sands Discovery Center, which introduces kids to the tar sands through a video in which a professor gets “improved” into a virtual version of himself… dissolving the nature / human binary from the get-go. It is further eroded when we learn that humans are just like beavers: “When you start thinking about it, beavers need a lot of boreal forest.” They move 250 cubic meters of material for their lodges, and each adult eats about 1.5 pounds of trees per day. Basically it’s the same as us using the tar sands. On the one hand, humans are a part of nature, using resources like any other species.

On the other hand, “nature” is shown by Syncrude to be a fixed state which land can be “returned” to after they borrow it.

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