Letter from Across the Pipeline
Dear Ethan,
At the risk of being publicly humiliated, I’m going to write you a letter. And I’m going to post it online for everyone to see.
I’m hurtling up Highway 63 towards tar sands ground zero, a couple days ahead of this Saturday’s Healing Walk. About 1700 km south, you’re at the other end of the proposed path of Keystone XL. When I read last week that Obama had approved the final permits for construction of the southern leg of the pipeline, my heart sank. Last summer in DC, when all 1,252 of us were arrested in front of the White House and after the huge momentum that followed, I thought for a minute that it wouldn’t come to this. But it has.
After two months up here, I have a pretty good sense of the players in this game. I hesitate to say “game,” but let’s face it: there are very clear winners and very clear losers. The winners, obviously, are the multinationals who rake in the big bucks; the biggest, actually, since oil is the most profitable industry… ever. And the losers are the First Nations and other people on whose land is being built a mining operation on such scale it would make you gape in wonder.
But there’s this whole gray area in the middle, too—people who are winners in some ways and losers, perhaps, in the long term. I’ve met good, generous, smart people who work for Big Oil. They’re certainly not evil. Many of them say that they’re more effective changemakers on the inside than on the outside. And then there are the men who work in the oil patch, living in dismal work camps but making more money than you or I have every seen. And some are sending their kids to college with that money. But they’re also living apart from their families, isolated in a bleak landscape that drives many of them to get wasted every night just so that they can forget, for a couple of hours, where they are. I talked to one guy, a musician, who left because he just couldn’t take that bleakness anymore. Are these winners or losers? You tell me.
But it’s not all bad up here, eh? Edmonton’s got the biggest mall in North America. I went yesterday. There’s a big statue of Alberta’s first oil men, right there between the Apple store and the Gap. An homage to the source of Alberta’s wealth in the place where people go to spend it. There’s a nice symmetry.
Meanwhile, just a few hundred kilometers away, members of Cold Lake First Nation sent out an urgent request for solidarity in their effort to resist a deal that has reportedly been struck with an oil company, giving the final go-ahead for tar sands mining on their land. A small group of resisters has been camping outside their leaders’ office for over a week now. I hope to meet some of them in person soon— they know that no amount of money is going to compensate for the damage that will be done to their traditional land. Like many others here, they’re rejecting every piece of that whole winner/loser dichotomy. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Sending love from one end of the pipeline to the other,
Kristin
After two months up here, I have a pretty good sense of the players in this game. I hesitate to say “game,” but let’s face it: there are very clear winners and very clear losers. The winners, obviously, are the multinationals who rake in the big bucks; the biggest, actually, since oil is the most profitable industry… ever. And the losers are the First Nations and other people on whose land is being built a mining operation on such scale it would make you gape in wonder.
But there’s this whole gray area in the middle, too—people who are winners in some ways and losers, perhaps, in the long term. I’ve met good, generous, smart people who work for Big Oil. They’re certainly not evil. Many of them say that they’re more effective changemakers on the inside than on the outside. And then there are the men who work in the oil patch, living in dismal work camps but making more money than you or I have every seen. And some are sending their kids to college with that money. But they’re also living apart from their families, isolated in a bleak landscape that drives many of them to get wasted every night just so that they can forget, for a couple of hours, where they are. I talked to one guy, a musician, who left because he just couldn’t take that bleakness anymore. Are these winners or losers? You tell me.
But it’s not all bad up here, eh? Edmonton’s got the biggest mall in North America. I went yesterday. There’s a big statue of Alberta’s first oil men, right there between the Apple store and the Gap. An homage to the source of Alberta’s wealth in the place where people go to spend it. There’s a nice symmetry.
Meanwhile, just a few hundred kilometers away, members of Cold Lake First Nation sent out an urgent request for solidarity in their effort to resist a deal that has reportedly been struck with an oil company, giving the final go-ahead for tar sands mining on their land. A small group of resisters has been camping outside their leaders’ office for over a week now. I hope to meet some of them in person soon— they know that no amount of money is going to compensate for the damage that will be done to their traditional land. Like many others here, they’re rejecting every piece of that whole winner/loser dichotomy. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Sending love from one end of the pipeline to the other,
Kristin
