AndyH
Well-known member
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/04/19/oil.sands.extreme.energy/index.html?hpt=C2
Fort McKay, Alberta (CNN) -- Celina Harpe was 7 when her grandfather made a prediction that would forever change her life.
"I won't see it, I'm too old now, but it's going to be really bad," she recalls him saying on a warm summer night after returning from a moose hunt. The two were standing on a hill that overlooks the birch-and-spruce-lined river here in far northwest Canada.
"You see these plants and this water we've got? That's going to be all polluted. You're going to have to buy water -- and water is life.
"Mother Earth is going to be all torn up."
His statement felt almost ludicrous at the time -- after all, the land seemed so infinite. Decades would pass before Harpe began to put any stock in those words. Now 72, she has watched oil companies surround her village with city-sized strip mines that look like something out of Mordor from "Lord of the Rings" -- with gas flares, smokestacks and the constant boom of propane cannons on the horizon. The explosions, which sound like mortar fire, are meant to scare off migratory birds. An oily death awaits them if they land in the area's toxic industrial lakes, byproducts of the mining process.