Alien's-eye-view of hellhole on Earth

https://vimeo.com/39298276
Would you allow this to happen to the land you love, just so a few oil CEOs and their political puppets could laugh all the way to the bank? Would a true patriot commit such an atrocious crime against his own country? Has anyone cast a passing thought for the animals who used to call this place home?

Anthony Marr and Taina Ketola flew over the vast Alberta tar sands mining area surrounding Fort McMurray in a Cessna 172 for 3 hours to see the environmental devastation for themselves and share what they saw with the rest of the world.

At one point, they were forced by a thunderstorm to land at the private airfield of the Albion Mine, with a 30 mph cross-wind, which the pilot confessed to be a hair-raising experience, but only after they had seated themselves in the state-of-the-art and very private Albion air terminal. There, they were astonished to see a jetliner land and take off with incoming and outgoing loads of workers. This alone attests to the immense wealth at the oil companies' command and disposal.

Strap yourself in and experience the mind-blowingest flight of your life, 49 eye-opening minutes condensed from about 3 hours of actual mine-hopping flying time. This is not something you can experience in a commercial flight. There is no commercial flight overflying the tar sands mines. No tar sands mine wants its dirty laundry aired out in public, live. So please, be our personal guest.

The general impression is one of vast expanse of poisoned landscape and, wanton and reckless destruction, with zero regard nor respect for anything sacred and priceless - forests, animals, aboriginals, global heating, economic collapse, ecological destruction, mass extinction... - except the almighty $$$.

Canada is a bullish bull in the china shop of her own very delicate environmental integrity, whose "Environment Ministry" is a sham whose function is to justify the Crime against Nature, against Humanity, and against Canada, rather than fight it as by definition it bloody well should.

It is to be noted that only 20% of tar sands extraction is by open-pit-mining, meaning that visible from the air is only 20% of the damage.

Other than the obvious, such as the wholesale "removal" of "overburden" (boreal forests) by the thousands of square kilometers, of special note are the "tailing ponds" dotting the landscape by the hundreds, which are essentially man-made toxic-waste storage LAKES, some so enormous to be visible to the naked eye from space, and one boasting of the third largest dam in the world. None of them is lined, so all of them leak, either down to the aquifer and/or directly into the over-used Athabasca River which drains into Lake Athabasca stridling the Alberta/Saskatchewan border farther north.

These tailing ponds happen to underlie the paths of migratory birds. Their contents are so oily and toxic that no water fowl landing into one can be expected to take off again - consider them having enjoyed their final flight.

The entire Athabascan watershed downstream from the mines has been poisoned - not just for now, but for centuries to come. The poisoned Lake Athabaska produces deformed fish upon which the local Chipewyan people feed, or used to feed, resulting in sky-high cancer rates. Who knows what evils would befall the animals drinking from Lake Athabasca, much less the toxic-cocktail directly from the tailings ponds?

Do the oil companies and the oiled governments care? Sure, one company claims to have "reclaimed" 22% of the land devastated by its gigantic Earth-raping machinery, but critics contend that it is in fact only 0.2%. Of course they have their little PR show-pieces. By the way, though they penalized the doctor who blew the whistle on the cancer epidemic, they did magnanimously provided the Chipewyan people with a cancer ward.

To learn more about these tailing "ponds", just google "tar sands tailings ponds".

If you haven't yet read the blog or viewed the preceding video episodes (at the bottom of this blog), please do so first before viewing this Episode #14-#15-#16. Thank you.


http://youtu.be/L4QZw981two
#13 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hellholes. Topic of this episode: ["Why you?"] This is a question I have pondered upon, but only when global warming gives me a break. It is true that of the 7 billion people in the world, I'm the only person doing what exactly what I'm doing. But then, almost every one on Earth can make this claim for himself/herself. The difference then is not in whether I'm doing something, but in what this something is that I've chosen to do, and this something I've chosen for myself to do has become exactly what I'm doing. So the question becomes, "Why have you chosen global warming to fight?" Of course, the standard answer for "Why you?" is, "If not me, who?" BTW, the scenery of the Albertan Rockies is breath-taking.

If you haven't yet read the blog or viewed the preceding video episodes (at the bottom of this blog), please do so first before viewing this Episode #13 of 17 and the aerial video #14-#15-#16. Thank you.

In 2008, the year after the Great Melt of Arctic sea ice in 2007, I published my second book [Homo sapiens Save Your Earth], co-authored with climate change expert Dr. Peter Carter, with a chapter contributed by Taina Ketola .

On July 1 (Canada Day), 2008, I left my home city of Vancouver, BC, Canada, in my car, aiming for Washington DC, USA, to speak at the Animal Rights National Conference scheduled for July 16-19. As with every year since 2004 when I spoke at the conference for the first time, I designed a speaking tour around it. I call these tours my Compassion for Animals Road Expeditions (CARE tours). They are not 2-week stints. CARE-1 covered 44 states in the 7.5 months spanning Sep 2003 and Apr 2004, and CARE-7 covered 40 states in the 7 months spanning Apr and Nov 2010.

The first stop was Edmonton, Alberta, 1160km/721mi from Vancouver via British Columbia's Hwy-5 and Alberta's Hwy-16. From Edmonton, I headed directly due north by a treacherous 441km/274mi 2-lane road to Sodom and Gomorrah, I mean, Fort McMurray, where the infamous Tar Sands mines were headquartered. Total driving distance from Vancouver - 1600km/995mi, driving time 14 hours non-stop.

Taina volunteered to come on this leg to serve as an interviewer in the car and operate one of the two cameras to be used on the plane while overflying the tar sands hellhole. We broke the drive up into 2 days, with an involuntary stay at Mt. Robson forced by an avalanche not far down the highway.

The purpose of this trip was first to see, and smell, the infamous tar sands for myself, and second, to photo/video-document the 6 hellholes ("mines") for the whole world to see. We chartered a Cessna 172 to overfly them for two hours (which ended up to be 4 hours) on July 3, a windy day complete with thunder storms which, at one point, forced us to land in a 25mph cross wind at the airfield of one of the mines, shortly before a JETLINER touched down, disgorging a plane-load of robotic workers (see one of the episodes to come) and whizzed away a waiting-room-ful of a bushed crew.

With some 15 hours' total driving time, we decided to take the opportunity for Taina to conduct a series of video-interviews with me while I was driving, on the subjects of animal rights, the environment, global warming, climate change, human population, world resources, food shortages, energy strategies, our children's future, veganism and specifically, the tar sands, presented here in 17 episodes.

There has been and will continue to be those who chastise me for driving a gasoline car while spreading the green message. Here is my answer: Either I speak at the conference or I don't. If I do, which I did, I had the choice of flying or driving, both being energy-consuming. Of the two, I always prefer driving. Not that I'm afraid of flying, but driving allows me to make speaking, action and media stops along the way. I also happen to love cruising on the highway, with my car stereo cranked up to 9.

The reality is that there was and still is no affordable electric car on the road that could handle the tour in terms of range-per-charge. And even if I had a good-range electric car like the Tesla, assuming that I had the $100,000 to pay for it, the electricity is still derived from the fossil fuels, namely coal. So, a Tesla essentially burns coal, while my Mazda burns oil - no real difference. Were electricity derived from solar and/or windy energy, it would be a different matter.

This, in fact, is one of my points to make, that Big Oil and its political puppets are deliberately stifling green tech to give energy-consumers no choice but to continue using their dirty products, that is, if the consumer wants any form of transportation at all other than the bicycle. Europe, on the other hand, is planning a supergrid to distribute electricity throughout Europe: solar from the Sahara and Arabian deserts, geothermal from Iceland and the Mediterranean, and wind, wave and tidal from the coast. In such a system, I would definitely drive an electric vehicle. Right now, in N. America, no such supergrid plan is on the table that we know of, and one of the points I want to make, and am making, is that there should be.

Following is a series of 17 episodes of the extended verbal interview over a 3-day period (July 1-3) in the background of cruising on the highway and aerial video clips from flying over the tar sands, the latter pretty much speaks for itself. The 17 episodes will be released 1-2 per day over the next couple of week, by being added to this blog, and by being individually posted in Facebook on my wall. Please stay tuned.

Following are the video episodes:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkGmK-2kraE
Episode #1: [Why climate change is an animal rights issue] - good episode to start with, especially since it ends with a bear sighting. The scenery is always gorgeous.

[An intro to the Tar Sands]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MncnV6g-Dbo
#2 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hell holes. Before watching it, please read the blog and view video below, if you haven't yet. This episode was taken on the Coquihalla Highway from Hope to Merritt.


http://youtu.be/ugtwqbXiiiU
#3 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hell holes. This episode was taken on BC Hwy-5 just NE of Merritt. Keep watching for dead lodge pole pines. Topic: [The most dangerous thing on Earth].


http://youtu.be/6Np9PPgxtMs
#4 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hellholes. Topic of this episode: [Lodge Pole Pine Devastation]. This episode was filmed on BC Hwy-5 just NE of Armstrong. There are no words in this episode, just the sound of music and the sight of dying and dead lodge pole pine forests across the landscape. BC has lost over 80% of its lodge pole pine forests. The cause is pine beetle infestation. Due to milder winters resulting from global warming, the beetle larvae, which normally would be killed by the winter cold, have been surviving to infest more forests in the spring.


http://youtu.be/g1l1nq6X8EM
#5 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hellholes. Topic of this episode: [How could the tar sands get past the Environmental Ministry?]. This episode was filmed on BC Hwy-5 just NE of Kamloops.


http://youtu.be/d_ZceKJ8xzA
#6 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hellholes. Topic of this episode: [How much natural gas would you like your stove to leak into your house? How much methane would you like to leak from the Arctic into the Atmosphere?] or [Methane in the atmosphere and its effect on the biosphere]. The video was shot about 100 km north of Kamloops BC on BC Hwy-5.


http://youtu.be/8gMjd7AQAOk
#7 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hellholes. Topic of this episode: ["Fix global warming or kiss our children's future good-bye."] The video was shot on BC Hwy-5 about 30 km SW of Avola and 280 km SW of Jasper.


http://youtu.be/I1_tsireCQY
#8 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hellholes. Topic of this episode: ["Possible collapse of civilization due to energy mismanagement; ecological destruction wrought by ethanol production."] The video was shot on BC Hwy-5 near Clearwater.


http://youtu.be/FZuX60O8qWk
#9 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hellholes. Topic of this episode: ["Deadly Feedback Loops."] The video was shot on BC Hwy-5 between Clearwater and Mt. Robson. In this interview, I was talking in terms of a global average temperature rise of 4, 5, even 6 degrees Celsius over the pre-1880AD pre-industrial global average temperature. The interview was conducted back in 2008, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was predicting a 2-degree-C global average temperature rise by the end of the century. I disagreed with it then, and disagree with it now, one of the reasons being that methane was not a factor in their calculation. Today, in 2012, talk of a 4-, 5-, or even 6-degrees-C rise by 2100 is more prevalent. So far, there is no climate conference I've seen that talks about the Methane Time Bomb, only CO2, its fuse, nor Runaway Global Heating. The world leaders are deeply quagmired in denial. We are the sighted letting the blind lead us into oblivion.


https://vimeo.com/39140640
#10 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hellholes. The video was shot on BC Hwy-5 at Mt. Robson. The scenery is so magnificent in this segment that I've decided to just let music (The Last Resort by the Eagles and Unearthed from Cold Case) present the message. A meditative session.


http://youtu.be/eFoT0DHbgrw
#11 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hellholes. Topic of this episode: ["Runaway Global Heating and Mass Extinction."] The video was shot on BC Hwy-5 / AB Hwy 16 while we crossed over the BC/AB border.


http://youtu.be/cU2DEWQyR_4
#12 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hellholes. Topic of this episode: ["Tipping Points"]. There are 9 Tipping Elements, each with its own tipping points. Anthony Marr thinks that 2 of them have already tipped. Find out which two. The video was shot on AB Hwy-16 shortly after we've crossed the BC/AB border.


http://youtu.be/L4QZw981two
#13 of 17 video episodes of my 2-day drive from Vancouver BC to the Alberta Tar Sands, and my 2-hour flight over the Tar Sands hellholes. Topic of this episode: ["Why you?"] This is a question I have pondered upon, but only when global warming gives me a break. It is true that of the 7 billion people in the world, I'm the only person doing what exactly what I'm doing. But then, almost every one on Earth can make this claim for himself/herself. The difference then is not in whether I'm doing something, but in what this something is that I've chosen to do, and this something I've chosen for myself to do has become exactly what I'm doing. So the question becomes, "Why have you chosen global warming to fight?" Of course, the standard answer for "Why you?" is, "If not me, who?" BTW, the scenery of the Albertan Rockies is breath-taking.


https://vimeo.com/39298276
Episodes #14-#15-#16-in-one of 17 in the [Alien's-eye-view of hellhole on Earth] series. Anthony Marr and Taina Ketola flew over the vast Alberta tar sands mining area surrounding Fort McMurray in a Cessna 172 for 3 hours to see the environmental devastation for themselves and share what they saw with the rest of the world.

The general impression is one of expanse and wantonness of destruction, with zero regard for anything - forests, animals, natives, global warming, mass extinction... - except profit.

The tar sands deposits being horizontally oriented, the ruined surface area is colossal. Considering that only 20% of tar sands extraction is by open-pit-mining, what is visible from the air is only 20% of the affected areas.

Other than the obvious, e.g. removal of "overburden", which includes the wholesale "removal" of boreal forests by the thousands of square kilometers, of special note are the hundreds of "tailing ponds" dotting the landscape, which are essentially man-made LAKES, some so enormous to be visible to the naked eye from space, and one boasting of the third largest dam in the world. No tailing lake is lined, so all of them leak, either down to the aquifer and/or directly into the over-used Athabasca River which drains into Lake Athabasca.

These tailing ponds happen to be in the path of migratory birds. Their contents are so oily and toxic that no water fowl landing into one can be expected to take off again.

The entire Athabascan watershed downstream from the mines has been poisoned - for centuries to come. The poisoned Lake Athabaska produces deformed fish upon which the local Chipewyan people feed, or used to feed, resulting in sky-high cancer rates. Who knows what happens to the animals drinking directly from it?

Do the oil companies and the oiled governments care? Sure, one company claims to have "reclaimed" 22% of the land ruined by its gigantic Earth-raping machinery, but critics contend that it is in fact only 0.2%. Of course they have their little PR show-pieces. By the way, they also penalized the doctor who blew the whistle, and provided the natives with a cancer ward.

To learn more about these tailing "ponds", just google "tar sands tailings ponds".


Anthony Marr, Founder and President
Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE)
Global Anti-Hunting Coalition (GAHC)
Anthony-Marr@HOPE-CARE.org
www.HOPE-CARE.org
www.facebook.com/Anthony.Marr.001
www.facebook.com/Global_Anti-Hunting_Coalition
www.myspace.com/AnthonyMarr
www.youtube.com/AnthonyMarr
www.HomoSapiensSaveYourEarth.blogspot.com
www.DearHomoSapiens.blogspot.com
www.HOPE-GEO.blogspot.com
www.ARConference.org