The true cost of oil

What does environmental devastation actually look like? At TEDxVictoria, photographer Garth Lenz shares shocking photos of the Alberta Tar Sands mining project -- and the beautiful (and vital) ecosystems under threat. (Filmed at TEDxVictoria.)

The world's largest and most devastating

environmental and industrial project

is situated in the heart

of the largest and most intact forest in the world,

Canada's boreal forest.

It stretches right across northern Canada, in Labrador,

it's home to the largest remaining wild caribou herd

in the world, the George River caribou herd,

numbering approximately 400,000 animals.

Unfortunately, when I was there I couldn't find one of them,

but you have the antlers as proof.

All across the boreal, we're blessed with this

incredible abundance of wetlands.

Wetlands globally are one of the most endangered ecosystems.

They're absolutely critical ecosystems,

they clean air, they clean water,

they sequester large amounts of greenhouse gases,

and they're home to a huge diversity of species.

In the boreal, they are also the home where

almost 50 percent of the 800 bird species

found in North America migrate north to breed and raise their young.

In Ontario, the boreal marches down south

to the north shore of Lake Superior.

And these incredibly beautiful boreal forests

were the inspiration for some of the most famous art

in Canadian history, the Group of Seven were very inspired

by this landscape,

and so the boreal is not just a really key part of our

natural heritage,

but also an important part of our cultural heritage.

In Manitoba, this is an image from the east side of Lake Winnipeg,

and this is the home of the newly designated

UNESCO Cultural Heritage site.

In Saskatchewan, as across all of the boreal,

home to some of our most famous rivers,

an incredible network of rivers and lakes

that every school-age child learns about,

the Peace, the Athabasca, the Churchill here, the Mackenzie,

and these networks were the historical routes

for the voyageur and the coureur des bois,

the first non-Aboriginal explorers of northern Canada

that, taking from the First Nations people,

used canoes and paddled to explore

for a trade route, a Northwest Passage for the fur trade.

In the North, the boreal is bordered by the tundra,

and just below that, in Yukon,

we have this incredible valley, the Tombstone Valley.

And the Tombstone Valley is home to the Porcupine caribou herd.

Now you've probably heard about the Porcupine caribou herd

in the context of its breeding ground

in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Well, the wintering ground is also critical

and it also is not protected,

and is potentially, could be potentially, exploited

for gas and mineral rights.

The western border of the boreal in British Columbia

is marked by the Coast Mountains,

and on the other side of those mountains

is the greatest remaining temperate rainforest in the world,

the Great Bear Rainforest,

and we'll discuss that in a few minutes in a bit more detail.

All across the boreal, it's home for a huge

incredible range of indigenous peoples,

and a rich and varied culture.

And I think that one of the reasons why

so many of these groups have retained a link to the past,

know their native languages,

the songs, the dances, the traditions,

I think part of that reason is because of the remoteness,

the span and the wilderness

of this almost 95 percent intact ecosystem.

And I think particularly now,

as we see ourselves in a time of environmental crisis,

we can learn so much from these people

who have lived so sustainably in this ecosystem

for over 10,000 years.

In the heart of this ecosystem is the very antithesis

of all of these values that we've been talking about,

and I think these are some of the core values

that make us proud to be Canadians.

This is the Alberta tar sands,

the largest oil reserves on the planet

outside of Saudi Arabia.

Trapped underneath the boreal forest

and wetlands of northern Alberta

are these vast reserves of this sticky, tar-like bitumen.

And the mining and the exploitation of that

is creating devastation on a scale that the planet has never seen before.

I want to try to convey some sort of a sense of the size of this.

If you look at that truck there,

it is the largest truck of its kind of the planet.

It is a 400-ton-capacity dump truck

and its dimensions are 45 feet long

by 35 feet wide and 25 feet high.

If I stand beside that truck,

my head comes to around the bottom

of the yellow part of that hubcap.

Within the dimensions of that truck,

you could build a 3,000-square-foot two-story home

quite easily. I did the math.

So instead of thinking of that as a truck,

think of that as a 3,000-square-foot home.

That's not a bad size home.

And line those trucks/homes back and forth

across there from the bottom

all the way to the top.

And then think of how large that very small section of one mine is.

Now, you can apply that same kind of thinking

here as well.

Now, here you see -- of course, as you go further on,

these trucks become like a pixel.

Again, imagine those all back and forth there.

How large is that one portion of a mine?

That would be a huge, vast metropolitan area,

probably much larger than the city of Victoria.

And this is just one of a number of mines,

10 mines so far right now.

This is one section of one mining complex,

and there are about another 40 or 50 in the approval process.

No tar sands mine has actually ever been denied approval,

so it is essentially a rubber stamp.

The other method of extraction is what's called the in-situ.

And here, massive amounts of water

are super-heated and pumped through the ground,

through these vasts networks of pipelines,

seismic lines, drill paths, compressor stations.

And even though this looks maybe not quite as repugnant

as the mines, it's even more damaging in some ways.

It impacts and fragments a larger part of the wilderness,

where there is 90 percent reduction of key species,

like woodland caribou and grizzly bears,

and it consumes even more energy, more water,

and produces at least as much greenhouse gas.

So these in-situ developments are at least as

ecologically damaging as the mines.

The oil produced from either method

produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other oil.

This is one of the reasons why it's called

the world's dirtiest oil.

It's also one of the reasons why it is

the largest and fastest-growing single source

of carbon in Canada,

and it is also a reason why Canada is now number three

in terms of producing carbon per person.

The tailings ponds are the largest toxic impoundments on the planet.

Oil sands -- or rather I should say tar sands --

"oil sands" is a P.R.-created term

so that the oil companies wouldn't be trying to promote

something that sounds like a sticky tar-like substance

that's the world's dirtiest oil.

So they decided to call it oil sands.

The tar sands consume more water than any other oil process,

three to five barrels of water are taken, polluted

and then returned into tailings ponds,

the largest toxic impoundments on the planet.

SemCrude, just one of the licensees,

in just one of their tailings ponds,

dumps 250,000 tons of this toxic gunk every single day.

That's creating the largest toxic impoundments

in the history of the planet.

So far, this is enough toxin

to cover the face of Lake Eerie a foot deep.

And the tailings ponds range in size up to 9,000 acres.

That's two-thirds the size of the entire island of Manhattan.

That's like from Wall Street at the southern edge of Manhattan

up to maybe 120th Street.

So this is an absolutely --

this is one of the larger tailings ponds.

This might be, what? I don't know, half the size of Manhattan.

And you can see in the context,

it's just a relatively small section

of one of 10 mining complexes and another 40 to 50

on stream to be approved soon.

And of course, these tailings ponds --

well, you can't see many ponds from outer space

and you can see these, so maybe we should stop calling them ponds --

these massive toxic wastelands are built

unlined and on the banks of the Athabasca River.

And the Athabasca River drains downstream

to a range of Aboriginal communities.

In Fort Chippewa, the 800 people there,

are finding toxins in the food chain,

this has been scientifically proven.

The tar sands toxins are in the food chain,

and this is causing cancer rates

up to 10 times what they are in the rest of Canada.

In spite of that, people have to live,

have to eat this food in order to survive.

The incredibly high price

of flying food into these remote Northern Aboriginal communities

and the high rate of unemployment

makes this an absolute necessity for survival.

And not that many years ago, I was lent a boat by a First Nations man.

And he said, "When you go out on the river,

do not under any circumstances eat the fish.

It's carcinogenic."

And yet, on the front porch of that man's cabin,

I saw four fish. He had to feed his family to survive.

And as a parent, I just can't imagine what that does to your soul.

And that's what we're doing.

The boreal forest is also

perhaps our best defense against global warming and climate change.

The boreal forest sequesters more carbon

than any other terrestrial ecosystem.

And this is absolutely key.

So what we're doing is,

we're taking the most concentrated greenhouse gas sink,

twice as much greenhouse gases are sequestered in

the boreal per acre than the tropical rainforests.

And what we're doing is we're destroying

this carbon sink, turning it into a carbon bomb.

And we're replacing that with the largest

industrial project in the history of the world,

which is producing the most high-carbon

greenhouse gas emitting oil in the world.

And we're doing this on the second largest

oil reserves on the planet.

This is one of the reasons why Canada,

originally a climate change hero --

we were one of the first signatories of the Kyoto Accord.

Now we're the country that has full-time lobbyists

in the European Union and Washington, D.C.

threatening trade wars when these countries

talk about wanting to bring in positive legislation

to limit the import of high-carbon fuels,

of greenhouse gas emissions, anything like this,

at international conferences,

whether they're in Copenhagen or Cancun,

international conferences on climate change,

we're the country that gets the dinosaur award

every single day as being the biggest obstacle

to progress on this issue.

Just 70 miles downstream

is the world's largest freshwater delta,

the Peace-Athabasca Delta,

the only one at the juncture of all four migratory flyways.

This is a globally significant wetland,

perhaps the greatest on the planet.

Incredible habitat for half the bird species

you find in North America, migrating here.

And also the last refuge for the largest herd of wild bison,

and also, of course, critical habitat for another whole range of other species.

But it too is being threatened by the massive amount

of water being drawn from the Athabasca,

which feeds these wetlands,

and also the incredible toxic burden

of the largest toxic unlined impoundments on the planet,

which are leaching in to the food chain

for all the species downstream.

So as bad as all that is, things are going to get

much worse, much, much worse.

This is the infrastructure as we see it about now.

This is what's planned for 2015.

And you can see here the Keystone Pipeline,

which would take tar sands raw down to the Gulf Coast,

punching a pipeline through the heart,

the agricultural heart of North America, of the United States,

and securing the contract with the dirtiest fuel in the world

by consumption of the United States,

and promoting a huge disincentive

to a sustainable clean energy future for America.

Here you see the route down the Mackenzie Valley.

This would put a pipeline to take natural gas

from the Beaufort Sea through the heart

of the third largest watershed basin in the world,

and the only one which is 95 percent intact.

And building a pipeline with an industrial highway

would change forever this incredible wilderness,

which is a true rarity on the planet today.

So the Great Bear Rainforest is just over

the hill there, within a few miles we go from these

dry boreal forests of 100-year-old trees,

maybe 10 inches across,

and soon we're in the coastal temperate rainforest,

rain-drenched, 1,000-year-old trees,

20 feet across, a completely different ecosystem.

And the Great Bear Rainforest is generally considered

to be the largest coastal temperate rainforest

ecosystem in the world.

Some of the greatest densities of,

some of the most iconic and threatened species on the planet,

and yet there's a proposal, of course, to build a pipeline

to take huge tankers, 10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez,

through some of the most difficult to navigate waters in the world,

where only just a few years ago,

a B.C. ferry ran aground.

When one of these tar sands tankers,

carrying the dirtiest oil, 10 times as much as the Exxon Valdez,

eventually hits a rock and goes down,

we're going to have one of the worst ecological disasters

this planet has ever seen.

And here we have the plan out to 2030.

What they're proposing is an almost four-times increase in production,

and that would industrialize an area the size of Florida.

In doing so, we'll be removing

a large part of our greatest carbon sink

and replacing it with the most high greenhouse gas

emission oil in the future.

The world does not need any more tar mines.

The world does not need any more pipelines

to wed our addiction to fossil fuels.

And the world certainly does not need

the largest toxic impoundments to grow and multiply

and further threaten the downstream communities.

And let's face it, we all live downstream

in an era of global warming and climate change.

What we need, is we all need to act

to ensure that Canada respects

the massive amounts of freshwater

that we hold in this country.

We need to ensure that these wetlands and forests

that are our best and greatest and most critical

defense against global warming are protected,

and we are not releasing that carbon bomb into the atmosphere.

And we need to all gather together

and say no to the tar sands.

And we can do that. There is a huge network

all over the world fighting to stop this project.

And I quite simply think that this is not

something that should be decided just in Canada.

Everyone in this room, everyone across Canada,

everyone listening to this presentation has a role to play

and, I think, a responsibility.

Because what we do here

is going to change our history,

it's going to color our possibility to survive,

and for our children to survive

and have a rich future.

We have an incredible gift in the boreal,

an incredible opportunity to preserve

our best defense against global warming,

but we could let that slip away.

The tar sands could threaten

not just a large section of the boreal.

It compromises the life and the health

of some of our most underprivileged and vulnerable people,

the Aboriginal communities that have so much to teach us.

It could destroy the Athabasca Delta,

the largest and possibly greatest freshwater delta in the planet.

It could destroy the Great Bear Rainforest,

the largest temperate rainforest in the world.

And it could have huge impacts

on the future of the agricultural heartland of North America.

I hope that you will all, if you've been moved by this presentation,

join with the growing international community

to get Canada to step up to its responsibilities,

to convince Canada to go back to being a climate change champion

instead of a climate change villain,

and to say no to the tar sands,

and yes to a clean energy future for all.

Thank you so much.

(Applause)