Last week my wife and I went out to see my favorite director, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, There Will Be Blood. I have to say I think this my favorite of his films so far and it is profoundly relevant as it exposes the disastrous human costs of capitalism epitomized in the oil rush.
I have been openly critical of some of my friends choices to go to Alberta in order to “cash in” on the great Canadian oil rush. In my criticisms I am not attempting to place myself on some higher moral ground, for I am well aware that I am complicit in the current human destruction of the earth. However, I still strongly discourage my friends to resist the desire to pay off university debt by means of exploiting the earth’s resources. It is my hope that St. Stephen’s University would become a place that fosters the kind of growth in students that would render active participation in economic exploitation, war, and environmental degradation unintelligible.
Recently, an environmental group called Environmental Defense reported that “Canada’s massive oil sands are the most destructive project on earth.”
According to a Reuter’s article the report noted that “excavation of the oil sands in the western province of Alberta — home to the richest petroleum deposits outside the Middle East — is producing vast amounts of greenhouse gases and poisoning local water supplies.” According to the article “The Alberta provincial government says it has issued leases for 4,264 oil sands projects covering 25,065 square miles . New projects costing more than C$100 billion are on the books for the oil sands region and production is expected to triple to 3 million barrels a day by 2015.”
