By: Neelam Khare, Grade 12

As much as I would like to say Happy New Year, I’d be lying if I did. Among many issues becoming worse across the world, the expansion of the tar sands in Alberta is one of them.
Tar sands are a mixture of clay, sand, and a heavy crude oil. In order to extract the oil you have to superheat the tar in steam; the unwanted materials are dumped into ponds. You need about 2-4.5 barrels of water to make one barrel of oil. In 2007, Alberta allowed 119.5 billion gallons of water to be used primarily from the Athabasca River, an important river to Native tribes living there.

I don’t get how [Trevor] Linden’s retirement or terrorist attacks in Bombay, not to say that their lives weren’t important, were all over the news channels and newspapers, but right here in our very own country we have an injustice taking place that is being ignored. There are Aboriginal people being denied their rights, kicked off their land, and dying from cancer caused by the tar sands. The tar sands are leaking 11 million liters of contaminated water a day, destroying the habitat of humans and other animals, killing any animal that comes in contact with the toxic water, desecrating the land and forests the size of Florida, causing the rivers to turn from blue to brown, polluting the air, and helping the increase of climate change. None of this is heard of from the [corporate] main stream media. We DON’T NEED more supervision on terrorist attacks; we need more supervision and regulation on our corporations, including Big Oil in Alberta.

We all know that this isn’t the first time that the Aboriginal people have been screwed over. George Poitras of the Mikisew Cree First Nation says, “If we don’t have land and we don’t have anywhere to carry out our traditional lifestyles, we lose who we are as a people. So, if there’s no land, then it’s equivalent in our estimation to genocide of a people.” It’s pretty sad that throughout Canadian history and even today the Aboriginal people are still being exploited.

Now, if you’re worried that we won’t get to be part of the action, don’t be, because soon Big Oil is planning to extend pipe lines to BC and South of Alberta so we can ship the oil overseas and to the US. You would think that with the global warming crisis, they would think about reducing oil extraction, but clearly that’s not the case. By 2030, the government is planning to allow Big Oil to increase the production limit from 2.7 million barrels per day to 6 million barrels per day. All for us to continue living our luxurious lifestyles and all at the expense of the people, wildlife, and ecosystems that are in place in Alberta.

I understand that it can be easy not to care, or to brush the issue aside because we’re not the ones being kicked off our land – yet. It’s not our river that has millions of chemicals dumped into everyday. It’s not our clean water that is being poisoned. It’s not our food that is being destroyed. It’s not our lifestyle or culture that is being disturbed. We may have neither friends nor relatives there. We are not somebody who lives in that area. We may not even be of Aboriginal heritage. But we are Human, and shouldn’t that alone be a reason to acknowledge, to care, and to help?