Dirty oil and The Great Bear Rainforest. Is it worth the risk?

There has been 14 oil spills so far in 2010. Deepwater Horizon and Taylor Energy Wells in the Gulf of Mexico; Exxon Mobil spill in the Niger Delta; Talmadge Creek oil pipeline spill in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. And many more. With all of the news in the last year regarding big oil disasters, one would think that we might begin to re-think our processes of extraction and shipping... maybe even push harder to re-think our heavy reliance on oil in general?

The very same company responsible for the Kalamazoo oil pipeline leak, Enbridge inc. has a proposed pipeline called Northern Gateway that will run from Alberta's 'tar sands' to the British Columbia coast, carrying 83 million litres per day of what has been referred to as "the worlds dirtiest oil". It will run straight through the Great Bear Rainforest.

The Great Bear Rainforest is the name given to the remote north central coast of British Columbia (BC), Canada. At 6.4 million hectares, it represents one quarter of all the remaining ancient temperate rainforest in the world.

It is home to Wolves, Grizzly Bears, Eagles, Cougars, Salmon, Black Bear and the Kermode 'Spirit' Bear, a subspecies of Black Bear which features a recessive gene that makes about one in every ten bears completely white. The Western Red Cedar trees here can be 1000 years old, and the Sitka Spruce more than 90 meters high. It is a very rare and very endangered eco-system.

The Great Bear Rainforest has been the epicentre of environmental dispute for the last two decades. And rightly so. It is worth fighting for. It is an intricately woven, beautifully symbiotic ecosystem. The ocean and the land are merely continuations of each other here. The salmon runs that feed the bears, eagles and wolves are the same that fertilise the trees, and feed the orcas, marine mammals and the people who call this coastline home. An oil pipeline spill, or tanker spill would quickly destroy this habitat.

And it's not unlikely. These are treacherous waters. The channel where Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in Alaska in 1989 was 10 km of navigable water wide. Douglas Chanel, where the supertankers will need to transit to reach Kitimat, the end of the Northern Gateway pipeline, is only 1.3 km wide at it's narrowest point. Add the notoriously difficult and unpredictable weather patterns of Hecate Straight, and massively increased marine traffic, and it's not difficult to picture a spill happening.

Enbridge can greenwash it's website all it wants. (And it has.) The reality is that an oil spill, as "rare" (their word) as they are, either by tanker or by pipeline could happen. And even the small ones are devastating. Is it really worth the risk?

Oh, and in case you're wondering, "rare" to Enbridge inc. means:

• 2007 Enbridge reported 65 "reportable spills" which leaked some 2 million litres from their pipelines

• 2008 Enbridge reported 93 spills which leaked more than 900,000 litres of oil.

• 2008 The State of Wisconsin sued Enbridge for more than 500 wetland violations and land disturbances during the construction phase of a pipeline.

• 2009 Enbridge reported 2 spills in the first 2 months of 2009. These leaked more than one million litres of oil.

• 2010 Kalamazoo River Enbridge oil pipeline spill in July. More than 3.3 million litres of oil spilled.

Sounds pretty common to me.

For a detailed account of ecological impact of oil tankers and spills on the BC coast, check out:

http://www.raincoast.org/publications/reports/whats-at-stake-the-cost-of-oil-on-british-columbias-priceless-coast/