[IPSM] Canada and the [indigenous] Arctic North

[Macdonald Stainsby]

Canada and the Arctic North

[entire article available here
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=30&ItemID=6559 ]

Well, now it appears to be official. On October Seventh, 2004 Imperial Oil
(otherwise known as Esso) has submitted an application to build the single
largest mega project of industrialization in the history of the settler
state of Canada. Along with several Inuit and many other Dene Nations, the
Deh Cho (Dene) Nations of the Mackenzie Valley are among those whose land
will be traversed by a 1700 kilometere long natural gas pipeline. It has
taken many years for oil and gas giants to breakdown the resistance of
local indigenous nations to such a project. In the 1970's, The Canadian
Government carried out an inquiry-- the Berger Inquiry-- to examine the
benefits and costs of the proposed pipeline. The various Nations and the
Metis would be decimated by such a proposal, according to the Mackenzie
Valley pipeline review written by Thomas R Berger in 1977 at the behest of
then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's government.

The reasons for such a recommendation were in mainly two areas: One, that
a pipeline could not be introduced in such a way as not to (further)
decimate the traditional lives and practices in the area, associated with
land use and hunting in a subsistence economy. The other was ecological:
the risks associated with such a pipeline-- over 1700 km in length-- would
be so astronomical as to render it beyond the pale in terms of what might
happen to "the last frontier" even in the unlikely event that there was
never a spill or an accident. And because one cannot predict the
unpredictable, the lands that contain among the very last giant migrating
herds involving hundreds of thousands of animals-- the porcupine caribou
herds-- need to be protected on their own right, never mind that the
people who live there depend on the land itself.


--
Macdonald Stainsby
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
In the contradiction lies the hope.
--Brecht.