ReturnToTheTarSands

After three days biking in the northern woodlands, many mosquito and spider bites later, sweat-stained and with berry spots still on our palms, we have arrived in lovely Lac La Biche.  This place is a seeming pastoral paradise–sheep and cattle loose in the green, round hay-bales on the rolling hills, Saskatoon berries and rose hips along the grill of aspen, the edge between the inner, blacker forest and the open field.  This morning I dug potatoes with red-faced-drunkard skins–big potatoes, shaped like a fist, mouthwatering and ugly.  You can always tell when the potatoes are ready like this because the plant is blooming little starry flowers.  The plant blooms and goes to seed, its big, ugly potatoes storehouses for next year’s sprouting.

The weather has varied quite dramatically over our the course of our ride.  One day its sweat-breaking work to bike, and the next we look like winter children in our colorful mismatch of snow and bicycle clothes.  Under these varied conditions, I have learned the simple truth that hot weather is not always good, nor always bad.  I have seen a sunbeam go from a warming ray of hope to a sweat and burn causing death ray in the span of one hour.  Perhaps this view can lend some understanding of how I feel about oil:

I hate oil.  I hate its colorlessness trashing spruce and poplar green, water blue rivers.  I hate its smell, like money, someone told me, its factories whose smokestacks fused to the clouds, creating the overcast.  I hate its machinery and its commerce and when it gets in the blood and eyes and hearts of people, their fingers excited, covered and wriggling in the stuff like worms in mud.  I can never hate it as much as the Athabaska aboriginals who bury their cancer-ridden children between the teepees and the church under a pile of cigarette butts.

I love oil.  For everywhere I’ve ever gone by fossil fueled car, train, plane, boat, for everything I’ve ever seen through my petroleum-product eyeglasses, I am grateful.  For my bike tires, for the soles of my shoes, for the asphault smooth bikeway from here to the campsite, for the exhaust plume of the ambulance I follow through the streets, a bleeding forhead safe inside, I love oil.

Currently, from the madness I’ve seen in the North, Alberta is blinded to the true colors of oil by its love for it.  Meanwhile, oil itself keeps the nature of any lover, unruly with ambiguity.  Oil’s pros and cons are discussed exaustively elsewhere, so instead of repeating them here, I take note that Canada is the only developed nation that has no national energy policy.  I propose that Canada base its energy policy off of the humble potato plant.  It is not a stretch to imagine Canada’s oil reserves as a tuber,  not a tumor, which if managed responsibley will give forth, though their energy and revenues, to an infastructure of solar, wind, thermal and hydro energy that will sustain Canada with out defiling her.

Filed under: RTTTS, Renewable Energy on August 21st, 2008