La richesse et les rivières

Photo: AFP

La revue Audubon s'est dépassée encore une fois: c'est cyberpresse qui m'a mis au fait que la revue Audubon a publié un article sur les sables bitumineux. La photo d'une exploration au bords de la rivière Athabasca en dit long, mais n'illustre pas ce qui se passe en aval.

Pas beaucoup de personnes habitent ce coin-là du pays, à part quelques membres des Premières Nations. Mais l'article parle d'un tour de bateau piloté par l'un d'eux, Joe Marcel. J'ai beaucoup d'affinité avec ce bonhomme. Il a passé sa vie entière dans et autour du delta Peace-Athabasca. Il connaît tous les cours d'eau comme le fond de sa main. On décrit la faune et la flore du coin: vous devriez être là au printemps, lors de la migration! De la sauvagine par milliers! 215 espèces dont des espèces menacées profitent de ces milieux humides et marécageux pour se reproduire ou pour se reposer durant leur périple migratoire.

C'est un endroit sauvage, éloigné de la civilisation. "Cet endroit, c'est tout pour moi. C'est mon chez moi" dit Marcel. Mais il sait que les distances y sont pour peu, ici. Pas loin, en amont, les pétrolières détruisent des étendues de forêt boréale pour nourrir le plus gros projet énergétique de la planète. "D'où nous sommes, c'est 60 milles au sud des sables bitumineux les plus près. Dans 30 ans, ce sera dans ma cour arrière. Et je ne peux rien y faire." conclue Marcel.
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It was brought to my attention that Audubon has an excellent article about the tar sands. Here are a few excerpts describing a boat expedition with Joe Marcel, someone I share a lot with.

"Crude Awakening
Right here in North America could lie the answer to our energy needs. But at what cost? Mining the tar sands of Alberta threatens to strip the world’s largest intact forest of its ability to hold carbon and to wipe out the breeding grounds for millions of birds.

On a breezy July morning, Joe Marcel steers his 18-foot aluminum motorboat through the back channels of the Peace-Athabasca Delta, 800 miles north of the U.S. border, in Alberta. Marcel, an elder in the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, cuts a confident figure: He’s a beefy 56-year-old sport-fishing guide with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a wild ponytail. Homemade tattoos cover his sausage arms—reminders, he says, of an impulsive youth. Marcel has spent his entire life in and around the delta. He knows its waterways—Canoe Portage, Fletcher Channel, Jackfish Creek—the way others know suburban streets.

The boat glides between banks lined with cattails and bulrushes that bow as we pass. The only houses along some stretches were built by beavers. A dozen kingfishers keep pace with us, and we spot pelicans and pileated woodpeckers. Marcel points to a distant flash of movement: a bald eagle. This avian display, he says, is nothing. “Some days in the springtime, when the birds are migrating north—oh, man! For days on end there are flocks in the thousands.” The delta, part of North America’s 1.5-billion-acre boreal forest, serves as the convergence point for all four major North American flyways. Some 215 species—including the endangered whooping crane and neotropical migrants like the olive-sided flycatcher and the American wigeon—use its freshwater wetlands for breeding, nesting, or stopping over.

Marcel loves this remote waterscape. The nearest town, Fort Chipewyan, is disconnected by land from the rest of Canada except in the winter, when the thick ice is graded and opened to vehicular traffic. “This place—it’s everything to me,” Marcel says. “This is home.” But he also knows its isolation is deceptive: Not far upriver, oil companies are digging up immense tracts of boreal forest for the world’s largest energy project.

“From where we’re sitting right here, it’s 60 miles due south to the closest oil sands,” Marcel says. “In 30 years it’ll be right in my back area. And there’s not a thing I can do about it.”"

Excerpts from article written by Barry Yeoman published in Audubon Magazine, here: http://audubonmagazine.org/features1003/energy.html