Pipeline Politics

It seems common sense when a state has the great good fortune to have natural resources that are in high demand, to exploit those resources to the best advantage. Governments have always recognized and done their utmost to make the most of their advantages in extracting from the soil and below the mantle of the Earth, minerals and fossil fuel deposits for domestic use and for trade opportunities.

Just as agricultural practices and logging management and hydro sales have made for productive, self-sustaining and wealthy states, so too have the resources that require deep drilling for extraction.

There was a time when all of this was undertaken with little concern about the devastating effects of clear-cut forestry and the detrimental effect it had on the ecology in soil erosion and flood control. There was a time when no one considered how polluting coal-fired furnaces to run the wheels of industry would wreak havoc on the atmosphere and on peoples' health.

Just as agricultural run-off with the use of chemicals and pesticides was little-understood to have a nasty impact on the water table and the health of the natural organisms in rivers, lakes and soil.

We now recognize the harmful effects that occur through degradation of water tables, lakes and rivers and the atmosphere around us, with particulate matter circulating and impacting the very air we depend upon for a healthy environment.

We're concerned now as never before, fully understanding, after decades of alarms that in extracting resources from the mantle of the Earth we're disrupting the natural rhythm and balance and causing deadly pollutions that endanger all living things.

We're a little more vigilant, more cautious, more inclined to recommend that greater care and concern be given to the eventual outcomes of resource mining and extraction, among other human activities that have such a gross tendency to alter natural systems.

Huge multinationals that have no loyalty to any particular country's well-being, because they're focused on wealth creation and their shareholders' profits are not entirely inclined out of a public spirit of concern to weigh down their ambitions by concentrating on public safety first and foremost.

So the public understands because of the close ties between the multinational corporations and governments, both of which entities are concerned with profits and advancing their interests toward same, that they must express a collective opinion. Which is just what non-governmental groups concerned with environmental fall-out do, in reminding both corporations and governments that the future of a country and its population is its foremost concern.

Governments must listen to those whom they govern. They are the voters who placed them where they are, in democratic societies. Most countries operate on a capitalist system, and advanced democracies do that with a modicum of social-welfare institutions and the circulation of public wealth to benefit as many as feasible, top of mind.

Countries like Canada have in place certain social and legal institutions meant to keep government in mind of what they must remember; the welfare of the country and its people.

So when a government feels embattled when a strenuous opposition from organized civil groups confronts lawmakers because of a general unease with a direction being taken, most reasonable governments listen and take heed. And from there usually some manner of compromise is undertaken, to appease the concerns of the protesters, while still maintaining the trajectory of government and corporate interests.

In the matter of the pipelines for the transportation of Alberta oil, both to send crude to refineries in the U.S. and to send oil and gas to Canada's West Coast for shipment to eastern destinations, the concerns regarding the potential for oil spills is foremost in peoples' minds. Pipelines that traverse huge tracts of land, rivers and streams, mountainous and sensitive terrains, rainforests, and First Nations territories, have the potential of creating disastrous oil spills.

There have been large numbers of oil spills, both small and catastrophically large with liquid pipelines and natural gas lines. It is not unreasonable for government to receive a message from concerned citizens that no future lines should be rushed into being. That shipping bitumen by tanker to Asian markets should be done from ports where weather systems do not constantly threaten the safe transport of those fuels.

It does not constitute radicalism to insist that one's government investigate all feasible options for safety, and that it urge corporations to invest in safer procedures for transport, and in the process devise imaginative and more reliable means of achieving their goals of sending products to market without imperilling the safety and security of the land and the people who depend upon it.

For much depends upon it.