A Thorn Plucked Out Of Contention

At age 70, after having built his own coffin, preparing himself to die, Wiebo Ludwig, the bane of Canada's gas industry, has died.  Mr. Ludwig was an original.  A patriarchal, bible-thumping eco-terrorist.  Once a pastor in the Christian Reformed Church, his confrontational, very personal and belligerent style alienated people and he left the Church to establish is own extended self-sustaining farm, and where he did pastoral work among his own.

His large, extended, family-owned-and-operated farm in northwest Alberta was plagued, in the 1990s by the incursion of oil and gas companies' building wells in sight, sound and smell of his Trickle Creek farmhouse.  "If the oil companies run roughshod over your lives, you have to take defensive action against them, whatever is necessary. You can't just let them kill your children", Mr. Ludwig explained years ago.

This was just after negotiations to purchase the extensive farm by AEC West, which was operating wells near Trickle Creek, fell through.  And it took no time at all before explosions were set off at two of the company's wells.  Mr. Ludwig claimed innocence, but he could understand how frustrated people were, reacting violently to the actions of the gas extractors.

His and his family's experiences with the sour gas wells was fairly dreadful.  Their deadly fumes made them ill, and had far more sinister, profound effects, both on women of child-bearing age and on the cows that were carrying calves.  Mr. Ludwig lost a few grandchildren in the process, stillborn, and this and much more was attributed to the ill effects of the proximity of the sour gas wells to his home.

He and his family were not dreadfully popular with their neighbours. They may have elicited sympathy at first, but that dried up after awhile, and he was simply viewed as a wild man.  Where others saw the potential of jobs and earning a good living working for the oil and natural gas industry, he saw the vulnerability of the land and the people who lived on it, to the poisoning effect of gas extraction.

He was accused of countless acts of vandalism against the industry.  But it was the notorious event one evening where joyriding area teens driving trucks, went onto the Trickle Creek farm, shouting and drunk, frightening Mr. Ludwig's family, with the result that shots were fired, and a 16-year-old girl on one truck died.  A preliminary RCMP investigation was never quite concluded, though Mr. Ludwig was blamed.

His farm was extensive and self-sustaining, with a biodiesel refinery of its own, a greenhouse, a mill, and dozens of other buildings.  It was not just his immediate and growing family who lived there, but his supporters as well, the entire becoming an extended family.  The final irony is that he died of esophageal cancer, diagnosed as he was touring with a documentary, Wiebo's War.

His war brought him accusations of violent explosions at Encana operations near Tomslake, near Dawon Creek, B.C.  He was arrested in 2010 on suspicion of being involved on those pipeline bombings, though he claimed to be willing to help the RCMP in their search for evidence.  They did unearth evidence, but it was located at Trickle Creek; explosive chemicals, chemistry books and notebooks that fingered him.

The man who was a pastor, an authoritarian figure, someone who enjoyed debating his ethics and values was an admittedly polarizing figure.  To some, a sympathetic figure.  And he was also an enemy of the oil and gas extraction industry which he felt ran roughshod over peoples' lives with no restraining influence from government to protect people.

It isn't hard to sympathize with the man on one level, while deploring at another, his having resorted to the kind of violence that just might have harmed other people.  And, in the case of one young neighbour, did.