While researching his new book, Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane travelled to the Ecuadorian montane cloud forest known as Los Cedros. Trees there are coated with ferns, bromeliads, orchids, lichens and mosses, constantly dripping water, supplying crystal clear rivers. Levels of biodiversity are even higher than in the lower elevation Amazonian jungle.
Macfarlane met with local water defenders and land activists who are resisting multinational corporations (mostly Australian, Canadian, and Chinese) that mine gold by stripping the forest, blasting the mountains into stepped benches, heaping the ore, and leaching it with cyanide. The gold becomes corporate wealth and shareholder dividends. Communities are left struggling to live in a devastated environment.
Burdened with debt and cash-starved, Ecuador’s government had issued mining concessions in the cloud forest region. Its state-owned mining company had partnered with a Canadian mining company to extract gold from the Los Cedros forest visited by Macfarlane. But because the government had also created a new constitution with articles giving nature legal rights, land defenders were able to persuade the constitutional court to halt mining.
But even with the multinationals driven away, illegal miners and drug cartels can move in, kidnap and kill activists, raid and burn out Indigenous and local communities. The land defenders told Macfarlane they call this extractivismo de muerte: “death-extractivism”. According to a Global Witness report, 196 people were murdered in 2023 for defending their human rights, land, and environment against oil, meat, pesticide and mining interests.
Canada was not among the 18 nations mentioned in the Global Witness report. But death from extractivism impacts not only human lives. Citing U.S. imperialism and “economic warfare”, Canadian governments are enabling projects to proceed without Indigenous consultation, environmental assessment, or at-risk species protection. British Columbia’s Bill 15, Ontario’s Bill 5, and Canada’s Bill C-5 are now the law of the land.
This appears to be a coordinated national effort. After meeting Alberta’s Danielle Smith and other provincial premiers in Saskatoon, Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke of building new pipelines and “decarbonizing the barrels.” His government then enacted Bill C-5, with its accelerated process for “national interest projects” that exempts them from environmental regulations.
Will new pipelines be on the list? The formal statement from the June 2 First Ministers meeting says “Canada must work urgently to get… decarbonized Canadian oil and gas by pipelines… to diversified global markets, including Asia and Europe.” University of British Columbia professor Simon Donner, co-chair of the federal climate action advisory group, responded by saying “There is no such thing as decarbonized oil and gas.”
The oil industry has already received huge tax breaks to pump carbon dioxide into the ground, along the lines proposed by the Pathways Alliance. Did Premier Smith make a “grand bargain” with Prime Minister Carney to scrap the federal “emissions cap” in exchange for “carbon capture and storage?” Time will tell. Carbon capture is hugely expensive and does nothing to eliminate downstream emissions when oil burns. Furthermore, most current projects are for “enhanced oil recovery”, perpetuating fossil fuel dependence.
“Decarbonizing carbon” would require changing it to another element. Alchemists tried for centuries to transmute elements without success. Carney and his fellow economists need to catch up on their physics. Thinking that fossil fuel carbon can magically be made to disappear is just as crazy as viewing the economy as capable of endless growth on a finite material base, akin to a perpetual motion machine.
You can’t have your oil and burn it too. Fossil fuels are a gift from past generations of plants that we are squandering on hyper consumptive lifestyles. Future human generations might be willing to burn them at a rate Mother Earth can tolerate. “Winning the economic war” with the U.S. shouldn’t require extracting resources faster and faster, destroying the environment and Indigenous cultures, and perpetuating plutocracy.
Will multinational corporations be the main beneficiaries of “national interest projects”? Will the wealthy few get richer as ordinary Canadians struggle to pay rent and taxes, heat their homes, and feed their families? What future do we want — neocolonial domination by big corporations, or healthy communities?
It’s time to decide.
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