Ecojustice Talks About Source Water

Sound Design and Music Composition by Allan Levy

Illustration and Animation by JinKyung Myung

http://theaquaticview.com/

More info on this Thought Bubble.

When I first met Jonathon and Suzanna (founders of Thought Bubble), there were a handful of things we had in common; the books we’d read, documentaries we both liked and our love of Democracy Now! Soon the conversation turned to authors and activists we admired and I quickly told them how much I respect Naomi Klein. Seeing Naomi in The Corporation and reading No Logo opened up my eyes quite a bit as a teenager and led me onto the path where I am today. I was very pleased to find out Jon and Suz were fans too. After that, we often talked about creating a Thought Bubble for Naomi as soon as we could. Two months ago, the opportunity arose when a video was published of Naomi giving a speech where she spoke of how absurd it was that Canada’s Tar Sands oil had begun to brand itself as ‘ethical oil’.

You might have heard it before (and if you haven’t, it’s worth looking into), but Alberta’s Tar Sands are a true embarrassment for us Canadians: a human rights crisis for the Indigenous communities living in Alberta and British Columbia and an environmental disaster of epic proportions. Many pipelines transport this dirty oil all around North America, and our exports make us the United States’ biggest provider of oil. In the last few years, a new extension to a current pipeline has been proposed to carry Tar Sands oil all the way to Texas, putting some of North America’s most fragile ecosystems and waterways in serious peril. Recently, Bill McKibben and his team at 350.org helped spearhead a movement called Tar Sands Action and enlisted the help of people all over the US and Canada willing to express their dismay and anger about a possible new pipeline. As of November 6th, thousands of people have risked arrest, standing in front of the White House, as well as Canada’s Parliament in Ottawa, to protest.

When we heard this impassioned speech that Naomi Klein delivered at the Washington, DC Tar Sands Action Rally back in September, we knew it should be our next Thought Bubble. We hope this video will help spread this message and pay homage to all of the people fighting this cause. And for those who know little about it, we hope you will do as much research as you can and decide if the Tar Sands represent a healthy future for us and the Earth.

The truth is our time is running out. We should seize the moment and demand that we come off of dirty oil and push our politicians to hear our voices: No to the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Please take a look at Naomi Klein’s Thought Bubble and feel free to spread the video around, we’d sure appreciate it!

Although we regularly encounter what we commonly refer to as ‘depressing’ news, events that are only setbacks, and the like, one of this week’s headlines rendered us gloomier than usual. The Cancun Climate Change conference closed today, and as promised, Democracy Now! started their coverage from Mexico at the beginning of the week. Here’s what one of the stories read:

“At last year’s climate meeting in Copenhagen, the room was buzzing with thousands of reporters. However, today climate change seems to be a forgotten story.”

Amy Goodman stood alone, in a room fit for hundreds of reporters and journalists.

Why is it that this year’s climate conference is barely being mentioned in the press? Last year’s talks were more than disappointing, but were at least given a fair bit of media coverage, and generated quite a bit of hype. The issues surrounding this year’s COP16 are closely linked with what the public is referring to as ‘cablegate’.

In the wake of the release of the newest Wikileaks diplomatic cables (as well as the war logs), it’s become clear how misguided and misled the public is by mainstream media. The documents have proven what those in the loop suspected; that many countries, fierce opponents of the US-led Copenhagen Accord like the Maldives, were targeted and bought out by the usual juggernauts or, in the case of countries like Ecuador and Bolivia, were cut off from funding.

Cablegate renders the so-called ‘ClimateGate’ events of last year a complete joke (if they weren’t already), and unfortunately, the media coverage of both Cablegate and COP16 has taken a backseat. The actual content of the Wikileaks documents seem to have fallen by the wayside, compared to the coverage being given to the organization’s spokesperson Julian Assange.

Surveying major “news” network websites, the most important topics seem to be Sarah Palin’s Alaskan adventure and Kim Kardashian’s new book. This is a worrying fact: the reporting of mundane pop culture events is sickly minimizing true news that should be in the forefront.

As the world appears to care less and less about climate change, the environmental movement and its activists will have to band together and ramp things up considerably, in order to counteract the apathy of the distracted, and misinformed general public.

I remember holidays many years ago, when I’d think to myself that I must have been born into the wrong family. Christmas seemed to become less and less like it was on TV, and more like a tradition I couldn’t understand, and therefore tried my best to resist. Gone were the days of decorating a tree, and us kids receiving dozens of presents. But nowadays, I couldn’t be more thankful for the change.

When the holidays come up in conversation, my friends often tell me how sorry they feel for me, considering my family omits Christmas music, traditional decorations and a tree. But I’ve come to greatly appreciate how my family celebrates, and how we spend our off time together.

In my opinion, the true culprits of the holidays are not the cheesy music and the kitschy sweaters, but traditions like Black Friday. Much like the diamond industry has rooted itself in the process of engagement and marriage, the holiday season is now defined by the discounts we manage to snag, and the presents we buy one other.

I first discovered what Black Friday was through Adbusters’ annual Buy Nothing Day campaign (now expanded to a full week of challenging the holiday status quo via the ‘Carnivalesque Rebellion Week’). Their creator and editor, Kalle Lasn, had done an interview on CNN about Buy Nothing Day, and it was only then that I realized how harmful this season of unabashed consumerism really was. When Lasn brought up the consequences of our shopping on the rest of the world; and notably the environment, the “news” anchor replied “Oh come on! If someone wants to buy their kid an Elmo doll, what’s the harm in that?” Unfortunately, we have become so far removed from the “externalities” of our way of life, that many of us cannot even fathom the idea that a talking doll (whose parts were most likely mined and manufactured in war torn countries, then assembled under terrible conditions and shipped across the world) could have a considerable effect on both people, and our planet.

Criticism of these traditions is often dismissed as mere bouts of over-intellectualizing. But questioning the conventions that are ingrained in our lives is one of the many ways we can move toward creating newer, more conscious traditions. Perhaps then, we could truly come to value these holidays for the time they grant us with family and friends, not shopping malls.

Image courtesy of Paul Blow’s website

Originally posted on Senator Grant Mitchell’s website

Unelected Conservative Senators killed Bill C-311 (Climate Change Accountability Act) without sending it to committee for further study or input from Canadians.

The defeat of this piece of legislation before the committee stage by the Conservative Senators is unprecedented. The Conservatives’ disregard for the House of Commons and this bill is underlined by the fact that not a single Conservative Senator has debated the bill even though it was presented in the Senate 193 days ago.

With only a part-time Environment Minister and no climate change plan, the Conservative Government has seemingly nothing to discuss at the international climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.

“Killing Bill C-311 shows a fundamental lack of respect for the many Canadians who care deeply about climate change. They had a right to have this bill debated properly,” said Senator Grant Mitchell, the sponsor of the bill in the Senate.

Bill C-311 would have called on the government to establish five year plans to meet greenhouse gas emission targets by 2050. The plans would have been monitored by the Environment Commissioner and the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy to provide accountability to Parliament and Canadians.

Illustration by Mike Mitchell

Here at Smart Bubble Society, we firmly believe in the prospect of a greener future, so we were pretty excited (no, ecstatic actually) to partner with an organization like Greenpeace; a pioneer in the world of eco-activism. Collaborations like these give us a chance to meld our expertise in the field of communications with our desire to inspire change. Not just a generic sense of change, but in this case, a call to action to shift our perspective and dependence on oil.

In Canada, we’ve got a hefty problem on our hands because we’ve got the Tar Sands. Not only that, we’ve also got a slew of offshore drilling projects both in northern and eastern Canada (including Chevron’s new oil rig off Newfoundland, one of the deepest offshore oil wells to date). All those things are not synonymous with less carbon emissions (which might be why we didn’t commit to anything reasonable at Copenhagen last year), nor do they support any hope for a greener Canada (remember when Canada used to pride itself on being an environmentally-minded nation?).

Greenpeace’s Go Beyond Oil project is working to demonstrate how we are implanted in a system directly tied to the to the consumption of oil. In fact, the team shut down a Cairn Energy offshore drilling rig located in Greenland on Monday morning by climbing and fastening themselves to the rig.

Unfortunately, we’ve become pretty accustomed to hearing about oil spills, offshore drilling, human rights violations in oil-rich countries, and damage to wildlife and our planet in general. It’s another day of headlines. But with Greenpeace, we hoped to remind our audience that the measly fines these multinational corporations pay, often just to tidy surface damage and quiet people from making an uproar, can never truly repair the damage already done. Nearly twenty years after the Exxon Valdez spill, 26,000 gallons of oil remained in Prince William Sound’s sands and water. The effects of these disasters typically last much longer than they are expected to, which is important to highlight given the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, oil that is spilled into bodies of water never truly disappears; it forms deposits near the bottom of the sea, evaporates as gas into the atmosphere, and in smaller particles, gets absorbed into various aquatic life. You’ve heard about the dispersing agents, right? All they really do – with their undisclosed, secret concoction – is speed up the process of breaking the oil down to those smaller particles. Bottom line, the oil doesn’t go away.

But don’t walk away slumping yet, we’re happy to report that we did find a glimmer of hope, in a little publicized piece of legislature called The Climate Change Accountability Act or, Bill C-311. This bill could very well be the government’s chance to put Canada on par with the rest of the world, and make up for its shameful standing at last year’s Copenhagen Climate Conference. It’s important that our country picks up the pace, and breaks up with its longtime, climate trashing boyfriend the US.

No matter how redundant the news seems to get, we ask you to do one thing; and that’s to stay on top, stay informed, and don’t lose hope. Read about C-311, about Greenpeace UK’s actions to help us Go Beyond Oil, and think about ways that you, yourself, can start to get there. It could be as simple as walking to work tomorrow, boycotting petroleum-derived products (plastic bags), or buying your first, electric car (make that second, if you’re one of those people from Who Killed the Electric Car).

To check out the Thought Bubble we created for Greenpeace’s Go Beyond Oil campaign, click here.

Illustration by Laura Callaghan.

Our mandate this year is to create a Thought Bubble that will speak to Canadians. Sure, maybe it was the result of an all time, patriotic high from witnessing people flooding to the streets to celebrate our olympic wins in Vancouver last winter (go Canada!), or maybe it was the fact that when the whole Thought Bubble crew sat up late at night watching live feeds from Copenhagen day in day out for the duration of Cop15, we felt like the worst country in the world. We were actually quoted to be “to the environment what Japan is to whaling”. We were ranked 56th, out of 57 countries in the Climate Change Performance Index. We broke our own law by signing the Kyoto Protocol, and then breaching it. Canada couldn’t even stand on it’s own two feet and pledge more than the US’s measly 17% reduction from 2005 levels. When you consider the fact that all other countries pledged reductions of a similar amount from 1990 levels, that brings Canada’s reduction to a mere 4%. According to Treehugger, our emissions will actually be 2.5% HIGHER. As Treehugger states in the article:

“…reductions by 2020 from 1990 levels need to be in the 40% range in industrialized nations to put us on a track to keep global average temperature rise below the critical threshold of +2°C and give us a shot at returning CO2 concentrations to 350ppm.”

350 ppm refers to the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere that we need to retain (or achieve, rather) in order to avoid severe climate consequences. In 2009, it was at 387.35 ppm (parts per million) according to the Mauna Loa Observatory and 350.org.

Canada has spun an upsetting, million-knotted string of disappointments, to be sure. Not to mention the elephant, juggernaut of an issue called the tar sands. The “second largest source of oil in the world after Saudi Arabia”, according to the government of Alberta. In addition to that their website says that, “production is expected to increase from 1.31 million barrels per day in 2008 to 3 million barrels per day in 2018″. There’s no signs of it stopping anytime soon. It’s widely held that the tar sands is the largest, most destructive project in all of human history. According to oilsandstruth.org, “the tar sands mining procedure releases at least three times the CO2 emissions as regular oil production and is slated to become the single largest industrial contributor in North America to Climate Change.” It has cleared an absurd amount of ancient Boreal forest, and endangered downstream communities who are reporting increasing rates of rare cancers. If you’ve wondered why Canada is so absurdly pathetic at committing to environmental law, or even setting respectable emissions reduction targets, the tar sands is why. Interestingly, it spells rat backwards, that ought to say enough!

Driving across Canada, we spoke to many strangers and friends along the way. We talked about taxes, indigenous issues, but most of all, we heard about the tar sands, and not just as a problem Alberta’s responsible for, but a problem that Saskatchewan may soon get pulled in to too. Canadians we talked to actually trembled at the thought. There are claims that tar sand production is already slowly spreading into Saskatchewan. That’s why we want to team up with the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest citizens organization. Started in 1985, they “work to protect Canadian independence by promoting progressive policies on fair trade, clean water, energy security, public health care, and other issues of social and economic concern to Canadians.” Who could be better to team up with to create a Thought Bubble on Canada’s biggest and baddest issue? One of their campaigns is already about the tar sands, and actually ties into another issue they’re passionate about: water. A massive amount of water is needed for the oil extraction process (2 to 4.5 barrels of water for every barrel of synthetic crude oil produced, to be specific), threatening the Athabasca River in Alberta. We’re going to combine these issues (as they’re all related), and inform the Canadian public about a topic we should most definitely have a spare bedroom made up for in our Thought Bubbles.

In closing, this is the result of our cross-country, what’s in Canada’s Thought Bubble tour that we so earnestly had hoodies created for (which I now wear everyday to lounge in and remind myself of my passion): a tar sand Thought Bubble. A tar bubble about tarnada’s tarnishing trap.

To learn more about some of the issues we also heard about from our trip, keep an eye on our Twitter feed. We’ll be posting quotes throughout the next few days.

If you want to be in the know when it comes to special edition Thought Bubbles like this one, or others we create in the future, be sure to sign up for our mailing list at the top left corner of your screen.

“an environmental short film competition that harnesses your creativity to convince the world to stop making garbage! But this is a film competition with a twist. All entries must be in the form of a movie trailer and they all have to convey this year’s waste reduction theme, which is: say NO to disposable coffee cups! Each year in North America we throw away billions of paper coffee cups, wasting trees and creating unnecessary garbage. Create a trailer that helps people make the choice to refuse to use disposable coffee cups!”

If you or anyone you know is interested in partaking or submitting to this competition, check out the website for more details.

This was a lot of fun to create, we decided on a cardboard theme for all the artwork, and fashioned it as a trailer to emphasize the concept of creating a trailer for the competition. We had the lovely Jeff Rechner a.k.a. VoiceBoy narrate it for us in your typical ‘trailer-man voice’ (but even more entertaining than anything else I’ve heard!), and the sound design and score was done by the superbly talented Allan Levy.

The competition was just announced, so we held off until now to share it with you all, we hope you enjoy it.

Check it out here.