Canada: land of the toxic lakes

Ecuador: The oil industry's toxic legacy

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

In the aftermath of the crash, polls have indicated that as much as 36% of the US population looks more favorably to socialism, and a recent Pew survey of America's youth between 18 and 29 found that more have a positive view toward Socialism than they do toward Capitalism, Socialism: 49% Capitalism 46%.  While there is no doubt what people mean by socialism varies I think it is fairly accurate to say it means a more egalitarian society, or more accurately, a more just social system.

The problem is that capitalism cannot deliver these goods.  Capitalism is an exploitive system of production in which production or the production of social needs is set in to motion on the basis of profit, on how it can enrich that small minority that own the means of producing human needs and the production process itself. Human needs are secondary as are the needs of the natural world.

Hunger, disease, war, these are the by-products of capitalism.  But so is environmental degradation as land, water, and the natural world is simply there to be exploited regardless of the long-term damage. I read now that Chevron is fighting back against an $18 billion judgment against the cpmpany by Judge Nicolas Zambrano in Ecuador. The ruling supported villagers, claims that Texaco had contaminated an oil field in northeastern Ecuador between 1964 and 1992. Texaco was bought by Chevron. Ecuador's Supreme Court has since reduced the amount to $9.5 billion.  Chevron attorneys have accused the US lawyer for the villagers, Steven Donziger, of “orchestrating an international criminal conspiracy by using bribery and fraud in Ecuador to secure a multibillion-dollar pollution judgment against the oil company.”

Meanwhile, BP which is responsible for the catastrophic spill in the Gulf of Mexico, has been accused of lying about the amount of the spill and is resisting paying reparations saying claimants who were not harmed are demanding payment.

No amount of court theatrics will stop the catastrophic environmental destruction that will at some point reach a tipping point with vast swathes of the planet becoming uninhabitable. Life on this planet cannot survive the ravages of capitalism forever, or more accurately, a system of production which places profit above all else and in which the means of producing humanity’s needs like energy, are owned by private individuals. We have absolutely no say in how decisions about these issues are made, decisions that have life and death consequences for all of us.

In the south, Ecuadorian rivers and fields are filled with oil and its by products. In Canada, the same forces that are responsible for the poisoning of the third world have new ideas on the disposal of the waste they produce as they convert bitumen, which is a form of petroleum, in to diesel: create man-made lakes with it.

Canada has three million lakes, more than any other country in the world I’m told and energy companies like Syncrude, Exxon and Shell want to create more. They are running out of room to store the contaminated water the bitumen conversion produces so they have “drawn up plans that would transform northern Alberta into the largest man-made lake district on earth. Several have obtained permission from provincial authorities to flood abandoned tar sand mines with a mix of tailings and fresh water. “ writes BusinessWeek.

One lake, when finished will cover 2000 acres and will “replicate a natural habitat” complete with fishes and waterfowl we are told.  The general direction is to eliminate “natural” habitats and replace them with replicas.  Capitalism is very innovative. There are 30 or more of these replicas planned which will no doubt make Alberta the mother of natural habitat replicas.  The process involves filling abandoned mines with toxic slurry then topping it off with fresh water to a depth of 16 feet. This is the depth that is necessary to force the toxic waste particles to remain on the bottom of the lake according to Cheryl Robb, a spokesperson for Syncrude, adding that tests carried out by the energy company’s scientists,  “discovered naturally occurring microbes in tailings that help break down some of the pollutants.” according to BW.  Well, that should make us all feel more secure; scientists are smart people aren’t they? They wouldn’t hurt us would they? Maybe they’ll be the first to swim in these toxic lakes just to show us how safe they are.

No doubt the dumping of 264 million gallons of contaminated water in to Canada’s Athabasca River forcing authorities to caution residents bordering it to not drink from it was a one in a billion event, well, two in a billion as it occurred not long after 1600 ducks died in another Syncrude tailings pond in 2008.

Regulations have been introduced but companies easily find ways around them, as I’ve pointed out in previous commentaries on the BP spill where regulators allowed the company to write the regulations itself. Not everyone is convinced, “There’s no way to tell how the ecology of these lakes will evolve over time,” says one official, “It’s all guesswork at this point. It’s reckless.”

David Schindler, an ecology professor at the University of Alberta is a little more blunt, “Nothing is going to grow in that soup of toxic elements except perhaps a few hydrosulfide bacteria. And all of the unforeseen events are being downplayed.”, he tells BW, and environmental groups are concerned that the contaminated water will reach the “boreal ecosystem”, the tree line and marshland around the top of the world that stretches from Canada to Russia and Scandinavia. 

Were the consequences not so tragic, we would have to laugh at the idea that the statements of scientists in the employ of a huge private energy corporation would be given any credibility at all. Doctors for the tobacco companies assured us for decades that nicotine had nothing to do with cancers. 

But it’s not just about them being liars, it’s about class interests.  In one way or another most workers know that the corporations, the bosses, the capitalist class, have economic interests that are fundamentally different from working folk, from wage earners. Even conservative trade union members have an understanding that we have had to fight for what we have and have to fight to keep it.

Yet we accept in some way or another their ideology that our society in which a small group of people own the means of producing the necessities of life is the only way social production can be organized and there is no alternative to it.  They produce for profit, not for social need, this is what drives them and is what leads them to attack workers and our wages, benefits and material conditions and to ultimately destroy the natural world in which we live; they cannot help it. Short-term gain outweighs social concerns every time.  Capitalism is a vicious competitive system, a state of eternal war that leaves death and destruction in its wake.

Human life is trumped by profit and so is the environment.  There is no rational planning in the capitalist mode of production; what is produced, how it’s produced, and when, is determined first and foremost by how it profits the ruling class. We must reject that status quo. We must reject in our own minds that there is no other way to organize society. Capitalism socialized production and it is the task of the working class to socialize ownership of the means by which we produce and determine what we produce in a rational, conscious way in harmony with the natural world not in opposition to it; we can’t “conquer” nature, we are nature.

As I follow stories like this macabre idea to create hundreds of toxic lakes in Canada it makes me sad for a moment, I think of the beautiful earth and what they’re doing to it, how they are sacrificing the future, denying our children a part in it.  But as a socialist I see another way, history teaches us that nothing stays the same, capitalism hasn’t always existed as the dominant system and it doesn’t have to remain the dominant system.  The problem we face is that it has the ability as no other social system did, to end life on this planet as we know it.  It will eventually make the earth unfit for human habitation.

As for a clearer understanding of what socialism means or how we can reorganize society there are many examples in history of how and why such a system is the freest and most democratic means of social organization.  The early years of the Russian revolution is one example as well as us taking time to investigate revolutionary struggles throughout history and the benefits of previous systems that we can appropriate.  Most workers here in the US have never taken the time to read our own history, the Seattle General Strike for example where workers controlled the economic life of that city for five days through a committee of 100, the minutes of which can still be read. This is hidden history because it is a small example of how capitalist production can be replaced with a more collective and rational alternative.

The propaganda of the capitalist class is very thorough and powerful, as Marx pointed out, the ruling class doesn’t just manufacture goods; they manufacture ideas through their control of the education system and means of communication.  There are many diversions, not just work and survival but the endless sports and mindless garbage they inundate us with through their control of the media, another social service that we must liberate from the hands of the 1%

We can be optimists but, as with alcoholism, we have to first recognize that there’s a problem, identify it and then move to correct it. What we can say without hesitation is that society needs new managers.