From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Host Jenni Doering and Producer Aynsley O’Neill with Kate Beaton.
AYNSLEY O’NEILL: The Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, Canada have been called the world’s most destructive oil operation, and for good reason. Extracting the thick bitumen involves razing the boreal forest and then strip mining the oil-rich sands underneath. And often, natural gas is burned to heat steam to force the oil out. The process is exceedingly resource intensive and, as a result, it’s one of the most costly ways of producing oil. It all makes the use of tar sands oil a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.
In May, a study from the government of Canada found that those emissions may be at least 65 percent higher than those reported by industry, adding even more warming to the atmosphere. And the effects of climate change were tragically felt right in the epicenter of the Athabasca oil sands when a 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray burned twenty-four hundred structures. Eighty thousand people had to flee their homes, and the fire caused nearly $9 billion Canadian dollars in damages.
JENNI DOERING: In addition to this environmental and climate toll, the extraction of these fossil fuels has also taken an emotional toll on some of the people who work in the industry. They typically live in austere work camps and rotate through 12-hour shifts both day and night, in temperatures frequently below zero degrees Fahrenheit.
And for the women who have sought employment in the male-dominated oil sands, the job can bring unwanted comments and sexual violence. That’s a painful reality captured in the 2022 graphic memoir, “Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands,” by cartoonist Kate Beaton. Please be advised that we will discuss sexual assault in this segment. Kate Beaton joins me now from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Welcome to Living on Earth, Kate!
BEATON: Thank you.
DOERING: So can you tell our listeners the story behind the title and explain why you chose it?
BEATON: Sure. The book is called “Ducks.” And there are a number of different things that you can take from that title. The main thing is that there was an incident in 2008, when I worked in the oil sands, when hundreds of ducks flew into a tailings pond at Syncrude, which is one of the sites that I worked at, and they died. And this became international news. And it was one of the first times where people really took a hard look at what was going on in the oil sands and decided that they didn’t like it.
When we were working there it seemed to be farcical because it was not as though those were the first animals that you saw that were endangered or dead because of the oil sands operations. And when you’re reading the book, it’s not the first animals that you encounter who have been impacted by these things.
Around that same time, local Indigenous people were catching fish, and saying that they were finding cancerous lesions on them. And people were scrambling to find ways to discount that, to disprove it, to say, “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think this is what you think it is.” And people didn’t seem to care about the fish in the same way that they did about the ducks. Because it was easy to see that the ducks were all dead.
But it was harder to admit that an entire watershed was poisoned. And these Indigenous communities were also reporting themselves to have high rates of cancer, rare cancers, things like bile duct cancer in their communities, in Fort Chipewyan and Fort Mackay, much higher incidences of those in their communities than you find in other places. And they’re saying amongst themselves and to other people, you know, it’s clearly linked to the oil communities. And people are bending over backwards to say, “No, probably not.”
When it, when clearly the link is there. And how would you feel if people around you were contracting these rare cancers, and the government was trying to deny it, and the corporations were not claiming responsibility, and then they went out and made a gigantic fuss about these ducks? And everybody cared so much about the ducks? You know, you would, you’d be like, disgusted.
DOERING: Why did you decide to go work in the oil sands?
BEATON: At that time, in 2005, that was the place where everybody was going to work. I had graduated from…
Read More: Q&A: Kate Beaton Describes the Toll Taken by Alberta’s Oil Sands on Wildlife and