Thoughts on Resource Extraction

By Phil Meintzer

Image and article Courtesy of Phil Meintzer on Medium, link to the original post.

First, I wholeheartedly agree that we shouldn’t have coal mining on the eastern slopes. That’s a no brainer. It makes no sense whatsoever to allow coal mining in our headwaters. That water is the lifeblood of everyone and everything that exists downstream. No clean water, no life.

But I also think that we — as environmentalists in Alberta — need to think about the issue of resource extraction more critically, because there’s a glaring inconsistency between the way that people react to the threat of coal mining in the Rockies, compared to other industrial impacts.

When coal mining threatens to destroy mountain hiking trails for white people, there’s outrage. But when Suncor proposes to build a 14-kilometre-long wall through one of Alberta’s largest wetlands for increased oil sands production, predominantly harming Indigenous Communities, there’s hardly a peep from most Albertans. At the same time, where is the public anger at Canadian mining companies that are digging up already over-exploited communities and ecosystems in the global south? Or is it only Alberta’s landscape that deserves protection?

If we can agree that our headwaters are really that important, then why are we alright with 75 percent of our water in southern Alberta going to a handful of industrial irrigators to produce cash crops for profit (during a drought), rather than feeding Albertans right here in our own province? If we don’t want coal in our headwaters, why do we tolerate tailings ponds leaking into the watershed further downstream? We want to protect the water at the source, but don’t seem to give a shit what happens to it afterwards. What kind of pollution are we willing to tolerate, and who is forced to bear the consequences of that pollution?

Sure, what the government of Alberta did by ending the moratorium on coal is objectively a bad thing for the environment. And maybe different political leadership would be marginally better. But we live in a world of global capitalism, which means that even if we ban extractive industries in certain parts of Alberta, it will push extraction to other jurisdictions, like the global south.

That’s why piecemeal regulations and reforms are always going to be insufficient. Regulations aren’t useless, but all they do is put limits on capital accumulation. If regulations are too stringent, then that can lead to “capital flight” where investments or businesses relocate. Advocating for stronger regulations in an isolated way without an international perspective means that our advocacy may push extraction to where labour and resources are cheaper — where it’s more profitable. It also risks causing economic hardship because of job losses when businesses cease operations in a particular area. And as we are currently witnessing — reforms can easily be undone. Protections under capitalism are never permanent.

They’re not permanent because capitalism doesn’t tolerate limits on growth — at least not for very long. Either the money moves elsewhere to where regulations are less stringent, or corporate lobbying weakens existing regulations, or the economy shrinks, which is called a recession, and millions of people are thrown out of work. This is why we can’t resolve environmental issues under capitalism. When the economy grows, the environment suffers. When the economy shrinks, people suffer.

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Some people are quick to blame these issues on ineffective or negligent regulators, like the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER). A regulator is like a sieve, and the stronger the regulations, the less projects go through. But in a world where our main goal is profit, then at some point the regulator is going to have to approve projects that put people and the environment in harms way. Regulations can’t get in the way of GDP going up. That’s how the system works.

One type of reform that environmental groups and activists often ask for is protected areas — like national parks (or similar). Protected areas are a reasonable tool in the near-term, because we don’t have many other tools available to set nature off limits to extraction, but they aren’t a solution. Protected areas reinforce this arbitrary (and settler-colonial) idea of “untouched” or “pristine” nature which is off-limits for meeting human needs (not even in a sustainable way). Kind of like how European colonizers removed Indigenous People from large tracts of land in the creation of national parks like Banff or Wood Buffalo. “Wilderness” is manufactured.

Unfortunately, we need protected areas under capitalism because it’s one of the few tools that limits destruction, but it also creates “sacrifice zones” everywhere else, where capital is allowed to extract and extract and extract. If we take the protected areas approach to its logical conclusion, we end up with 1) human no-use zones, and 2) sacrifice zones that are destined only for continued extraction. But how do those protected areas survive as little disconnected islands amongst an ocean of harm?

I’m not saying that we should give up the fight to protect Alberta’s ecosystems, or that reforms don’t matter, but rather, that we need to view resource extraction as part of the global system of capitalism and change our tactics accordingly. This means that we need to bring an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and international perspective to the way that we fight against industrial development in Alberta.

What is it that we are fighting for? What is the end goal of environmental work? What is the world we are seeking to build?

In my view, we should be seeking to reestablish a sustainable relationship between human society and the non-human (or “more than human”) natural world that we depend on.

Human society will always use nature in some way to meet our needs, like we always have. But our relationship with nature can be more-or-less sustainable depending on the economic system at a given time. Right now, all our economic activities are geared towards turning nature into money for a privileged few — rather than meeting our needs — and we are running out of nature. Sustainability is impossible under capitalism, because capitalism requires never-ending growth.

Better regulations, moratoriums, and protected areas are decent band-aids for an economic system that keeps producing new wounds, but at some point, we have to force those in power to drop the knife. Real sustainability is only possible if we can respect that the earth has ecological limits or “planetary boundaries” and that all human activities need to be coordinated in a way that equitably meets our needs without stepping beyond those boundaries.

If you want to save Alberta’s Eastern Slopes for real, then you need to be anti-capitalist.