We featured local Shannon Walsh's documentary about the tar sands, H2Oil, on our cover a few months back. The film critiques the controversial billion-dollar industry that extracts crude from the tarry sands of Alberta through a procedure so toxic it has become both a blight and an international cause for concern. "Four barrels of glacier-fed spring water are used to process each barrel of oil, then are dumped, laden with carcinogens, into leaky tailing ponds so huge they can be seen from space." (One of the cheery tag lines of the film.) 

If you missed the film screening of H2Oil, catch director-activist-scholar Walsh speak at McGill University Feb. 8. Walsh will discuss the local implications of the tar sands on Quebec  - yes, those pipelines will run through our own backyard - and the growing global movement against the tar sands.

As our film editor Melora Koepke wrote in a sidebar to the cover piece: "There are several proposals in the works to reverse and extend pipelines from the oil sands to our front doorstep (or at least to a refinery in Montreal's east end). It's all part of processing bitumen, the viscous, soluble substance from which oil can be extracted through various resource-intensive processes. The Athabasca oil sands may seem very far away to us as Montrealers, but really, they're very close, and not just in the sense that the hydrologic cycle and climate change affect everyone from coast to coast.

One statistic cited in H2Oil illustrates that if oil sands extraction expands at the projected rate, it will soon exceed carbon emissions produced by every passenger vehicle in the country. Currently, oil sands extraction accounts for at least 5 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, making it impossible to meet our Kyoto commitments according to Greenpeace Canada."

Shannon Walsh gives her talk Tar Sands, Environmental Justice and Resistance on Monday Feb. 8, 12-2 p.m. at McGill's Faculty of Education 3600 McTavish (rm 233).