Two men from Massachusetts, veterans at getting information to the public, one by aerial photography the other by environmental news writing, have taken aim at the amazing Canadian oil boom. By all appearances they regard the mining and processing of hydrocarbon-pasted Athabascan tar sands in Alberta as an abomination for the province and the globe. Well, they have lots of company in that sentiment – and of course the scorn of many hard-hatted oil workers and their increasingly wealthy employers, not to mention the global warming-dismissive, free market embracing ministers in Ottawa. The pair is also, notably, trying to raise $10,000 from a crowd-funding operation so they can keep charging full-tilt at the north’s new, expansionist and cowboy-hatted oil baronies.
A muscular story they’ve just published provides a good sense of their angle and style:
- GlobalPost – Daniel Grossman (words & multimedia) and Alex MacLean (photos): Flying over Alberta’s tar sands, evidence of wealth and destruction ; This is a worthy team. Authors’ hyperlinks go to their home pages.
For those who have followed the breathtaking industrialization of a broad swath of Canada’s boggy woodlands the story and photos bring few surprises. It does have a good first-nation angle, opening on an elderly woman whose father was a subsistence hunter in the region but might not find much that is edible in his traps today. We read that she lives “virtually in the center of the vast Athabasca tar sands, a colossal deposit of extremely heavy crude oil in the western Canadian province of Alberta.” Hmm, can’t suppress that inner editor here. If it is at or near the center, say it that way. “Virtually” is a fuzzy word that sort of means that “center” captures the essence, like a good metaphor, but it is not a fact. Plus we got a ‘vast’ and a ‘colossal’ referring to the same thing in one sentence. But don’t let me stop you from reading it. The yarn gallops along with vivid prose, permeating horror, and excellent photos.
The mega-engineering of a huge near-wilderness landscape has been well-reported by many journalists. Similarly, other aerial photos, like the excellent ones taken by pilot-photographer MacLean , are out there (such as this book-based collection, called Beautiful Destruction – Alberta Tar Sands Aerial Photographs, or another, by a reporter, Robert Johnson, for Business Insider.
Grossman told ksjtracker by email that his colleague MacLean’s images have been circulating widely as well in recent months thanks to coverage from Fast Company and HuffPo. Grossman tweeted live during their flight, paid for by a Pulitzer grant, and a website DeSmog Canada posted on their coverage and got 80k views.
Their crowd-funding appeal, dubbed Tar Sands Truth, is on view at Indiegogo. It’s been less than a week, but as of this morning it showed a bit less than $1000 contributed, more than $9000 to go by mid-August. Donors, depending on their generosity, cannot expect a cash return but are rewarded with goodies such as signed books and autographed, large-format photos and so forth.
Good luck to them. It is a well-chronicled shame that such experienced and savvy reporters have no regular jobs that pay for this sort of thing up front. And as I told Grossman, they have their work cut out for them to craft a message that stands out – in thoroughness or revelation – from what has been done already.
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