“We understand that a business is in business to make a profit, and we don’t have a problem with that – we run a business too,” says Tracy Kuhns, who used to run a shrimping boat business in Louisiana. “But you should not be allowed to make a profit until all the costs of doing business are paid. Our coast and our livelihoods are ruined, we have not been compensated, and yet the BP board still pays themselves bonuses.”

A year on from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP’s Annual General Meeting struck a far different tone compared to the 2010 congregation, held just a week before the explosion in the gulf, which released over five million barrels of oil and destroyed the fisheries, coastal estuaries and fishing economies of the Gulf of Mexico.

Last year’s AGM: quiet and uneventful, save for a formal resolution supported by Fair Pensions and campaigners from Canada regarding the risks of potential tar sands extractions, which seemed to go largely unnoticed by most of the shareholders.

This year: the board unsurprisingly found itself at the receiving end of impassioned criticism. “This AGM is the last chance to hold the company accountable,” said Kuhns.

She and other representatives from gulf coast communities staged a protest at the entrance of the meeting – Diane Wilson, a shrimp farmer from Texas, was arrested by police after covering herself in black goo, “the only thing they understand,” she told the television cameras. Though they were entitled to enter as proxy shareholders, BP security barred them from the conference on the grounds that they could cause a disturbance in the proceedings.

Activists from Climate Rush, the UK Tar Sands Network and Rising Tide were dragged out of the building, after attempting to create a human banner spelling “No Tar Sands”.

Members of the Ethecon foundation entreated the board to let the barred Gulf representatives into the building, and attempted to present the board with the “Black Planet” award – a planet-coloured beach ball covered in black ink.

Risky investment

Anti-tar sands campaigners from First Nations communities in Canada – Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Jasmine Thomas and Clayton Thomas-Muller – spoke to the board about the impacts of tar sands extraction projects in Alberta, and questioned the board’s decision to enter into the region, the world’s largest industrial project and a “risky investment”, as Thomas-Muller described it.

Many long-term shareholders of a more conventional stripe asked difficult questions regarding the spill, as well as the company’s future plans: “You assert to us that you can plan for climate change by asserting that you are good at drilling in deep waters,” one white-haired shareholder asked. “I would caution you to watch that hubris does not overtake you,” said another.

And, more to the sentiment shared by all shareholders who hold stake in the company, which lost £40 billion due to the spill, “Quite frankly, you have cost me money.”

With so many dissenting voices, the tone was markedly different from the previous year’s unexceptional meeting. Though some shareholders present denounced the “harassment” and “intolerable treatment” of former CEO Tony Hayward by “the Americans” last year, the overall sentiment in the room appeared undoubtedly to be one of anger regarding the accident and a degree of sympathy for the Gulf residents, including those who had travelled from the US for the AGM and had been barred entry.

When chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg tried to interrupt author Antonia Juhasz (who like many dissenters had bought a BP share for the opportunity to question the board at their meeting), the crowd came to her defence, the crowd came to her defence – in this video on Sky News you can hear cries supporting her to read the statement (about 1:40 in) from Keith Jones, father of Gordon Jones, one of the 11 men who died in the explosion:

“You had to make more money faster, and if that put those who were on the rig at risk, well sometimes one has to take a few chances, right? Well none of you were on that rig, and none of you were rolling the dice with the lives of your sons or daughters – but you were rolling the dice with my son’s life, and you lost.”

Though the explosion is largely regarded by the public as an accident, and perhaps one that could have happened in any industry, Juhasz explained two days previous to a gathering of dissenting BP shareholders, activists and campaigners that the catastrophe was not “a fluke”.

“This was an expected outcome of an industry that has extended beyond its technological capacity,” said Juhasz, author of Black Tide: the Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill. ‘They were using shallow water technology, the same used back in 1989. And yet their documentation said they could handle a spill of 300,000 barrels per day – the Deepwater Horizon only leaked 80,000 barrels per day.”

Winners and losers

There are 148 other deep wells around the world, she said, and Juhasz is not alone in thinking the Deepwater Horizon spill could just be the first of many such environmental disasters as oil and gas exploration heads into more extreme environments, from the deep ocean to polar waters to oil shale and tar sands.

Questions regarding the tar sands in fact garnered a huge amount of attention – a stark change from the previous year, when few shareholders seemed to be aware of any controversy. The Financial Times blog even declared tar sands campaigners to be among the few “winners” of the AGM, for “attracting maximum attention to their cause”.

But one is left wondering how many shareholders would give the green light to operations in Alberta, in particular because the board sold them the idea of a “lower impact” form of tar sands extraction, steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD). Also known as ‘in situ mining’, this process injects steam into deep fissures underground, melting the oil and piping it to the surface. Svanberg proudly proclaimed that the process, which will be utilized at the Sunrise project (operated by BP with Husky Energy in Canada), due to its subterranean nature, leaves no tailings ponds and only affects “five per cent” of the surface area.

But these figures are extremely misleading, says Greenpeace’s Laboucan-Massimo, who published a report last week showing that the energy and water needs of SAGD operations are in most cases just as bad as open pit tar sands mining operations – and in many cases worse.

But like the spill in the gulf of Mexico, these effects will not be readily seen by board members in London or energy consumers around the world – only those on the front lines will be able to see the true impacts, unaffected by the glossy PR campaigns. BP may claim that the cleanup operation in the Gulf is complete, but coastal communities and local scientists know that the oil is still there, just lingering on the bottom of the ocean. Oysters, shrimp and fish have not returned, dolphins continue to wash up dead on the shores, and the rivers continue to stink. ‘We still have oil coating the bottom of the ocean, we still have dispersant coating the bottom of the ocean, what we don’t have is the life that is supposed to be there,’ says Juhasz.

The impacts of SAGD too could be as intense and expansive – yet remain out of sight and out of mind for BP’s board, shareholders, and everyone worldwide who consumes their oil. Svanberg soothingly claimed that BP had become ‘a wiser company’, yet history may be committed to repeat itself.

Published in the New Internationalist

The Syncrude upgrader and tailings pond in the Boreal forest north of Fort McMurray. Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, courtesy of Greenpeace.

It should be an easy story to tell: the world’s biggest industrial project, the richest oil companies in the world, the largest toxic quagmires ever formed, and the denial of any link to cancer deaths nearby. Destruction and death, power and wealth, wrapped up in a government conspiracy — plus aerial shots of an unprecedented man-made moonscape so sublime they border on beautiful.

But director Niobe Thompson’s documentary Tipping Point: The End of Oil has taken on more than the standard hand-wringing anti-big-business stance of other non-fiction features about the Alberta tar sands. in environmental contexts, the phrase “tipping point” usually refers to ecological thresholds beyond which there is no return — such as the potential for “runaway climate change.” But the film’s title goes further: it refers instead to a turning point for civilization.

“We want the audience to understand: we are at the end of the age of oil, and this is what it looks like,” says Thompson. “The subtitle ‘The End of Oil’ may make one think our film is about solar panels and electric cars, but really this is about what our oil-driven society is doing.”

“Oil invades every part of our lives. We go to enormous lengths to extract it, and we will go to war to get it,” writes David suzuki, the film’s narrator, in an e-mail interview. “Then when people say we have to shift our energy sources, the immediate response is to say that is crazy. Of course, it’s easy to say it’s crazy when you look at the world through the perceptual lenses of our vested interests.”

But through the lens of a camera, the sheer scale of the tar sands project never fails to impress. It’s a “provincial sacrifice zone,” as Thompson puts it, created through “a Faustian pact” Canada has made in the pursuit of economic growth. Deep toxic tailing ponds, larger than any man-made structure on earth. Vast scourges in the earth, forged by what Stephen Harper once aptly described as “Brobdingnagian technology.” And rare, fatal liver, blood and brain tumours afflicting the people who live downstream in the community of Fort Chipewyan.

The saga is not necessarily easy to tell, for the very same reasons that make it so gripping: so unprecedented in scope, it is difficult to truly capture. And so dramatic, the story has already been told many times before.

The sands and Fort Chipewyan have already featured in half a dozen documentaries: Crude Sacrifice, an independent 2009 film by Vancouver filmmaker Lawrence Carota; H2Oil, a feature-length 2009 doc by Montreal director Shannon Walsh; Greenpeace’s Petropolis, more a work of art by Toronto’s Peter Mettler, 45 minutes of spanning aerial shots of the operations; and Downstream, a 30-minute film by U.S. filmmaker Leslie Iwerks shortlisted for a 2008 Oscar, expanded into the feature film Dirty Oil in 2010.

“With the exception of Petropolis, these are all essentially David and Goliath stories — people facing down a massive project run by the world’s richest oil companies,” says Thompson. “We wanted to do something different to give the audience an idea of what is really at stake by combining a conventional survey of the issues with a narrative built on strong story lines.”

What is at stake? not only the lives of the people downstream, the forests and rivers in Canada, or even the global climate. The fate of all human civilization hangs in the balance.

“The tar sands are telling us that everything about fossil fuel–based economies has changed. This is the tipping point,” says Andrew Nikiforuk, journalist and author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, interviewed for the film. “If we can get off of fossil fuels in 30 years in response to this wake-up call that would be great, but if we don’t, then as a society we will collapse because you cannot sustain a civilization on a resource as dirty as bitumen.”

The aptly titled Suncor Millenium tailings pond and mining operations north of Fort McMurray. Photo by Jiri Rezac, courtesy of Greenpeace.

The End Of Oil

Most of the other tar sands documentaries hardly travel outside of Fort Chipewyan. The Oscar-nominated Downstream, for example, focuses on Dr. John O’Connor, the family physician put under investigation by Alberta Health, Health Canada and the Alberta College of physicians and surgeons for causing “undue alarm” when he raised concerns about cancers in Fort Chipewyan. His tale also features largely in Crude Sacrifice and H2Oil.

By now most Canadians are very familiar with this story, says Thompson, so he does not dwell on it. Instead, Tipping Point tells the story of how the people with the most at stake — the community of Fort

Chip — brought their story to the world stage. “This is about people with no voice who reached out beyond Canada to find their voice,” says Thompson.

Of central importance are Francois Paulette, a former chief of the Fort Smith Chipewyan who fought for native land claims in the 1960s with the Canadian government and is now fighting again on the world stage in Copenhagen, New York and Norway; David Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Alberta whose research brought the truth about the toxic impacts of the industry to the global press; and James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of the film Avatar (widely seen as an allegory for northern Alberta).

Added to this, a who’s-who of climate and oil-sands experts: Andrew Nikiforuk; Andrew Weaver, Canada’s pre-eminent climate change scientist; Tim Flannery, Australian scientist and author of The Weather Makers; Bill McKibben, journalist and founder of 350.org; George Monbiot, Guardian columnist and author of Heat; Ronald Wright, author, academic and civilization theorist; and rob renner, Alberta’s minister of environment.

Even the interviews lying on the cutting-room floor could have produced a documentary; they include the head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Rajendra Pachuri, and Jim Hansen, a NASA physicist and unquestionably the world’s most famous climate change expert (best known as the scientist who revealed that the American government tried to squash evidence of climate change in the 1980s, as immortalised in An Inconvenient Truth).

“There is always the frustration when you work on a film for this long that you will never have enough space,” says Thompson. The film touches on the contribution of the oil sands to climate change — epitomized in Canada’s notorious obstruction at negotiations in Copenhagen last year — but lacked the scope to explore the issue to its fullest. For his part, Suzuki would have liked to have said more.

“My message, I’m afraid, is drearily repetitive, and has been for decades: human beings have very suddenly become a geological force, but people just don’t realize it,” he says. “We have reached the moment when humanity is altering the chemical, physical and biological makeup of the planet on a geological scale.

“If I were to put a concluding message to the film, it would be to remind people that we are animals, and our most fundamental needs are not dictated by economics, but biology. It is completely mystifying to me how we continue to place the economy, a human construct, above the very fundamental things we need to survive: clean air, water, energy and soil.”

A Global Warning

Filming took Thompson and the crew out to Copenhagen for the 2009 UN climate conference, to new York and Norway following Paulette on his diplomatic missions, and many other locations that did not make it to the final cut. I myself signed a release form in London, England, in November 2009, when Thompson followed First Nations activists to parliament to argue their treaty rights.

And of course, filming took the team out to the sands and Fort McMurray a total of  29 times. “It’s impossible to get a sense of the sheer scale of the operations without aerial shots,” says Thompson. “In a sense, they really are a character themselves in the film.”

They brought the Cineflex helicopter-bound high-definition camera from Los Angeles, the same machine used in the BBC Planet Earth series. “You can zoom up the nose of somebody driving a truck with this thing — it costs a lot of money, so it requires a project of this magnitude,” says Thompson.

Greenpeace used the same camera for Petropolis. They, however, were only able to use the Cineflex for two hours in total — Thompson and his team had it for a full week. They now have a library of footage, which they hope to make available to other projects.

The sands have an added meaning for Thompson — he grew up in Wabasca, Alberta. “I had no conception as a child that this land was part of the oil sands,” he says. Nor did he know during the eight summers he spent as a forest fire fighter. “I put out a lot of fires on land that is now a pit — it is absolutely bizarre to think about it.”

Photo by Jiri Rezac, courtesy of Greenpeace.

After all these years, and having flown over them more than 20 times, has the sight of the tar sands ceased to impress?

“Yes, they do stop being shocking after your 20th flight — and that really was a challenge. Any filmmaker is always battling the loss of distance,” he says. “You always need to be conscious of the process of estrangement. You constantly need to distance yourself from the subject matter so you can look at it with fresh eyes — the eyes of the audience. But this becomes hard when you live the subject for years.”

Sound & Fury

Another challenge for any filmmaker covering the sands—and for anyone trying to come to an informed opinion — is the public clash of rhetoric.

On the one hand we see the oil companies and the government, who have always maintained that the environmental impact is minimized.

“We have large industrial projects that to the uninformed eye appear to be out of control, but the fact is that this is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world — this is anything but the Wild West,” premiere Ed stelmach says soothingly at a press conference.

On the other side: activists and environmental NGOs, most infamously the Rethink Alberta campaign, widely broadcast in early 2010 throughout the U.S. to discourage tourism to the province. “Alberta’s greed threatens to keep America, Europe and Asia addicted to oil for many more decades,” the ad’s narrator warned, against a backdrop of oil-covered ducks, to the beat of harsh piano chords. “Thinking of visiting Alberta? Think again.”

“Let’s face it: there is a great deal of distrust aimed at professional environmental campaigners,” says Thompson. “I think ordinary Canadians who are mildly interested in this issue are just as distrustful of the ENGOs as they are of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. The message of the Rethink Alberta campaign came across as spin — people got the sense that they were being manipulated.”

The only solution, he says, is to base one’s opinion on science.

A Scientific Vacuum

But until very recently, there was no science for the public to see. The only monitoring of the river was conducted not by the province of Alberta but by an industry-funded organization, the regional Aquatics

Monitoring program [RAMP], which did not release its data to the public.

“We monitor water quality carefully, and to date all the data shows no long-term effects on water quality from oil sands development,” Stelmach maintained consistently for years.

But few were convinced. “In the absence of transparency, it looked like a conspiracy,” says Thompson.

The government always conceded that there were chemicals in the Athabasca River, but have long contended that they were “natural,” leaking from the river banks. Inputs from the tailings ponds were said to be negligible, and nobody could disprove them.

“I think industry likes it this way — as long as there is confusion, there won’t be any regulation,” responds Schindler. “We’ve seen this with acid rain, tobacco, and right now with climate change — [manufacturing doubt] is a standard industry tactic. After 40 years, I am tired of seeing this fool people time after time.”

The crux of the confusion lies in the sources: though simple water testing shows high levels of arsenic, mercury, lead, other heavy metals and carcinogenic byproducts of petroleum refining, it was difficult to prove that these derived from the tailings ponds and the smokestacks. A small study released in December 2007 and profiled in detail in H2Oil found extremely high levels of heavy metals in the water and in the wildlife. Nonetheless, despite high cancer rates and deformed fish, it remained difficult to prove industry as the source until recently.

Manufacturing Doubt

One of the keys to industry’s defence has been a deficiency in their monitoring program: they did not measure airborne inputs, a glaring omission in a region dotted with giant smokestacks so impressive they were once dubbed “dark satanic mills” by National Geographic.

To provide the necessary evidence, Schinder sampled the contaminants in winter snow, which would have to have come from man-made pollution falling from the sky. Samples collected near the stacks are grim and black. Calculations reveal that within a 50-kilometre radius, 11,000 metric tonnes of particulate would have been deposited during four months of snowfall — the equivalent of a major oil spill. The findings were reported around the world.

Photo by Colin O'Connor, courtesy of Greenpeace.

Its hand forced by the global spotlight, Ottawa appointed a panel to review Alberta’s monitoring program. The result, announced this December: a unanimous decree that RAMP is inadequate, and a new one will be created.

Of course, reliable monitoring is still a long way from actually changing the way the oil sands operate. But one thing, at least, has been accomplished: the story of Fort Chipewyan has reached the world.

“When the early films like H2Oil were made, this community had no voice,” says Thompson. Years later, the arrival of James Cameron in Fort Chipewyan was covered by The New York Times, the Oprah Winfrey Show and Time magazine. “Now they feel they have been heard.”

The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point will go on from its high-profile launch on CBC’s Nature of Things to international distribution in markets ranging from Al Jazeera to broadcasters in Norway, Japan, Greece and Sweden. When the film reaches a global audience, ideally, more people around the world will understand the consequences of our oil-driven society.

“To me the issue is that we have gotten very used to the convenience of oil — when we pull up at the pump, we can’t see (and don’t care to see) the enormous ecological, social and economic factors at play,” observes Suzuki. “I hope this film helps show some of those costs to people around the world.”

But, at the end of the day, will anything in the sands change? global oil demand goes up by two per cent a year, reserves go down by seven per cent a year, and Alberta’s 176 billion proven barrels remain slated for development for 150 years. Production is set to triple by 2020. Some may adhere to the belief that we can “shut down the tar sands,” but most people think that is impossible.

Even if America turns its back on Canada’s oil, there are plenty more that will take it: China, Thailand and India are all fuelling their conversion to western-style economies with our dirty oil. And there are resources like this all over the world—tar sands in the Congo, Madagascar and Venezuela, oil shale in the U.S., Australia and China, just to name a few. “As a civilization of oil consumers, we are standing at a crossroads,” says Thompson. “We are at a tipping point—the tar sands may just be the beginning.”

But as dreary as this could sound, there are still reasons not to despair, says Suzuki.

“The enormous success of our species is attributable to our foresight — our ability to look ahead and imagine a world as it would be, avoiding dangers and exploiting opportunities,” he contends. “No other animal has the ability to invent a future and then work to achieve it. Though now we are turning our backs on the very survival strategy of our species, i don’t think anyone can say it is too late. If we work hard to give nature some room and some time, she might be far more forgiving than we deserve.”

Published in Point Of View

It is hardly surprising that many films have been made about the Alberta oil sands – the largest industrial project in the world, the area indisputably makes for sublime cinematic material. Already Oscar-nominated Downstream (later expanded into the feature film Dirty Oil), H2Oil, Crude Sacrifice, and Greenpeace’s Petropolis have brought the sands to the screen.

Tonight in Canada the latest will air: Tipping Point, three years in the making and one of the most expansive docs yet, which took its filmmakers to New York, Norway and London in an effort to communicate how vast and far reaching the impacts of the project are – far beyond Alberta’s forests.

“We want the audience to understand: we are at the end of the age of oil,” says director Niobe Thompson, ”and this is what it looks like.”

Suncor Millennium operations north of Fort McMurray. Photo courtesy of Greenpeace.

Tonight at 8pm on CBC Television – and soon worldwide as a feature film.

First, everything flammable would burn – paper, cardboard, wood and tree – up in one giant firestorm. All the oxygen would be devoured, fueling the blast, and everyone nearby would die.

Farther away, other horrors, instantly. Everyone looking in that direction would be blinded. Those spared instant incineration would die in agony over minutes, or hours, slowly from blood loss and radiation poisoning. And still others would be covered in burns from head to toe – most would die solely where they lay, but others might be lucky enough to find themselves taken to any hospital not blown apart in the blast. But there they would find themselves one of thousands in line for treatment by exhausted doctors, binding, swabbing and dabbing.

But what would the treatment matter anyway? Within half an hour the same scenario would play out halfway across the world, then in nearby nations, the earth blanketed with the pitter-patter of nuclear missiles. If the shower rained hard enough, most life on earth would end – cockroaches might survive, but we at the very least would all die.

This scenario is a familiar but forgotten one. When was the last time you saw a film, fictional or factual, about the threat of nuclear war?

But according to Lucy Walker, director of Countdown to Zero, that threat is still very real. There are good reasons people are calling this, set for release on January 25, the “scariest documentary of the year.”

“It’s hard to compete with big-budget mainstream horror films, but this should be the scariest film you’ve ever seen,” she says.

There are still tens of thousands of nuclear warheads ready for launch – possibly up to 100,000 – all around the world, from America and Russia to Pakistan and India. And those are just the weapons we know about.

Since the breakdown of the Soviet Union, there has been a slow leak of weapons-grade uranium from Russian reactors and military bases. Lax security (exacerbated by the breakdown of the USSR), opportunistic smugglers and eager buyers in central Asia – notably terrorist cells operating in Afghanistan and neighbouring countries – have made for a most unfortunate combination. Unknown quantities, no doubt sufficient to kill almost all life on earth, sit in the hands of those most keen to use deadly force. As it is put in the film, Al Qaeda’s stated objective is to kill four million people; you don’t do that by flying planes into buildings.

Could Islamist terrorists set off a dirty bomb in an American (or Canadian) city? Without a doubt. Smuggling tiny amounts of uranium over national borders is laughably easy: shipping containers are not checked for fissile material at most ports, and even when they are in airports, the detectors are so easily set off by tiny amounts of radiation that they are worse than useless.

Want to get uranium into the US? Hide it in kitty litter. A hundred pounds of uranium would fit into six beer cans.

The implications are terrifying beyond measure. “When I started making this film,” says Walker, “I thought we should be afraid of the potential for smuggling, but I didn’t realize that every single step that could lead to New York being blown up had already happened.”

A film that at first glance might be about security and terrorism is actually about a very different problem altogether: the continued existence and production of nuclear weapons in the first place.

“There is no credible alternative to zero: the only answer is zero,” asserts Walker.

As long as fissile material continues to exist anywhere in the world, we all remain in danger. Even without the threat of rogue terrorist attacks, the risk of a nuclear missile being launched by one of the armed nations is still very real. Theoretically, the probability of a launch is not zero; therefore, it is almost bound to happen. There is a first time in history for everything.

And in reality, it has almost happened on such a huge number of occasions it is almost sickening to consider. Both the Americans and the Russians have mistaken flocks of geese and rising moons for nuclear warheads, and retaliatory shots were almost fired. This happened as recently as — are you ready? — 1995; Russian officials marched into Boris Yelstin’s office and asked him to fire missiles, and the Russian president — thankfully, “not drunk for a change” — broke with protocol and refused to do so.

Why so many mishaps? A big part of the problem is that efforts to make the system more reliable, by adding in larger safety nets and complex security measures to thicken the web, have made the system less reliable. A more complex system has more interactions that can be difficult to monitor. Simply put: complexity is the enemy of reliability.

Those stories revealing the giant holes in our safety net continue throughout Countdown to Zero. A training tape accidentally slipped into the computers at NORAD, and everyone there thought America was actually under attack. It was only after U.S. forces went through a frenzied checklist that the error was spotted. On another occasion, a single malfunctioning chip that costs less than a dollar was responsible for eight minutes of launch preparations that were only cut in the nick of time. Another time, a B-52 loaded with six nuclear warheads flew across the U.S. from South Carolina. The missiles weren’t logged as missing for 36 hours.

And nuclear material has gone missing, as well, while an ounce of gold has never gone missing from Fort Knox.

“You wouldn’t use a phone from the 1950s, and yet so much of the equipment pointing missiles from Russia to the U.S. and vice versa are just as old,” she says. “You would think the arsenal would be the most safely guarded equipment in the world.”

As the film puts it, “Every man woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or madness.”

But perhaps what is so striking about Countdown to Zero is not that it covers terrifying subject matter, but that it stands alone in doing so.

The past five years have seen a torrent of films about climate change and other environmental issues. The tar sands (and Fort Chip alone) have taken centre stage in at least half a dozen films produced over just two years.

But how many documentaries have been made in the past two decades, let alone the past two years, about the threat of nuclear war? For a threat so massive, so staggeringly great that “it kills in numbers the human mind simply cannot comprehend,” as the narrator of Countdown to Zero says, why have we heard barely a word about such an unparalleled threat since Reagan and Trudeau were in power?

“People think this is yesterday’s issue, but it’s such an illusion to think that we are out of the woods,” Walker says. “That’s why the subtitle is ‘how I learned to start worrying and hate the bomb’. [It’s also a cheeky reference to the subtitle of Stanley Kubrick’s black comic satire on nuclear war, Dr. Strangelove.] Unfortunately, without giving people too much to worry about that they become paralysed with fear and passive, there is simply nothing not to worry about.”

This brings us to the obvious but unavoidable question: Why have we forgotten about the threat of nuclear war, if it never really went away?

“That’s exactly why I wanted to make this film. My childhood was haunted by the spectre of nuclear war,” recalls Walker. “My mother taught us that if it happened we wouldn’t need a shotgun to survive the aftermath, we’d want cyanide to end it all. Why did this issue fall off the radar?”

Interviews with random pedestrians throughout Walker’s film reveal a telling story: nearly all say they aren’t too concerned about weapons. Except for one man, an old man: “Isn’t everyone worried?”

It is undeniable that for activists and environmentalists, the issue is almost completely nonexistent. In Scotland, a sad, solitary protest camp sits next to the port holding the U.K.’s Trident nuclear submarine fleet. The few dozen campers have been there for decades, and almost all of them are over 40. Young activists have taken up climate change and other issues. Old greenies in the U.K. often say they long to put the ‘peace’ back in ‘Greenpeace.’

“But there is no point in worrying about global warming if we don’t live long enough to see it,” Lucy Walker says. “The advent of nuclear weapons changed everything, except our way of thinking. As human beings, we now have the ability to actually kill all life on earth but most people’s thinking hasn’t caught up with that game-changing discovery.”

Which is where Countdown to Zero comes in: to shock the audience into truly grasping how serious the threat is. Not merely to educate, the film — like all others made by Participant Media (Fast Food Nation, Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck) — aims to turn audience members from passive viewers into impassioned actors.

Making a documentary like this is obviously not easy: “Sleeping three hours a night for something that should have been done yesterday is not easy. I worry more about the impacts of stress on my health!” she says. “But money is not what I’m after. You know that line about supermodels who won’t get out of bed for less than $10,000? Well, I won’t get out of bed unless the idea is completely gripping. Making documentaries is just too hard financially — it’s such a slog. In this case, I was on a need-to-know basis: I wanted to know why nuclear weapons had fallen off the radar.”

Lucy Walker, image courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The film is making big waves in Europe already, though, unfortunately, not simply for the subject matter. A feature on Walker in The London Times was titled “The Blonde’s Bombshell” (Walker is undeniably attractive), a tiresome label she refused to comment on. As to her gender, she does say that “it’s really interesting that there are lots of really cool women making amazing documentaries right now.”

Countdown to Zero is often compared to An Inconvenient Truth (naturally, given it was made by the same producer), but the aim is the same: to convince the audience of the urgency of a pervasively unappreciated threat, and to inspire them to actually do something about it.

“You couldn’t not see that movie and walk away thinking the reality of climate change was debatable,” she says of the Al Gore-narrated environmental feature-doc. And she hopes to do the same.

The making of Countdown to Zero is a story in itself. “What you see in the film is just the tip of the iceberg of what we did,” she says.

Walker put herself in considerable danger countless times, bartering with Georgian prison officials to obtain an interview with an incarcerated Russian smuggler, riding trains with missiles on board, visiting old nuclear test sites in Kazakhstan where even a single radioactive particle entering her lungs would virtually guarantee lung cancer.

One of the most impressive features of the film is the cast of interviewees, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Valerie Plame (a former undercover CIA agent, famous now for being ‘outed’ in a notorious scandal), and a raft of high-ranking American nuclear specialists.

“Absolutely none of these interviews was easy to get. Every single one was a giant pain in the ass,” she says.

Blair’s interview is particularly chilling: “The threat of this falling into other people’s hands kept me awake at night,” he says in the film.

“I thought it was really cool of him to do this interview with us after the whole WMD [weapons of mass destruction] issue being his downfall,” comments Walker. One of her most striking interviews is with Oleg Khintsagov, a small-time hustler who was caught stealing several kilograms of uranium in small amounts, a crime for which he is serving time in Georgia, the corridor between Russia and Azerbaijan — the “highway for stolen uranium.” He wanted the money to buy a new fridge. Undercover agents posed as Islamist terrorists, and nabbed him trying to sell them weapons-grade plutonium. So if a small-time hustler can do this, imagine what real professionals with an ideology, brains and an agenda can do.

And it is not difficult in the slightest to create a nuclear device capable of killing millions of people once you have the uranium. The hard part was achieved more than half a century ago: doing it the first time. Once Oppenheimer and the rest of the Manhattan Project scientists cracked the secrets of splitting the atom, the rest was easy. The genie, once out of the bottle, cannot easily be put back in. What makes the launch of weapons truly foolproof? Nothing. As long as there is one weapon, there will always be that slim chance.

So the argument and the solution are quite clear, and thankfully Obama and the other leaders of armed countries right now do seem to understand that the only solution is zero, and are working to achieve that goal. Simple story, good news, the end is nigh — wrapped up, done deal? Something we can finally feel good about, as though humanity has fixed one of its errors?

If only. Unfortunately, particle physicists have been busy working toward the development of thermobaric nuclear weapons (an issue Walker did not have space for in the film), which would harness the power of nuclear fusion — the fusing of hydrogen atoms to produce incredible bursts of heat and energy (the same reaction that takes place inside the stars and our sun). Sadly, most members of the public are not aware of the development of these weapons. If they are aware at all, they might know of the friendly PR face for laboratories like the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California. The NIF is working toward nuclear fusion using lasers inside giant mirrored domes, ostensibly under the guise of developing clean energy — but only 15 per cent of the facility’s time is used for peaceful research; the rest is geared for weapons.

The only credible solution for nuclear weapons — or any weapon of such lethal scale — is zero.

Will we learn the lesson soon enough before new, even more sophisticated and more destructive weapons are produced, proliferated, and even used? We can only hope.

“I just want to wake people up to what is going on — people haven’t debated this issue in film for so long,” Walker says. “Part of the problem is that nuclear weapons are just so difficult to talk about: the scale of human horror is on such a scale that it defies the imagination. We need to change our way of thinking and eliminate these from the face of the earth, before they do the same to us.”

Published in Point of View

An unnamed child on an Indian construction site, surrounded by asbestos-laden broken pipes. Photo courtesy of the Rideau Institute.

Last week a delegation from the Asian Ban Asbestos Network, including cancer victims and widows, travelled from their homes in Indonesia, India and elsewhere to ask the Quebec government not to revive a dying industry that has brought cancer and death to millions of people around the world.

‘We felt the best thing was to give these victims the chance to appeal to the Quebec government as human beings, face to face,’ says Laurie Kazan-Allen, founder of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat based in London, one of a number of advocacy groups that provided financial support to help the delegation make the trip to Canada.

Among those victims was Jeong-Rim Lee, suffering from mesothelioma, an incurable and fatal cancer of the lining of the lungs which she developed after living near a factory which used the material in South Korea. You can listen to an interview with her and another delegate, Anup Srivasta, on CBC radio here.

As Asian delegates met with Canadian officials and journalists in Quebec and Ottawa, the IBASheld a small protest in front of the Canadian High Commission in London, England, while anti-asbestos groups held their own protests in Paris, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, London, Mumbai, Delhi, and outside Canadian diplomatic offices around the world.

There is now barely a week remaining before the Quebec government decides whether or not to guarantee a $58 million loan to the Jeffrey Mine – the announcement is set to be made between 20 and 30 December. This would occur during the annual low point in media activity – hardly a coincidence, say critics.

The possible reviving of the mine – one of the last remaining in Canada – has incited anger and controversy all year. Demonstrations like last week’s were seen in front of Canadian consulates worldwide on Canada day, 1 July, in the hopes that the country would finally cease exporting the mineral and funding the ‘scientific’ studies that support its use. In August this year it seemed that the mine was certain to close, but then in September the owner was given a $3.5 million line of credit by the Quebec government to allow the mine to operate long enough to court new investors.

Investors were found, and if the Quebec government matches their financing with a $58 million loan, the mine will expand and increase its output ten-fold up to 250,000 tonnes a year – roughly a tenth of all global trade. For the next quarter century Canada would continue to export asbestos to China, India, and other fast-growing economies in the Global South.

The key word is ‘export’: the Canadian government does not allow the mineral to be used in construction projects in its own country. Though Canada (and other developed nations) once used various forms of the mineral in thousands of applications, almost every white fibre is now exported.

The World Health Organization estimates that asbestos is responsible for one in three work-related cancers worldwide – a sad truth that is unlikely to change, given that more than 120 million people are still exposed every single day at work around the globe. All forms of asbestos are carcinogenic, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and there is no ‘safe limit’ for exposure.

Yet the Chrysotile Institute, based in Montreal, promotes white asbestos as ‘safe for use under controlled circumstances’ – a claim ridiculed by all medical experts, including the Canadian Medical Association, which describes this as a ‘shameful political manipulation of science’. The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet drew attention to Canadian ‘hypocrisy’ last week.

Just days now remain before the announcement is made. ‘This really is the last stand,’ says Kazan-Allen.

Published in the New Internationalist

Photo by Amigos da Terra Bresil under a CC Licence.

Today thousands of people are expected to take to the streets of Cancun in Mexico as part of the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice, partly co-ordinated by La Via Campesina (the International Peasant Movement), to protest what they perceive as a lack of respect for human rights at the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Under the banner ‘Peasants Cool The Planet’, they will demand that more attention be given to matters of social justice – such as the transfer of $30 billion in aid from developed nations to developing ones, a pledge that was made last year that rich countries now appear to be ready to drop. La Via Campesina, the Indigenous Environmental Network and other NGOs from around the world are also extremely concerned about the emphasis at the talks being given to measures such as REDD (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) which they contend only undermines human rights by transferring ownership and control of forests away from the people who depend on them.

The turnout at the demonstration today will no doubt be dwarfed by the 100,000 people who marched this time last year in Copenhagen – largely because the UN conference last year drew far more attention in the run-up to December. Many described COP15 in 2009 as our ‘last chance’ to seal a binding and effective international accord to prevent dramatic climate change. Hopes were high.

But after last year’s unambiguous failure, this year’s conference has utterly failed to rouse the same level of enthusiasm. Press coverage is scant in comparison. Few politicians, journalists or activists believe much will come out of COP16 but more hot air, late nights, and meaningless pieces of paper.

Yet again, little more but sound and fury – both from politicians proclaiming that progress is afoot, as well as angry activists, understandably frustrated by the inability of all United Nations Climate Change Conferences to halt the global rise in carbon by even the tiniest degree. Two decades of jet-fuelled meetings have achieved nothing but a steady rise in global greenhouse gas levels, and steady shrink in forests (and other carbon sinks), and a seemingly inexorable march towards dramatic climate change.

Thousands of demonstrators and NGOs have converged on the city, yet their impact on the conference is likely to be even less marked than last year, due to the cosy confinement of the delegates inside the complexes of the Mexican beach town, a cotton-woolled resort that has long secluded wealthy tourists away from Mexico’s slums. The barricades around Copenhagen’s Bella Centre pale in comparison.

Nonetheless, activists and NGOs from around the world are still making the trip to Mexico to make what stamp they can. One of those is the Polaris Institute, based in Ottawa, Canada, who last week made their way towards the beach resort town from the small community of Cerro San Pedro, 500 kilometres north of Mexico City. Travelling southwards in a collection of caravans, they are meeting with a dozen communities that have been affected by massive industrial projects, such as those near Cerro San Pedro which have been coping with impacts created by huge mines operated by Canadian company New Gold.

“We want to highlight the social and environmental destruction that is created by these huge projects,” says Richard Girard, Research Coordinator from the Polaris Institute. “In Canada a few small populations are impacted by the tar sands, but our same companies impact millions of people in Mexico, and their voices are not heard.”

The Canadian government as well is a target for impacted communities – Canada was named last week by the Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres as one of three countries (together with Russia and Japan) trying to kill the Kyoto Protocol, the only international accord on climate change to date with any bite. This comes as little surprise – Canada was again named the Colossal Fossil last year in Copenhagen for obstructing progress at the talks, in large part due to massive expansions in the Canadian tar sands.

“Though the local populations in Mexico and around the world see their local battle as a regional struggle of their own, on a larger scale the degradation and pollution that comes about from these projects is part of the whole process that is causing climate change,” Girard says. “A lot of the NGOs who come to talk about climate change are only thinking about polar bears and trees – they are not familiar with how people’s lives are impacted. This is something that is, unfortunately, often missing from the broader environmental movement.”

Published in the New Internationalist

Image courtesy of Grundon Waste Management.

Julie’s Bicycle is a not-for-profit music industry watchdog that provides research and information for sustainable business practices, and manages the Industry Green certification programme. “In lots of ways, festivals have led the entire music industry in waste management,” Helen Heathfield, director of energy and environment for the group, tells Access. “They are way ahead of fixed venues in so many ways because the rubbish left behind is so visible.”

The average punter, Heathfield says, will produce about two kilos of rubbish every day, so festival organisers need to think carefully about how to manage all of that before it starts piling up. Fortunately, festival crowds tend to be just the right demographic to work with.

“They tend to be quite environmentally minded,” Suzanne Clark, business manager at Aktrion Recycling & Waste Management, says. “And obviously giving out a green message is something that sponsors can boast about.”

More festivals and events are paying attention to their eco credentials, and as trendy as all things green are, the BS 8901 ‘specification for a sustainability management system for events’ can now provide some assurance that any ‘environmentally friendly’ festival isn’t guilty of greenwashing. The 47 recipients of this year’s Greener Festival Award include a good number from the UK, the best of which will be named at the UK Festival Awards on November 18.

And industry groups like the Sustainable Event Alliance and A Greener Festival are working to help organisers everywhere understand how to minimise the mess.

Plan Ahead

The most important step to getting rid of all the rubbish as quickly as possible is to come up with a careful plan. So more waste management providers are popping up to help.

“I have worked providing crew and technicians for 12 years, and was always disgusted at the amount of good material that went straight into the skip,” John Diamond, operations director at Edinburgh-based Diamond Event Services, says. The company duly added recycling and waste management services to its portfolio earlier this year.

“The easiest thing to do is to chuck everything and send it to landfill, but it’s definitely not the cheapest. Anything you recycle will actually save you money because facilities will accept recyclable material for nothing.”

Tax on waste sent to landfill in the UK is currently £48 per tonne, and will increase by £8 per year until at least 2014/2015, when it will have reached £80 per tonne. The goal is to prevent any paper or plastic from reaching a tipping site by 2013, and nothing at all by 2020.

“The average event is now achieving a 15 to 30 per cent recycling rate. Add composting and you could get up to 40 per cent,” Ed Cook, business manager at Network Recycling, says.

Festivals routinely leave out brightly labeled bins so people can chuck their paper plates, plastic cups and metal cans into the right batch. Wooden cutlery, napkins made from recycled paper, and plastic beer cups made from PET as opposed to polypropylene, are all helping. And the greenest festivals are now setting out bins to capture food waste for composting or biogas generation.

One of the most progressive changes is the cup deposit system. Instead of a thin disposable, bars at festivals like Latitude are giving out durable plastic pint pots, like those produced by the Incredible Cup Company, for a £2 deposit.

“I can’t believe how sceptical I was five years ago when these first came out,” Cook says. “They are brilliant, and they have had a massive impact.”

Elsewhere, many festivals are implementing a deposit scheme of 5 to 10 pence per cup on the regular paper and plastic kinds, so the young and the skint go around collecting them to earn spare change.

“Even if an event organiser doesn’t have the funds to invest in a reusable cup initiative, a deposit system can help them improve recycling rates and spare their conscience without spending a penny.”

Human Error

Even with the best and most carefully laid plans, a lot of any festival’s impact is in the hands of the audience. The most clearly labeled and thickly dotted recycling bins won’t make a difference if people don’t bother to separate their waste properly. Carelessness remains a problem.

“The big challenge is to get people to use the facilities properly,” Matthew Ball, special events manager for Grundon Waste Management, explains.

Which is why it sets up only one bin for all recyclable materials, in order to make it as simple as possible for the public. “We can then separate all the paper, plastic and glass ourselves afterwards.”

Even then, there will always be a huge number of cups, forks, napkins, leaflets and plates left on the ground. A small army of litter pickers can quickly gather up most of it, but the smaller bits require weeks of work.

Take cigarette butts, an estimated 20 million of which are left behind on the fields of Glastonbury, and tent pegs. Both have to be painstakingly picked out of the grass to prevent illness and injury when Michael Eavis’s dairy cows return. And there is a new, growing problem. Festivalgoers, often sleep deprived, lazily leaving big things behind in campsites, from sleeping bags to folding chairs and whole tents.

“As long as Asda sells tents for £10 this is going to be a problem,” Heathfield says. “It comes with the assumption of disposability that runs through our whole culture.”

It’s Only Natural

There is of course the matter of the waste that no amount of planning, scolding or coaching can prevent.

“You can never have enough toilets,” Clive Owen of A1 Loo Hire says simply, and the company has provided for Glastonbury, Latitude, Reading and Leeds festivals among others. Numbers are subject to realistic budget constraints, but on the plus side, the number of attendants A1 provides to clean the toilets has increased dramatically. “Sometimes we are able to get round three times a day and people really appreciate that,” he says.

Nonetheless, punters are still making careless additions to their loo deposits. “We are constantly having our pipes blocked up by beer cans and cups that people throw down the loos,” Owen says. And when it comes to long drops, the mess becomes even more of a nightmare. “People throw all manner of things down there. We’ve pulled all sorts of things out, wellies, bin liners, even entire tents.”

Heathfield is a big fan of compost toilets. Not only do they negate the use of chemicals, they also cut down on water use, and return waste to the soil rather than using up energy and water at sewage plants. Alongside which, the open air environment can be a lot more pleasant than an enclosed space.

“Punters really like them, and I think we can expect to see them more and more in the future,” she says.

Australian compost loo provider Natural Event, supplier to Secret Garden Party, Sunrise Celebration, Waveform and other festivals around the UK, even attempts to give patrons an experience that makes them feel ‘happy and respected’ by covering the doors of every stall in floral art and cheeky graffiti.

In The Pipeline

There are other innovations that Heathfield expects to go mainstream, most to do with food waste, which will remain a big source of rubbish no matter how high the percentage of cups and plates that gets recycled.

“I’m really looking forward to composting becoming truly standard,” she says. “Having anaerobic digesters right on site linked to all the catering stalls so all the food waste can go directly to producing energy.”

In a perfect world everyone would bring their own cups, plates, pint glasses and cutlery. Mural-splattered compost toilets would be ubiquitous. All sets would be made from reclaimed and recycled materials, and reused the next year. No toxic metals in the wiring or hazardous chemicals in the fabric. And that’s just material waste. There’s still the emissions and air pollution from transport and energy to consider. A green festival utopia would be powered entirely by micro wind turbines and solar panels. Everyone would reach the site by train or electric car. All food would be sourced locally from sustainably managed farms. There’s a lot that can be done.

“But the bottom line is that festivals are pretty good,” Heathfield concludes.

“They have taken huge amounts of action over the years, and started incorporating these initiatives long before local authorities in many cases. By providing alternative behavioural spaces where people can try out new things, they have done a lot to raise people’s awareness of all the issues and have played a vital role in waste management leadership. They receive a lot of criticism because the waste left behind is so visible.”

What we throw out at home, after all, is channeled away. Out of sight, and out of mind. Anyone who tuts at the mess left behind by a weekend of music would be wise to keep things in perspective. “If you could see what the average street produces in a weekend it would be one interesting comparison,” she nods.

Published in Access All Areas

Tim Jackson on campus at Guildford University. Photo courtesy of the New Economics Foundation.

We are already overshooting the earth’s carrying capacity by 30 per cent. For nine billion people to enjoy a western standard of living, the global economy will need to be 15 times larger by 2050.

It all boils down to one challenge: how do we prosper without any increase in our gross domestic product (GDP)? What might seem like a purely academic concern to the uninitiated—or borderline heresy to traditional economists—is the single most important question we ought to be asking, according to economist Tim Jackson in his new book, Prosperity Without Growth.

Avoiding runaway climate change means reducing the carbon intensity of every dollar 130 times, says Jackson.

This cannot be done without forgoing economic growth, he says – a difficult task, given that GDP growth has been the single most important policy goal for a century.

Thanks to his book’s critique of the “iron cage of consumerism,” many label Jackson’s work as anti-capitalistic. But, he argues, capitalism can exist without growth — just not capitalism as we know it.

Why do you dismiss as “delusional” the Stern Report’s conclusion that spending three per cent of our GDP on abating climate change is sufficient?

The main inspiration for this book was this seductive idea that clean, clever, and efficient technologies are all we need. But real progress has been hampered by perverse incentives towards efficiency that encourage the development of new technologies, wasting more resources in the process.

Do we just need to reconfigure our thinking?

That is the thrust of the argument. Environmental economics tried to account for the failings of the model with slight adjustments, such as carbon taxes. But what we really need is to change the internal dynamics of our current economic model, because it pushes us towards expansion or collapse—not stability.

What critiques of your work bother you the most?

One is simply ignoring my idea. Another is claiming that profit-driven economics are in accord with the natural motivations of people who are inherently selfish. We have institutionalized this narrow vision of humanity into an economic system that calls on us to be myopic, individualistic novelty-seekers in order to drive material output.

What is your reaction when people accuse you of being anti-progress?

I characterise my position as “trans-modern”: many of the ways that society was traditionally organized were valuable, such as locally-organized economies and strong communities. Those have been swept away by a vision of modernity that functions merely to fuel consumerism. We need to retrieve those ideas and use them as the building blocks for a new definition of shared prosperity.

I have derision for those who would throw traditions away to maintain a derelict system. That is a very destructive way to treat human history and how we understand progress.

The book was written when the economic crisis was just kicking off. What do you have to say about recent events?

In the aftermath of the crashes in 2008 there were a number of attempts at reform that turned into false starts. That was very disappointing. The British elections did not feature any questioning of the model whatsoever in a country where the national debt grew at a million pounds every eleven minutes while the recession loomed in 2008.

It is understandable, looking at the horrible situation in Greece, that people are nervous to talk about changes to the model, but my point is that Greece is a casualty of the model.

Do you have hope for the future?

Absolutely. I have faith in humanity’s inordinate ability to adapt to difficult circumstances. And I think it’s a responsibility to have hope. Hope is a psychological strategy for achievement.

Published in Corporate Knights

Runner beans. Seedlings. Plots.

Smack in the centre of London’s most regal green space, Regent’s Park, sits a scattering of seedlings, creeping vines, apple tree saplings, swelling courgettes and  giant, sagging sunflowers. Next door: the famous Queen Mary’s Rose Garden, quintessentially London.

This vegetable garden however is brand new – look on Google Earths’ satellite view and you’ll see the parking lot that sat it its place just six months ago.

The Regent’s Park Allotment Garden is the 500th such urban veggie patch installed by Capital Growth, which aims to create 2,012 similar spaces in the British capital by 2012. The goal: not only to produce genuinely local and sustainable food, but also to bring those skills back to an urban population that has forgotten how to farm.

Want to get your hands dirty? Volunteers are always welcome.

Open Day this Sunday September 26th, 10-4pm – free food, and lots of it.

Sunshine. Sunflowers. Bees. Pollination.

Ripe seeds. Ready to eat.

Basil. Purple lettuce.

Apples.

Onions.

Reuse.

Food.

Workers cutting pipes reinforced with asbestos in an Indian construction site. Photo Credit: Hein du Plessis, Courtesy of Kathleen Ruff of the Rideau Institute.

The Quebec government in Canada has given a life-saving injection to a bankrupt mine so it may continue producing one of the most dangerous and carcinogenic substances ever known.

The Jeffrey mine, one of two remaining mines in the country, has been given a $3.5 million line of credit by the Quebec government to allow it to operate for a month – long enough to attract crucial investors from London and India, who are touring the mines now, according to the Montreal Gazette.

Though Canada restricts white asbestos – also called chrysotile – it was the world’s fifth largest producer in 2009, mining 153,000 metric tonnes of the material. More than 95 per cent of this was exported, primarily to Indonesia, China, Mexico, and other fast developing nations in the Global South. In such nations the mineral apparently can be used ‘safely’ though it is tightly restricted in developed nations, and banned outright in over 50 countries (including the entire European Union).

As sales of the mineral declined in Europe and North America, producers shifted their attention to developing nations, such as Mexico and China. Now sales in the West are nonexistent, but business in the developing world is booming – Indian imports of the mineral have risen 83 per cent since 2004.

Documentation of construction workers wearing handkerchiefs and hauling sacks with their bare hands can be seen freely online in the CBC documentary, ‘Canada’s Ugly Secret.’

Health officials describe India as fostering a ‘ticking time bomb’ of cancer, set to explode later this century (just as Western nations are still dealing with one).

Though an extremely useful material – once considered a miracle substance – handy for such applications as insulation, electrical resistance, and reinforcing cement, the wispy fibres of every form of asbestos are notoriously carcinogenic. More than 100,000 people die every year from asbestos-related diseases, it is responsible for one in three occupational cancers, according to the World Health Organization, and 120 million people are still exposed every day in the workplace.

Death from mesothelioma, an incurable cancer in the lining of the lungs, is slow, intractable, and incredibly painful. Every other form of the deadly mineral is banned worldwide altogether – only one form remains in use: chrysotile, or white asbestos. It is classified as carcinogenic by the International Agency for the Research of Cancer, yet promoted as ‘safe for use under controlled circumstances’ by its producers – most notably the Chrysotile Institute, based in Montreal, Canada, which has been funded by Canadian tax monies to the tune of $20 million for the past quarter century, according to an investigation by the Centre for Public Integrity. In turn, the Chrysotile Institute provides funds to the Indian lobby group the Asbestos Cement Products Manufacturers Association, which promotes asbestos as entirely safe.

Though Canada remains a small producer of the mineral on a global scale – Russia is both the largest producer and consumer, followed closely by China – its role is utterly integral to the continued survival of the global trade.

Canadian support provides legitimacy to a lethal product, as documented by the New Internationalist a year ago.

Canadian lobby groups have been integral in blocking the addition of white asbestos to the Rotterdam Convention, a UN-kept list of hazardous substances. The Canadian Medical Association Journal has lambasted this as a ‘shameful political manipulation of science’ and Kathleen Ruff, Senior Advisor on Human Rights to the Rideau Institute in Ottawa, says: ‘Our government should not be funding this manipulation of science – Canadian scientists should stand up because this is scientifically indefensible as well as morally indefensible.’

Though Canadian global influence is considerable, the domestic industry is marginal – unnoticed by most Canadians. Just two mines remain, both of them in Quebec. Struggling to survive, the Jeffrey mine – once one of the largest asbestos mines in the world – is gasping for breath.

The end of the Canadian asbestos industry seemed certain two months ago – Bernard Coloumbe, owner of the mine, declared the mine would only be able to stay open with a $58 million loan. The Quebec Medical Association – for the first time in history – joined the Canadian Medical Association in calling for the government to stop funding the mine and the Chrysotile Institute with federal cash and to put an end to Canadian asbestos mining and export.

Public demonstrations on 1 July (to mark Canada Day) by asbestosis victim support networks in Australia and Asia demanded that the mines be shut.

The Asbestos Diseases Foundation of Australia issued a press release on 16 August expressing relief over the news that the mine seemed certain to close, declaring: ‘For the Canadian authorities to even consider in this day and age subsidizing the export of death for the sake of about 200 Canadian jobs is just appalling.’

Two days later the Asia Regional Conference on Asbestos, Jakarta, issued a similar statement, demanding that the exports cease and adding: ‘Canada portrays itself as a defender of human rights, while continuing to export deadly chrysotile asbestos to Asia.’

Yet now it is an entirely different story: investors from India and London are touring the Jeffrey Mine, being courted for the necessary funds to reopen the mine and breathe life back into a dying, and deadly, industry. The Canadian Cancer Society calls this ‘deplorable’.

Do you agree? Sign the petition asking Canada to end the trade in asbestos.

Published in the New Internationalist