If the tar sands refuse to sleep in, so will people across the globe!

Malaika Aleba from Alberta Canada, who spoke in London at International Stop the Tar Sands day.

Last Saturday morning I woke up with an extra spring in my step and hopped (despite the ungodly hour) onto the Oxford tube to London. Why in the world, you may be asking yourself, would a twenty-something-year-old choose to spend a Saturday morning jumping onto a bus, when she could be partaking in a myriad of other activities, such as, you know, sleeping in?

Well, June 18th's International Stop the Tar Sands Day was a great example of the inspiring fact that if the tar sands refuse to sleep in (preferably permanently), so will people across the globe! Need proof? A record number of protests took part in European and North American cities, with people waking up to speak up about what is being called the largest and most destructive industrial project in human history. 

Since I am currently living in Oxford but originally from Alberta, I was more than happy to speak about the horrors happening in my province. I told of how when I visited the infamous sands last fall, I became physically ill from witnessing the environmental destruction - a horrible stench hangs in the air over a moonscape of treeless gray land, smoke stacks, and toxic lakes filled with the poisonous water leftover from tar sands mining. I remember the sound of canons in the distance, firing repeatedly to scare  birds from landing on the toxic lakes, signalling, it seemed, a war against nature.

Danny Chivers, a performance poet, activist, and author of the The New Internationalist’s No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change, also spoke out against this war on nature. He compared the tar sands industry to “a nicotine addict stowed away on someone else’s spaceship using up the last of their oxygen supply to fuel his dirty habit.” Unfortunately oil companies, like cigarette companies in the retro-years, would have you believe that we don’t have to worry about so-called dirty habits: nicotine is great for the lungs; and according to radio and television ads played throughout Alberta, pollution is great for the environment.

Luckily, activists are fighting hard to dispel tar sands propaganda, and hopefully results will soon be seen in the form of the EU banning tar sands oil from Europe. Jess Worth, of the UK Tar Sands Network, spoke of how the UK is one of only two member states working to block the move to ban dirty oil from the EU. We signed a giant petition, protesting the UK‘s efforts to keep using unethical oil; and on Monday it was delivered to the Department for Transport.

If laughter is the best weapon, the People and Planet activists are definitely a force to be reckoned with. They performed a comic skit in which an “activist” was tarred (with molasses) and feathered by an “investor” for speaking out against the tar sands. London’s International Stop the Tar Sands Day was concluded by a procession across the street to lay flowers on the steps of the Canadian High Commission - flowers for all the people whose lives this dirty oil industry is negatively affecting and even ending, thanks to rising cancer rates in communities downstream from the tar sands.

As a Canadian, I am so thankful for this London event, organised by No Tar Sand’s Pete Barker.  That people all the way here in the UK care about what is happening in my province gives me hope. Canada’s boreal forest is important to us all - let’s not let it be destroyed. Wake up, hop on a bus, write an article, talk to a friend. No matter what, speak out! Please don’t be indifferent about what is happening to my home.