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The issue of pipeline safety is clouded enough with a slew of "captive regulators, from Alberta to the United States, but the situation gets even more sticky because the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, and others from the tar sands, will be transporting "dilbit" which carries its own problems with it.

By Joyce Nelson

This article is a preview of the story to be published in the March-April Watershed Sentinel.

A Decade of Enbridge Oil Pipeline Spills

by Joyce Nelson, part of a feature Pipeline Safety, Dilbit, Captive Regulators and Smart Pigs coming in the March-April Watershed Sentinel

2000: 7,513 barrels. Enbridge reported 48 pipeline spills and leaks, including a spill of 1,500 barrels at Innes, Sask.

2001: 25,980 barrels. Enbridge pipelines reported 34 spills and leaks, totalling 25,980

by Susan MacVittie

Many Gitxsan First Nation people and their supporters spent their Christmas holidays at the blockade outside of the Gitxsan Treaty Office (GTO) in New Hazelton, BC. On December 5, 2011, after consultation with their clan members, Chiefs and members converged on the Gitxsan Chief's Office in response against a deal signed on December 2 with Enbridge in support of the controversial Northern Gateway Project by hereditary Chief Elmer Derrick, a negotiator with the GTO. The deal provides the Gitxsan with an equity stake in the pipeline project that could be worth $7 million over the life of the project.

by Joyce Nelson

Investment banker Goldman Sachs has famously been described by the Rolling Stone's business writer Matt Taibbi (July 2009) as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." So it's a good idea to take notice whenever that Vampire Squid moves its blood funnel towards something. Having profited handsomely from the Wall Street bailouts, the Squid has smelled money in a new direction: water privatization.

 by Joyce Nelson

Most of BC's public land forests, and all of BC's private land forests, are owned by two huge companies, known as TAM and BAM [see diagram]. TAM is Third Avenue Management of New York, and BAM is Brookfield Asset Management, based in Toronto.

As Briony Penn wrote for Focus Magazine (Feb. 2011), "Look out your window anywhere from Crofton to Sooke and you'll be gazing at a piece of real estate owned in some fashion by BAM or TAM ... [which] form a many-headed hydra that has been devouring most of the private forest lands on southeast Vancouver Island." 

Sometimes, when I wander in the natural world, away from human concerns, I sense some sacred balance that will restore itself, a resilience and patience in living systems that will endure the hungers, fears, and gullibility of my civilization.

On the other hand, a part of me weeps almost daily at the reckless dismantling of this miracle into which I - and the entire human experiment - was born.

Witness: Plastic islands in toxic seas. Methane rising from melting permafrost. Creeping deserts, shrinking aquifers, and declining biodiversity. Black sludge lakes in Mordor landscapes delivering deadly crude oil to our shores, risking our marine environments and coastal communities with oil spills. Our bays, inlets, and wild rivers sold to Babylon.

by Mark Anielski

Economics is failing to improve well-being for Earth's seven billion people. The high priests of economics have forgotten that economics' primary concern - the meaning of the word - is the well-being of the household. Economy (Greek oikonomia) means "household management." Most economists have also forgotten the meaning of "wealth," from 13th century Middle English, meaning "conditions of well-being." Instead of practicing genuine economics, the high priests have become experts at chrematistics (which Aristotle defined as the art of getting rich).

Howard T. Odum redifined economics using the fundatmentals of energy transformation. Odum's daughter, Mary Odum Logan, Ph.D., adjunct professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, helped Watershed Sentinel excerpt her father's key concepts, such as why consumption has limits and why "success" in Nature can be a liability.

In the 1960s," recalls Mary Odum Logan, "I heard dinner table lectures regarding the energy and ecology problems we witness today. My father appeared more optimistic in the classroom and saved his gloomier fears for intimate conversation."

by Ben West

Last week, I sat in my office in the Gastown district of Vancouver and learned that the most powerful government in the world is putting my community on notice.

From my window, I watched a large crude oil tanker cruise through Burrard Inlet, as an email arrived quoting the US State Department about these very oil exports in our city. The email came from an ally in the historic civil disobedience action outside the US White House in Washington, DC. Over 1,200 people were arrested for opposing the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would link Alberta tar sands to heavy oil refineries and tanker ports along the Texas Gulf coast. In their report on the pipeline expansion, the US State Department claims that if the Keystone XL pipeline isn't built:

by Erik Andersen

The Gordon Campbell/Christy Clark energy policies have pillaged BC Hydro of the equity that employees contributed and created. I feel sorry for the employees, who do not understand that their contributions have been squandered for the benefit of others. When the predator class gets sight of a sound balance sheet - as BC Hydro once had - it is slaughtered like an innocent lamb. The gamers and parasites only see an opportunity to exploit.