Reclamation or Masturbation? Critical Response #2.

When considering the impacts of a wide-scale land disturbance, it’s important to weigh the political, economic, and social elements that are or will be affected. This article will attempt to further examine the long-term ecological and landscape impact of fossil fuel extraction by examining the reclamation standards determined by the Alberta provincial government. Using the Alberta oil sands as a case study, I will look at open pit mining rather than Steam Assisted Gravity Drained (SAGD) operations as this type of extraction involves the largest landscape impact of the development. I propose that due to the substantial environmental impact in this region, the current reclamation standards fail to encompass the grand scale of the oil sand development.

According to the Alberta Oilsands Vegetation Reclamation Committee, any user of public land whether it be a private timber licensee or a multinational energy corporation, must “achieve maintenance-free, self-sustaining ecosystems with capabilities equivalent to or better than pre-disturbance conditions” (OSVRC, 1998). For many industries such as forestry, this is a complex but very attainable task, and in many cases the outcome does actually benefit the ecosystem (such as salvage harvesting Mountain Pine Beetle stands). For other resource sectors following the governmental guidelines, the task is completely moot. The Alberta oil sand extraction, for example, is a large-scale development that involves ecosystem reconstruction at the scale of entire landscapes. “Given the large area of each mine (ca. 100 km2) eventually to be stripped and mined, this is not a restoration problem but the engineering of new ecosystems” (Johnson. 2008). For example, the largest tailings pond in the world “Mildred Lake”, resides in the Athabasca region which is owned and operated by Syncrude Canada Ltd. The Mildred Lake Settling Basin has a water surface area of 13 km², and holds more than 400 million m³ of tailings (Fedorak et al. 2002). Further, a major problem with using tailings ponds as a disposal method is the slow rate of sedimentation of the fine tailings, which could take 125–150 years (Eckert et al. 1996), which far surpasses the reclamation timeframe.

Because of the oil sands development of the landscape, the ground and surface hydrology is rerouted wherein whole wetlands and creeks disappear or move, the soil chemistry is changed to a point that native species won’t grow without annual fertilization, and whole boreal ecosystems are removed (OSVRC. 1998). The current remediation tactics use the same reclamation standards that the forestry industry uses, requiring “80% of the plots in a standard survey to be stocked with an acceptable tree(s) to a minimum height standard” (Alberta SRD. 2008). This standard is based on the assumption that the ecosystem occupying the site after the disturbance will be the same or similar to what it was prior; but because open pit mining alters the whole landscape, the silvicultural prescription will not necessarily equate to what remains after extraction. Regarding development in peatland areas, Mark Sherrington writes “peatlands are vegetation communities established on organic soils over several thousand years and cannot be reclaimed in the 80–100 year time period considered for reclamation in the Oil Sands region” (Sherrington. 2005). This means the peatlands removed for development will, at best, be returned to marches or swamps which don’t support the biodiversity or carbon storage that the peatlands previously did. The reclamation procedure also relies on salvaging peat deposits from the excavation sites, as well as harvesting organic soils and peat from offsite locations to mix with the replaced top soil, to create a suitable growth medium. While this method is “noteworthy because native seeds and root fragments transferred with the soil became established and grew rapidly on the reclamation sites” (OSVRC. 1998), it further expands the “footprint” of the operation and relies on fragile ecosystems to provide another resource to supplement the damages driven by fossil fuel consumption, which in turn releases more carbon previously stored in the frozen organics within the peatland permafrost. This is analogous to the consumption of a cleaner energy, natural gas, (or maybe even nuclear), to produce energy deemed by President Barack Obama as “dirty, dwindling, and dangerous.”

For these reasons, it should be clear that the generic reclamation standards of the province are not sufficient when dealing with such a macro anthropogenic disturbance. Reclaiming this land involves more than a superficial cleanup with the assumption that nature will restore itself and it’s unrealistic to assume that the landscape after extraction would resemble anything close to “pre-disturbance conditions”. As filmmaker Shannon Walsh and writer Macdonald Stainsby point out: Alberta’s failed reclamation strategy is “an absurdist creation only possible at this point in market-utopian logics” (Walsh. 2010). To recreate viable whole landscapes, a strategy must be created with the end goals and design objectives clearly laid out, a bottom up approach; which would allow developers to incorporate final objectives into land-use planning. The Landscape Design Checklist proposal by the Cumulative Environmental Management Association does just this. The document recommends compiling the design objectives into a checklist for creation of landscapes, and then incorporate the checklist into the design process. “Although many of the items in the design checklist may already be incorporated into the design process by some mining operation staff and their consultants, not all items are routinely or optimally followed, and the process is seldom systematic” (CEMA. 2005). If a design such as this were integrated into the provincial reclamation policies and guidelines, it may encourage a forward-looking approach rather than one that prioritizes short-term issues for the largest profit, and would contractually obligate the companies to reclaim land to a standard that actually supports the re-establishment of healthy ecosystems and landscapes.

Nevertheless, if reclamation standards change to incorporate ecosystem reconstruction at the scale of whole landscapes and hold the oil companies to a greater environmental accountability, this will effectively increase the costs of reclamation and therefore the overall cost of production. This would drive the cost and consequently the price of each barrel of oil from the oil sands up, which would create even greater disdain for a resource that is already marginally accepted by North American societies; (although the reduced environmental pressure does stand to reduce social pressure). If Alberta continues to allow large scale landscape reconstruction and environmental modification without fully acknowledging the long-term consequences of these actions, then I propose that the term reclamation be changed to masturbation; because it may look and feel good right now but in the long-run their only screwing themselves.

Literature Cited:

Alberta Sustainable Resource Development. 2008. Alberta Regeneration Survey Manual. Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, Forest Management Branch. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Effective May 1, 2008.

CEMA-RWG Landscape Design Subgroup. 2005. Landscape Design Checklist, Revised RSDS Government Regulator Version, May 2005. Cumulative Environmental Management Association. Fort McMurray, AB. http://www.cemaonline.ca/  (accessed on October 22, 2010)

Eckert, W.F., Masliyah, J.H., Gray, M.R., and Fedorak, P.M. 1996. Prediction of sedimentation and consolidation of fine tails. AIChE J. 42: 960–972.

Fedorak, P.M., Coy, D.L., Salloum, M.J., Dudas, M.J. 2002. Methanogenic Potential of Tailings Samples from Oil Sands Extraction Plants. Department of Biological Sciences; Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. NRC Research Press.

Johnson, E.A., Miyanishi, K. 2008. Creating New Landscapes and Ecosystems: The Alberta Oil Sands. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Department of Geography, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

Oil Sands Vegetation Reclamation Committee, 1998. Guidelines for Reclamation to Forest Vegetation in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region. Alberta Environmental Protection. Edmonton, AB.

Walsh. Shannon; Stainsby, Macdonald.  2010. Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution. AK Press, Chapter 28, Part 7. Pages 333-344.