As a Canadian company readies its plans for extraction at the first proposed tar sands mine in the United States, a group of climate justice activists is readying its own mobilization: a permanent protest vigil at the site to protest what they see as the project’s “swift obliteration” of ecosystems, danger to waterways and contribution to the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.
The company, Calgary, Alberta-based US Oil Sands, has leased over 32,000 acres of public land in the Book Cliffs area of Utah, and foresees its $60 million PR Springs project producing tar sands in 2015. The site of the mine also sits just outside the Northern Ute Ouray Reservation.
The project has faced ongoing resistance from environmental groups who have seen the devastating impacts the Alberta tar sands have brought to land, water and indigenous communities.
“These beautiful lands that US Oil Sands plans to destroy have been enjoyed by Utahns for decades and were the home for Ute people for hundreds of generations,” Jessica Lee, a spokesperson for Utah Tar Sands Resistance and Peaceful Uprising, said in a statement. “This tar sands strip mine would cause swift obliteration of multiple ecosystems and severe contributions to climate-change related disasters.”
Those two climate justice groups, as well as Canyon Country Rising Tide, aim to to put a spotlight on what US Oil Sands is doing to the biodiverse area with the permanent vigil, which was launched over the weekend.
They’ve held periodic camp-outs over the years, Lee told Common Dreams, and the groups are hoping the permanent vigil, located within the 32,000-acre leasehold, will offer a place where journalists and others who are concerned can come and see what’s at risk.
“We’re going to be able to observe what they’re doing to the area,” she said. The company gives out the impression that everything’s going well, because that’s what it wants its investors to hear, she said.
About a two-hour walk from the US Oil Sands mine is a 30-year-old tar sands mine that was abandoned because it was unable to make a profit, Lee said. “That land has never been recovered. It’s had 30 years to recover itself. Nothing grows there. It’s a dead zone,” she said, and referenced its degradation as sign of how unlikely US Oil Sands’ claims of land recovery are.
The company is also set to be the first to use a citrus-based chemical solvent in its processing of tar sands. The company claims it is environmentally-friendly, and chief executive Cameron Todd has said, “This stuff will smell lemony fresh.”
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