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Winona LaDuke: Leech Lake braces for oil 'invasion'
Monday, April 27, 2009
Filed Under: Opinion

"Keep your children close, your inhalers in hand and don’t forget to stock up on drinking water, as a new pipeline is proposed for northern Minnesota.

A set of corporations has offered $10 million to the Leech Lake tribe in exchange for a 20-year lease of tribal lands. The proposed Enbridge Alberta Clipper pipeline is one of the most controversial in history, with immense environmental and economic impacts. Leech Lake Band and the rest of northern Minnesota would do well to stop the pipeline, joining with thousands of Canadians, indigenous peoples, and indeed a host of shareholders, who think this project is a sham, as well as an environmental and ethical disaster.

The Tar Sands are ecologically considered the most destructive project on the Earth. The impact is devastating in northern Alberta, and promises to not only link our region into an unsustainable and immoral set of projects, but threatens our own groundwater in the land of lakes.

The proposed pipeline starts in the north of Alberta, Canada, where a set of companies is literally squeezing oil out of sand, in an economically and ecologically insane process. Consider this equation — one barrel of tar sands oil requires between 2 and 4.5 barrels of water, the addition of two tons of tar sands (scraped from below the surface of the boreal forest), and creates two barrels of toxic waste and one barrel of oil. We might also add that the processing of this tar sands oil requires immense amounts of natural gas. Daily, tar sands producers burn 600 million cubic feet of natural gas to produce tar sands oil, enough natural gas to heat 3 million homes."

Get the Story:
Nellis Kennedy and Winona LaDuke: Leech Lake, prepare for invasion of Tar Sands oil (The Bemidji Pioneer 4/25)
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