Alex MacLean and Dan Grossman are documenting what the oil companies are doing to the forest and bogs of Alberta as they strip the land to retrieve oil from the tar sands. You can read about their project at Tar Sands Truth. The environmental destruction happening in Alberta is hard to comprehend. It makes you wonder what planet earth is going to look like in fifty years.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ1fNnVs2iM?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360]

How does this have anything to do with raising chickens and growing produce at a man and his hoe®? We are all connected, no matter how distant we might be from each other. The air that blows over the tar sands of Alberta eventually blows over you and me. The mindset that allows such environmental degradation is a mindset that affects all of us. By saying that it is OK to do that over there, we have no right to say you can’t do it where I am.

People will be needing to live on this planet a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, ten thousand years from now, a hundred thousand years from now, a million years from now. They will need pure water, pure air, pure soil to live. How are they going to have these things if this is what we keep doing to our tiny planet? Our economic and political systems are set up to just look at a few months to a few years ahead. But we need economic and political systems that think far, far, far into the future.