The debate over Alberta’s oilsands is taking on religious overtones these days.
Two months after a Roman Catholic bishop wrote a scathing letter against the province’s vast and controversial energy development, an Anglican bishop has spoken out against “vilifying one of the most exciting and challenging projects in Canadian history.”
John Clarke, bishop of Athabasca ”” a diocese that covers all of northern Alberta ”” said in a pastoral letter that some politicians and news reports focus on negative images of the oilsands, such as the mining process, tailings ponds and dead waterfowl.
“It is time for all (of) us across the Diocese of Athabasca and the Canadian Church to support the good work of the people of Fort McMurray, and not allow the agenda to be driven by the sensationalism of the National Geographic approach,” Clarke wrote in a letter published last week.
[blockquote][i]“I have seen over my time, many, many instances where people from an urban centre, sitting in their comfortable condominiums, view issues that are happening in rural, northern Canada. They don’t have a clue, but yet they make these great pronouncements.â€[/i][/blockquote]
Pretty well hits it spot on. It was true 35 years ago when I was living in the Yukon, and probably worse now. It is, unfortunately, not limited to Canada or to opinions on the north.
Current ignorance extends far beyond urban ignorance of more remote and rural areas, and has come to embody near cluelessness as to how things are produced, how modern life is sustained, and how wealth is generated — rather than merely redistributed.