From Canadian Business magazine, November 22, 2010
Environment
Opinion: Dead ducks, bad faith and the Alberta oilsands
Three hundred ducks died in toxic tailings ponds. And about 10,000 birds die each year flying into Toronto skyscrapers at night.
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You'd have to be a sadist to enjoy watching a bird in its death throes, thrashing about in an oily swamp. Images like the ones that emerged from the Alberta oilsands last week, where about 300 ducks made the deadly mistake of landing in toxic tailings ponds during a freezing rain storm, get people feeling emotional. Most of us prefer not to peek into the messy inner–workings of the energy economy.
Sure, we all know that when we drive we are depleting a finite resource and pumping nasty chemicals into the air. But our filling stations are so neat and tidy we eat apple fritters and drink coffee while we pump our gas. And yes, we know that our homes aren't cozy warm thanks to the generosity of the heat fairy. But our furnaces silently suck gas from pipes that run beneath our roads, and come with Energy Star stickers to reassure us that we are good people.
So when we see some poor bird, feathers slicked with brownish goo, our instant reaction is to scream "Shame!" And then we change the channel before our forebrain starts percolating with uncomfortable questions. For instance: how many dead ducks are we willing to accept for our standard of living?
Tough question that. We're supposed to say none, right? We will not sacrifice a single innocent mallard in the service of our pampered, fuel–sucking modern existence. God bless the ducks, and their little green heads.
Feel better? Great, except that hunters typically kill 125,000 ducks every year in Alberta according to Ducks Unlimited. That's one province, every year … for sport. But you don't hunt right? Do you drive? Collisions with motor vehicles kill well over 80 million birds each year in North America. Roughly 10,000 birds die annually in Toronto by slamming their little heads into the sides of tall glass buildings at night — not as a byproduct of some much bigger industrial purpose, but because we can't agree to turn the lights off when we leave the office. Guess what else has a nasty habit of killing birds? Wind turbines. They don't produce carbon, but they are efficient bird guillotines. Michael Fry of the American Bird Conservancy estimates wind farms kill at least 75,000 birds a year in the U.S.
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