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If you’re a Canadian who cares about things like uncontaminated beauty and sustaining human life on earth, you should stand up and demand that the Alberta’s tar sands be shut down.

The latest news out of Alberta is that a flock of five hundred migratory ducks are drowning [Update: have drowned] in a massive pool of thick sludge, the ever-growing byproduct of one of the dirtiest engineering projects on earth.

From DeSmog Blog:

The oil sands are licensed to use more fresh water in a year than the entire City of Calgary (about the same size as Austin, Texas) and 90% of that fresh water ends up in massive tailing ponds, so large that that they are considered one of the largest human-made structures in the world.

Forget the term ‘tailing pond’. Let’s call these things what they really are: pollution pits. The largest pollution pits in the world. In the Canadian wilderness. What an embarrassment.

(Remember what pits like this have already done to Canadians?)

And all this for an inefficient source of energy that even our mighty American customers are saying is too dirty?

Please do your part towards making sure that the tar sands get shut down.

(Image above found over at oneearth.org)

[Update: To provide a degree of context, here’s the number of dead ducks that we’re talking about…]

Terrible news out of B.C. yesterday as the CBC reports that yet another ‘positive’ climate change feedback loop has been activated, accelerating the Earth’s rush towards full-blown climate crisis.

Warmer weather has allowed pine beetle populations to spread far and wide across British Columbia’s Central Interior region, turning a once effective forest-based carbon sink into a carbon smokestack. The article quotes estimates that the beetle will wipe out 80% of the pine forest in the next five years. And what does that mean?…

Canadian Forest Service scientist Werner Kurz estimates the beetle’s devastation will release almost a billion megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2020. That’s equivalent to about five years of emissions from Canada’s transportation sector, said Kurz.

What’s it going to take to start moving information like this from the science page to the front page? (More info here.)

Al Gore updated his talk for TED. See it below.

Al Gore is set to unveil a three-year, $300 million climate change campaign Wednesday that is one of the most ambitious and costly public advocacy campaigns in U.S. history.

What I like about this story is where the money comes from. Including this snip:

While Gore declined to quantify his contribution to the effort, he has devoted all his proceeds from the Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” the best-selling companion book, his salary from the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and several international prizes, such as the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which add up to more than a $2.7 million.

Read more here and see the video below.

Last night Montreal hosted ‘Nuit Blanche‘ a sort all-night winter party that wraps up the Montreal High-Lights Festival. The ‘festival’ itself is really just a glossed-up bundle of disjointed cultural events that would be going on festival or no festival, but it still manages to turn into a pretty good exercise in city-wide cohesion. When you’ve got stuff going on all night, free shuttle buses, communal breakfasts and disco dancing at City Hall, you’re obviously heading in the right direction.

Since I’m interested in the future, the environment, oil and the end times, I decided to head down to the Canadian Centre for Architecture to check out a program that they were offering that included DJs, an outdoor bar made of ice and exibits on the looming global oil problems and a look back at the energy crisis of 1973. It was pretty fun to wander around the exhibit at two in the morning reading about a series of experiments in off-the-grid living that took place in the late 70s.

I’d never heard about the “New Alchemy Institute“, for example, who from 1971 to 1991 conducted a series of experiments whose aim was to discover new sustainable living techniques. They used fish and rabbits and worms. A quote from New Alchemy co-founder John Todd:

We asked ourselves the question: Is it possible to grow the food needs of a small group of people in a small space without harming the environment and without enormous recourse to external sources of energy and material? Could we design a system that is self-sustainable?

We’ve been in trouble before when it comes to expensive energy and the effects hit the Western world hard and fast. We started to put our heads together to work towards practical solutions and then we totally stepped on our dicks, forgot our lessons and were suddenly building McMansions to house our boxy SUVs. A truly huge wtf? moment in human history.

You can catch the “1973: Sorry, Out of Gas — Architecture’s Response to the Global Oil Crisis” exhibit in Montreal until April 20th.

An unprecedented exploration of the architectural experimentation following the 1973 oil crisis, when the value of oil increased exponentially and triggered economic, political, and social upheaval across the world. Sparked by the combination of reduced oil production and drastically increased prices, the oil crisis marked the end of a period of constant growth in Western countries following the Second World War. Along with social and economic adjustments came the understanding that unlimited development based on unrestricted oil at low prices was no longer feasible. Taking its title from familiar signs at gas stations throughout North America during those years, 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas features over 350 objects including architectural drawings, photographs, books and pamphlets, archival television footage, and historical artefacts to map the global response to the shortage and its relevance to architecture today.