[Text: Tomas Borsa. Photos: Jean-Philippe Marquis.]
Allow me to begin by saying that I was not expecting a great deal out of our time in Prince George. On most days, the place smells like an old rug, and as a veteran treeplanter, nearly all of my prior experiences in the city have left me feeling about as welcome as a mosquito at a garden party. But from this moment onward, if the Prince George City Council needs an ambassador, I can be that guy. It is a true diamond in the rough, and the people who inhabit it are some of the friendliest and most accommodating I’ve met anywhere in Canada. For now, some highlights from our time at the University of Northern British Columbia – a relatively small, research-intensive, and profoundly scenic campus at the top of a hill overlooking Prince George proper.
Throughout the day, many students expressed the perspective that as Northerners, their voices seemed more readily discarded – that is, that the North was often treated as unoccupied, untamed, and unimportant. Rita Mehmi, a student who we spoke with during a seminar led by Dr. Zoe Meletis of the Department of Geography, noted that “When you see a map of British Columbia, there are a few red dots ‘up there’, in the north…but what really seems to matter is in the lower mainland.” As such, many students felt that the risks associated with the Northern Gateway had been deliberately played down, and told us that they had become extremely distrustful toward Enbridge as a result. Dr. Annie Booth, an expert in environmental ethics, took the notion of Enbridge’s indifference toward the North one step further by framing it as a classic utilitarian dilemma: “If you are going to have an oil or natural gas industry in a particular area, you are asking the residents to inherit the risks. The people who tend to benefit are not the ones who tend to inherit the costs of these activities. So you have a situation in which you are asking a small group of people to suffer for the greater good…But we tend to live in a democratic society where we say that it’s a right of the minority not to suffer in order to benefit the majority.” Whoa.
And then there was Dr. Art Fredeen: a fellow Saskatoon ex-pat, and professor of Ecosystem Science and Management. As an intervener in the Joint Review process, Art’s personal anecdotes proved every bit as enlightening as his professional evaluation of the pipeline. I was interested in finding out how he, a soil scientist – that is, a person taught to remain objective and unbiased in his observations – felt able to involve himself in such an intensely political affair as the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. “People ask ‘how can we trust you as a scientist if you’re now taking a very strong position against something? I think of it as I do being a teacher, being a parent, and being a son: we all wear many hats. In my research, I am objective. But as a person, I understand that this pipeline holds nothing but negative consequences for the lives of many others; scientists are increasingly feeling comfortable stepping out and taking a stand, and I would challenge others to find this balance between their professional and personal roles.”
