Tarnished Earth - The Tar Sands Of Alberta Are Weeping

In pedestrianised Briggate in the center of Leeds there is an exhibition by the Co-op 'working with Greenpeace' featuring about two dozen huge photographs by Jiri Rezac of the wonderful endless lakes and forests of Northern Alberta and the encroaching ruin of it by the extraction of oil from tar sands.

The Co-op thinks its a catastrophe in the making.

Who would have thought it about those nice Canadians.

It involves running pipes for miles deep into the forest, stripping off the forest and the peat (the 'overburden' as that is called) and then pumping hot water into the tar sands to liquify the oil and then pipe it away.

It involves ruining an area the size of Switzerland and then spreading the toxic waste water wherever that eventually finds a home.

And it's on tribal lands that are treaty-bound to be left alone.

They are taking 1.3 million barrels a day out of the tar sands and there are 170billion barrels of oil in the tar sands still to be extracted - second largest oil reserve in the world.

From tarnishedearth.co.uk

Tarnished Earth is a dramatic street gallery of photographs by Jiri Rezac telling the story of one of the world's biggest ecological disasters. Read more at tarnishedearth.co.uk