Name: 【TED】Garth Lenz: The true cost of oil (Garth Lenz: The true cost of oil)
Uploaded: 2017-06-29T16:55:45.000Z
Duration: 17 min 41 s
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Translator: Morton Bast Reviewer: Thu-Huong Ha

The world's largest and most devastating environmental and industrial project

Basic passive voice

is situated in the heart of the largest and most intact forest in the world,

It stretches right across Northern Canada, in Labrador,

it's home to the largest remaining wild caribou herd in the world:

Unfortunately, when I was there, I couldn't find one of them,

we're blessed with this incredible abundance of wetlands.

Wetlands, globally, are one of the most endangered ecosystems.

they sequester large amounts of greenhouse gases,

and they're home to a huge diversity of species.

where almost 50 percent of the 800 bird species found in North America

migrate north to breed and raise their young.

In Ontario, the boreal marches down south to the north shore of Lake Superior.

And these incredibly beautiful boreal forests

were the inspiration for some of the most famous art in Canadian history,

the Group of Seven were very inspired by this landscape,

and so the boreal is not just a really key part of our natural heritage,

but also an important part of our cultural heritage.

In Manitoba, this is an image from the east side of Lake Winnipeg,

and this is the home of the newly designated UNESCO Cultural Heritage site.

In Saskatchewan, as across all of the boreal,

an incredible network of rivers and lakes that every school-age child learns about,

the Peace, the Athabasca, the Churchill here, the Mackenzie,

and these networks were the historical routes

for the voyageur and the coureur de bois,

the first non-aboriginal explorers of Northern Canada

that, taking from the First Nations people,

for a trade route, a Northwest Passage for the fur trade.

In the North, the boreal is bordered by the tundra,

we have this incredible valley, the Tombstone Valley.

And the Tombstone Valley is home to the Porcupine caribou herd.

Now you've probably heard about the Porcupine caribou herd

in the context of its breeding ground in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Well, the wintering ground is also critical

and is potentially, could be potentially, exploited for gas and mineral rights.

The western border of the boreal in British Columbia

is the greatest remaining temperate rainforest in the world,

and we'll discuss that in a few minutes in a bit more detail.

it's home for a huge incredible range of indigenous peoples,

why so many of these groups have retained a link to the past,

I think part of that reason is because of the remoteness,

of this almost 95 percent intact ecosystem.

as we see ourselves in a time of environmental crisis,

who have lived so sustainably in this ecosystem

In the heart of this ecosystem is the very antithesis

of all of these values that we've been talking about,

and I think these are some of the core values

the largest oil reserves on the planet outside of Saudi Arabia.

Trapped underneath the boreal forest and wetlands of northern Alberta

are these vast reserves of this sticky, tar-like bitumen.

And the mining and the exploitation of that

is creating devastation on a scale that the planet has never seen before.

I want to try to convey some sort of a sense of the size of this.

it is the largest truck of its kind on the planet.

and its dimensions are 45 feet long by 35 feet wide and 25 feet high.

my head comes to around the bottom of the yellow part of that hubcap.

you could build a 3,000-square-foot two-story home quite easily.

So instead of thinking of that as a truck, think of that as a 3,000-square-foot home.

And line those trucks / homes back and forth

across there from the bottom all the way to the top.

And then think of how large that very small section of one mine is.

Now, you can apply that same kind of thinking here as well.

Now, here you see -- of course, as you go further on,

Again, imagine those all back and forth there.

That would be a huge, vast metropolitan area,

probably much larger than the city of Victoria.

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【TED】Garth Lenz: The true cost of oil (Garth Lenz: The true cost of oil)

incredible

massive

critical

vast