While shooting in Fort McMurray during the making of his award-winning film, White Water Black Gold, director and producer David Lavallee learned the vehicle he drove mattered. So when he returned to Alberta’s oil sands region to film his new documentary, To the Ends of the Earth, he planned ahead.
“I knew filming in the tar sands driving around in a little old Toyota would get us hassled,” Lavallee said. “So I rented a big Ford F-150 and some safety vests. Hide in plain sight.”
Fort McMurray was just one of several places Lavallee visited over the two and a half years he’s worked on this film. Closer to his North Vancouver home, he drew attention from CSIS and the RCMP’s anti-terror unit after he used a drone to film Kinder Morgan’s facilities on Burnaby Mountain.
Filming also brought him to Canmore, his former hometown, where local cameraman Glen Crawford filmed resident Karen Barker dealing with losing her Cougar Creek home after the 2013 flood.
Lavallee’s inspiration for To the Ends of the Earth came on the heels of White Water Black Gold, which followed the Athabasca River from its headwaters at the Rockies’ Columbia Icefield to Alberta’s oil sands in search of answers about the world’s most water-intensive oil industry.
Whenever he showed White Water Black Gold, someone in the audience would inevitably ask, what about the economy?
Lavallee decided to follow the question.
“I decided to ask, do we really need this? Is it good for the economy?” Lavallee said.
To the Ends of the Earth looks at the rise of non-traditional energy production through oil shale, bitumen, fracked gas and Arctic drilling, as experienced by the people directly affected by these practices. It also examines how the associated costs of these methods often exceeds the amount of energy produced, and investigates options for transitioning to not just environmentally cleaner, but more affordable, energy.
To complete his project, Lavallee recently launched an IndieGogo crowdfunding campaign that ends on July 18. Thus far he’s finished a rough cut with aims for a fall 2015 release. Additional funds raised through IndieGogo will provide professional editing, high quality animation, music composition and licensing of archival images and video.
Through making his film, Lavallee learned Alberta’s oils sands industry has generated $330 billion over the past 10 years, thanks to multi-national investment. That amount, however, only represents just two per cent of Canada’s GDP, and didn’t exist prior to 2003.
“It’s two per cent we didn’t have before 2003, back when the tar sands was just a little backwater project,” he said. “All we have to do is go back to 2003. It’s not like we were suffering then.”
In 2005, regular conventional crude oil production stopped growing. All of the growth since then has been from unconventional methods.
To make his film, Lavallee travelled to Baffin Island, the Utah desert and northeastern B.C.
“I followed the earth journey that the oil companies are taking to find the next oil and gas reserves,” he explained.
Even if all the oil in the Arctic could be recovered, he said, it would only yield a three-year supply. In Baffin Island’s Clyde River and Pond Inlet he spent two weeks learning from and filming local Inuit.
“I hung out with Inuit hunters in Clyde River and Pond Inlet. I ate boiled seal soup, and I got charged by a polar bear,” he said. “We were at the floe edge hunting for narwhal and a polar bear came out of the water. He shook himself off then started coming towards us. One of the hunters yelled at it and he backed off, but then he started coming back. So the hunter fired a warning shot over its head. It took off – much to my relief. They are so big!.”
Clyde River’s mayor expressed concern about how drilling for oil in the Arctic would disrupt his people’s ability to practice their 10,000-year-old subsistence hunting way of life. He also described how exploration methods adversely affect marine life.
“They tow these sonic arrays behind the boat and they are 100,000 times louder than a jet engine, 250 decibels,” Lavallee said. “The Inuit are recording confused narwhals exhibiting unusual behaviour and hanging out in unusual places. They think they’re afraid, that they don’t want to be in the water.”
Hunters have encountered seals that did not flee at the sound of a boat approaching – they’d been deafened by the sonic booms. The methods being used for oil and gas exploration are robbing the mammals, including whales, of their most important sense, Lavallee said.
“To a marine mammal, echo location is everything,” Lavallee said.
Meanwhile, going to the “ends of the earth” to extract increasingly difficult to access fossil fuel sources makes less and less economic sense.
“Up to 30 per cent of the projects in Fort Mac consume more energy than they give back to society,” Lavallee said. “The only reason they get away with this is the Alberta government gives them natural gas practically for free. It’s heavily subsidized.”
All the while, he added, society’s dependence on fossil fuels for everything from sunscreen to cooking utensils to transportation is steadily exacerbating the effects of earth’s warming climate – effects that contributed to Canmore’s 2013 flood.
“The Canmore flood event was an extreme weather event, the type of which are becoming commonplace as our climate destabilizes,” Lavallee said. “One thing that will exacerbate that destabilization is using ever increasing carbon intensity fuels, which every resource - shale gas, bitumen, oil shale - that I feature in my film is. To have a climate change flood happen in my former hometown really brought the climate change issue home for me.
“And Calgary is also featured – the irony of having tar sands execs not able to get to work because of a climate change flood was an irony not lost on me.”
While the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers declined Lavallee’s interview requests, the film features authors Naomi Klein and Andrew Nikiforuk, UBC Canada Research Chair in Global Politics Michael Byers, New York’s Syracuse University energy researcher Dr. Charles Hall, among others.
Overall, Lavallee said making the film was educational.
“I learned that conventional economics is largely a delusion, operating on assumptions of plentitude that just aren’t there,” Lavallee said. “It’s not a peak oil problem, but a peak economy problem. We can no longer afford to get at these things.”
To learn more, visit www.indiegogo.com/projects/to-the-ends-of-the-earth--3/#/story
