Our home on borrowed land

EDMONTON — A documentary on children in Fort Chipewyan and their concerns about oilsands pollution in their area has made it to a short list for a Fan Favourite Award at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival.

The short documentary, called Keepers of the Water, features several children aged nine to 12 talking about what they think the industry is doing to their water supply and to their health. The film is competing with four others for votes for best emerging filmmaker. Voting closes at the end of Wednesday.

I brought this up earlier this week on Twitter, noting that the evils of the oilsands seem to be limited to some of the families boiling their tap water as a precaution. If you've ever been to anywhere in Germany, you'll notice right away that most people would kill to have water this "contaminated". What else is really the story here? "Remote and genetically invariant communities with drug and alcohol abuse problems noticing spike in cancer rates?" Is anybody really surprised by this stuff?

Anyways, director Ayelen Liberona promotes her new film in the Edmonton Journal article linked to above. Why, she volunteers, did she interview young children who are more effective to use as weapons in a cheesy propaganda war so important for the future?

"As I was reading it really got me right at my heart. ... I realized it was our children who will really inherit all our mistakes that we’re making now and will inherit our water, or what’s left of it."

She found a group of children in the community who had already taken it upon themselves to protest against water pollution. "I really wanted to let them speak and let their voice be heard because often we forget that we’re just borrowing this land from our children."

Well if we're going to go this far, why leave it to the children? Those children will have children (our grandchildren) inheriting their water, and maybe we should make a movie entirely showing 5 week old babies giving us their uninformed opinion on the matter. Especially if it just happens to be that their opinion is drill baby, drill!

But wait, our grandchildren will have their own children! Even worse, their children will have their own grandchildren, and we're all just 'borrowing' from them! I guess none of us should be doing anything! We've been blessed at this point of our development with awesome reserves of built up energy, but if we use them up we're depriving our great-great-great-grandchildren of the singular thrill of sitting on awesome reserves of built up energy and not using it lest they deprive their great-great-great-grandchildren.