What does massive environmental devastation look like? In this powerful and moving presentation, Photographer Garth Lenz shares shocking photos of the Alberta Tar Sands mining project — and the beautiful ecosystems and human communities that the project threatens.
For almost twenty years, Garth’s photography of threatened wilderness regions, devastation, and the impacts on indigenous peoples, has appeared in the world’s leading publications.
His recent images from the boreal region of Canada have helped lead to significant victories and large new protected areas in the Northwest Territories, Quebec, and Ontario.
Garth’s major touring exhibit on the Tar Sands premiered on Los Angeles in 2011 and recently appeared in New York. Garth is a Fellow of the International League Of Conservation Photographers
Filmed at TEDxVictoria on November 19 2011
… it’s so hard to find words here, so hard not to rage, so hard not to cry, not to express violent thoughts, but to consider the ways that will work and prevent this crime against Earth, this crime against the biosphere, this crime against Humankind.
In that fairyland world which we call reality, and in which the UN and all its august bodies exist – including the international court system, there are supposed to be the remedies for injustice, for crimes against humanity, and the punishment for perpetrators of genocides.
But everywhere the key points of the system have been captured, gate-keepers installed, and all that which was meant to defend us, and keep us from oppression, the 99% of humanity, is now employed on behalf of post-modern imperialist enterprise to rob us, seize our assets, lower our working conditions, poison us slowly so that they can farm us as we slowly die and maximise their profits from the investments they have made in private health corporations.
“They”, the super-rich 1% of the 1%, who live in their own deluded fantasy world, believe they will be wealthy and powerful enough to live the life of Riley in some bubble world serviced by robots and slaves.
How will it ever be possible to cut this off in time to save life on Earth?