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An Interview with Petr Komers - Part Five in Max's Blog Series on the Tar Sands

Talking with Petr Komers - The Inside Scoop on Environmental Impact Assessments and How First Nations Interests Are Not Really On The Table

Introduction
The world of professional ecological management has become increasingly complex of late -- some would say deliberately so because it forces rich, particular and deliberative ways of engaging with nature to accede to the logics and provisions of an industry in structural harmony with the politically and financially well-endowed. To develop an oil sands project, the Alberta government requires proponents to submit what is now a true proliferation of assessments, provisions and reports. This in the faith that ‘good governance’ is being done. But while documents like the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) are supposed hold all affected parties to regulated fields of engagement, in reality they often work to the advantage of the developers (i.e proponents), with the particulars of what ecological assessment actually is, veiled from the people most affected by change.

I’d first heard of Petr Komers in the Fort McMurray office of the Mikisew Cree last spring, when I was doing research for my Master’s Dissertation. Komers’ Calgary-based environmental firm MSES was assisting the First Nation in understanding what the highly technical EIA documents were really saying, and perhaps more importantly, what they were leaving out. We caught up recently over the phone, and a summary of my interview with him follows...

MR: Begin by telling us about what MSES is, what about your relationship with the Mikisew Cree is and how that began.

PK: Well, we at MSES are a small environment firm working out of Calgary, and we received a phone call from a representative of the Mikisew Cree who asked if we could help her review an EIA and make sense of it. That’s pretty much how our working relationship started. This was in 2001.

MR: Not everyone familiar with the oil sands is aware of how important an EIA is. Can you talk about it a little -- who creates it, what it is supposed to do, and who it is meant for?

PK: An EIA or Environmental Impact Assessment is intended to help all sorts of parties in the environmental planning process understand the impact of industrial development. It is meant to help with the understanding of the planning processes, and how to mitigate that impact. And this is really key here: the EIA is not only for the proponent and government; at least in theory, Environment Impact Assessments should help those people who are most affected to understand and plan for the impact that is predicted to come.

The Mikisew Cree, along with other first Nations and Aboriginals who live near the oil sands and use the lands are obviously most directly affected by development, and they would like to be able to take these impact assessments and understand them. But not only that, they would like to have input in how the impact assessments are actually conducted so that studies would address the concerns that they, the Aboriginal communities, have.

MR: And your involvement suggests that EIAs in oil sands have not been too effective in this latter regard...

PK: Right now the way the process works -- and we at MSES have actually done research on many years of review -- EIAs in the oil sands do not allow the Aboriginal communities to be involved up front and to help to design the impact assessment. Instead, the First Nations and Aboriginal communities are basically told what the impact will be -- from government and from industry. We think that this is a little bit backwards...

MR: There’s this assumption that development is going to go ahead, regardless of what the impact is suggested or predicted by the EIA. Have there ever been EIAs produced in the tar sands that recommended against a development outright?

PK: I am not aware of any in the oil sands. There are very few impact assessments anywhere that have been rejected as far as I know. Some in Nunavut, one that I know of is in southern Alberta, but none in the oil sands.

MR: Tell me about the so-called ‘scoping phase’ of the EIA and how, in theory at least, it is supposed to work in relation to adequate community engagement for First Nations and Aboriginal communities?

PK: The scoping phase, at least in theory, is where the project is conceived. It is here that all stakeholders and all potential affected parties should be asked what potential concerns should be addressed by an impact assessment. And hopefully here, the future impact can be mitigated. Right now that doesn’t happen; what happens is the use of standard terms of reference that Alberta Environment has, one that is simply given to the proponents who carry out the study, and the impact assessment proceeds. Once the EIA is done, it becomes a public document. And at that point, the impacted communities have a chance to look at it, and have a chance to say how that proposed project will affect them. And at that point, it’s basically too late.

MR: So it seems rather easy for industry to get off the hook...

PK: There is a regulatory framework -- essentially regulations dictating to industry what industry needs to do. If industry can demonstrate that they have followed all the processes required, then they are off the hook. We find this time and time again -- basically industry says, ‘well we were not asked to this and asked to do that.’ Most striking perhaps is that, as part of the regulatory framework, for all sorts of small developments such as access roads, pipelines, exploration programs industry does not need to do any cumulative effects assessments, industry does not need to assess the impacts of a pipeline on traditional land use. What they need to do is simply mitigate everything that they disturbed along the footprint of their project.

MR: And it’s only for a big development that they have to do an EIA?

PK: That is correct. Though it’s different with a trans-boundary pipeline, where a project gets elevated into the federal level. At that point they do have to do an impact assessment. But if it’s within Alberta, not so.

MR: Tell me more about the ethics or politics of constructing these documents. EIAs are highly technical documents, with potential capacity to mislead or obfuscate. Can you discuss any specific ways or instances wherein impact assessment has done that?

PK: One example pertains to the absence of knowledge regarding what happened to date. That is, the question of how much has the environment changed from pre-disturbance conditions. In the oil sands, we take as a benchmark the year 1965 because that’s when basic development started. Today, when we see a report that says a given development will only add 1% disturbance to the land, we ask, “How much of that land has been disturbed already [i.e. since the benchmark year]?” That question isn’t addressed. We need to understand the rate of development and how much that land has been degraded already so that we can understand what additional effects the development might have.

Another problem is that at no point in time is there any concrete monitoring program with specific targets or benchmarks against which you can measure the success of your mitigation. What this means is that basically the Environmental Impact Assessment presents a scenario for a predicated impact: “We think such and such impact will be low because we will re-vegetate after disturbance.” We ask, “What does it mean when you say, we will re-vegetate?,” “What does it mean when you say, ‘This many animals will be there.’?” We want to know how many plants, what species and so on -- all those parameters can and should be measured and they should be used as a measure of the success of a mitigation...

MR: And then there are macro-level questions too, like climate change of course. How do they feature in the scenario planning part of an EIA?

PK: Well, climate change is usually requested in the terms of reference. But in terms of an impact assessment it is such a nebulous concept, it is really hard to deal with. This is mostly because a project is tasked with its impacts on the environment, now any given project has a contribution to a phenomenon that is global but of course it can be hard to measure at such a large scale. One could ask the question the other way around: what effect will climate change have on the success of your mitigation or reclamation efforts. So when the project is supposed to begin decommissioning 20 years from now and we project that region to be two degrees warmer, reclamation practices will probably need to be different than they are now.

MR: Getting back to our original topic, I want to ask how, as an ecologist, do you feel the sorts of scientific assumptions about nature embedded in EIAs work in relation to values held by the Mikisew Cree? Can you see reconciliations in terms of models and maps that can support multiple ways of seeing and understanding nature?

PK: You have to understand that we at MSES are ecologists, we’re western scientists. We always say this to ourselves as a preamble when we are approached by a First Nation. The First Nations can tell what they think are their traditional resources -- and note that I am saying ‘traditional resources’ and not ‘traditional resource use’ -- those are two very different things. Traditional resources can be populations of moose, fish, medical plants or other resources that are being harvested by traditional land users. As scientists, we can assess them, we can measure population density, whether or not a population is viable, whether it has enough habitat and so on. What we cannot do is to assess how exactly those things are used, and how that use is integrated into the culture of the First Nations. That is for the First Nations people themselves to do. They need to extrapolate from the numbers -- perhaps with the aid of social scientists -- to determine what effects those numbers will have on their practices.

MR: It is easy to forget the government in all of this. There seems to be a reluctance or incapacity on the part of the Alberta Government to adequately inform all of the citizens and inhabitants about what is going on in the tar sands. Can you speak to that dynamic a little -- with the government not really being a part of the EIA process it seems?

PK: I understand Alberta as a bit of a particular jurisdiction: it downloads a lot of the activities and responsibilities in terms of consultation to the proponents of industry. So basically in applications like an EIA the proponent is asked to go and talk to the First Nations, to ask what their issues are. The problem with that is the collaboration with the proponent and the First Nation is much lower often than the proponent would like to have. So by the time they submit the Environmental Impact Assessment, the proponent does not have the information necessary to understand the impact on the traditional uses of the First Nation. You could say that the government should do that. It may well be more efficient if there was a central agency that helps to develop a database. What we have is a piecemeal assessment process, a one-at-a-time process.

MR: Do you see your work as being political -- because you are interested in working with people who are not interested in simply profiting from the land, but in keeping large tracts of land from being made into profitable entities?

PK: Well, no, I couldn’t say that I see our work as political. We get into the political crossfire of course. We are asked a question by First Nations, they want to know, “How well are our concerns addressed?” and we go out there and test this. We find that sometimes industry does a good job, but oftentimes, they do not.

MR: Well, it seems to me that by simply acknowledging that certain questions exist and need to be asked you are doing something political. OK, final question: Tell me as best as you can, what sorts of questions should a good Environmental Impact Assessment ask? What should a good Environmental Impact Assessment be able to do?

PK: From a First Nations point of view and in a more general sense for anybody who might potentially be affected by development, the Environmental Impact Assessment must integrate their questions and concerns and the result of the impact assessment must be an answer as to how these questions and concerns can be alleviated. And that is different from what is happening now: the current process only actually lists some of the potential concerns, but does not actually address them, or does not alleviate them. I have yet to see an Environmental Impact Assessment in the oil sands which would provide a list of mitigation measures that would assist in protecting against the cultural impact for a people.

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  Max Ritts recently obtained his MA in Geography from the University of Toronto, where he wrote his Master's Thesis on the political ecology of the Tar Sands. He has written freelance for various publications, and will begin his PhD in Geography in the fall at UBC.

Posted by Max Ritts Tuesday Aug 24, 2010 15:05
Categories: Beaver Lake Cree, Environment , Max Ritts | Tags: Alberta, climate, environment, First Nations, indigenous, Max Ritts, oil sands, tar sands

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