Elizabeth May, Sierra Club of Canada

Elizabeth May is the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and a lifelong environmental activist. She is also a lawyer, educator, writer, and mother. Her most recent book, coauthored with fellow Canadian activist Maude Barlow, is Frederick Street: Life and Death on Canada's Love Canal.

It seems that all week the news flashes have been coming from the East Coast. The Sydney Tar Ponds in Nova Scotia, the Main River in Newfoundland, an industrial pig factory in New Brunswick, and today the urgent alerts came from Atlantic Canada again. Fisherman's wife and activist Mary Gorman got hold of the terms of reference for an "environmental assessment" for oil and gas development in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Let me back up and fill you in on why it is beyond nuts for anyone to want to develop oil and gas there.

For readers in the United States, picture Maine and keep going east into the Atlantic. The province of Nova Scotia extends out and cradles above it a little province called Prince Edward Island (PEI) -- home to Anne of Green Gables. Anyway, that northern shore of Nova Scotia and all of PEI are in the body of water below where the mighty St. Lawrence River dumps into the sea. The relatively narrow and shallow area between Nova Scotia and PEI is called the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. It is rich in marine life -- whales, dolphins, fish, crab, lobster, sea birds. The fishery in the southern Gulf supports 20,000 fishers in a $1 billion per year industry. Nevertheless, with no consultation and no environmental assessment, an area of 600,000 acres of sea bed extending from the coast of Cape Breton Island 20 miles into the southern Gulf has been permitted for oil and gas exploration. The coastline along this permitted area abuts some of the world's most spectacular scenery. The Cape Breton Highlands National Park and the Margaree River, a Heritage River and a productive salmon river, would be impacted. The views from the Cabot Trail could include oil rigs. And an island set aside as a bird sanctuary is smack dab in the area of prospective oil and gas development. If there were ever an oil spill in this relatively enclosed body of water, the oil would have nowhere to go but the miles of shoreline of the three abutting provinces -- Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI.

It is astonishing that development permits could be granted in such a rich and significant marine region without any assessment. It's thanks to a law called the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board Act, which was intended to give industry quick approvals. It requires no environmental assessments.

But local opposition to this drilling plan has been mounting. Every fishermen's organization, every First Nations Group (including the Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nations Chiefs), tourism organizations, and local clergy from all three provinces have banded together with Sierra Club of Canada and other environmental groups in the Save our Seas and Shores coalition. We oppose any activity in the southern Gulf, as well as another shoreline drilling permit on eastern Cape Breton. (We've discovered that Atlantic Canada is the only place in the industrialized world with shoreline permits!) Even the seismic exploration process could damage fish at every stage of their lifespan, thus compromising the fishery. Whales are particularly vulnerable to damage from the massive blasts from air guns, as they are dependent on sonar for navigation.

So the government announced a delay in the testing in the southern Gulf and promised an environmental review. Today, Mary Gorman emailed me the terms of reference she uncovered. The study is to determine "the manner in which exploration, development and production should be conducted." No part of the mandate is to determine if exploration should happen at all. The assumption is that oil and gas production will proceed as soon as they appease us with a little study.

Of course, the planet needs more oil and gas like it needs a hole in the head. (Actually, that's a particularly apt simile because both are suicidal.) The known reserves of oil and gas around the world, if pumped up and burned, would push global warming into the sort of runaway greenhouse effect that would put life on the planet in jeopardy. Threatening a sustainable local activity like the fishery in order to pump up more pollution is insane. But when has the relative sanity of an enterprise stayed the hand of the greedy?

The rest of my day was more fun. A local bike shop, Sportables, gave us eight bicycles for our canvassers! I was overwhelmed. So we went over and had a little hand-over ceremony. Then I had to finalize our press release on endangered species for Monday, do an interview about corporate influence over environmental policy in Canada, and have a staff meeting. Plans are well underway for Canada-U.S. negotiations on trans-boundary smog, and as the session will be on a lake, we had a long discussion at our meeting about whether we could hold a banner between two canoes.<

Well, I better get this little rant to our friends at Grist. It's been nice sharing my days with you!