Taking on Tarmageddon

The film

Taking on Tarmageddon is a documentary from activist film-makers Zoe Broughton and Pete Speller. The film follows 8 students from the UK that will head off to Canada to meet with the Beaver Lake Cree first nation who live right in the middle of the biggest industrial project on Earth, the Alberta tar sands. The documentary will explore the impact of the tar sands on the environment and the indigenous communities that have been kicked off their land as well as recording the students' thoughts and emotions on seeing and experiencing the devastation caused by tar sands oil extraction.

Whilst staying with the Beaver Lake Cree, the students will aim to build up friendships and soildarity during a traditional powwow. Upon returning to the UK the students will embark on a campaign against UK businesses involved in the tar sands as well as fundraising to bring their new friends from the Beaver Lake Cree to the UK.

A key part of the film will be to get the perspectives of the students and the Beaver Lake Cree campaigners. Through the video training side of the project we aim to give the Beaver Lake Cree and the student campaigners the equipment and skills to tell their own stories through online video. These will become part of the final documentary.

We need your help to tell this story.

What are tar sands?

Canada’s Tar Sands are the biggest energy project in the world, currently producing 1.3 million barrels of oil a day. Largely located in Alberta, the Tar Sands deposits are distributed over an area of 140,000 km2 – an area larger than England. Canada has the second largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia, and is the biggest supplier of oil to the US, the world’s largest oil consumer.

Already, millions of barrels of Tar Sands oil have been extracted from under the Canadian wilderness, producing three to five times as many greenhouse gas emissions as conventional oil extraction and using enough natural gas every day to heat 3.2 million Canadian homes. Add to this the mass deforestation the project is causing and it becomes clear that the Tar Sands must be shut down if we are serious about tackling disastrous climate change. In fact, leading climate scientist James Hansen has stated that runaway climate change will be almost inevitable if Tar Sands extraction is allowed to continue.

The effects of the Alberta Tar Sands on local First Nations communities are devastating. The Tar Sands development project has created toxic tailing ponds so huge they are visible from space, leaking poisons into the local water supply. Indigenous rights being violated and livelihoods and futures are being destroyed. Communities on land where Tar Sands extraction has been imposed are experiencing disturbingly high rates of rare forms of cancer and auto-immune diseases.

This is a non-commercial, not-for-profit project.

http://campbellroadproductions.com/tarmageddon

http://peopleandplanet.org

http://no-tar-sands.org

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