Ghiasi.org

My first article in the Daily! Pretty exciting for me…

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6715

Alberta: Tar sand wasteland
By Marzieh Ghiasi
Monday, November 19th, 2007

Author decries rush to exploit Canada’s natural resources

In northern Alberta, an estimated 174-billion barrels of black gold lie trapped in grains of sand, and capitalizing on this dormant cash cow has become a national obsession.

In the recently published Stupid to the Last Drop, award-winning investigative journalist William Marsden critically examines the oil boom in the Alberta tar sands, a sprawling industry that has promised to make Canada the new Saudi Arabia. In his non-linear but fluid style, Marsden argues that, while Albertans may see some marginal gain from this relentless resource exploitation, Canadians stand to lose a lot.

The tar sands are thought to have been made by geological forces which pushed oil up into the limestone and sand landscape. Composed of bitumen – a viscous form of crude oil, silica sand, clay, and water – the tar sands present a unique challenge in resource extraction and are famously expensive to exploit. Just how much are people willing to sacrifice to extract this oil? Marsden contends: everything.

Stupid to the Last Drop begins in 1957 with an American paleontologist, Manley Natland, and his proposition for Alberta’s future: a nine kilo-ton nuclear bomb set 1,300 feet below ground in the Athabasca tar sands to create a giant underground cavern, with enough heat and pressure to force oil into it. In spite of the obvious environmental hazards, including radiation leakage and land collapse, Marsden details the quick acceptance of this proposition. In just two years, the inconspicuously-dubbed “Project Oil Sands” gained support from a major oil company, approval from the U.S. Senate, a nod from the Canadian federal government, and a nuclear-bomb-to-go.
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Recently I’ve spent a lot of time developing the details of this site, but of course, a project like this is constantly ongoing, evolving. You come up with new ideas and work to implant them. Though sometimes everything falls into place as planned, often, the project takes a life of its own and you find yourself in an entirely new and unique domain- no pun intended.

So far, I have completed the structure and organizational backbone of the site, and have designated the direction each of my projects will be taking. But the web’s most basic attribute is its ability to transfer content, and developing that content is often the hardest and trickiest task of all. As anyone who has ever tried to write an essay in the middle of the night will attest, writing coherently and concisely is not as easy as some people make it seem (especially when you’re jittery on coffee :o).
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