jsheppard
From Friday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Monday, Mar. 30, 2009 02:57PM EDT
Earlier this week, Mike Hudema stood with a crowd of about 60 other protesters on the sidewalk outside the Vancouver hotel where the premiers were meeting about climate change. The 29-year-old Greenpeace activist waved a sign showing the environmental group's Stop the Tar Sands logo, with splotches of blood across a map of Northern Alberta.
"It's a fairly dramatic image," he said. "But it makes the point."
Mr. Hudema, a native of Medicine Hat, returned to Alberta in August to open a Greenpeace office in Edmonton. It had been five years since he last visited Fort McMurray. Flying over the sands in a helicopter in the fall, he said, "I was completely astonished in terms of the scale of it. It was one of the times that I questioned our own humanity."
Greenpeace, he said, plans to raise awareness of the environmental costs of the oil sands in the coming provincial election, as well as draw the attention of the rest of the world. He will feel the fight has been won when all development stops in the boreal forest.
"We need to say no, that as good, conscientious Canadians, we can't go ahead with this project."
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