James Cameron talks oil sands with the Globe

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Canadian-born director James Cameron wrapped up a three-day tour of Alberta Wednesday. He toured the oil sands with industry, met with the premier and two opposition parties, as well as a leading academic and a host of first nations groups. When it was all over, Mr. Cameron appeared alongside the first nations groups and urged the Alberta government to do more to protect their land from pollution caused by oil sands development. He spoke with The Globe and Mail Wednesday afternoon.

By appearing here, are you effectively lending your name to the people of Fort Chipewyan who have long complained about water quality, in an effort to get them some more attention?

I don't know if you lend your name. I think you have to lend your energy. You're not lending, you give your energy, give your personal resources, in the sense that if I call a press conference and people show up, and I can do that in a way that's helpful to the plight of first nations people who really need that voice, I'm going to do it. As long as people keep showing up, why not?

Your visit was greeted with some hostility; namely, Wednesday's Edmonton Sun featured your photo on its front page above the word "Dipstick!" Some have suggested this is Hollywood eco-tourism. Were you surprised by that reaction?

Pretty surprised, pretty surprised. You know, I don't think it's just about me showing up here. I think it's the fact an outsider showed up to form an opinion. And I think everyone was leaning forward to find out what would happen there, what would oil say, what would government say, what would first nations say, what would the scientists say. Everyone had a story to tell and it was fascinating. And I want to be clear - I don't feel that I'm some independent arbitrator, you know, completely unbiased, coming down from some Tibetan mountaintop to arbitrate on this thing. I've got my own opinions. I don't want to say an agenda, because I didn't really come here with a strategy per se. But I did come here with a very, very strong set of opinions - you might even say passions - about what we need to be doing to save ourselves, and to save the natural world around us. Everything I learned I had to fit into that framework, and nothing that I saw challenged it. In fact, a lot of what I saw just reinforced that framework. You see the devastation of the surface mining around Fort McMurray, just north of Fort McMurray, you know, it's appalling. Then you see the efforts to restore that back to a mature boreal forest, and you see how difficult that is and certainly how expensive that's going to be.

You toured some of those reclaimed sites. Syncrude has a "fen," or a marsh, that it has reclaimed. Suncor lifted the curtain on its reclaimed Pond 1 last week.

Syncrude has a little patch, you know, I think in terms of certified reclaimed boreal forest, it's one per cent of the area disturbed. But you know, to complete that thought, it's all sort of appalling in its scope and scale. And then when you think it's two to three per cent of what it will be when the entire deposit, which covers a fifth of the province is mined one way or another through in situ or surface mining - You think, my God, you can't even get your mind around it. You cant even get your mind around what's going to happen here. On the other hand, you have to balance that against: well, you know, we need energy, no matter how optimistic one is about how quickly we can convert to a green, clean energy economy, we're going to still need oil for a while. It's just a question of if that's 10 years, 20 years, 30 years [away] And I would always [qualify]any of this with the given [fact]that I think it needs to be as quickly as possible by whatever means necessary. But even with that as a given, we still need oil. Why not have that oil come from Canada? And have Canadians benefit economically from that? Why not have Canadians be the saviours of North American oil security?

You've said that the United States should be less reliant on oil from the Middle East.

When right now the U.S. is spending $1-billion a day fighting in the middle east. What we're doing, we're spending $1-billion buying oil from the middle east. We're spending $1-billion a day fighting there. Between the two of them, it's ridiculous. Just by buying our oil there we're funding both sides of the war, you know what I mean? Makes no sense. The whole thing makes no sense. So that's ludicrous on its face. And you know, maybe the lesser of two evils is to progress with this [Albertan]development. The crucial thing is we've got to do it right.

On Wednesday, you told a press conference you'd like to see a moratorium on tailings ponds; issued a press release saying you'd like to "put the brakes" on all development; while Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach said you didn't mention any moratorium at all. Which is it?

"Putting the brakes on" was a well-considered phrase. It doesn't mean you're stopping. Put the brakes on, you're slowing down. It's what you do when you see a hazard ahead. You slow down, you don't charge into it. I made this other little movie about a ship that charged ahead at full speed despite the warnings. Now, that didn't work out too well for them. And Avatar is the same sort of warning told in completely different terms as a movie, but there's that same idea there that we're heading towards something. We all feel it, but we live in denial about it. I've decided to devote as much of my personal energy and resources as possible to that issue.

Don't you have the same problem in the hills of Los Angeles, where oil rigs produce a heavy crude that has a per-barrel greenhouse-gas-emission rate that is actually higher than bitumen mined in Fort McMurray? Is that a double-standard?

I don't think the hills of Los Angeles are in any way comparable. That's an ant crawling up the elephant's leg. The hills of Los Angeles are not a good comparator. The state of California, we have the offshore platforms, and it's low-grade stuff, but it's all in decline. We're talking about something [in Alberta]that's in the first two or three per cent of a massive development. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that will be reaped by the Canadian economy as a result of that. I think that given that upside, given that almost certain upside, why not be proactive? Why not spend the money now to do the right research? And I mean independent research, not research that's done by the oil companies, but independent research that can assure the public that this is going to be safe when done with best practices. I want to appeal as a Canadian to Canadians to be what we imagine ourselves to be, which is better. You know what I mean? Better, more fair, wiser, than some of our neighbours.

You say you're offering your support. Would you shoot a movie - or a documentary - about the oil sands?

Yeah, maybe. Documentaries, I mean, have some value. Avatar reached a lot of people with an emotional message and not too many facts. But the emotion is the first step towards action. You know a documentary would be valuable if it told people what to do - not only defined the problem, but told them what to do. The problem with documentaries in general is that they preach to the converted. And so the question is how to get the message broader, because the entire public needs to engage by this. They need to be incentivized by understanding the threat [of over-paced development]and the upside to learn the issues, and not just go with the first knee-jerk demagoguery that they're told, like "we can dismiss all those health issues because they're naturally occurring" and "the river's been going through these formations for ages, and it's naturally occurring."

Do you reject those statements?

I don't think I'd reject the fact that we don't know the answer to that. But that's a knee-jerk argument.

You met with Dr. David Schindler, who authored an independent study showing a host of pollutants, including mercury and lead, are present at elevated levels in the Athabasca River, which runs through the oil sands and past Fort Chipewyan, whose leaders invited you in the first place. Now, you've said we need better water monitoring - less industry, more Dr. Schindler?

We need better and independent research, because the water monitoring has been funded by the oil industry. And the RAMP [Regional Aquatics Monitoring] program, we need independent monitoring. Where independent science has been done, it's showing a whole different story - that there are contaminants in the water. That some of those contaminants are carcinogens, and you have a higher-than-normal cancer incidence downstream in Fort Chipewyan. Can we prove that causal link? No. But I certainly think it's setting off alarms that should be acted upon.

You said you and Mr. Stelmach agreed to disagree "in a number of areas." Tell me about that.

Obviously his perspective is more based on economic growth, business in a recession economy and so on. And, you know, his perspective on some of the issues that I raised was very different than mine. When I told him what my hopeful vision for the future was, he said, "Well, that's going to be difficult." And I said, "I know it will be difficult." We have to do it. We really don't have a choice. We either do it or have it thrust upon us. What I did was I appealed to his sense of fairness, and as a guy who grew up close to the earth, close to the soil on a farm. Saying what about these people who are living downstream, who are living in the path of the enormous development. What are their lives like? Maybe a sense of compassion, or a sense of taking the high road, which he has historically been able to do. So, does it change something in his mind? I don't know. I hope so.

Funnily enough, he also said you two bonded as farm boys. And yet you've said his province's top industry is a "black eye" for Canada, where you were both born and raised on those farms. Do you still think it's a black eye?

I've had it thrown back in my face a few times, and I think it's legitimate in terms of it being a valid, not valid, but it being an actual perspective that people outside have.

What message will you bring to the United States?

I'm not running around here saying, "Yeah, I went there, and it's an atrocity, and this whole thing has to stop, and you know, it's an embarrassment, blah, blah, blah." I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is there's an enormous upside potential in this thing, and upside should be able to fund the methodology to do this right, to use technology, to use science to do this thing right. And I don't mean that in the way they kind of mean that, like, "We're going to gloss over this, and technology is going to fix everything downstream, carbon capture and storage is going to fix it all, you know, let's just make more promises." I think we need to see that stuff is going to work first, then we can proceed with confidence on a large scale.

Will you continue to use your notoriety for this cause?

I think if I wasn't a known celebrity, I wouldn't be able to pull a press conference together, you know what I mean? So yeah, sure, I'm going to use that. I think everybody should use everything they have right now to do the right thing.

You compared the people of Fort Chipewyan to the Na'avi, the aboriginal characters in Avatar. Are they?

They [Fort Chipewyan residents]said something interesting, They said "I see you" [a line used in Avatar] That's what it's all about. It's about seeing and respecting the other person, even though they're different, even though you disagree with them. You've got to understand where they're coming from, otherwise you're not going to be able to work through this thing. And everybody is in it together. Maybe it's only 1,200 people in Fort Chipewyan, and the rest of the province thinks "Well, why should our prosperity be hurt by them?" But you know what? They were here first. And they're Albertans too. And I think with the amount of wealth that this thing provides, I think you have the luxury of doing it right.

This interview has been condensed and edited