If environmentalism is dead, what am I doing in a bunker in the middle of this frozen oilfield? I am standing here, my drawers down around my ankles, watching the customs agent in his crisp uniform don the dreaded rubber gloves. I am thinking, maybe it would be better if I were promoting wind generators at Martha’s Vineyard. I could be eating fresh-caught salmon with honey-mustard dip and drinking chardonnay. That’s the problem with these big, ugly energy projects; they are most often found in the middle of nowhere, in a lawless, frozen land ruled by despots and oligarchs.

I am in a very small, dingy concrete room in the back of the airport and it’s already 30 degrees below zero and snowing sideways outside. It only gets worse up north where the largest oil boom in the history of the Earth is underway, and where I am heading.

I escape the butt search.

The trick is to act like you don’t mind, that it is no more intrusive than giving your middle initial or your date of birth. That’s because it’s not the butt search itself but the anticipation of the butt search that the guards like to wield over you.

He laughs and sends me on to the next checkpoint where I am confronted by another armed guard with a snarling dog and sent to another room to be interrogated still again. I tell them I am a Journalist from Lowbagger.ORG and am supposed to cover a big press conference on power lines in the morning.

I am then sent to another room where they punch my name into the computer and it takes the printer several minutes to spit out my rap sheet.

About four hours after that, I had to shell out two-hundred bucks to get my temporary terrorist visa.

I had just crossed one of the most secure international boarders on the planet and had entered into one of the most secret areas of the global industrial energy complex. I was in Calgary, Alberta. Welcome to Canada!

I hop a flight to Edmonton. On the plane I sit next to a friendly young roughneck from Calgary. He eyes my jeans, boots, work jacket and jaunty Canadian Tuke and assumes I am on my way to up to Fort Mcmurray to work in the tar sands.

I say, “Hell no, I am too old to roughneck anymore, I got out of the oil patch 25 years ago.”

He says that I could make some real good money up there so I think about it for a minute. I am still smarting from paying the Canadian government $200. Beers up here are $8 a pint. (A seven dollar Flugel if you factor in the current value of the Canadian dollar). The area I am standing in exports more energy to the United States than Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria or any other country in the world. I could earn more money working on a derrick in a month than I could in a whole season planting trees in Montana.

But then I remember I am up here to visit my friend Brian Stazenski, who has spent the last twenty-five years of his life fighting energy development in the ancestral home of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. I tell the roughneck that I am just on vacation. He looks out the window at the frozen, broad, flat, and windy, snow covered plains and thinks I must be crazy.

Brian picks me up at the airport and it’s late so we head out to his place up in Strawberry Creek near Leduc, one of the Earth’s most prolific oil fields since 1945. Everywhere there are oil derricks, pumping units, compressors, coalmines, draglines, power lines and generators. I decide the roughneck must be right. Energy exports from Alberta are expected to double over the next two decades. For every wind or solar project built in the U.S., there will be a new oil well, tar sands project or coal-fired power station in Alberta. To make this all happen, new pipelines and power lines will have to be constructed. One proposed power line is called the Montana-Alberta Tie Line, which will link Edmonton to Great Falls, Montana via giant new 500mv power lines that are being considered in order to export additional power from Montana and Wyoming.

Brian has arranged a press conference for the next morning announcing a coalition of environmentalists, ranchers and farmers who are opposed to the project. I am there representing the Lands Council and other concerned citizens in Montana. I take the podium and pound on the lectern. I too am irate, but since I just got here and I haven’t had much sleep, I am still not sure why.

Following the press conference we had a meeting with the representatives of the power-line company. The room is packed with environmentalists, landowners, and lawyers. A vice president from the company is attempting to run the meeting. His power-point program has crashed and he is holding up these pathetic black-and-white copies of his presentation pointing at bar-charts and graphs. The locals are agitated and not interested in his presentation.

He is getting grilled. 

They pepper him with questions. It is all very polite, but he was clearly sweating. After my evening with the border guard in the small concrete room, it is nice to see big energy dude Bob Williams squirm as the angry landowners confront him. At one point one of the big energy dude’s assistants tries to diffuse a contentious debate between his boss and one of the farmers. His assistant is floundering badly and the farmers are only getting more irate. The big energy dude goes over to the table and glares at his staff. “Let Bob Williams handle this!” he snarls, talking in the third person under his breath. You know you have them on the ropes when they start talking about themselves in the third person.

After the press conference Brian drives me around to take pictures of the draglines, power generators and electrical towers, just the sort of things one does on a temporary-terrorist visa. And I must be honest here; we were scouting sites for possible non-violent protests against the power companies.

Again, the sort of things one does on a temporary terrorist visa. This is a great country. This time of year half of Canada, including most of the white folks, are watching the curling championships on television. Nobody is guarding the power lines; they are all getting drunk and watching curling. Again, just the sort of thing one learns when traveling on a temporary-terrorist visa. We take some more pictures and finish our beers and go back to Brian’s house.

I am heading back to the U.S. tomorrow. Unlike Canada, they will have to let me in. They might search my butt, but they will have to let me in. I have to go up to Great Falls to scout some power lines.