What are the psychological impacts of oil sands development?

As the oil industry advances with every cut line, pipeline right-of-way and oil sands moonscape, the cumulative effects may manifest in Albertan’s psyches as mental illnesses. How’s that possible?

What do you see?

While reading THIS post at BLDG Blog on the psychological effects of construction in cities, I came across the following sentence:

. . . [I]f a new highway can have a measurable, and easily detected, impact on a city’s economic health and administrative well-being, then could a new highway – or bridge, or tunnel, or flood wall, or, for that matter, sewage treatment plant – have a detectable impact on the city’s mental health? After all, these sorts of massive public works “may carry a psychological burden . . .

An Environmental Impact Assessment is conducted for each and every oil sands project in this province as part of its approvals process. These approvals encompass all manner of impacts, from groundwater to traffic to noise, pollution and economic variables such as housing, jobs and tax revenue. Each project is not discreet; it must be considered in light of other projects in the area. This is the cumulative impact of oil sands development.

But what’s not considered is the psychological impact a development has on the well-being of individuals. So I’ve decided to look into this some more.

WorldChanging.com:

Solastalgia describes a palpable sense of dislocation and loss that people feel when they perceive changes to their local environment as harmful. It’s a neologism that Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher at the University of Newcastle’s School of Environmental and Life Sciences, created in 2003.

Albrecht’s work among communities distraught by black-coal strip mining in New South Wales’ Upper Hunter Region convinced him that the English language needed a new term to connect the experience of ecosystem loss to mental health concerns.

“The sense of a home landscape being violated [by strip mining-related environmental damage] seemed to have disturbed the region’s social ecology so much that the psychic or mental health of many people living in the zone of high impact was being affected,” he says.

Wired follows up:

“What’s more, Albrecht has noticed that the more quickly environmental change occurs, the more intense the solastalgia. The mental-health effects can be powerful. In the Australian outback, industrial activity — notably open-pit coal mining — has turned verdant areas into moonscapes seemingly overnight, and the suicide rate in the region has skyrocketed.

There doesn’t seem to be much recent research published on suicide in Alberta, and my recent forays into the topic found that the data are reserved for insurance and emergency workers. There seems to be a lid on the subject in this province after the Calgary suicide fiasco, where suicide was revealed to be the number one cause of death amongst young males in the city.

Imagine your house. Now imagine me parking a dragline behind your house. How do you feel?

First, I’m no psychologist, but I would imagine that one must establish how changes in one’s environment can affect their mental state. This can be shown subjectively through a person’s own observations. Imagine you are hiking through the back woods, in a very isolated area, where bears fear to tread. You smell the crisp air, you hear the chickadees, and you can sense the cool breeze coming off the glaciers in the region. As you reach the summit of the mountain you are ascending, you stop to enjoy the scenic vista spread out before you. It’s the most breath taking thing you can imagine.

Using this as a baseline scenario, now imagine a nuclear cooling tower or an open-pit mine in the valley below. Does it seem as pristine and wild? Look through some Burtynsky photos to get an idea of what I mean. Industrial landscapes might be compelling, but it’s all about the contrast and juxtaposition.

Ceteris paribus, if it holds that the perceived natural wildness of nature increases as the presence of industrial activity decreases, one would probably rate the preceding vignette as “less wild” in the presence of a nuclear cooling tower, and vice versa. Central Park would generally be rated by humans as less wild than Jasper National Park, for example.

Moreover, the difference between the two is associated with a sense of loss. It’s a sense that the ecosystem is not as undeveloped as previously thought. This sense of loss comes from the shattering of one’s expectations. Again, I’m not a psychologist, but I have a hunch that cognitive dissonance comes into play here.

I know many Albertans who have experienced this sense of loss. In my own experience, it has happened twice. The first time, I was fly fishing in a remote area and came across an oil slick on a stream. The sense of loss led me into a state of anger. The second time, I was in an industrial environment (petro chemical facility) and found a dead baby goose in an alki (alkaline) pond. In essence, the two scenarios were as far apart in terms of the environment, but in both scenarios, I was observing something that didn’t belong in the particular environment. One doesn’t expect to see oil slicks on pristine mountain creeks any more than one expects to find a baby goose swimming in a substance that can only be neutralized with battery acid. Both episodes evoked a sense of loss, followed by anger and a search for someone to pin the blame on.

Albertans are an angry lot, as a recent Angus Reid poll suggests. We have many reasons to be angry, from long lineups in a labour-crunched economy, to governments that vote themselves pay increases while shortchanging us on energy royalties. But are these just targets of our deep-seated anger, as opposed to the roots of it?