09 Apr A different take on Fort Mac

I learned this week that Mabou-reared cartoonist Kate Beaton, whose wonderful work we have featured before, has another very Cape Bretonish entry on her resume: she once worked at a mine site in Fort McMurray, Alberta. I learned this because Beaton has just produced a five-part graphic novella about her Tar Sands experience. Ducks centres on an incident in 2008 when 500 waterfowl touched down on a Syncrude tailing pond, killing all but five of them.

Greenpeace responded four months later by blocking, or attempting to block, a discharge pipe that flowed into the tailing pond. Syncrude was eventually later fined $3 million for the wildlife kill.

I’ve had hundreds of conversations about Fort Mac, but these pieces helped me to understand the place in a way I had not before. Beaton has a knack for recounting everyday occurrences that punch above their weight in their ability to convey complicated, nuanced truths. She writes:

It is a complicated place, it is not the same for all, and these are only my own experiences there…. Ducks is about a lot of things, and among these, it is about environmental destruction in an environment that includes humans.

Here’s a brief excerpt, but do yourself a favour and read all five in order.

Beaton describes these five stories as “a sketch… to test how I would tell these stories, and how I feel about sharing them.” She is considering “a larger work” on the subject, to which we can only say, duckspeed. You can follow Beaton’s work and musings on her Tumblr blog.