| To find the town of Demmitt on a map of Alberta you trace your finger up Highway 3 from Calgary, through Edmonton to Highway 43, which steps up through Whitecourt, Valleyview, Grande Prairie and Beaverlodge. There’s Demmitt just before the B.C. border. Its little dot, according to the legend in my Rand McNally road map, tells me it is "less than a thousand" in population.
"Demmitt doesn’t really exist," says internationally celebrated Alberta artist Peter von Tiesenhausen of the town that maps show is closest to his home. He notes that the town dwindled from a thriving mill town in the 1950s to a general store to a mere mail box beside the road today. If that were the worst disconnection people from Calgary had from this place he would be a very happy man. What really concerns von Tiesenhausen is how oil and gas companies see the area as an abstraction of resources waiting to be seized – after living there for more than 40 years, he sees it as a treasure.
ARTISTIC CONNECTION
Von Tiesenhausen is currently opposing the sour gas well proposed by Calgary-based ConocoPhillips Canada for a site 1.2 kilometres north of his home. What makes his struggle unique is that he is summoning his art to defend his family and land from this latest advance of the oil and gas industry. He argues that his land and art are essentially inseparable and that any further wells with 2.45 kilometres of his land are violations of artist’s copyright.
As a Calgarian who benefits from the prosperity the oil and gas sector bring to our city, it was hard to resist von Tiesenhausen’s invitation to visit the Demmitt area to try and understand through a landowner’s eyes the connections between our city’s wealth and the areas from which it is derived.
Walking with von Tiesenhausen on his land is a humbling experience. His parents moved to the area to homestead when he was three years old. At the age of six, von Tiesenhausen and his two brothers picked rocks to clear the field just north of their home. He chose the site for his own home at the age of nine, and built the initial rooms when he was only 19.
His early years working in the oil and gas industry, gold prospecting and construction took him as far as the Arctic and Antarctic. Later, as an artist, he was invited to create work in France, New Zealand and Germany. Yet, as von Tiesenhausen walks the land, it is clear there is no other place he would rather be. Between stories of childhood adventures, he stops to point out the variety of mosses under the aspen and spruce canopy – his awe for even the smallest natural wonder on his land rivals that of a first-time tourist taking in the obvious splendours offered by Banff or Jasper.
This profound connection with his land is the basis for all of von Tiesenhausen’s artwork. It inspires the magical ice boats, carved out of ponds by axe, that he started making eight years ago. It grounds his patience, too – after he had a vision of a tower of willow branches woven around two aspen trees, he walked the land for years to find two trees exactly the right distance apart before weaving an awe-inspiring 45-foot tower he would later create without the aid of a single nail.
HEAVEN AND HELL
Throughout von Tiesenhausen’s lands are The Watchers, eight-foot tall human figures Peter carved with a chainsaw from wood and seared black with flaming diesel fuel. They are both forbidding and engaging, suggesting defiant burning heretics or stoic Buddhist monks undergoing self-immolation.
Without seeking publicity, von Tiesenhausen took The Watchers on a journey across the country – they were bolted to the top of the Louise Block building in Calgary in 1996, and later stood for months at Flatrock, Newfoundland overlooking the Atlantic Ocean before being mounted on a Canadian Coast guard icebreaker, which toured the waters off Greenland before docking in Tuktoyaktuk. Like von Tiesenhausen himself, they captured the imagination of many in their journey and saw much, but ultimately they are at their best on his land.
Why the burning, though? Von Tiesenhausen, who never travels without a lighter, replies, "Fire cleans away the marks of my hand. It lets a natural process have the final say in how a piece will turn out." I was reminded of English poet and artist William Blake speaking of his use of corrosives in making his etchings. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he writes: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite. This I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid."
Blake’s fellow poet and countryman Rudyard Kipling might have thought that Alberta was as good a place as any for a marriage of heaven and hell. "You people seem to have all hell for a basement," he quipped to locals upon seeing the gas fields near Medicine Hat in 1907. Ever since, Alberta politicians, along with the oil and gas industry and others, have celebrated Alberta’s economic heaven gained through the harvesting of the hell below us.
Economically, it is difficult to argue with this view. Conoco alone employs 1,200 people in Alberta and annually invests hundreds of millions of dollars in the province, according to Peter Hunt, general manager of public affairs for Conoco Canada. He says that through taxes, Conoco, along with other oil and gas companies, helps pay for schools, and hospitals that benefit every Albertan. "All of Canada, by extention, benefits when those taxes, through equalization payments, flow out from Alberta to other recipient provinces."
Starting slowly in the ’60s, oil and gas began to exploit the resources below the Peace Country’s surface to bring prosperity to those above. In recent years, the longstanding debate between landholder concerns and oil and gas company access to private lands has largely been handed over by the media to extreme voices. Perennial cheerleaders canonize the oilpatch in editorial pages of Calgary’s two daily newpapers. Meanwhile, landowners in resource-rich Peace Country near Grande Prairie who might speak up are silenced for fear of being painted with the same brush as convicted oil-vandal Wiebo Ludwig.
STANDING UP TO INDUSTRY
Von Tiesenhausen entered the debate with a mixture of trepidation and inherited courage. In his teens, he watched his painfully shy father stand up at a hearing to oppose the construction of the Hythe Brainard gas treatment plant built just west of his lands. "My father was scared as hell and shaking, but he did it for his family. That day marked my life. I have to stand up for my family in the same way now."
He comes by his fear of the industry honestly. Von Tiesenhausen says about 10 years ago, a powerful smell of SO2 gas began emanating from the direction of the Hythe Brainard plant. When the wind was right,the family’s home was directly within its path. "I’d walk out the door and think I was in paradise, but then the smell would hit me and I’d get depressed," he says.
"There was a slow internal leak into the flaring system. Turns out it was this faulty valve screwing up the mix of gases burning in the stack. When that valve was changed out the smell stopped. For over a year now there’s been no more smell from their direction." He notes that without the hard work of certain proactive EnCana staff, the faulty valve never would have been found and fixed.
He cannot prove scientifically that there is a connection, but he is adamant that the family’s health deteriorated over the same period that the smell persisted. First, he and his wife, Teresa, watched their son Magnus, now 11, develop severe asthma. Von Tiesenhausen was eventually diagnosed with osteoporosis in his back that was so progressed his doctor thought his X-rays must have been switched with that of an elderly woman. Looming over the whole family, however, is the health of Alexander. Born with a single ventricle heart nine years ago, doctors told the von Tiesenhausens they didn’t expect him to live for more than a few days. Surviving several life-threatening operations, Alexander has become a charming boy who von Tiesenhausen says "steals the hearts of everyone he meets."
Former plant manager Ron Bettin provides a larger context: "Our concern was not just for Peter, but all our neighbours, and our employees who live and work in the area. We have worked for years to improve processes to reduce emissions. EnCana supports continuous improvements in our facilities and that particular valve was one of the changes made to ensure the plant remains safe and efficient."
All the same, von Tiesenhausen is angry. "Alexander can’t run around too much because it exerts too much stress on his heart. I get pissed off on the days I have to carry him out to the bus when he is too exhausted. Every step of the way I curse the industry because I know he deserves more and it didn’t have to be this way."
Along with the gas plant, nine other gas wells are active within 2.5 kilometres of von Tiesenhausen’s house. "My question is simple: how many of these things does a family have to endure? Tell me? Five, 10, 25, 100? The government sure as hell isn’t giving industry a limit so I’m drawing my line in the sand."
LINE IN THE SAND
The line is a circle with a radius of 2.45 kilometres from the von Tiesenhausens’ residence, and will oppose any more well sites within this radius. Not coincidentally, oil companies use the same distance to determine which landowners they must consult for a proposed well.
Von Tiesenhausen is concerned about the density of drilling, though. The Conoco well wouldn’t brother him as much if it didn’t add to the disturbance industry has already brought to the area. On a tour of the lands around his home, the level of oil and gas activity is pretty stunning for the uninitiated. One cannot drive a few hundred metres without seeing a well pad, a road built to a well, a pipeline right-of-way or a seismic cut line.
"Pull in here," says von Tiesenhausen, directing me to drive onto a road leading to a well site. We get out of the car. "See that stand of spruce?" I follow his hand gesture to the dead patch of trees covering several acres. "Those trees were fine when I was a kid," he says, then points to the other side of the gravel road, "but why are these trees on this side OK? The companies say the impact is only on the well site, but they built this road quickly and didn’t think much about drainage. These muskeg areas are sensitive. If you change the water levels they’re screwed."
Near another well site with a similar stand of dead trees, we encounter two surveyors. Von Tiesenhausen and the chattier of the two fall into talk of how they know the same people in a nearby town. Despite working in that particular area often and priding himself on knowing the land’s natural values, the surveyor had never noticed the dead stand of trees seemingly caused by drainage. Driving away afterwards, Von Tiesenhausen sighs in resignation, "See? Even that guy who kinda knows the bush starts doing his job and forgets to see the land for its own sake and just sees it for what is coming out of the ground." After a few moments of thought, he adds, "I guess when you’re paid to be a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
ARTISTIC OPPOSITION
Von Tiesenhausen’s opposition to these "hammers" has been his art. His paintings have taken on an aggression similar to Van Gogh’s as the natural elements became more isolated. The same way his sculptures ask audiences to consider more than one angle to comprehend the whole piece, he speaks to audiences about seeing the world from more perspectives than the thin angle of economics.
His claim of artistic copyright over his lands has proven to be his most powerful tool. Its greatest success came in 1997, when Alliance Pipeline diverted their pipeline around his property out of respect to his art and land, which some consultants in the industry say cost the company between $500,000 and $1 million. The Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) was also sufficiently swayed to grant the Von Tiesenhausens a hearing on December 9 to play out the argument against Conoco’s proposed well site.
Like many landowners in Alberta, the couple is intimidated by the hearing process. Arriving at the Quality Hotel in Grande Prairie by themselves, they faced a Conoco panel of seven experts and two lawyers from Fraser Milner Casgrain. The hearing followed the pattern of one side cross-examining the other, then the EUB would ask series of follow up questions. After a long discussion on remote systems out of Calgary to dispatch well operators, SCADA gas monitoring sensors, and 3-D seismic models of the formations below ground, von Tiesenhausen seemed to sense that something was not right. He asked who among Conoco’s witnesses had ever actually walked on the ground on which they planned to drill. Remarkably, not a single witness from Conoco, not even the land agents, had ever scraped their Calgary shoes on the very ground they claimed to understand.
Later, von Tiesenhausen launched into a flurry of questions about Conoco’s moral responsibility. Not getting satisfaction, he sat down to let the EUB finish. To the dismay of everyone, EUB counsellor Doug Larder, wanted to refocus von Tiesenhausen’s last questions and asked how Conoco would take moral responsibility for incidents related to the well. The panel of technical experts deferred to Luigi Marchesin, a Conoco Grande Prairie supervisor. "I don’t know if I understand the question," Marchesin replied, and then added limply, "We think of those things."
At 10:20 a.m., the Conoco experts’ eyes widened again as Wiebo Ludwig entered the the room with several members of his family. The von Tiesenhausens were visibly affected too. For all their efforts to be moderate they could not stop Ludwig from catching the CBC radio report that morning on the hearing and the von Tiesenhausens’ opposition to the well.
Ludwig was allowed to speak as an intervener. Living only eight kilometres from von Tiesenhausen, this appeared reasonable. Ludwig spoke of "knowing Peter" and made some general remarks about the terrible effects of the industry on the area. "He was just here to hijack the media attention Peter is getting," commented one Grande Prairie resident. If that was his aim, he succeeded: a national CBC Radio report that day focused most of its attention on Ludwig in reports after the hearing, although it did at least air von Tiesenhausen’s claim to have no association with Ludwig.
In the afternoon, von Tiesenhausen passionately guided the hearing through a slide show detailing his art and connection to his land. The cross-examination by lawyer Bernard Roth tended towards painting von Tiesenhausen as a radical, noting an article where he was quoted disparaging the industry and looking forward to the far off day glaciers ground up the "shit" the industry had created into dust. Everyone laughed, though, and von Tiesenhausen smiled shyly as though his school yard big talk had been over heard by the teachers.
More interestingly, the EUB’s questions focused on his art. Larder did not appear to be an art buff, but after being led through the slide show into Peter’s world, he asked questions about what it meant for land to be a canvas, and how far that canvas and its viewing area extended. He sounded more like an academic art critic than a lawyer, and the discussion was lively.
"I don’t know what they’ll decide," said von Tiesenhausen after the hearing, "but at least I got them to see my world through my eyes, which is a big victory right there."
The members of the EUB and Conoco staff gathered around the von Tiesenhausens afterwards, expressing appreciation for their art and their lives. Speaking off the record, one Conoco staff member admitted the possibility of talking further with the von Tiesenhausens to reach a resolution before the hearing results are announced, which will be within 90 days.
Hunt, speaking from Calgary, stated, "Conoco tries to be a good neighbour and can usually find ways of working together. We recognise that individuals have needs, but there’s also a need to strike a balance with society’s needs."
LIFELINE
The next morning I visited with the von Tiesenhausens to thank them for their time and to walk Peter’s field by myself a final time. I was drawn across the field to Lifeline. Starting in 1990, Peter put up a single eight-foot section of white picket fence. He adds another section every year, each section west of the of the previous one so that Lifeline grows from east to west following the path of the sun, from dawn to dusk, from light to dark, from birth to death. Repairs are never made, so the paint is faded and flaking off the first sections, and willows and aspens grow through the slats. Moving west the fence becomes whiter and brighter.
I walked back and forth. letting the morning light throw the shadow of this Calgarian across the slats and wondering about the decision the EUB will deliver in the coming months. Eventually I stood so my shadow fell across the ground where the next section of the fence would stand and asked: What mixture of light and shadow will stretch across the next section of Lifeline? |
