Imagine you pack up your family and move out into a pristine countryside away from cities, noise and everyday hassles. Your family builds a house together, starts a garden and raises animals like goats and sheep to pursue self-subsistence, and generally lives a bit more simple to focus on things that matter more to you. After a few years a gas and oil company sends you a letter informing you that they'll start drilling for gas on your property next week. In no time you have a gas well next to your shed, without receiving compensation of course. In disbelief, you search for help but it turns out that you only own the top layer of your property and your government has sold underground rights to that oil & gas company without notifying you - because they don't have to. It also turns out that the gas is sour gas which contains some of the deadliest substances on Earth, including H2S - the colourless, highly poisonous hydrogen sulfide. Suddenly your animals abort, the women in your family miscarry and every family member falls sick. Oops, there was a yet undetected leak. Despite your struggles to live on your own property, neither the oil & gas company, nor a government body or the Energy Board cares about you. In fact, as you object and fight against what is happening to your family you become the suspect of "eco-terrorism" and the law-enforcement body of your country repeatedly invades your property and searches every corner of it.
If this happens to you, you probably live in Canada. Feeling lucky?
I'm not making this up - Wiebo's War is a real story of a large family that wanted to get away from it all to follow their religious beliefs and live more acccording to how God wants them to live. They move into Northern Alberta, unfortunately right into the middle of a large gas reservoir that is discovered a few years later. Within a few more years a 100 wells are covering the land around the farm, some wells stand right on the farm. The gas production, including leaks, threaten the life of the family as it contaminates the air, the water supply of the family and the soil. Meantime, gas wells are being bombed in Northern B.C. Although no evidence has ever been found, the RCMP highly suspects the Ludwig family (Wiebo is the head of the family) to be involved and starts disrupting the family's life. The most shocking part to me was that nobody cares about the health issues that affect the family and their livestock ever since the sour gas drilling has began. Even the neighbours oppose the Ludwig's fight against EnCana as most of them simply start working for an oil & gas company that moves in to "develop" the area further.
I don't agree with the bombings or with the family's religous beliefs but I don't get why the family is being attact for not submitting themselves to the regime of the oil & gas companies. Surfing quickly the internet on the subject, I read opinions expressing hate for him, saying he's a terrorist, he tore church communities apart in Ontario where they family moved away from, he could have just accepted an offer to be bought out by the oil & gas companies ... hang on a minute. Where do we end up if everybody just takes the money and runs and ignores the distruction that's being caused by greedy corporations that turn your once-idyllic home into an industrial site? We need more people like Wiebo if we don't want this country to become the synonym for apocalypse.
The film, a production of Canada's National Film Board was recently shown at Waterloo Library and there were a "whopping" 12 persons in the audience. Sigh.
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