The Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival announced last Saturday the winners in its Environmental Film category, with ' SPOIL: The Fight To Save The Great Bear taking top prize.
The film documents the efforts to save Canada's Great Bear Rainforest from a proposed 1,200-mile-long twin oil pipeline between Alberta's tar sands and British Columbia's Pacific coast.
Behind the effort was the International League of Conservation Photographers, who dispatched some of the world's best photographers to capture images of the area to raise awareness in the hopes of protecting it. Their Rapid Assessment Visual Expeditions, or RAVEs, have already helped gain protection for British Columbia's Flathead River Valley as well as areas in Mexico and Equatorial Guinea, as we mentioned in the December issue of ϳԹ.
This is not the first time the Alberta tar sands have caused a stir. Writers David James Duncan and Rick Bass recently wrote about their opposition of ExxonMobil's attempts to drive huge trucks full of equipment through the twisty mountain roads of Montana and Idaho en route to Alberta. An excerpt of their piece can be found at ϳԹ Online.
ILCP can be viewed at their web site, along with the .
For more information, check out .
–Michael Webster