In a community of five hundred people in northern Alberta, a 20.8 kW solar installation has been set up to power the First Nation’s health centre, and put additional energy back in to the grid. The Indigenous community of the Lubicon Cree used to be self-sufficient and was able to live off the land. Now the community deals with contaminated water, polluted air and a compromised landscape. In 2011, the community dealt with one of the largest oil spills in Alberta’s history.
After dealing with three decades of intensive oil, gas, logging, fracking and tar sands exploitation in our homeland, my community of Little Buffalo has chosen to forge a new future and become powered by the sun. First Nation communities have been on the front lines of resource extraction for far too long, and we have paid dearly for the price of humanity’s addiction to oil, but we have hope that we will find a way out of the crisis we are currently facing in Alberta and around the world.
Refusing to be victims in this game of fossil fuel roulette, communities like Little Buffalo are leading the way towards energy independence – making The Leap towards a new future that some of our leading thinkers say everyone else must follow.
