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This article accompanies the October 20 episode of The Barometer Report at Mesoscale News, where special guest Aalia’s Substack joined host Rebekah Jones to discuss their recent experiences in the occupied West Bank, the escalating violence against Palestinian communities, and the environmental dimensions of dispossession.
Powerful institutions treat geography as a matter of ownership rather than responsibility. A forest becomes a petroleum reserve. A river becomes an industrial waste repository. An olive grove becomes a security concern. The people who depend upon these landscapes are expected to accommodate whatever transformation someone more powerful has planned for them.
Tuesday’s broadcast traveled between three seemingly distant places: Alberta, Canada; East Palestine, Ohio; and the occupied West Bank. Their circumstances differ enormously, but each raises the same fundamental question: Who controls the land, and who must live with the consequences?
Alberta’s fossil fuel empire faces a political reckoning
The Barometer Report began with Canada, where Alberta’s separatist movement suffered an overwhelming electoral defeat earlier this week.
On Monday, 75% of voters opposed beginning the process of separating Alberta from Canada.
But the movement’s political grievances extend well beyond provincial identity.
Alberta sits atop one of the world’s largest petroleum reserves, primarily in the form of bitumen extracted from its oil sands. The province’s fossil fuel industry generates enormous revenue, but its environmental costs extend far beyond its borders.
According to Canada’s national greenhouse gas inventory, Alberta produced approximately 260 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2024, nearly 38% of Canada’s total. That excludes emissions from burning exported petroleum abroad.
But climate pollution is only part of the damage.
Industrial extraction has fragmented boreal forests, disturbed wetlands, transformed watersheds, and produced vast reservoirs of contaminated waste. Evidence of contamination extends well beyond oil sands extraction sites. In some cases, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were found as far as 90 kilometers from operation sites.
Earlier research documented industrial contaminants deposited onto snow and entering the Athabasca River watershed, challenging claims that elevated pollution could be explained entirely by naturally occurring bitumen.
More recent research has identified substantial atmospheric emissions from oil sands tailings ponds, enormous industrial reservoirs containing contaminated water, sediments, and residual petroleum. A 2020 study demonstrated that these waste repositories can contribute significantly to atmospheric pollution.
The consequences extend to Indigenous communities whose lands, waters, livelihoods, and treaty rights are affected by industrial development. Restoring an excavated landscape does not necessarily restore the ecological relationships that sustained it.
Alberta’s voters rejected political separation from Canada. Whether the province can separate its economic future from increasingly destructive fossil fuel extraction remains a far more consequential question.
East Palestine: When environmental evidence becomes a legal battleground
On February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, releasing hazardous chemicals and ultimately leading to the controversial burning of vinyl chloride from several tank cars.
More than three years later, residents are still fighting for accountability.
Nearly 900 residents have filed lawsuits against attorneys involved in the $600 million Norfolk Southern settlement and other parties, including East Palestine Justice, an organization associated with Erin Brockovich.
The victims included evidence that important environmental testing results were withheld while residents were encouraged to accept compensation and surrender future personal-injury claims.
How can people make informed decisions about their health, homes, and legal rights without access to the evidence?
Like Alberta, East Palestine demonstrates that contamination is not merely a matter of chemistry. It is also a question of who controls scientific information, who interprets the risks, and who is expected to bear them.
Palestine: When land becomes a weapon
The second half of Tuesday’s broadcast brought those questions into a more immediate setting.
Researcher, technology entrepreneur, and environmental advocate Aalia Mauro joined me to discuss our recent travels through the occupied West Bank, where we accompanied Palestinian communities facing violence, intimidation, and restrictions on access to their agricultural land.
We witnessed threatening incidents ourselves, including an encounter involving dogs and another in which armed men pursued members of our group.
Mauro recalled the proliferation of Israeli flags along roads passing through Palestinian territory.
“There were literally flags every 10 feet,” she said.
In a landscape shaped by military occupation, settlement expansion, and unequal control over land, such displays can become declarations of authority.
In its July 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful. The court examined settlement expansion, restrictions on movement, land confiscation, and exploitation of natural resources.
These policies are particularly devastating for Palestinian agricultural communities.
Olive trees represent far more than income. They are living connections between generations, often cultivated by families for decades or centuries. Destroying an olive grove can erase both a livelihood and an inheritance.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has documented escalating attacks against Palestinian olive harvesters, damage to agricultural property, and restrictions preventing farmers from reaching their fields.
Agricultural dispossession does not always require confiscating legal ownership. Preventing people from tending, maintaining, or harvesting their land can make that land economically useless.
During our travels, we met families living under these pressures, including Palestinian Americans whose homes and agricultural property had been attacked. Their experiences revealed how intimidation can turn ordinary acts, like harvesting olives, maintaining a field, traveling home, into potentially dangerous undertakings.
We also discussed how technology and disinformation can distort public understanding of violence. A video may capture a confrontation while concealing the restrictions, threats, and historical circumstances that preceded it.
“The existence of homes does not negate the presence of oppression,” I observed during our conversation.
Mauro described the emotional difficulty of leaving the communities we visited.
“I feel like we abandoned them,” she said.
It is a feeling difficult to escape when the people who welcomed you remain exposed to dangers you were able to leave behind.
What the land remembers
Alberta’s boreal forests, East Palestine’s contaminated neighborhoods, and Palestine’s olive groves are not interchangeable. Their histories and injustices differ.
But each reveals what happens when institutions wield disproportionate power over land, resources, and the information used to justify their actions.
Lake sediments preserve evidence of industrial contamination. Environmental testing can reveal what official assurances overlook. Maps expose the fragmentation of occupied territory. Eyewitness testimony records what powerful institutions would prefer to deny.
The land remembers what is done to it. Contaminants accumulate. Forests bear the scars of excavation. Olive trees stand, or fall, as witnesses to generations of cultivation.
The question is whether the rest of us are willing to pay attention.
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